The Hickory Head Hermit

Watermelons and Writing

2012-02-01T19:38:00.001-05:00

I wake up at 4:15 andknow I have to write, but I have to go to work. It’s there, this thing, thisthing that wants me to write…something. This thing inside me that wants me towrite…

I worked out in the watermelon fields as a teenager. Workbegan when it was light enough to see. Work ended when it was too dark to see.There was a thirty minute lunch break but nothing to eat and nowhere to get anyfood. The water, warm and stored in ancient metal urns, ran out in the middleof the day. Triple digit heat kicked in before lunch and ruled over us untillate afternoon. There were no breaks, no shade, no rest, no comfort, and onlythe sputtering of the trucks we were loading as background noise.

There were twenty of us, give or take a few, and we wouldstand five or six feet apart. Someone would go ahead of us, cut the melon’svines, and stand them upright. We would walk abreast, picking up the melons andchunking them to the man next in line, and he would chunk it to the next man,and eventually it would be tossed onto the truck and someone on the truck wouldstack them. We rotated from closest to furthest away from the truck, and thosenearest to the truck worked the hardest, but there was no relief, no easy job,no rest, and no mercy. You were fired if you missed a day of work. You werefired if you called in. You were fired if you got injured. Day after day, hourafter hour, melon after melon, the days never seemed to end. Time ceased tomove at all. Each hour of the day was its own purgatory. Each day was anendless Hell of heat, grime, pain, thirst, and surreal toil.

I worked for seventy dollars a week.

Writing can be like that, sometimes. When I woke up thismorning I knew something was there. Where? I can’t say but there it was and Ididn’t know where this was heading when I started. There this was, this thingyou are reading now, sitting like a rock in my shoe, beating down on me likethe Summer sun, enveloping me with a feeling that something had to be started,worked upon, polished like a jagged stone, and in the end, possibly, destroyedout of hand. It doesn’t matter how tired I am, or how low my energy is, or whattime of day it is because, this thing, like the exhaustion of the fields, itnever leaves me.

I remember taking my shirt off in the fields and how littleit helped. It was a filthy, grimy rag that was soaked in sweat and looked as ifit were used as bedding for a stray pack of pigs. I would undress outside atnight, hose myself off and then go inside to bathe. That’s what this thing islike sometimes; it’s another layer of skin that is impossible to wash off orscrub away. It builds up and becomes harder to hide, and after a while, it is secondnature.

There was a day when a truck driver got onto a patch of thedirt road that had been flooded by an irrigation pivot. The fully loaded truckslid into the ditch and the last we saw of the driver he was walking away fromthe field, fired, and without a way home. But that was just the way it was. Theman we worked for ran his farm the same way everyone else did. But we had tounload the truck, go through the melons to see how many could be saved, takethem off the truck, stack them on the ground, push the truck out of the mud,and then reload the truck.

That’s how editing feels.

If all of this is making writing sound like more drudgerythan it could possibly ever be worth it’s because writing is hard work. Thiscomes easy for me in the sense I have paid for my skill at word constructionwith more hours than I put into the watermelon fields. It has been longer hoursfor less money and in the end, it has been much more difficult work,intellectually. As far as I can tell there are no short cuts. As far as I cantell the first twelve years are the hardest. It will take you over a decade toknow when your writing is what the Muse ordered, and if it is saying what youwanted it to say.

I had to read that last sentence out loud three times andedited it, maybe a half dozen times. It didn’t work the way I had it so Istopped writing and then came back to it. Again. Again. Again. Again. That’spart of it. A sentence that doesn’t seem to be much stopped everything for anentire day. Does it seem simple? One problem is I tried to make it toocomplicated. That is also part of it; know when you have said too much, orgotten brambly.

When that first watermelon season began to end, some of thelast guys hired were let go. That was our first clue things might be coming toa close. The melons were not as large and they were not as many. One afternoonthe man who hired me said simply, “That’s it. See you next year.” He shook myhand, handed me my wage, and he walked away.

In writing and watermelons there is Hell. Yet the fruit ofwork, be in harvested in a summer, or pulled back from the fields of the past,is sweet. I didn’t go out into the melon patch looking for this, but look,there in front of you, is this thing that haunted me, went back into my memoryand got dressed, and then came to flirt with your mind. It flirted with my mindand then took over. If you are thinking about writing be aware than it willthink about you. It will work you. Youmay have to load a hundred thousand watermelons on a truck to get one essay,but it’s worth it, yeah, oh yeah, it is.

And there’s the thing, right there.

Take Care,

Mike

Alyssa talking backwards. Poteau Oklahoma

2012-02-01T18:49:00.001-05:00

For The Love Of Books

2012-01-30T20:50:00.003-05:00

A roommate of mine once spent the better part of threemonths trying to find a book that was out of print. He finally found joy in abookstore that specialized in hunting down the rare and obscure, and the oddthing was how the final price of the book was rated by the bookstore’s phonebill. Part of the bill for the book was itemized so we could tell who and wherethe dealer called and I was mesmerized at such a network of bibliophiles. Theowner of the store wrote handwritten letters updating my roommate on theprogress of the search and with each letter there was an assumption of anupgrade in price, but this was a quest. The damning thing is I can’t rememberthe title of the book, but I think it was a collection of short stories by oneauthor. I seem to remember a baboon in a hot air balloon.

I once owned thousand of books. The six or seven shelves inmy house were all filled with books. I had read most of the fiction andnonfiction yet there were some that were included in boxes of books I hadbought, including a yard sale by an animal rescue group that sold me all theirbooks at one time. They had thirty-six boxes of books, trust me, I know exactlyhow many there were, and they had imposed upon someone to get the books therebut were in despair as to what they would do with the unsold books, and how totransport them. The offer of twenty dollars seems low but it was all that Ihad, and they really didn’t think they would sell much more than that beforethey stopped for the day. It took an entire day to go through those boxes andit was one of the high points of my life, really, to just look at that manybooks, and find the real gems. The old books with still good covers, thefavorites visited yet again, and the odd misplaced classics, all of this aswell as the obligatory Reader’s Digest Condensed Books. The set ofencyclopedias from the late 1800’s was a stunning find, really. There were alsosome mid 1900’s science fiction books hidden among the chaff of romance novelsand books on how to make a million dollars selling how to books.

A woman I once knew decided to marry and got boxes to puther books in when she moved in with him. She then decided to give away what shecould and out of a few hundred she managed to find a dozen or so that wereexpendable. She had more boxes of books than she had boxes of other stuff andit was a testament to his love for her that he lugged those things around. Hewasn’t a book person. You either are or you have no idea what I am saying here.If you don’t get at least a little judgmental, good or bad, when you look atwhat’s in someone’s book collection you aren’t one of us.

Books are some of my oldest and closest friends. There for awhile they were my only friends. In High School, when I spent the vast majorityof my time restricted to my room for bad grades I would read for hours andhours and hours. I wouldn’t waste my time on a book that wasn’t at least acouple of inches thick. A devoured the “Foundation” series by Asimov and thenwent after “The Lord of the Rings” and haunted the library at school. Themystery was never solved; how can the worst student in school be its bestreader? I couldn’t explain “Watership Down” to a senior English class. Yes, itwas about rabbits but no it was not a children’s book. The richness and beautyof how the book was written, and the skill of Richard Adams that he put intothe writing, transcended the story being about rabbits. It was such a greatbook, and it still is, Hazel-rah.

Books are real. Books are real in a sense that goes beyondpaper and ink. Hitler burned books and if Hitler thought something was bad thenyou have to see some good in it. The people who seek to limit other peoplefirst seek to limit their books. Books are more than just the printed word, andI am here to tell you that in and of itself is enough to inspire reverence, butbooks are repositories for the thoughts of the human mind for generations. Thelonely and damaged mind my body carried in High School found kindred spirits inthe back of each book where the names of those who checked out the book werekept, and the dates they had checked the books out. That is gone now, replacedwith records that the individual reader cannot see, and I think that sad. Iremember names reoccurring in books that I liked, and I wonder after I wasgone, if someone carrying a damaged mind saw my name in the back of yet anotherbook, and smiled.

This isn’t the last rant of an aging paper junkie who doessee the writing on the screen. Books will change with the times and the days ofthe hardcover and the paperback are numbered, at the upper left. The modern ageof reading is not ending, but rather I believe that it has only just begun.Books were not the apex of an epoch but instead they were the first experimentswith fire that will now spread in ways we have only glimpsed. Books, entirevolumes of ideas, can be sent in an instant to millions of readers, and this ismighty. Hitler could not stop the book and against such as we have access todayI believe the freedom of the press might be more powerful than any one man, exceptmaybe, Mark Zuckerberg.

This is truly a wonderful time to be a writer. I have neverhad this sort of opportunity to meet the people I have meet through my writing,and theirs. You, yes, you, that was your name, wasn’t it, in the back of thatbook? I thought I recognized that smile. Ah, but wasn’t “Crime and Punishment”a wonderful, wonderful, book?

Take Care,

Mike

The Cave Of Forgotten Dreams

2012-01-29T17:52:00.001-05:00

There have been many times in my life when I have beentotally at ease in complete darkness. It isn’t for everyone, I know that, andthere are many people who get freaked out whenever they are left to their owndevices in total darkness. My younger sister is one of them, and my materialgrandmother was another. This isn’t to imply this is a gender issue but I willlay claim to the darkness disorder being on of cultural inheritance. We humanssee better with light but this has been taken to an extreme that is blinding usall.

The black belongs to those of us who remember it. Iremember the tomes before security lights and blinding everywhere- you- go-illumination. A man could once see amillion more stars at night than can be seen now and each nighttime horizon hasmore and more sunrises from towns that light up the skies with photo-pollution.There are keychains with lights on them so you can find the right key and thecorrect place to slip it into. There aremore and more lights and people can see less and less clearly at night.

What has confounded many a scientist over the ages is howcave painting were done so well and there not be any more ceiling scorchingthan there is. There is evidence torches were used in the caves but the drawingand paintings in the caves in France must have taken many hours yet there justaren’t that many torch marks or that much soot to be found. Some, true enough,but not enough to shed light on how they managed to do so much work with solittle light.

If you knew the smell of a torch might mean someone elseout there would know what you were doing and the light of a torch wouldannounce to everyone and everything where you were, how big of a torch wouldyou carry? Would it be one of those four foot long Hollywood torches you see inall the movies or would you carry illumination just enough for you to see whatyou were doing? Excess in all things is a strictly modern trait and toattribute it to our ancestors thirty-thousand years ago is foolish andmisguiding.

How much light do you really need to open your door atnight when you are carrying an armload of groceries? I do it on a regular basiswith no light. My fingers find the right key by touch. The slot for the key isclear to me in total darkness because this is how I have opened this door forover eleven years now. I can find the handle to my truck door in the dark, andI frequently navigate my home and property without light. Could you change atire in total darkness? Could you wash a load of clothes without a light? Couldyou walk ten miles to a cave in a few hours, in total black night, and insubfreezing temperatures? You do realizethat the harnessing of light in any form is more or less a modern trait also,do you not? The movies that show ancient Egyptians with palaces that are lit upLas Vegas style are very likely incorrect, at best.

When we draw or write we use a surplus of light. Myefforts on a computer lights up a room with enough light to have severalAbraham Lincolns doing math homework on the head of a shovel with a piece ofcoal and it doesn’t seem excessive to me now. But after a couple of hours ofwriting I can go into the backyard with the dogs and I am all but blind. Thisisn’t the way we began, you know, and it isn’t the way we have to be now. But we’vecome to believe dark and foreboding are one in the same and they are not.

You have to remember that as a class of human beings,artists have nearly always been those who stayed in the darkness. Not becausewe are evil or depressed, but because late at night is when the Muse willvisit, and by the light of a low fire, the cave drawings might have been done.How much light is needed by those who have little to begin with? How many greatwriters scribble away thousands of years ago by moonlight, starlight, and thelight of a tiny oil lamp? How much of what we consider to be literature waswritten by the flame of a single candle? How many words have been typed away ona mechanical typewriter when there was only the light of a single bare bulb,dangling overhead?

Imagine if you will the coals that you might cook a hamburgerupon, or roast a few ears of corn with. Imagine that this was the brightestlight that you could afford without having to go get firewood, or risk givingyourself away in the night ( or in the day) for cave bears were known to lovecaves of all things. Who can say? Was this something an entire group of peopledid? Was one person in the clan appointed to paint? Was this a social event, aceremony, a plea to the gods, a flight of passion, or something that we of thebright lights and instant access to everything, simply cannot comprehend?

We will never know.

Nothing exists of these people but stone tools, somebones, and the cave paintings. We know they buried their dead, but not in theCave of Forgotten Dreams. There are no human remains left behind there. Thatcave doesn’t seem to be used for living, but rather, perhaps, the first artgallery. Perhaps the presence of large predators made making art the firstdangerous form of self-expression. Perhaps before we humans chased the cavebears away our art was created there for some shamanistic reason.

We will never know.

But there are still those of us who fear no darkness, whowalk with the dogs in the night full of stars, and who see quite well whenthere seems to be nothing there but fear, and a cave of dreams.

Take Care,

Mike

Kate Winslet: 'I Don't Look Like That And I Don't Desire To Look Like That'

2012-01-29T09:54:00.002-05:00

How to Remove Ads From You Tube

2012-01-29T07:59:00.002-05:00

The Other Tribe

2012-01-22T10:46:00.001-05:00

Working at night was what I think being addicted to heroinmust be like. I’ve never been hooked on anything worse than cigarettes andquite honestly I am not sure there is anything worse. Night work stretched outin front of me like a hundred million marathons with each night going onforever with any break in the heat or the artificial darkness or the endlesshours. Each day was spent trying to sleep, trying to rest, and trying not todread the night that rushed towards me like a slow moving mudslide ofdespair. My social life ceased to exist. I worked over ten hours a day, fivedays a week, spent one day a week in a daze and one day a week trying to get mylife in order for the next week. We did this for eight months and then one dayit was all over.

Working on the interstate at night meant out of thedarkness would come a human form, shuffling like a zombie, eyes weirdly lit,clothing shabby, and that odd look on his face as if he had been given somemission, finally, he could understand. Yes, we did have work lights out there,portable towers with banks of white bright lights on them, but the light destroyedall night vision and deepened shadows. Fatigue cut into the ability to see, andto react to what was seen, so when a poorly dressed wreck of a human came outof the dark it was a surprise, always, and frightening, sometimes, and weird ina way I cannot explain.

They had learned not to crowd the marks. The trainingprogram for the homeless is nothing if not a precise art. No politician everhad a speech written more succinctly. I imagined that one night I would happenupon their university in some dry culvert, with words to be used on one wall,words like “sir” and “ma’am” and “please” and “God Bless” and on the opposite wall, written in chalkfrom a dirt dauber’s nest, would be the concepts, the storylines, the narratives,of the industry, and all would and could, recite them by rote.

Me and my wife and three kids were traveling down to Florida,and we broke down and got stranded at that last exit so I walked all the waydown here looking for some gas, and we haven’t eaten in three days and the doggot hit by a car and died, and I ain’t heard from my mama in a week, and mywife’s cancer came back, and little Timmy’s leg needs an operation, please sir,if you could just gimme a dollar, please, just fifty cents, please, I’m beggingfor my baby girl, she ain’t et in a week now, and she’s lying there crying, Ican’t stand it have you got a beer?”

You’d give one a dollar to get rid of him, to get himaway from the work, and later than night see him stumbling out of the truckstop with a six pack of cheap beer, holding it like a running back, heading forthe woods, or an overpass, trying to avoid the other homeless who would wanthim to share. Each overpass a collection of beer cans, bottles, used toiletpaper, and the smell of urine. Some of the men on the crew were mean to them;cruel to the point we would have to rein them in. One man threw a handful ofchange into the highway, into the middle of the Interstate, just to make ahomeless chase it. It was incredibly horrible to do this. The homeless would believeforever and ever there was another dime out there he had missed. As we movedslowly forward we left him behind in the dark and as traffic got near he wouldstand at the edge hoping to see the reflection of silver in the light.

It is very easy, and perhaps even idiomatic, for us toput these people in a category that includes metal illness, substance abuse, orperhaps laziness. What if none of this was who or what they are, but rather a symptomof how they deal with a world in which who and what they are isn’t any moreproductive than how they are living now? You admire the works of a man whocarves angels out of stone, but who was this man if he had been born on anisland of fisherfolk living in the South Pacific? Albert Einstein, a man of aremarkable mind and now the symbol of great intellect, who would he be had hebeen born in the American colonies, on the frontier, in 1700? Georgia O'Keeffeborn in Hiroshima, 1920, might have never grown up at all, or never painted. Thehuman wrecks that you see on the road might be exactly as they appear, and theymay be all we expect them to be. Or it may very well be they are human beingswhose minds, and spirits and talents fit into our world not at all.

These people seem so alike in so many ways I wondersometimes if they are now all part of some genetically alike group who we areforcing into extinction. Our heavily structured society gives them no way toreproduce and survive except on the outer edges. Like the Natives of thiscountry who were pushed off their lands and nearly died out, the homeless maybe of a tribe of people who cannot adjust to a society that is so bound by theclock and so enslaved to money. They version of freedom seems to us a life ofsqualor and despair yet they are not the ones out on the road for months onend, working a dangerous job for little money and no comfort at all.

The idea of some people being genetically predisposedtowards being unable to accept civilization as we define it is sort of a foggything. Yet so much of how we have advanced in culture was considered too weird orinsane, in the beginning. I am not saying that each person you see on the roadis a genius undiscovered. I am saying that each person on the road is not somedrunk who crashed out of society and landed at the bottom. We, those of uswilling to work long hours for no joy, created this world. Who are we to judgethose unable to live in it?

Take Care,

Mike

The Woman Who Sang "Caroline"

2012-01-21T09:37:00.000-05:00

Angles. Walls. Shadows. Emotions of yearning, all of these are memories I think Ihave of being an infant. I say I think I have these memories but who can saywhat memories are real and which are false? There was a mobile hanging over mycrib that had a redbird, a cardinal, as part of the flock that circledendlessly and one day I discovered it on the floor. I tore one of its wings offand bit into the body. There was sand inside of the tiny bird’s body and thatwas one of the first sensations I remember; grit in my mouth.

There isn’t a method to reveal if these memories are real ornot. There may be one day some device suitable for reading memories but thetroubled recall we have now is all there is. Each time a memory is recalled itis changed in some way. Each recollection drives a wedge of fantasy orperception between what really was and what we believe, in a very religiousway. We know this, of course, but we cling to the past, all made up in ourheads, as if it were words transcribed in solid concrete.

Verifiable evidence makes things better, but it also makesthings much worse. In my birthtown of Cuthbert Georgia, there is a statue of asoldier in the town square. We left that place when I was four so I can saywith some degree of accuracy I had at least one memory that predates my fourthbirthday. I remember when I was thirty-four I went to Cuthbert as part of mywork and saw that statue again for the first time in thirty years. Instantly, thestatue in the memory was modified, never to return, and the real statue tookits place. But you see, now in my mind there is a memory just like there wasbefore. If I went back today the memory would change again. It is never reallythere but it is also never really gone.

“Like a memory in motion, you were only passing through.That is all that you’ve ever known of life and that’s all you’ll ever do.”

I recalled those lyrics from memory and I am reasonablycertain they are exact. I am totally convinced the song is titled, “Caroline”and the name of the group is “Concrete Blonde” and the name of the CD is“Bloodletting” Ah, but the name of the woman who sings “Caroline” escapes me.Her last name, my memory reports to me is Napolitano. I suspect the name isn’tright, exactly but it is close. Close? How can a memory be close? But we allhave experienced a memory we know isn’t right but “close” Something like that.I know “Janet” is wrong but “close”.

If you asked me to sing that song, and recorded my efforts,I suspect my sense of timing would be off, and I doubt if I could get thelyrics right. Yet if I play “Caroline” I’ll remember the words as what’s-her-namesings them. The name hasn’t returnedyet. Let’s say I do not look the nameup. Why is it that if I get some friends to send me suggestions as to what hername is, when the correct name arrives, I’ll know it, but not until then? If Idid not listen to “Caroline” for thirty years, would I know the name of the womanor the lyrics on my eighty-first birthday?

All things human are fallacious and all things human fail. Weare all masters of sinking ships. We can hope to close some gaps andfrantically bail, but the woman who sang “Caroline” is a lesson not a lie. Sincethe song came out in the mid-eighties, I suspect the group “Concrete Blonde” isno more, and unless she is one of those aging rockers who keep plugging away atit, the woman who sang “Caroline” is likely doing something else for a living,or not living at all. Her name… it still escapes me. How much more will I losebefore the last wave covers my ashes? The storage unit has a hole in it thatleaks reality and lets in moonshine.

If someone from my past was to arrive now, in this future, whereare all the memories that represents that person stored and how are they sostored that unless some song, or scene, or chance meeting, pulls forth the mistfrom the pond, so I might interpret it as my mood demands? The human mind is agraveyard of the past, and we look upon the bones as if they were who we onceknew. Someone you once loved and lost, decades removed from your heart andlife, can stumble into you at the grocery and suddenly your mind reinvents timeas well as reality.

When I was a little boy photos were imperfect and rare. Noteveryone had a camera, not all shots came out, and not all events where worthy ofbeing preserved. Not one photo was taken the night the Titanic sank, no oneupdated their status or tweeted about the event as it happened. The emotionsand horror were recorded only in the human mind and no one lives now who wasaboard that boat when it slammed into hardened water. Now children have theirown video cell phones and nearly every waking moment can be recorded. The captured past is stored safely and permanentlybut time stalks this medium too. I own disks with information on them I cannotretrieve. One day my flash drives will be obsolete. One day my hard drive willbe a relic, tossed away, and what you are reading right now, will be someancient writing method awaiting oblivion, very much like the author, and you.

Damn, I really thought I would remember her name. I havesearch every name I know, every character in every book I remember (remember!)and nothing. The woman who sang “Caroline” has slipped away. I will see hername and instantly know the truth, but now, at this moment, I see not the past,but the future.

Take Care,

Mike

To everyone who loves dogs

2012-01-21T05:39:00.001-05:00

Killing Kids

2012-01-19T21:05:00.001-05:00

It gets past me, really, the thing about killing kids. I donot particularly like children as a class of people, and I didn’t like themmuch when I was a kid. Yet it neveroccurred to me that killing a kid was something that I, or anyone else, oughtto do. Some guy in north Georgia justkilled himself in prison after confessing to killing a seven year old girl. Noreason, really. The little girl wasn’t loud or destructive, toting athermonuclear device around, or constantly singing Justine Berber songs.

This guy just wakes up one day and decides to kill achild, and now, once he’s thought about it for a while, hangs himself.

I’ve been revisiting the West Memphis 3 case in the lastcouple of days and it astounded me that three little boys could be murdered andnot one piece of condemning evidence could be found, or at least that’s the wayit’s portrayed on television. Three very young men were convicted, one sentencedto die for the crimes, but they were all released last year because so many holesappeared in the case.

Justice, in this case, really hasn’t been done because noone knows who killed three little boys. It’s good if the three were innocentand they were set free, that is important, but we still have three dead littleboys who were killed in 1993. There has been three movies, several accusations,a lot of talk, but not one person who the evidence declares guilty. One of therelatives of the children, a man by the name of Mark Byers, shuffled into thespotlight and hillbillied his way into all three moves, was named a suspect bymost everyone who knew him, but in the end, there wasn’t any evidence he did iteither. Byers may very well have killed the kids, but mostly he was just nutsand liked being on camera.

So who killed those three kids?

Casey Anthony walked after a jury declared her not guilty.That outranged a nation but the bottom line is there wasn’t a shred of evidenceagainst the woman except she’s a pathological liar, and she didn’t report her daughtermissing for a month. So help me dog, I would have put her away just for notreporting her kid missing but that’s just me. And a few million of my closestfriends.

The whole sex with kids gets right by me too. I canremember a time in my life a girl fifteen years old was fair game. Of course, Iwas in High School at the time, and most of the girls I knew of dating age werefar younger than eighteen. When I turned eighteen and became legally an adultthe rules changed because dating young girls meant I could be arrested. Bytwenty-one, anyone who wasn’t old enough to drive was a kid. By the time I wastwenty-five anyone too young to vote was jail bait. When I hit thirty it seemedlike woman in their early twenties were just advanced High School girls. Once Igot past fifty I wouldn’t give anyone female a second glance unless they’re oldenough to have daughters in college, or older.

I do understand there are female humans out there underthe legal age of consent who are having sex with underage partners and I thinkthey’re playing with fire, but hey, I got burned at that time in my life, andthat’s just part of trying to grow up. But hey! If you’re old enough to vote you’re old enoughto stay the hell off the school yard.

It seems like a lot of the people who kill kids also rapethem and when you mix the two crimes together that’s a synergy that is evil to thepoint you can damn near bottle it. Jon Benet Ramsey’s parents paraded heraround dressed up like a twenty dollar hooker and much to everyone’s surprisedthe little girl was found assaulted and murdered. I think once someone stopslooking at kids as kids then very bad, very bad, very bad, things begin to takeplace in the human mind. Dressing them the part invites trouble of a speciesthat ought to be extinct. My heart goes out to those parents, especially sincethey were accused of killing their daughter and it turned out not to be true,but dressing a four year old up like astreet walker is just plain damn wrong.

I don’t get that either, by the way, beauty contests forlittle girls.

Kids aren’t something I want, or have ever wanted. I don’tparticularly like anyone who isn’t old enough to string together a few cogentthoughts without whiplashing to another totally unrelated subject without warning.I don’t like people who pull dogs’ tails. I could give a damn less about anyhonor student at your school. I don’t like the idea that I can’t go out to eatwithout some two year old screaming two tables away from me. Some five year oldwith a Ritalin IV drip damn near clipped me with a shopping cart one day andnearly took my knee out. Most of the problems people have in life that aremoney related are child related, and we have all been down that road before,have we not?

But for some reason, when I read about someone that haskilled a kid I have to wonder what was wrong, so terribly and incurably wrongwith that person? I have to wonder why they would do that to a kid, when evenBert, wizened and white faced and grumpy, would allow the Puppy Lucas to climball over him over two years ago. As a species, are dogs truly that muchtolerant than we, or is it they are just less crazy?

While I was watching the show last night about the threelittle boys who were murdered so many years ago, it still broke my heart into amillion pieces.

Take Care,

Mike

Hitler reacts to SOPA

2012-01-19T19:43:00.001-05:00

SOPA

2012-01-18T20:09:00.002-05:00

Eagle Nebula Multi-Wavelength View [720p]

2012-01-18T13:57:00.001-05:00

The Stop Online Piracy Act and the Protect IP Act

2012-01-18T09:18:00.001-05:00

The proponents of the Second Amendment are some of the most rabid activists operating within the law, at least in the United States.Their train of thought runs along a single track, straight and true, and thereisn’t much chance of derailment of that locomotive or loco motive anytime soon.They believe the government cannot be trusted and armed voters are more powerfulthan unarmed voters. They think if the government can take the guns then thegovernment can take the rest of the Constitution as well. I think some of thesepeople are more than a little crazy. But the crazy people with the guns do notfrighten me nearly as much as the people who truly think we would be better offif citizens had no guns. I like being armed. And like the rest of the peoplewith guns who aren’t about to turn them in, I do not trust a government whofears an armed populace.

You may wonder, or at least you should wonder, why all ofa sudden we have a plethora of bills in Congress that would turn control overthe Internet over to a group of people whose approval rating is just somewhat lowerthan Fidel Castro’s in Miami. The Stop Online Piracy Act in the House and theProtect IP Act in the Senate are ostensibly being crested to protectcopyrighted material from being illegally shared. However, if these billsbecome law, the federal government, the same people who have an approval ratingjust a bit higher than leprous strippers, would be able to shut down any and allinternet sites at will.

If you think this is the same paranoia that we gun peoplehave when someone sponsors a bill that would track gun owners in the samemanner that sexual predators are tracked, think about how much power andinfluence the internet in general, and some sites in particular, had in the “ArabSpring” where decades old regimes fell in turn, and even those backed bybillions and billions of US dollars were no match for cell phone videos postedon You Tube and real time information posted on Twitter.

When dealing with the American Congress you can alwayscount on greed being a prime motivating factor. Fear runs a close second. Theidea, the fear, that the American people might rise up and take away the powerfrom those in Washington is the driving force behind these bills. This isnothing less than a preemptive strike to stop an American Spring. The peoplewith the money want to keep the money, and to keep the money they have to own thefederal government, and they do.

If you want to know who is in pay of the people reallyrunning the show you have only to look at who is getting the money to run foroffice. You cannot tell me that a man who stands to make four hundred thousanddollars a year isn’t beholding to someone out there when he spends tens ofmillions of dollars to become president. Members of Congress make a lot less yet innational campaigns they spend enough money to cure poverty one hundred timesover.

Now these same people, the people who clearly give a damnless about what the American people want, are on a power grab to gain controlover the one medium we could possibly use to reach out to likeminded people andtake this nation back from those who have bought it.

These acts will pass and if they do not pass then someother version of them will pass, and failing that, we will wake up one day and discoversome amendment has been added to some existing law and no one told us that thefreedoms we once enjoyed were out sourced to the rich and powerful, so theymight better take care of them in the splendor such rights were meant to beenjoyed.

It is much later than you think. The time between beingable to do something about this without violence and the time when the shootingbegins is about the same time between the first protest in Egypt and the timewhen the first unarmed protestor was gunned down in public. The difference isthe video of that event was broadcast worldwide. We will fight alone, in thedark, and the only scenes of the carnage will be those the government allows,protects, and broadcasts for their own purposes.

When the screens go black we will be isolated, cut offfrom the rest of the world, and no one will ever know what happened. Those crazy gun people are about to be theonly standing between us and 1984. You need to decide today what direction thisthing takes, and you best be getting the message out now while you still can.

Exercising freedom is a lot easier than dying to get itback.

Take Action,

Mike

They Know Who Is Kind To Them

2012-01-16T17:49:00.001-05:00

The Zombies Of Seminole County

2012-01-16T10:56:00.001-05:00

Raymond sat in the holding cell of the Seminole Countyjail and thought about what to do next. Oh, this wasn’t the first time he hadbeen in this cell, for sure. His first trip in was when he was fourteen and hehad snuck into that Mexican’s house and stole a bunch of stuff. Of all thestupid ways to get caught… One of the radios the Mexican was using had an alarmclock on it and the damn thing went off right when the deputies got to hishouse. The Mexican worked two jobs and one of them started at three in the afternoonso the radio went off at two-thirty and as Raymond stood in the doorway of hismama’s house telling that fat old deputy he didn’t know a damn thing about any thievingdone the radio started blasting awaysome Mexican music. The deputies started calling him “Chica” after that and hehated that it caught on, but that was a long time ago. He had sat in this verysame cell many times since then, wrote his name on the wall, come back a fewmonths later to find they had painted over it, or not, but this time, Raymondthought, might just be the last time.

Raymond knew that one day it would catch up with him. He figuredas long as he was stealing then that was less wrong than doing something thatgot people hurt. He never used a knife or a gun, never hit nobody, and he sureas hell wasn’t into beating up old people for their checks. The law seemed tosplit the difference, too. They treated him better than they did the meanfolks. Hell, they called him up on his cell phone one day and told him to comein because that warehouse he hit had a video camera. “Got fried pork chops on Thursday,Chica.” And the food wasn’t half bad back then. Then the county had turned thejail over to a “Justice Center” run by some company up north and everythingchanged. The tore down most of the old jail and instead of cells they had thesetiny rooms without enough space to turn around good. There was air conditioningbut it was stale air that seemed sticky. The food was processed little blocksthat all tasted the same and they gave to a big paper cup of water to drinkinstead of sweet tea. Who in the hell came up with that idea? Raymond thoughtit was their way to keep crime down and he had to admit it was working some. Heworked harder now to stay out of jail than ever before, but he knew it wouldcome back on him.

He was lucky, and he knew it. Jimmy and Po Boi hadplanned to rob a store and he was supposed to be the wheel man. He parked thecar two blocks over in Bainbridge and he waited just like they had planned on.Then it sounded like a dove shoot and Raymond had run like hell. A thousandtimes over he had thanked God he had the sense not to take the car, becausethat belonged to Jimmy, and all Raymond had to do was stop running, think aboutit, and then walk back to where a crowd was gathering around the store. Jimmylay in the middle of the parking lot bleeding out. Po Boi was inside with mostof his head missing. The owner of the store was dead too, and the policeassumed that the car was there when they made their escape and no one ever knewRaymond was there. But God knew. And Raymond thought one day God would dosomething with that knowing. He just never thought it would look anything likethis.

The law seemed to hate some people for no reason. TommyJinks was busted for breaking into a jewelry store and they beat him to deathfor it. Raymond knew most of it was because rich people got more protectionfrom cops than anybody else, but damn, that was harsh. Now this… Raymond triedto block out the noise but there was that fat assed deputy Hanson and that overthe top dispatcher from out of town both trying to break into his cell, puttingtheir arms through the bars trying to grab at him. They had been at it now forthe better part of three days and things in the cell were being a mite weirdpast that.

The electricity had died the first day but the waterstill worked. The holding cell whereRaymond was still had one of the porcelain toilets with a tank and Raymond wasnever so happy in his life to have one of those. No power in that first day wasbad enough, but then Hanson had stumbled through the door moaning and groaningat him. Raymond thought Hanson must have been in a damn car wreck because theman had one hell of a head injury, but that wasn’t it. That skinny boy fromBlakely had been in the cell across the hallway and he got too close to the bars.Hanson grabbed him and started tearing him apart slowly. The dispatcher hadcome in and helped. Raymond screamed and hollered but that didn’t help any morethan the screaming the Blakely Boy did. And that man did some screaming. He gotaway from him but the next day he looked a lot like they did. And now bothHanson and the dispatcher were trying to get into the cell with Raymond.

That was three days ago. Raymond flushed the toilet andthe tank refilled halfway and stopped. How long could he live off that water?How much longer could Hanson and the dispatcher wave their arms through thebars and moan at him. For three days, day and night, that was all they did.Raymond tried to talk to them, plead with them, played the dozens with them,cursed them and ignored them but they stood there, day and night, with theirarms sticking through the bars trying to get to him. The skinny boy fromBlakely was doing it too, but they ignored him now. They all smelled like deadanimals, and Raymond was sure they were dead, but there they were, trying topush through the steel bars.

All the new cells had electronic doors on them andRaymond wondered about the other guys who were locked up. What happened whenthe power went off? They had those new steel toilets that didn’t have a tank.Here in the middle of summer, with no air, how long would they last? Would theyturn into…? Raymond wondered how many more there were. Was everybody like thisnow? Raymond dipped the last of thewater out with the paper cup and ignored the debris in the bottom. How muchlonger would he last? A day? Two or three at the most, maybe. Certainly not aweek. What were his options? Lying in the rack waiting to die of thirst orbeing eaten alive and maybe becoming one of those things? Raymond looked awayfrom the cell door but he couldn’t shut off the sounds.

At dawn the next day Raymond woke from a dream where hewas in a river, floating on his back, and there was a noise, a moaning noise.He woke up and there was Hanson and the dispatcher, arms extended, facespressed into the bars, moaning at him, arms going up and down, fingers reachingtowards him. They never stopped, never gave up, and now, Raymond looked at thepaper cup, there was no water left. His mouth was dry and he could feel the heatin the cell raising. The smell was getting worse. Pieces of Hanson dropped offand lay on the floor, stinking. The dispatcher’s face was rubbing off on thebars. The skinny boy from Blakely had popped part of his jaw off trying topress through the bars. Raymond sat on his bunk and realized tomorrow was goingto be just like today, except he was going to be closer to being dead.

At noon the next day Raymond took a step towards Hanson.Hanson’s face was a mess, and Raymond had never seen anything like it. The man,or what was left of a man, had pressed his face so hard into the bars one ofthem was embedded into his cheek. There was no blood but a thick gooey slimethan oozed like peanut butter stuck to the ceiling. Raymond remembered how ingrade school they had all thrown their sandwiches up on the ceiling and countedas each piece of bread had fallen, food, oh God, food, just one of those back,please, just one. Raymond took another step towards Hanson’s outstretched handand wondered how long it would take. A minute? What was worse; a minute withHanson and the dispatcher or another day waiting to die? A minute wasn’t sobad. He had gotten locked up in Dothanonce and the first night in two of the larger inmates had gotten to him. Thatlasted a lot longer than a minute and when it was all over he was okay. It feltlike hell during the fight but a week later it was like it never happened. Noone knew. It would take a minute and then it would be over. There would bepain, and he knew he would scream, but it would be over. It would be over. Nomore thirst. No more stink. No more cell. God was punishing him now, but maybethis was His way of getting it all over with. Maybe this was hell. In one moreminute it would be over with and whatever came after this would be not as badas this.

Raymond stepped towards Hanson but his instincts tookover and he ducked at the last second but it was too late. Hanson grabbed hisneck, and pulled him close to the bars and Raymond did scream as Hanson’s teethsunk deep into his flesh. He flailed and squirmed but Hanson bit him again, andagain, and …Raymond broke free. Raymond leaped away but he was bleeding, and theblood seemed to excite Hanson and the dispatcher. The both got louder and louder.The boy from Blakely chimed in. Raymond put his hand to his neck and felt hisblood flowing. He put part of his bed sheet on the wound and passed out.

When Raymond came to he was hungry. Both Hanson and thedispatcher were gone, but he was starving. He got up and stumbled to the celldoor but he couldn’t remember how it worked. The door. It did something. What didthe door do? He had to get out, get help, but the things in his mind weregetting off the bus, one by one. Where was he? He was in the Seminole CountyJail. His name was Raymond Richards. He repeated that time and again, but hisvoice began to slur. No more talking. My name is… You know your name, say itout loud. Raymond moaned and realized his name had left. No, not that. Therobbery. Yes, it was still there. His mother, yes, no, wait, that was hisgrandmother, no, that was…He was hungry. The door. He pushed against it withhis body but it didn’t move. Would it? He was hungry. Raymond felt his thoughtsfleeing from his brain like water out of a cup with holes in it. No, keep ittogether man, Raymond thought, but he was hungry. Try to think. Where did thoseother two go? How was he supposed to get out of here he was hungry. Raymondtried to remember the store robbery and discovered it was still there. He hadbeen there with Po Boi and there was… Raymond couldn’t remember. He was hungry.There had been shooting, where had there been shooting? What was he thinkingabout? Raymond discovered he had pushed his face against the bars but it didn’tmatter because there was food somewhere outside and pushing… Raymond felt hismind flash with terror as it fought to stay alive and for a second, a fleeingmoment, he had clarity but then it was gone. He was hungry. Raymond pushedagainst the cell door and knew nothing else.

end

More Saving Money: DIY Laundry Detergent

2012-01-14T19:31:00.000-05:00

Okay, when someone offers to save me some money, I’mthinking someone is out to make some money off me trying to save money.Enter peanutbuttermacrame run byElizabeth Schartok. She posted the following recipe.

1 4 lb 12 oz box Borax (2.15 kg or 76 oz) found in thedetergent isle

1 4 lb box Arm & Hammer Baking Soda (1.81 kg) foundin the cooking isle

1 box Arm &Hammer Super Washing Soda 55 oz (3 lb 7 oz) found in the detergent isle

3 bars of Fels-naptha soap, found in the detergent isle

2 small containers of oxyclean or store brand oxyclean(try to get about 3.5 lbs total (1.58 kg)) found in the detergentisle.*(optional, see below)

Now at this point we can take into consideration one oftwo possibilities. One, Elizabeth is in the pay of the international Fels-napthaconsortium, and is collection a very healthy kick back on every bar she sells,or we can consider Elizabeth might be a mother of two young children, and anexpert seamstress and by those virtues an excellent source of information.

I’ll give you a couple of minutes to consider those possibilities.

So away I went.

I looked n a few places, got come blank stares for thewashing soda and then hit a four for four pay dirt, no pun intended, and forall the needed ingredients in one place for less than ten bucks. That is lessthan ten bucks. You might want to consider that fact.

At this point, if you’re feeling like a pawn of the internationalFels-naptha consortium, you might want to just bail out and go out and buy theliquid mostly water expensive stuff, or the powered that foams stuff that costsmore money.

It took a while to grate all the bar soap up, yes, but Iexperimented with how well it dissolved in water and it did, totally.

My first victim was the mutt blanket of extreme dogsmell. It came out clean and fresh smelling!

All in all, either you want to save money and you’ll givethis a shot, or you refuse to be a pawn of the international Fels-napthaconsortium and you’ll keep paying for water and lemon freshened scent.

Take Care,

Mike

2012-01-14T13:30:00.002-05:00

http://www.dogsagainstromney.com/

Dogs Against Romney

The Official Site of Dogs Against Romney(TM). Founded June 2007. Hi, I'm Rusty. Mitt Romney is mean to dogs. Help me get my message out.

What song is this?

2012-01-14T13:20:00.001-05:00

The War Of Northern Aggression

2012-01-13T08:04:00.000-05:00

The argument that the War Of Northern Aggression was not basedon the issue of slavery is an argument so weak as to not to be considered byanyone who has studied history, but then again, those who make this argumentare very rarely historians. I’ve listened to this argument all of my life,having lived in The South during that time, and I’ve never once heard anythingthat dissuaded me from my conviction that the one single driving issue for thewar was slavery. Without that issue there would have been no war.

My case for this is simply put; the rich land owners inThe South wanted to remain rich. They cared not at all of the suffering of theslaves and they cared even less about the overpowering and grinding poverty ofpoor whites that made up the vast majority of the population. Yet the richpeople sold the idea of succession to the poor, and therefore sold the war tothem. It was a matter of regional integrity and cultural purity, in which theywrapped the war in quite prettily, and that illusion has yet to be dispelledeven over one hundred and fifty years since it was spawned. There are stillpoor white people who believe The South is a homeland once taken away fromthem, and they cannot and will not believe that war freed their ancestors froma fate just slightly less worse than that of slaves.

When I have any sort of discussion of this issue with Southernersthe first thing I do is ask them why the Confederate Constitution was set upthe way it was. Most have no idea such a document existed at all, and I thenask them how do they know the reasons behind succession if they have no ideawho wrote and planned how The South would exist if they have never read thegoverning articles which would define how the Confederacy would operate? Whowrote it? Who were the representatives from the individual states who contributedto it? What did it have to say about the issue of slavery?

Slavery was illegal in most part of the world by then andmost European countries had long since banned the practice. In one of the mosttelling political concessions in the Confederate Constitution is the banning ofthe importation of slaves from Africa. Clearly, the people who owned slaves didnot care about the slaves or where they came from, but this article was meantto assuage the European powers that might become very important allies againstthe United States. Slavery would not only define the war but it would alsodefine the diplomacy. The Confederation, willing to fight a war to keep slaveryintact, was from birth forced to take a step away from it.

Documents from the era of the War Of Northern Aggression areof two sorts. The first is the correspondence from the soldiers in the fieldwhich are laced with patriotic fervor. The second is from those who are seeingthe war far from the front. The men who started this war, the Confederates whoseek the dissolution of the Union speak only in terms of economics. Riches andracism drive their part in this, and they care nothing at all about who dies topreserve their plantations. Greed, pure and simple, is the reason for this war.Only those men who money could afford to start the war and money is why theystarted it. Racism is their way of justifying keeping other human beings inbondage and it is an institution that still exists today, for very much thesame reasons. Yet no matter the outcome of the war the poor whites were goingto be handed a life pretty much the same. They would remain poor. They wouldremain under educated. They would remain convinced it was poor blacks who weremaking a living off of their sweat regardless of the evidence that it was rickwhite people who were living quite well off of everyone else. There is stillvery much of this mindset going on, hence this conversation.

Racism in The South is not the same as regional identity. More than any other part of this nation,The South is more clearly defined by a culture, an accent, and a sense ofcommonality. In some ways this is a good thing but there are still some very self-destructivebehaviors we cling to in each generation. We cannot make peace with the rest ofthe world, the United States, or ourselves as long as we deny the root cause ofthe War Of Northern Aggression to be slavery. This is not to say that we cannotbe proud that we were once a nation. This is not to say that we cannot definewho we are by where we live. But the idea that the people who lived at Tara are“Our people” is ludicrous and it iswrong. Those were the people who sold us the idea the war would keep ustogether when it fact that war, had it been won, would have ensured the poorwould remain forever poor.

Most poor whites today who fly the Confederate battleflag have no idea why that is a symbol of everything that is wrong with The South.To them, it is the flag of a nation born of a people who rose up against theFederal government bent on dominating each state in turn. You cannot blame themfor their distrust of the Federal government, but at the same time theirignorance of history is truly profound. At the end of the day those who flythat flag are either racists who wish to turn the clock back far enough so theycan be poor white trash in a world of black slavery, or they are those whoembrace their own willful ignorance, in a world where they, and their children,are left in a past that never existed.

Take Care,

Mike

The Spiders and The Rain and The Noise

2012-01-10T20:37:00.001-05:00

It hasn’t rained here on a regular basis for so long now Ihave forgotten what it was like. The rain used to “set in” and there would be alight gentle rain for days on in. You could count on the places that weresupposed to have water to have water, and sometimes the places that were notsupposed to have water did anyway. It flooded here in 2002 and 2003 and Iwondered if I would ever see all of my backyard again, and I wondered if Iwould ever come home to find Bert dry. Bert would get into water that wasnearly over his head and then roll over on his back and his feet would stickout of the water as he rolled around. That dog loves water like no animal Ihave ever seen who didn’t have a set of gills hung on him.

The mosquitoes were bad one year here, the first year Iwas here, 2001 and they have not been very bad since. 2001 brought a flock of “crunchy”mosquitoes that made a noise when they were hit. Crunch! There were big black bustardswith white stripes on their legs. Itwasn’t safe to go outside even in daylight without some repellant of a baseballbat. I do not know what changed, but I don’t have the mosquito problem manypeople in this area have. I don’t spray for pests and I won’t. I keep spidersand let anything that slightly resembles a dragonfly live. I don’t have theproblems with roaches that other people have. People tell me the giant roachesthat infest nearly every house not sprayed and some that are sprayed, can’t besafe using all natural methods, like spiders, and they have a good point inthat one of the full sized adults is likely not going to get tangled in a web.But they are short lived creatures and they are born very small. My spidersfeast on the small. The lizards and frogs near the door keep unwanted visitorsat bay there. All in all, nothing I do not want to live here will not livehere. Just like in nature, where there is a balance as far as how many of onespecies can survive in a location, my house supports a few more spiders thanyou might find somewhere else because they are safe here. Conversely, roachesare on the hit list as well as the menu.

Two years in a row I have stepped on a Cottonmouth,starting in 2010. Both were my fault, both were in places the snakes shouldhave been, and both times I did not get bit. Still, even though I am totally atpeace with these animals, I suspect they are not with me and I have just beenvery lucky. This is not some movie where I can nudge pit vipers out of my pathwith my bare toes and a soft word. I suspect that I’m either going to get bitor I am going to start doing things to keep from being bit. I may have to startcarrying a flashlight at night when I walk barefooted.

Sam, the Happy Hound and Mid-Mutt, kills things, but heis slowing down. I’m certain Lucas can handle a bite from a small snake but Ihaven’t stepped on a small snake yet. But the Loki Mutt isn’t some purse carriedtoy dog who is fed downers and kept in a crate. This is a strong willed huntingdog who doesn’t show much fear of wildlife at all. Whatever else you may believe,the clash between dogs and venomous snakes usually winds with a dead snake and anunscathed dog. Toss in the fact that Sam has trained this animal and the oddsare tilted dramatically. Sam is a surgeon, precise and neat. He kills withoutsound or mess, breaking the neck of an armadillo in seconds and walking awaywithout any hint of pleasure. This is business, nothing more and nothing less.Sam is a professional hunter and doesn’t play with his quarry. Bert is a loudbrawler and Lucas hunts more like Bert, but he has picked up Sam’s sense of dedication.No, I’m not much worried about a dog getting snakebit, but I do allow that itmight happen, and I have to live with it.

I could live another way and one day I might have to doexactly that. Even a smallish snake could kill Bert outright, as old and feebleas he is. Bert has always been more of a fighter than a hunter, taking positioninside Sam’s stalk to bring down prey. It’s worked really well for over a decadenow, and nothing these two ever chased walked away from it. I didn’t train themto do it, but I did allow it, and I did because they spend more time alone withone another than they do with me here. I have to trust them to do whatever itis they do, and it is whatever it is. Sam, as I pointed out, killspassionlessly. To him it is not a game or a sport. Bert, on the other paw, is achomper and he wades in snarling and snapping. His neck is protected by thickfur and his face sort of pushes forward as to protect his eyes. Bert allsquinty eyes at you is Bert about to bite you. It is the same as hearing thesound of a gun cocking and whatever else you may believe, when Berthorripilates and his eyes become narrow slits, there is going to be some blood.

I miss the rain. I wish it would flood one more time soBert could play every day in the water. I could come home and despair at howbad he smelled and have to towel him off three times a day. I would wash a loadof towels a day and the house would smell doggy.

But it hasn’t rained like that in years, and Bert doesn’thave years left.

Take Care,

Mike

The Time Man and The Alcohol

2012-01-09T19:33:00.001-05:00

There was a time in my life where waking up, or comingto, in strange places wasn’t that big of a deal. Alcohol was sort of ageography game of Russian Roulette where drinking in one place might land mesomewhere else by the end of the weekend, and I never knew where that might be.There was an old deserted farmhouse in the middle of nowhere and I woke upthere one morning with no clue as to how I got there or who I had been with, orhow to get away from the place. I burned a joint and considered the options.Back in the 70’s hitch hiking was still very safe, but at the same time Icouldn’t very well get a ride if I didn’t know where I was or where I was going. The people I had been partying with the nightbefore finally showed up and they were fairly pissed at me. I had wandered offin the middle of the party and they assumed I was at the farmhouse but didn’treally know. It was the only thing near where the party was, but ti was stillthree miles from one to the other. It wasn’t the same farmhouse I ventured intoat Frog Town, and that is another long story, really.

This farmhouse was in Early County, I think, and FrogTown is in Alabama somewhere, I have no idea, because it all blurs. Thefarmhouse where I was had a pile of clothes in a corner, and it wasn’t like meto go through a pile of clothes, and no reason for me to do so, but Iremembered that the Manson Family did that. They kept all their clothes on onebig pile. No one owned anything as far as clothing went and that madeidentifying individuals much harder when the police got to looking at who waswho. They traded off nicknames too, and for some reason I thought about all ofthis while I looked at the pile of clothes. Really, it was getting a littleweird. What if the people who wore these clothes showed up and wanted them? Therewere all sorts of clothes there. Baby clothes, adult clothes, big jeans andlittle pants. There was a Corduroy jacket that was a different shade of blue.Sort of blue green, and faded, with two pockets in the front, up top, and avery wide lapel, the jacket looked like something a woman would wear. I thoughtthis because back then men generally didn’t wear clothes that color. Blue-greenwasn’t one of the primary colors and men just didn’t wear outside that group atall, and sometimes not even within it.

I can’t explain it. The jacket meant something. Not tome, no, not like that, but it meant something to someone and I could tell itsomehow. I looked in the pockets and there wasn’t anything there at all, butjust touching it I could feel something. It felt like stealing to touch it.None of the other items had that. Okay, now to make this as surreal as it mightbe, the touch of the jacket wasn’t like touching the woman who wore it, or thewoman who owned it, but rather something else. There was something thathappened to her, and the person who had last seen her alive had seen thisjacket. I didn’t think it was murder, but some sort of odd accident like apenicillin reaction that was fatal. It wasn’t that, mind you, but that was howit felt. But that was when my ride showed up.

I forgot about the jacket. What was there to remember?

It was a year or so later, I was in my senior year inHigh School, I think, really, the late seventies is such a blur, and I was onthe verge of a condition I called “free fall” because I was too drunk to catchmy balance. The world tilted a bit and even though I was still doing shots ofIrish Whiskey, it was damn hard to hold onto the tabletop. I was being a defacto bartender, pouring shots for anyone brave enough, or stupid enough, todrink the good stuff straight. A guy sat down across from me and startedtelling me about his girlfriend and it freaked me out. First off, I couldn’thave a conversation with a stranger and not freak out. People terrified me. Iwas just eighteen and socially awkward to the point of pain. The second reasonis this guy felt familiar and I knew I had never met him before. No one else inthe room seemed to notice there was a stranger there. I tried to concentrate onwhat he was telling me but the words made no sense. And finally he stoppedtalking and laughed. I remember what he said next because it seemed so real.

“I’m telling you this because you aren’t going to rememberany of it, and even if you do, I don’t think you’ll live long enough torepeated it, and even if you do, who would listen to you?” That seemed funny,even to me, and I asked him if he wanted a shot of whiskey and he sat there anddrank with me, and told me things that did not make sense at all.

He got up and went to a book shelf, studied the titlesfor a few moments, and picked out a book.

“She died trying to figure out the things I told her, andwhen she did, it killed her.” And he put the book down in front of me and theman walked out of the party and I didn’t see him again. I did another shot andlooked at the book. It was a textbook from grade school; a souvenir from thehost’s fifth or sixth grade classes. The book sat there like a coiled up snakeand I wondered if I remembered what the man has said if I, too, would bekilled. The book was the same color as the jacket and for some reason, Iremembered every detail of that jacket perfectly.

Since then, after I quit drinking so much I thought aboutwhat he said, and it didn’t make any sense at all, still, but you know what?Every once in a great while something will happen, like the space shuttleblowing up over Texas, or the wars in Iraq, or the president being impeached,and I’ll remember that man, and that jacket, and somehow, what he said seems tobe related in some way to what happened.

I can’t remember. I can’t. And I wonder if that is why hetold me.

Take Care,

Mike

2012-01-08T10:43:00.001-05:00

Dothan Alabama and Faith, the Rescued Dog

2012-01-08T08:30:00.000-05:00

Dothan Alabama is where everyone in Southwest Georgia tookdates in the 70’s. That was the only place with a movie theater and restaurantsthat didn’t have retirees clogging up the waitress by drinking a gallon ofcoffee a day. Even the most strict parents allowed this pilgrimage and theforty minute drive there was some one on one time that was magic to those of usjust trying to figure out which end was up in life. I haven’t been there inyears and hadn’t planned to go, but that was where Elbow had planned to pickFaith up, and so on to Dothan, to rescue a dog, I would go.

If I started now and wrote for another four years I mightbe able to give you an idea of how much time I spent on the road to Dothan whenI was in High School. That was the place everyone went when a new Pink FloydAlbum came out ( I bought “Animals” in Albany Georgia just to be different) Thatwas where we went to secretively visit the head shop. That was where we wentwhen we got stoned and wanted to watch a midnight movie.

The girl who was my High School sweetheart liked aMexican restaurant on Main Street there and there is where I took her on ourfirst date. It was a surreal thing because I was terrified of socialinteraction but more than willing to give it a shot for her. That was also thelast place she and I went in High School, the night she told me she was gettingmarried to someone else. I remember both scenes equally and they were matchingbookends for our relationship that would not truly die for another five years.I nearly asked Elbow to drive by the place to see if it was still there, butno. There comes a time to let go and that time has come and gone many othertimes.

There was an old state roadside park where she and I usedto make out and that too has been close. I saw it on the way back and Iremembered that night we were driving back from Dothan on our first date andshe reached over and pulled the blinker on to let me know she wanted to stopfor a while. Of all the things that I done and seen while on a date that was myfirst real erotic moment behind the wheel, a simple act really, but one fraughtwith implications. Did I mention letting go somewhere before? I am certain Idid.

She and I went to see a friend who had been in a wreck,one that I indirectly caused, and the hospital was right across the street fromwhere Elbow and I waited for the dog delivery. I remember seeing that womanwith a long and wicked looking gash in her head, and it never occurred to me Ihad a hand in what had happened but I did, and it took years for me tounderstand what had happened.

The dog arrived and I have seen scared dogs before. Faithwas homeless, without a pack to love and protect her, and no one but kindstrangers to guide her. She didn’t have her own place to sleep, or eat, or hangout, and she had no one to protect and love. This terrifies a dog more thananything else. The realization of abandonment, that feeling every dog that hasbeen left at a shelter or dumped on the road is an act of rape. There isn’tanything we humans do that is worst to dog, emotionally. Here Faith is,wondering what she did wrong to deserve what has happened and there is no oneto guide her but people she has never smelled before. Her terror was clear and palpable.We would not be her family on this day and it would take time before she could learnwe were.

Faith lay on the floorboard and she didn’t move very muchon the way home. The day for her had already been very long and very hard. Shehad been spaded the day before and the pain meds were making her blurry. Wherewere the people she loved? Where were these humans taking her? What had shedone wrong? Three weeks in the shelter were an eternity in dog years. Now thelong road trip, likely her first, and the never ending feeling she was gettingfurther and further away from home.

Faith acted as if she were in a state of shock as we ledher around the yard. There was no tail wagging and little interest in herenvironment. She finally found the water trough and I noticed that seemed tohelp. Water, to strays and the abandoned, is a community not to be takenlightly. If there is water, a good steady source of fresh and clean water, thenthat’s a start. That’s not a bad thing at all.

Theo, the ancient black lab seemed to like Faith andFaith seemed to like Theo. They traded snuffles and neither growled at oneanother. Lucy, the gentle giant of a Great Pyrenees was not so accepting. Lucycurled her lips and growled at Faith but Faith didn’t seem the least bitconcerned. Later, we tried to let the two sort it out and Lucy attacked Faith.I grabbed Lucy, who out massed Faith by half again, and Faith went after Lucy.Okay. Faith clearly still has come self-confidence when it comes to defendingherself. How these two are going to sort it out, I cannot guess at this point,but Lucy is a good person, I do know that.

I left Elbow and Faith with the rest of the pack, and mademy way home. Today one less dog is without a home, even if she doesn’t know ityet. Today, one less dog is without a family, even if she doesn’t feel it yet.Today, one less dog is abandoned, and all in all, that makes this a good day.

Take Care,

Mike

2012-01-08T07:48:00.001-05:00

Did perpetual happiness in the Garden of Eden maybe get so boring that eating the apple was justified?
Chuck Palahniuk

The Snake That Was Not Missing and Miss Kitty

2012-01-05T20:18:00.001-05:00

As a child in South Georgia growing up in the 60’s therewasn’t a whole lot of choice given as far as what I liked and did not like.Elsewhere the world may have been a’changing but South Georgia was as static asa television channel after eleven at night, when there was nothing on but themoon. Hell, even the moon was changing, but we were not. The rules our parentshad grown up with would be, would be, the rules we grew up with, and therewasn’t going to be any debate about it, at all. The Law Of Adult Infallibilitywas absolute. The Law Of Adult Infallibility stated that any adult could orderany child to do anything and the child, under threat of severe punishment, hadto obey. It was like feudal Japan with a drawl.

The Calley’s lived a couple houses down from us and I wasreally good friends with their son, Marvin. Marvin’s mother, Janet, was one ofthose advocates of Adult Infallibility to the point she made the Nazis look likePomeranian puppies on Xanax. Children were meant to be seen very little andheard not at all. Children were like dogs in they were not allowed on thefurniture, and if she would have had her way, Janet Calley wouldn’t have letany of us in the house at all. They were the first people I had ever known withcarpet on the floor and, of course, children were not allowed on it. The carpetwas a bright electric blue and it was as if a piece of the sky had fallen downupon their floor. Janet Calley would have made my life miserable but she wasmore afraid of snakes than she was God, and I started catching snakes at agefive. My mother and father would have killed me if I had thrown a snake on anadult, but the rules were somewhat less clear on pretending there wasn’t asnake in Janet Calley’s house.

Not only did the Calley’s have carpet, which we had heard ofbut never really seen, they also had the first color television in theneighborhood, and not even Janet would deny children a peek at such a marvel.But she slowly weeded out the time we spent mesmerized by it, and it was in thesame room as the carpet, so watching the color television was paramount togetting an audience with the One Eyed God of the Electric Blue Floor Covering. Ourbig thing was “Gunsmoke” that never ending saga of the American Western repletewith the James Arness as the Marshal and Amanda Blake as his saloon girlgirlfriend. Watching “Gunsmoke” in color was nearly a religious experience, andJanet Calley was a heretic of the worse kind.

One day, just before “Gunsmoke” I snuck in while Marvin wasout playing with the other kids. I took with me an empty jar and the lid of thejar had some holes stuck in it. I took the lid off, stood on the electric blueheaven and waited. I still remember how odd carpet felt on bare feet like thefur of a unicorn. The smell was as foreign as that of dragon dust. I wiggled mytoes and breathed deep of the incense of the temple, and like clockwork, JanetCalley walked in and exploded. I rarely raise my voice to the dogs. It’s evenmore rare I do more than have to pop one on the butt to get a dog’s attention.But the standard operating procedure of the Law Of Adult Infallibility was toyell at the top of one’s lungs if there was even a whiff of child misbehavior.My parents were advocates of the hit first and ask questions later sect ofchild raising. But all in all, it was a guilty until proven innocent world andJanet Calley had caught me black footed in her den of the One Eyed God of theElectric Blue Floor Covering.

“Wait, what is in that jar?”

She asked this question while skidding to a stop. Why,nothing, I replied, and hid it behind my back. Oh, let me see it. I reluctantlyshowed the jar in one hand, the punctured lid in the other, and hung my head.Before she could ask another question I blurted out...

“There wasn’t a snake in it, there wasn’t a snake in it!”

If Karl Marx would have fallen nude from the ceiling whilesinging dialectic dirges accompanied by banjo music Janet Calley would not haveexited the building any quicker. The idea there was a live snake in the housewas enough to send her running like her head was on fire and her ass wascatching. I followed her out, but she demanded that I not leave the house untilI found that snake.

“There is no snake.” I said, but The Law demanded I look soI did.

Believe it or not, the control panel of the television wassomewhat of a mystery. There were two big knobs, three dials, and one push/pullstemmed button that looked like it might be the power control. I gently pulledthe knob until it popped into place and the sound began. The screen flickeredfor a few seconds and lo! “Gunsmoke” had just come on, and I had been leftalone in the den of the One Eyed God of the Electric Blue Floor Covering. I layon the blue flying carpet and paid homage to the colorized god.

The adults involved in all of this were not morons. Yetneither my mother, who was just slightly less afraid of snakes than JanetCalley, nor Janet Calley herself could bring themselves to believed I had gamedthe system. After all, I had said all along there was no snake. Now Ned Calley,the father of Marvin and husband to Janet, jumped on the idea I had bought anhour of television time with an empty jar and the truth. He was a profane manand usually drunk, and he also loved this sort of thing when a kid managed tomilk the Law out of something. That is, as long as he wasn’t the one gettinghad. My father scoffed at the idea I had been smart enough to pull somethinglike that off, and so I did manage to get away with it, clean. To this day Iremember lying on that blue carpet, watching a color television and shoutingout, “No ma’am!” every time Janet yelled in asking if I had caught the snake Ihad told her wasn’t in the den of the One Eyed God of the Electric Blue FloorCovering.

Take Care,

Mike

The Soviets Versus Fireants

2012-01-04T21:12:00.001-05:00

Many years ago I drank some really good dark beer with anArmy Captain, played below my level at chess, and listened to him talk aboutthings that might have gotten him a court martial. I was more than a good chessplayer; I was a good drunk chess player. If I could have gotten Bobby Fisher atthe table with a fifth I would have owned that punk. Drinking with an officer wasgood enough. But this was a man who wanted to win, or at least beat this lowlyPrivate at chess, and as long as he was supplying the beer I was more thanwilling to let him come close, but not quite winning.

I asked him where the Soviets would invade from and hesaid “North”. The idea was a fairly old one with the Soviets launching a fullscale invasion using the vast frozen north as a springboard. I didn’t say sobut I didn’t think it would work for a lot of reasons, first and foremost thetundra favors the defender and wide open spaces favor anyone with a decent airforce and we had one, and still do. The idea of attacking that far away seemeda little weird, too, and I did mention that, and the Captain said there reallywasn’t another way in.

The big problem with an invasion of America, he slurred,was the Communists had over one hundred thousand men trapped in Cuba? Trapped?The plan to invade the South looked good up until they reached I-10 in Floridaand then all hell would break loose. Whereas in most cases of invasion thedefenders would be hampered by thousands of refugees flooding away in front of the invaders, the South would havejust about seventy percent of those capable of holding a firearm runningtowards the front…grinning. The population of the rural South is an armed camp.Nearly everyone is armed. Most of those people shoot on a regular basis. Noneof them have ever truly bought into Marxism. More than a few of them play withthings that explode for a hobby. I went to High School with those people.

The US military planned to drop as much of I-10 that waselevated on its side in such an event, and pretty much try to make a stand somewherearound fifty miles north of that, just in case the locals didn’t eat the Sovietsfor breakfast. Think about it. How manyofficers can you lose to fourteen year olds in tree stands using high poweredrifles before you have to start promoting people in places they aren’t suitedto serve? You think Iraq was a hard fight? Fargo Georgia would run red withblood before anyone ever set up a base camp in that tiny town. You would have asmall population of heavily armed and totally dedicated people, men, women,children, old folks and pit bull dogs with nothing better to do than hunt andkill. Now imagine a few thousand places like this from the Atlantic to theborder of Texas. The Union Army took a quarter of a million fatalities cominghere and they spoke the same language, sort of. That was before we started buyingAK-47’s at Wal Mart, too. They used to sell them there, time was.

I grabbed a beer and looked at the Captain meaningfully. Hecouldn’t let an enlisted man outdrink him so he finished half a beer at onetime and motioned for another. I opened one for him, and then went to the bathroomand let him contemplate his pieces. My kingside knight had bounced around themiddle of the board drawing his pawns out, too far out, and now the otherknight was about to leap over his pawn structure to fork his queen and rook ifhe wasn’t careful. He would see that, of course, that was why I was giving hima little time to look. I returned andnoticed he had moved his queen, blocking his knight in, just as I thought hewould.

The problem with the Soviets coming up from Cuba is theheat. Cuba is hot but it’s different from the triple digit heat and drippy humidityof the Deep South. There is thick undergrowth here; kudzu, briars, and vineswith thorns, as well as tangles of wild grape vines, and that’s those thingsnot actively trying to kill you. Chiggers, a nearly microscopic insect thatsucks blood and leaves welts on the skin that itch, live in Spanish moss arepandemic. Fireants, tiny but mighty, attack in mass, and kill more people everyyear than do venomous snakes, which we have in the most exciting varietieshere. The first time someone who is accustomed to smallish snakes sees a sixfoot long Eastern Diamondback is for that person’s eyes never to leave the groundagain…ever. And then there’s that fourteen year old in a tree stand armed witha rifle with an effective range somewhere around five hundred yards, on a badday, and there will be a few of those.

The Captain looked at his beer as if it were getting morefull, not empty. I was one up on him, beer-wise and he was trying to catch up.I listened to him talk about the logistic nightmare of trying to get suppliesthrough hostile territory, and at the same time, his queen was blocking apiece, and his pawns were getting picked off one by one. He had lost theability to castle when I sent in a knight to die to make sure he didn’t. The center of the board was crowded andsticky with pieces and no one was going anywhere. I was going to flank the oppositeside where his queen went to rescue and collapse the entire mess. But I wanted him to think there was a way outfirst.

“Where did you say you were from, Firesmith?” the Captainasked as we set the pieces up again. He had very nearly got his queen andremaining rook out to attack before the end.

“Georgia, sir,” I replied, “beer?”

“Yeah, thanks, you’re not bad at this you know, but I’mjust a little rusty.”

“Yes, sir, I can tell.” I opened up another beer, and aqueen pawn.

Take Care,

Mike

Back To The End

2012-01-03T19:31:00.001-05:00

The backwards calendar is one of my personal quirks and itis damn hard to put into words. It makes sense to me because I created it, buttrying to explain it to other people is kinda weird. I’ll try, anyway, and ifit gets past you I apologize in advance, but just try to keep up with the storyin general, which is life running backwards instead of life creeping forwards,even though they’re going at the same speed. See, I confused you already, andreally, once you wrap your mind around time as something that can be measuredin more than one way, it isn’t very hard at all.

I can’t retire from the job I have right now until Novemberthe ninth, 2020. That is three thousand, two hundred, and thirty-three daysaway from today, which is the third of January, 2012. That’s an easy concept isit not? Okay, now to put it in units less perverse. If you started out walkingand you knew you were going to walk one hundred miles, suppose you weresixty-three miles out, and had only thirty-seven more to go. Now, if you werewalking that one hundred miles, and you had just thirty-seven more to go, couldyou remember where you were when you were at mile thirty-seven of your walk? Asyou contemplated your former destination and headed towards mile sixty-four,you realize that you are also thinking about where you were at mile thirty-six,and instead of thinking forwards you are also thinking backwards. The backwardscalendar works the same way. When youare thirty-seven miles from the end, on the backwards calendar you arethirty-seven miles from the beginning.

My first day at work was on the sixteenth of March, 1992. Thatis the starting point. I have three thousand, two hundred, and thirty-threedays left, so add that number of days to the starting point and you arrive onJanuary the 20^th, in the year 2001. It is a Saturday, and believe itor not, I remember that day fairly well. That’s why we’re having thisconversation. Oh, I forgot to tell you; I have an Excel program that keeps upwith the backwards date. That’s why I know what backwards day it is, andbecause that day meant something to me. I remember it. It was one of the firstdays in my new house. The house I live in now. That was nearly eleven yearsago.

We had bought the house on a Friday and we spent thatweekend moving. Saturday, the 20^th, was our first full day in thehouse. I was still married, Bert was still a puppy, and neither Sam nor Lucashad been born, yet. The paint in the house still smelled fresh. The house wasnew territory and there were boxes everywhere. I hadn’t even gone to work in mynew location in Valdosta and that would come Monday.

The marriage was just over a year old and even though Ididn’t know it, the end of the marriage was twenty months away. Bert would findSam in eight months. But right now, the experience of the new houseovershadowed everything. There were boxes everywhere, did I mention that? Aweek later, I would dump everything out of all the boxes and burn them all in apile in the yard. That forced us to put stuff away, somewhere, anywhere, justnot in the damn boxes anymore, okay? My wife hadn’t worked in a couple ofmonths and wouldn’t ever hold down a real job while she lived there. We weredesperately poor at that point in time and it never really got any better astime went on, and time did go on.

That was the last time I moved, you know, and had just movedfour years before that, and had moved three times in the last four years beforethat move. I hate moving, but I love the feel of the new place once the boxesare all empty. It rained a couple of days later and the sound of rain on theroof was comforting. My last house, which had been the first house I ever bought,was drafty and the heat pump didn’t work well but the new house was a warm one,and it still is. I remember how exciting it was to discover the ancient Oakthat lives in the corner of the property and I still get that feeling wheneverI stop beside it and think about how much history it has survived. Thebackwards calendar of the Oak might see a time before the invasion of thiscontinent was assured. We humans might think a house is old or new, or warm orcold, but the Mighty Oak has seen a time before the houses, and has seen housesrise and fall before. The old metal and shattered glass in the yard testifiesthat a home was once here, and someone once moved in, just as I did, but longerago than anyone but the Oak knows.

The backwards calendar from here will reach points in myhistory that I remember poorly. In fourteen months I will be single again, andin a couple of years I will buy my first house, and a couple of years past thatI will live in an apartment for the last time (I hope) and a few months beforethat I will become a fledgling writer. My personal history will finally reach apoint when the calendar ends, Mayan-like, and what lies beyond that no oneknows, not even the Oak. My snapshot into the past will begin its journeytowards a beginning it cannot reach, for my future will not reach that far intomy past.

If I have lost you here, fear not, for the past isn’t nearlyas important as it seems or as interesting as we make it sound sometimes. Butdo the math and look back at your life at a time when what was happeningconsumed you, and then that fire went out. Was it ever really burning?

Take Care,

Mike

Little Hitlers Cause No Wars

2011-12-30T17:31:00.001-05:00

Adolf Hitler was fascinated with the idea of “The Law of theJungle” where only the strongest survive, and they preyed on the weak. Thisbelief held all the way down to the end, with Germany in ruins, and Hitlerstating that the Germans had brought this all on themselves by putting him inpower. Hitler surmised that if Germanydid not win the war then they deserved total annihilation, and this is what hisbeliefs led to for one nation and for about sixty million people worldwide whenthe war ground to a halt. Hitler’s thousand year Reich last less than a decade.The same people he had labeled as subhuman would occupy his formercapital. Those who had most ferventlyfollowed him to ruin also followed him to death via suicide.

We look back in hindsight with no small amount ofrevulsion at this man and his followers as symbols of the ultimate in evil. Itisn’t hard to do. In fact, it is quite easy to make a case for Hitler andNazism to be held up as an example of a time in history where one man’s ideagrew to a terrible and incredible wickedness. The argument against Hitler beingthe ultimate in all things created evil is usually made by those who still seesalvation in the twisted cross of the swastika. History will be unkind to themas well, for they seem to be little more than disenchanted societal dropoutslooking for a scapegoat for, or a Hero to, their inabilities. In Hitler they find shock value, andrightfully so, but I suspect that is all they will find, and I suspect it isall they truly have.

Yet here we are, seventy years later, and even though wegive great lip service to how Nazism could not rise again, certainly not herein America, and certainly not in this modern day and age, the evidence of someof Hitler’s teachings are not spoke aloud or preached, but they are insteadpracticed silently. Hitler’s beliefs arenot institutionalized not by the government but are instead dictated to us byeconomics and poverty. We will not condemn the Jews to ghettos because of theirreligion but we will condemn children to live in ghettos because their parentsare poor.

While no one is being taken by rail to the showers theend results is there are people who are being killed simply because of who andwhat they are. The volume of death is not the same but this lessens the evil bydegree, not actuality.

Think about it like this; the German people were toldthat a group of people called “Jews” were such terrible people they deserved tobe treated as if they were less than human. Laws were enacted to ensure theywere a criminal class of people, and they could not under any circumstance riseabove this. Their children were to be Jews, and they were to live only withJews, never to mix with those of the pure of blood.

Now think about how you would feel if someone moved innext door to you and they were instead of Jewish, a prostitute. Now, before youget all weird on me, I am not equating a religion with prostitution, and forthose of you out there who are insulted by this anyway, allow me to apologizefor insulting the prostitutes. At least their trade is a product of necessity,but religion is a choice and I assure you, there are more reformed prostitutesthan religious zealots. But back to the street walker who lives next door toyou now. Maybe you rather call her a “Hooker”which is a term used to describe those women who followed General Hooker’s campin the War Of Northern Aggression. You will not, in point of fact, find a referencethat describes the men who kept them in business from that point in history, orfor that matter, many others. The men who have kept flesh sellers on theirbacks for centuries have mostly gone unnoticed, even though they are responsiblefor half of the equation and all of the money.

Ah, but suddenly, if you’re living next door to thiswoman of the evening, the men who come for service might not be the type youwant standing around your front yard smoking cigarettes. Yet, generallyspeaking, men who get busted for using whores are not nearly as prosecuted, or persecuted,as those women on the receiving end of their desires, no pun intended.

So Hitler, truly and terribly demented, and homicidal,decided to go after the Jews, as well as any other group of people consideredto be an underclass, and the people of Germany jumped on the bandwagon, andyou, yes, you who are all shocked and shaken by the presence of the doxie nextdoor, you would not dream of putting up with something like that, would you?

Strip away the labels we put on people are just toss themtogether as a function of consequence and what have you? Your top serialkillers and Adolf Hitler have something in common; both classes of lunatic wentafter victims they knew, truly knew, were the most defenseless socially. Bothclasses of lunatic used not just murder, but savage, soulless, and brutalmurder to mark their prey as less than human. Both could not be sated but continuedto kill even as murder became what undid them.

Look at how many terms for these women I was able torecall from memory while writing this. Look at how many of those terms didn’treally shock you, or outrage you, or cause you to blink an eye. How do you feelabout these women? How concerned are you about those killed by some serialkiller on Long Island? Because they are just minor Hitlers, not killingmillions and after all, are only killing whores, it’s not nearly as bad asgoing after a religion, is it?

Is it?

Then why haven’t we fought a war to stop it?

Take Care,

Mike

The Clunkers, the Spanish Russians, and the Cypress Holocaust

2011-12-30T08:26:00.001-05:00

The Okefenokee is a place of splendid solitude, I told her,and it is a place you can stop speaking, breathe, and hear nothing but thesound of the trees living, and the wind and the birds, and the odd sounds thatThe Swamp will give you, but never noise. It is a place where time ceases toexists, and where cell phones do not work. It is a place where two people might get awayto themselves and speak plainly and openly while walking and no one but thedeer and fish would hear their voices. The Okefenokee, I say to her, is magicaland beautiful, and quiet.

The ride to The Swamp is magnificent, with theapproaching canoe trip seemingly already begun. The road stretches before uslong and straight, and the sun comes up bright and warm, the sky clear andnothing in the way of a day spent on the water in the woods, with birds callingand perhaps wildlife standing in the shade of the cypress trees, posingperfectly for photographs.

When we got to the park the evidence of the fire earlierin the year was apparent. It was worse, far worse, then the fire of 2007, justfour years ago. The damage to the treewas more severe than I expected, and as we drive deeper into the park the moreobvious, and horrible, the sight became. As we pulled in there was a smallcrowd of people loading canoes, and there were noisy people, speaking loudlyand loading a year’s worth of supplies into each craft, and wandering aroundwithout purpose. We waited for them to get ahead of us, but finally gave up andgot into the water what was left of it. I have never seen the water level solow in The Swamp. Worse still, and the two words “worse still” will reappearhere again and again, worse still, the banks of the canal leading into TheSwamp had been mauled by the fire, and clear cut, a lonely deer stood in theruins as if she were the only witness left alive. The camera died too, thebatteries no longer capable of sustaining life, much like the burned out banksof the Okefenokee.

No sooner did we reach the wide channel, or what was oncea wide channel, in The Swamp, did we realize the damage was far worse, muchmore worse, than I ever feared or imagined. The water level was horribly low,forcing all the canoeists into a smaller area. The people ahead of us were loud, and behind us were another group, sowe pulled over to the blasted western bank to allow them to pass. It was a terrible sight. Nearly every treewas scorched and many, many, many, many trees were now gone. Those that wereleft looked like the survivors of Hiroshima, standing in mute shock, to stunnedby the violence to escape the scene of the carnage. The shade of the treesextending over the water were gone, and even had the trees been there the waterwas gone, too. The deep dark red blackwater was gone, and replaced by a muddy colored stream that looked more likesomething you’d find in a theme park than the greatest natural swamp left inGeorgia.

Those people ahead of us we could hear, but from behindus came the sound as if someone were dragging a logging chain down a paved roadwith tin cans attached to it. Again, we let them pass, and this was a motherand father, with a teenaged girl in front of the boat with the mother, and atiny five year old in the front of the boat with the father. They banged andclanged with paddles against their canoes if the boats were sonically driven.We nicknamed them “The Clangers” and waited a while to let them pass. Far, downthe river they went, like a sound driven disaster, mirroring the actual damageby the fire.

But there were more and more and more people to come. Ina place where I could have counted the people I’ve seen totally in the years onmy fingers and toes, suddenly the holocaustic Swamp was an amusement park fullof inept boaters who could not hear the silence of The Swamp and would notallow it for others. We got behind a man and a woman speaking a foreignlanguage that sounded like Russian and they could not control their canoe, andthey zigzagged their way in the narrows, blocking us from passing, and causingmore people to bunch up behind us like lemmings at the edge of a cliff.Everyone was heading for Billy’s Island, and it was like a traffic jam there,with canoes and canoeists littering the bank. The dock, usually flush withwater, hung five feet in the air, useless for unloading or extracting a canoefrom the water. We managed to get out boat out of the water, but the Clunkerscame behind us, having taken a side path. The father tried to beach his canoewith his little girl in front, instead of backing in, and I had to help pullthe thing to shore. The man was close to true stupidity, trying to get a boatout of the water with the heavy end still in the water, and a five year oldtrying to get out alone. Getting himback into the water was also more fun than it needed to be, and I wonder, trulywonder, if he really knows what happens to people in the water when the airtemperature is below sixty. Hypothermiacan, and will, kill a child before you can get her dried off, or back to somewherethey can keep her warm.

Billy’s Island was already populated by the Russianspeaking people, but they were now speaking Spanish. Everyone had arrived atonce and there were more people on Billy’s Island than there had ever livedhere before. The trials were crowded and even though we had a good conversationwith people from Atlanta, who had never seen such a crowd or the water as low,there was no wildlife to see. The Spanish Russian had made camp in the middleof the trail and we had to walk around them. A nice little bench in the middleof the forest might have been a good place for a break but this was rush hourand there was no semblance of privacy to be had at all.

We lost most ofthe crowd on the way back, and we totally lost track of the Clunkers. They wereahead of us, noisily setting the pace, and suddenly we did not hear themanymore. But the trip back to the landing revealed more damage, more deadtrees, more burned growth, and no sign that this was some sort of rejuvenationof nature. We asked the woman at the landing if she had seen the Clunkers andshe seemed uninterested in their fate. The Okefenokee is not what it was and Iam not sure if it will ever be again. I would have rather died than to haveever seen such a sight as I have seen and I can only hope that somehow, naturecan heal her own.

Take Care,

Mike

2011-12-26T18:23:00.001-05:00

Lavatory Lovestory from Bellerofonte on Vimeo.

The Long Road

2011-12-26T09:24:00.001-05:00

The road to my father’s house is always long. There isn’t away to make it shorter. I once had friends in Thomasville I could drop in andsee but at Christmas their road was much longer than mine. They spent two days onthe road at Christmas, first getting up at dawn to dive to her parent’s housewhich was only twenty miles away, but bylunch they had to go back home and drop off the toys her parent’s had giventheir two kids, and then on the road to his parent’s home which was seven hoursaway. They would spend the night there and come home the next day and all thewhile the kids were yelling and screaming about wanting to go home to beginwith. No one on either side of the issue would give an inch because of thatinsane idea of having Christmas at someone’s house is more important thanChristmas itself.

We did that for a couple of years when I was a very smallchild and it was worse back then because there were three of us kids and welived in a very tight knit little neighborhood. We wanted to get out andexplore Christmas gifts with the other kids, but we were boxed up and taken toour grandmother’s house two hours away and wouldn’t get back until dark. Thatonly lasted a few years and then everyone started coming to our house Christmasmorning and that lasted until the divorce then we started having two of everythingthere for a while. The two Christmas and Thanksgiving ordeal still goes on tothis day, except we finally have just one Thanksgiving at my sister’s housenow.

The road back is long. The place where I spent the worstpart of two decades of my life is packed with ghosts and dead memories, long pastattempts at growing up and drunken swipes at good times. Most of the dirt roadsare gone now, and we never saw that coming, like most things, but no one everrealized roads themselves where transmutable. Once was, at sixteen, you couldpark a car in the middle of the road in the middle of the night and stand thereand take a leak, drink a beer, roll a joint, make out with a young girl, and trafficdidn’t exist. You could pull off into any field and there was nothing butdarkness and stars and hope. Rarely was there any sort of interruption and thatwas not nearly as rare as meaning, but we weren’t sure what that meant any morethan we were cognizant of the world around us that might change.

On the outskirts of Blakely there’s a small motel and Ithink it was there before the town, actually. I spent forty dollars, back inthe early eighties, for two night there, for a long date with a woman I loved,and lost, and had regained just for a while longer. I was going into the Army,she was a single mom all of a sudden, and it seemed like what we had lost in theHigh School we might have again. There was alcohol and pot, and a lot of sex intwo nights but there wasn’t anything else. To me, what else was there to have? Iwas twenty-two, and broke, with no car, no prospects, no outlook past what wasin the last bottle, no future past the next erection, no sense of obligationexcept to keep the illicit drug industry alive, but I did love her wildly. Shehad left her daughter with her parents and she missed the child and I did notunderstand that, could not understand that, and when a friend picked us up totake us home after those two days we went down that same road that I had totravel to get to Christmas, and I remember it still.

The road has been changed, though, and now it’s a fourlane where there was once only two, and there’s a by-pass and the woman who wasstill a girl with a daughter is now a grandmother because that daughter has adaughter. In the blink of an eye everything changed and now all that is leftthat was the same is the motel at the edge of the town I cannot stand but haveto come back to anyway. There is the house where the first young person I knewdied of cancer. There is the house where the first person I knew whose fatherdied when we were still in High School. There is the house where someone I knewwas killed along with his brother in a car wreck. There is a spot where therewas a restaurant, now long gone, just a bare patch of land. There is the oldpizza place, long since turned into other restaurants, but that is where I fellin love with pinball. There was a liquor store there where I bought cheap boozewhen I was sixteen. I know where each and every side road leads and each andvery side road leads nowhere, just as they always have, and just as they alwayswill, until they in turn, are changed or destroyed.

I feel like a ghost, recalled from the dead, to hauntwhere I once lived, in the name of the past. I pull over in the parking lot ofwhere there was once a place that made good pizza, and where I learned to playpinball, and I wonder about what happened to the man who ran the place, andmade the food, whose name I never knew. I made a drug deal in this very spot in 1978 and bought a pound of pot,and that was going to be my ticket to big time drug dealing, and I wonder ifthe man who ran the pizza place had dreams as big as mine. I am likely olderright now than he was when he made pizza, and I always thought he was ancient.

The road back leads past all these places, but now I amsurfacing, driving upwards and outwards and into the future, not the past. Christmasis over and the town where I am but a ghost recedes from my rearview mirror andresides only in the form in which you see it, for yet another year.

Take Care,

Mike

2011-12-26T07:37:00.002-05:00

Henry Miller said "Develop an interest in life as you seeit; the people, things, literature, music — the world is so rich, simplythrobbing with rich treasures, beautiful souls and interesting people. Forgetyourself."

There's a Catch

2011-12-26T07:05:00.001-05:00

Take a single man playing a kid's game and give him a few million dollars a year, and he still can't raise a kid while he's doing it. Give a mom a glove and she can not only catch a ball, but give her kid something to talk about forever, once he's old enough.

I finally reached this place.

2011-12-25T19:14:00.003-05:00

yes it is a real town, in Georgia

2011-12-25T06:13:00.001-05:00

The Novelist Oren Arnoldhad the following Christmas gift suggestions: "To your enemy, forgiveness.To an opponent, tolerance. To a friend, your heart. To a customer, service. Toall, charity. To every child, a good example. To yourself, respect."

You and Bob

2011-12-24T03:15:00.001-05:00

Suppose you had a friend. Let’s give this friend a name,your friend ‘Bob” and Bob is someone you met when you were a little kid, solittle, you really don’t remember meeting Bob because you two were infantsplaying together when you lived next door. Your parents and Bob’s parents havealways been friends, too. In fact, you went through school with Bob, eachgrade, and nearly every class. Over the years you two have defining momentsthat really couldn’t possibly mean anything to anyone else. You remember theday Bob kit a golf ball with a baseball bat and the thing hooked wicked andhard, arcing towards Mrs. Redfern’s plate glass window was if it were one ofthose smart bombs, and as it streaked towards the window you both stood therein horror because right there behind the window was Mrs. Redfern reading herpaper, doing her crossword puzzle with her cat in her lap and there’s thelittle white ball going to… and at the very last moment, a squirrel jumped fromthe roof of her house down to the ground to eat some of the birdseed spiltthere, and that damn squirrel gets nailed by the golf ball, dead center, anddeflects the ball harmlessly away. Mrs. Redfern looks up, having caught theaction out of the corner of her eye, but she can’t see anything. Bob and yourselffall over dead laughing, cheering, the relief so strong it’s nearlysexual. Later the two of you retrievethe dead squirrel and bury it with the golf ball. You keep thinking one day thetwo of you will dig it up again but oddly, neither of you ever bring it upagain.

But youand Bob go on to High School together, and play baseball for the team, you inleft field, and Bob playing center. Your team is good, but loses thechampionship in your senior year 15-2, but you and Bob score those two points,and somehow, you both feel like you took away more from the defeat than youropponents did in victory. College is a blur of good times and all night studysessions and suddenly you and Bob are looking at getting real job in the realworld. Bob winds up with Diane Holton, and you knewthose two would make a break pair, even when you were dating her. Had to breakher in for you, is how you joke about it with Bob, and with anyone else thatmight start a fight but not with Bob. You get married to Diane’s first cousin,Lisa, and people talk because the two look so much alike, but you don’t careand neither does Bob.

There’s no way the two of you find a job together andthat’s okay because you live on the other side of town and that’s not too far.Things are different, but everyone knew it would be one day, and Diane getspregnant first. You and Lisa try as hardas two people can and you lie awake at night wondering if it’s you or if itmight be her, or maybe both, but they have doctors that can help. Then one night,very late, Bob shows up and he’s clearly upset and he wants to talk to you, inthe car and he turns up the music way too damn loud and has to shout in yourear for you to hear him. You think you hear the word “aliens” and you thinkthis might be an immigration issue of some sort then Bob starts to write things down. Bob thinks there are aliens in the woods behind his house and he thinksthey want to steal the baby.

Here’s the thing in all this; everyone goes to the moviesbecause they want to see something spectacular and unreal, but when it getsright down to it, no one wants anything like that in their own life, or in thelives of the people they know. You try to talk Bob down from this and you’resurprised he’s so adamant about you not saying anything out loud about it. Hegets physical and loud when you say the word aloud and clearly he’s very upset.He makes you promise not to mention this to Lisa or Diane, but you know you’regoing to have to explain why Bob woke you both up at two in the morning. Andyou don’t have to wait very long, either. Diane and Lisa are already talkingand when the two of you get back Lisa is standing in the yard talking.

Of course you feel like it is a form of betrayal when thethree of you get together to talk about him behind his back. These two womenhave no idea who they are talking about or what they are talking about but youhave to admit to them, and to yourself that Bob has slipped a cog, that somethingis wrong, and this isn’t something that spending a few hours butchering wood inthe shop over a few beers will solve. Bob has quit his job and he spend all histime hiding in the woods and stocking up for the invasion.

So finally you go with Bob into the woods and he tellsyou there’s a mother ship and the aliens are pouring out of it like ants.Halfway there you realize he’s packing a gun and now you realize the women wereright and something has to be done. The mother ship, of course, isn’t there andBob laments that they moved, knowing he was bringing someone to prove theyexisted, and he is sure he can find them again. You ask Bob if he remembers thesquirrel and you think it’s time to dig it up again.

The day you drive Bob to the hospital he’s holding anancient golf ball still pocked with dirt, You and Bob dug a hole the size of agrave trying to find it, but there it was, still in what was left of the oldtin lunch box, but there were only tiny bone fragments of the squirrel. Youhope the meds keep Bob quiet until they get him processed in but he loses itand goes in screaming. The drive home is silent, lonely, and tense. As you pullinto the driveway you notice lights are dropping from the sky.

Take Care,

Mike

2011-12-23T13:55:00.001-05:00

The Christmas Apocalypse

2011-12-23T11:35:00.002-05:00

If there is ever some weird Mayan Apocalypse the people ofAmerica are going to be ready. Everyweekend since Thanksgiving we have practiced for it. And now, in the last week,preparations for the end of the world have been in full swing. America is ready for anything and everything.The Four Horsemen might as well be selling rides for a quarter at a petting zooin Cleveland. That nation stand ready for a full nuclear war, locusts, a twohour dancing with reality stars on an island television special and Ebola onpop tarts. Ladies and Gentlemen, theweekend before Christmas is upon us and next to that there is nothing more stressfulor frightening known to mankind since the two words “President Quayle” werefirst spoken.

Anywhere anyone is selling anything is packed with peoplewho want to buy something. People like me, who ordered online, had it shippedat the last moment, and now are frantically realizing not even Fed-ex is goingto throw us a package over the fence, are freaking out. Well, I’m not freakingout because I went out for some food and just came back home instead. I’ll be damned if I’m going into a buildingwith that many people in it unless there’s a football game going on, or atleast some beer. A homeless man set up a booth on an overturned shopping cartand put out a sign that read, “Half off” and it’s standing room only under thatcart. Plumbing supply outlets now have people wandering around looking for thatperfect gift. I swear I passed a junkyard that had some people browsing.

You could sell radioactive altars suitable for SatanWorship and you’d get a hundred people walk in and, one, see if it was cheaperon Amazon and two, ask you if you gift wrapped.

If you sold gift cards where the money went to drivingthe whales into extinction and hauling the dead carcasses to Elementary Schoolas playground equipment you would sell out before anyone really asked you ifthis included porpoises, too.

If you put up a nativity scene in the shower room of a maximumsecurity prison for the sexually disturbed, the criminally insane, and the sexuallyhyper, people would stop and take pictures of it to put on Christmas cards.

I swear to dog this year seems to be the worst ever.

The one local store we have has cars parked directly infront of the store where there are no parking spaces. People are so driven, sobent on shopping, all other considerations are now gone. The time it would taketo walk across a parking lot has become a hindrance to survival. I cannotimagine what it looks like inside that building right now. Christmas is stilltwo days away so no one has to start cooking right now but just the act ofbuying food has become a quest. It’s a mission. It’s a pilgrimage. For somepeople getting everything done right damn now has become an issue so personalit’s like they’re having sex with their credit cards. They’re putting moreeffort into buying stuff than I would getting Angelina Jolie to undress infront of me. After a while, after some point, isn’t there a time when you justhave to admit it isn’t really worth it? I’m talking about shopping still, tryto focus.

There were people trampled to death on Black Friday. A woman piked a crowd of shoppers that sameday. Bodies were left pushed to the side so people could spend money on gifts. Peoplewere robbed at gunpoint. People died in car crashes. People put money on creditcards they know damn well they will not be able to repay. All in the name ofgetting something to put under the tree some people will break their personalbudgets and their families will suffer for it. I can only wonder how many dogsare dumped out or taken to the pound after Christmas, living sacrifices forthat perfect gift.

You have to wonder how much money is spent on nothing atall. All that pretty gift wrapping paper, and the packaging it came with, well,it’s all headed for the landfill. All the boxes all that stuff came in, yes, ittoo is headed for the landfill. The dead Christmas trees have to be disposed ofand you see many alongside the city streets with tinsel still covering their nowdead branches. Miles and miles ofpacking tape, tons of broken ornaments,and that cheap plastic throw away junk Wal-Mart sells as yard decorations areall headed into the earth where it will not decompose but it might wind up inyour drinking water one day.

In two days’ time I will once again get into my truck anddrive two hours to my father’s house where my sister and I will spend part of amorning and an afternoon. We’ll leave and I’ll drive two hours back home, and Christmaswill be over for another eleven months or so. Hopefully, I wouldn’t get killedon the way home, and hopefully, everyone there last year and this year will bethere next year. But I also hope that one day the madness will end and Christmaswill one day mean something more than a nation’s moth-like attraction to conspicuousspending.

Happy Festivus,

Mike

Guy Just Fucking Lost it on Air

2011-12-22T09:58:00.001-05:00

No Souvenirs):Melissa Etheridge

2011-12-21T19:39:00.001-05:00

Hello, hello this is Romeo
Calling from a jackpot telephone
Shame, shame but I love your name
And the way you make the buffalo roam
Oh fly, fly I guess this is goodbye
Oh you packed up your heart
And you left no souvenirs

But if you want me you can call me
In the night you know where I'll be
Broken lover you can touch me
In the dark the innocent can't see
You lock it up now hide the key
It would mean surrender to let me see
Oh brave, brave soldier keep it under cover
You fell alone like no other lover
Burn the pictures break the records
Run far away to a northern town
Sell your fear and leave me standing here
With no souvenirs

Once, twice I thought it might be nice
To come into your kitchen and play
Cool, cool just a crazy fool
I never saw it any other way
Oh wait, wait I guess I'm just too late
Oh you made up your mind
Love shouldn't be so hard

But if you want me you can call me
In the night you know where I'll be
Broken lover you can touch me
In the dark the innocent can't see
You lock it up now hide the key
It would mean surrender to let me see
Oh brave, brave soldier keep it under cover
You fell alone like no other lover
Burn the pictures break the records
Run far away to a northern town
Sell your fear and leave me standing here
With no souvenirs

No shirts, no shoes
No jackets, no blues
You car's for sale
You forward your mail
You're growing your hair
You don't want to know where
I'm calling you from
Or how come

But if you want me you can call me
In the night you know where I'll be
Broken lover you can touch me
In the dark the innocent can't see
You lock it up now hide the key
It would mean surrender to let me see
Oh brave, brave soldier keep it under cover
You fell alone like no other lover
Burn the pictures break the records
Run far away to a northern town
Sell your fear and leave me standing here
With no souvenirs

Melissa Etheridge » Royal Station 4/16

2011-12-21T19:30:00.002-05:00

It's so hard to listen to these trains
Outside my window here it comes again
And it's calling me begging me
Follow me down the track
And it moans so dark and low
Baby ain't comin' back

I refuse to believe
It could happen to me and you
It's lonesome and it's hard and it's true

It got this whiskey to take care of my lips
I got these long cool steel strings
At my fingertips
I ain't got nothing to soothe my aching soul
Except this screeching and screaming iron
To tell me where I ought to go

I refuse to believe
It could happen to me and you
It's lonesome and it's hard and it's true

I hear the train sigh
And idle down below
Why your love is so sweet and while
Is something I'll never know

It sounds like crying
It sounds like letting go
Breathing and lying
Sinking and dying slow
And I watch from my window
Touching the cold glass sky
As the train rolls down the track
I say goodbye

2011-12-21T17:17:00.001-05:00

Tebowing

2011-12-21T11:09:00.000-05:00

If I Sleep Before I Wake.

2011-12-21T08:46:00.001-05:00

Sleep is designed not to rest the mind, or at least notmerely rest the mind, or people would be able to watch television for months onend without sleep. But perhaps the rest a television gives the mind is the samesort of rest alcohol gives the body in that while the state is comatose theresults are rarely soothing. But my theory is that sleep is not entirelydesigned to supply rest. Before you say design begs the question of designerlet me quell any philosophical first cause debates by suggesting the mind hasdesigned itself. I’m not saying the brain created itself out of pond sludge andfinch beaks, but I am suggesting that consciousness as we know it is a functionof the mind, and the reality in which we have all agreed to live in requiresthis. We go to great lengths to help those who are physically unable tofunction within our reality. We provide wheelchair ramps, Braille markings onATM’s, truncated domes on walkways, and we allow service dogs into restaurants.But someone who is mentally or emotionally unable to function in our agreedreality is shunned or medicated. It may not bother you to see someone in ascooter in the grocery store, even if you have to walk around them, or dodgethem, but if there is a woman talking to the voices in her head on aisle threethen you’re going to put the produce section between the two of you, aren’tyou?

When I was doing night work last year I discovered that Icould not sleep during the day and the result was I was nearly always verytired. I wrote well, and had great ideas, but the number of hours when I couldbe productive was a very low number. Yet this didn’t really count as truesleeplessness because even though the project lasted three months longer thanwe originally thought, there were milestones that gave us hope that it would beover sooner or later, so we knew, and I knew, the condition was a temporaryone. There were times, especially on weekends, when I did sleep as much as Icould, and that took me deep into the next week. One week bled slowly into anotherand one day was my first to see the sun come up as I was getting up, not goingto bed.

So what is the function of sleep if not rest, or better put,what else does sleep supply other than rest? Our shifts on night work were openended on the tail of the shift, which by that I mean be always started at acertain time but sometimes instead of a ten hour shift we might work a twelvehour, or worse, fifteen hour shift. Thefifteens were monsters because the body would crave release but the time clockwould show no mercy. Yet even after a fifteen hour shift there was some time torest, and a few hours later when it began again, it wasn’t unexpected. Even inthis madness there was routine.

In a true state of chronic insomnia there are no linesdividing the days and nights, and hours become meaningless. Eight in the nightand three in the morning feel the same as does two in the afternoon and anytime before or after. Dawn comes in the middle of the day as does sundown. Isuggest to you that sleep is not only rest but a reset button that ends one dayand begins another, giving the mind a scale by which to measure what hashappened. That was one thing night work did to us was confuse us as to what daysomething happened and how many hours we had worked each day, and the dividingpoint was midnight. When a person does not sleep there is no division betweendays. There is no division between what happened at some point in the past andthe present because it is all one very long day.

A person living in a work of eight hour shifts, one hourlunches, one hour classes, two hour movies, and a sound bite cacophony of news,weather, and talk show philosophy is going to fit right in with everyone elseliving this same sort of life. This is the society in which we live today. Yettake someone who already doesn’t watch very much television, eschews commercialradio, and is suddenly not sleeping, and you’ve got a new species of animalliving amidst the territory of another. To the nonsleeper the world is far lessfrantic, longer, yet not nearly as energetic. Time isn’t measured in hours butnaps. The world doesn’t have places it stops and starts but merely pauses. Andpasses.

Artists, creative people, madmen, the insane, and childrenlive in this world without division. Children are forced to go to bed when theyare not sleepy, forced to get up when they crave sleep, and the reality that wehave created out of a need to possess material goods has produced cookie cutterhouses, cookie cutter people, and made to order disorders. Those whose mindsrebel against the mental and emotional ice cube trays in which we have beenfrozen are deemed unfit mentally. There are medications that are designed todestroy that sort of intellectual sedition and it is a multibillion dollar ayear business.

More and more, as the people who have the money begin togather it around them closer, there is less and less chance for survival ofthose who see no divisions in time except those created by their own minds andbodies. Sleep is not a function of a clock, nor a time card, nor a televisionschedule, nor a medication, nor even, the will of some other person, no mattertheir intent. Sleep is a state natural to the human mind, but it occurs, or itought to occur as the mind of the individual deems necessary or not.

I haven’t slept for more than four hours in a row for over aweek now. This is what my mind has come up with in the way of explanation.

Take Care,

Mike

Don't Panic

2011-12-21T08:19:00.001-05:00

The Cat Man

2011-12-21T05:28:00.004-05:00

Edward Hoagland said, "Many divorces are not really theresult of irreparable journey but involve, instead, a desire on the part of theman or woman to shatter the setup, start out from scratch alone, and make lifework for them all over again. They want the risk of disaster, want to touchbottom, see where bottom is, and, coming up, to breathe the air with relief andrelish again."

Elizabeth Benedic

2011-12-20T05:02:00.000-05:00

Elizabeth Benedict was born on this day in Hartford, Connecticut (1952). Benedict's family was nota literary one — her mother was a gifted artist who worked as a secretary andher father was an insurance salesman — and Benedict had never considered acareer in writing until she was in college. But it was there, on the day beforeher 19th birthday, that a prescient professor returned a term paper with a notesaying it was obvious that Benedict wanted to write a novel — a fact that hadnot been obvious to Benedict herself. Still, that night she decided that shewould in fact become a writer, and that to do so she must write every day, nomatter what the subject, and that one day what she had written would become abook.

After college, Benedict worked for the MexicanAmerican Legal Defense and wrote her first novel, Slow Dancing (1985),about an immigration lawyer. She followed that with The Beginner's Book ofDreams (1988), Safe Conduct (1993), and numerous other novels aswell as the writing craft book The Joy of Writing Sex: A Guide for FictionWriters (1996).

Benedict has said that "If it were deniedme to write, I imagine I would die," for through writing she makes senseof her own deepest experiences as she reshapes them into "a fictionaluniverse much larger, more varied, and ... more compelling than the extremelypersonal" with which she begins. And from those deeply personalexperiences, she also offers four important lessons for herself and otherwriters: First, work like a maniac because no one else will do it for you.Second, know that art matters. Next, understand that fiction is abouttransformation and that change is possible. And finally, make the surface of writinglively, fun-filled, and funny, even if the characters are in excruciatingpain."

The Hat and Traffic

2011-12-19T20:18:00.001-05:00

The Hat and I went shopping today and even in books storesit’s getting ugly. I like books stores. Even the large ones still are bookstores but right now you can forget about getting any service. You can alsoforget about having any sort of room to walk, any sense of thought, any timealone with a book, or for that matter, anything other than the feeling you’re aloud noise away from some serious directional stupidity from a mass of humans.

Bookstores ought to be different. I think you ought to have to have a passportto get in. If you only come in to shop once a year you can’t.. Bookstores arefor people who like books, not people who need to buy a once a year gift.Dammit, that’s my territory and if you’re mean and snarky get the hell out andgo into the Maul where you belong. I have on The Hat and I am in a bookstoreand no I am not in a boat.

There are books here, please show some respect.

Bookstores sometimes have women who are looking at booksand I know they aren’t for sale and I know I cannot browse through them, butjust like the books, it’s nice to look at them even if picking them up isn’tthe same, metaphorically speaking. Or maybe it is, at that. You pick up a bookbecause the title is interesting and the first few pages are good and suddenlyyou lose your place and have to start trying to figure out what happened…yeah,it works. But I’m looking to buy a book and getting distracted isn’t good.After an hour or so of desperate search, I come up empty and no I am nottalking about the tattooed woman in the Vegan Section. Really, could we focushere?

I stopped packing a gun a while back. People in lawenforcement and people who have worked in traffic have some trust issues whenit comes to the general public. I simply will not walk out in front of a carand hope that it will stop. I don’t think people are murderous, well, yeah, Ido actually, but I don’t think the average person is out to kill someone intraffic simply because they’re on foot, you know, I kinda do believe that too. Ifsomeone stops and waves for me to go in front of them I will if they’re farenough away, but hell no, I am not stepping out in front of a car simplybecause a light is one color or another. People will kill you, and today it’sas if they‘ve all got meth stashed in their armpits and it’s the middle ofAugust.

Don’t make a left turn unless (a) there isn’t any trafficaround or (b you have a light. Trying to make a left this time of year is to betrapped, trapped like a rat. Just make a right and go around, or to the nextlight or whatever. I do this and wouldn’t you know it? I turn left at a lightand plan to circle back but a car stops as I am making a U turn. They’re on acell and they forget a parking lot is just a wide road with stripes. They cometo and see me as I am about to broadside them and in the meantime the light isn’tgreen anymore. They could turn right or red but do not. We get a green arrowand a gang of idiots cross against the light and we’re stuck. But this is justa warm up.

There’s four lanes. One left lane for left turns. Twolanes going straight One lane for right turns. Got that image?

A guy in the straight lane decides he wants to make aleft turn. Instead of waiting or going down the road and turning, he BACKS UPand tries to back into the left turn lane but there is a car there. So he cutsit sharp, backs to and fro and winds up sideways in the left turn lane while thefront of his car is in the straight lane. The guy in the straight lane locksdown and won’t move just to trap the moron and that causes traffic to back upeverywhere. The moron blows his horns and gestures wildly but the guy who hastrapped him rolls his window down and there is an exchange of middle fingers inthe air.

I’d like to teach the world to point, one fingerperfectly, like limbless trees as hell does freeze, all this we’re not above.

I bail into the other straight lane, morph over to the rightlane, and get the hell out of there. Twenty people are blowing by that pointand that man has to remember the same people who will step in front of you in astore are at the wheel of a ton of metal. You see why I don’t carry a gun?Without a gun my first impulse is to get the hell out of there before someonewith a gun shows up. I don’t need a reason to hesitate to get away from crazypeople in traffic.

I have to stop to buy eggs and the little girl behind meis talking nonstop the way children can and will do. She’s telling someone, andI don’t turn around to look, that today at school the teacher told them shewanted them to write down one thing they already have that’s a gift and it can’tbe a toy and she wants to put Socks down because Socks is a good dog andremember when Socks grabbed Sally by the arm and ran down the street with her andyou chased her and daddy got the camera out and you made him take it outbecause you said something that…

The little girl stops talking. She has seen The Hat. Thecashier likes The Hat and she smiles, a weary soul in a sea of terrible,terrible, people. I tell her the earrings look good on her and she smiles atme. “My son gave them to me” And she smiles when she tells me this, all of thisworthwhile for her son. The silent little girl behind me whispers to hermother, and I slip away into traffic, and make a right turn to go home.

Take Care,

Mike

2011-12-19T18:40:00.000-05:00

Concrete Finisher Gone Wild

2011-12-18T20:32:00.003-05:00

The Pirate Gold Quarter and The Santa Hat Versus the Split Christmas

2011-12-17T19:06:00.001-05:00

The question was to hit the interstate and run flat out forthe better part of sixty miles or just stick to the back roads. Oddly, the factthat I drive slower than anyone else alive made me chose the interstate. On thebackroads I like to cruise at fifty-five and invariably some moron will get afoot behind my truck and damn near kill us both before he realizes we’re goingto go through a dozen tiny towns, each replete with one horse, one cop, and onelight. But out on the interstate I hammer down, and eighty miles an hour forthat sixty miles means I’ll get there quicker unless there’s a wreck and then Iwill be totally screwed.

That happened a couple of years ago, Christmas at mom’shouse means I have to drive two hours to get there, which isn’t too bad, butnext week we’ll have Christmas at my father’s house, which is two hours away,and just a couple of weeks ago it was Thanksgiving and that was at my oldersister’s house which is about an hour and a half away. I leave early because I’mweird that way and by the time the sun is supposed to be up I am already tenmiles away.

All of this wandering from house to house is the resultof a divorce that happened in 1972. I’m tempted one day to look up how manydivorces there were in our little town in that year and I would bet you goodmoney we were the only ones throwing that kind of party that year. I wonder ifthe lawyers are still alive, and I wonder how well they’re living off thedivorce business. I wonder if that part of my life made a car payment, or apiece of a house payment, or if they just stuck it in the bank, so over theyears they could enjoy the interest off of it as much as I have enjoyed thefallout. We’ve done this split Christmas thing in some shape fashion form oranother for nearly four decades. We will do it until we pay someone else to saystupid things about a dead body and then, in an odd twist of fate, we’ll missit.

Last night I drank far too much than was good for me, andI knew I would regret it, but someone dropped by with some beer and a six packlater I shooed an old friend away and lay me down to toss and turn. I driftedin and out of sleep, in and out of dreams, and in and out of sane. There wassomeone wearing some odd looking knotted tie and it glowed, and for some reasonthat tie on that person meant something really bad and it kept occurring to methat something really bad had happened, even though I woke up and realized itwas a dream at least twice. Then I dreamed I was in a pond trying to get backout of the water, and the edge was just a foot or so away, and the water wasonly two feet deep, but I started being pulled back into the pond, under thewater, by what felt like gravity, that same simple pull that makes you sit downtoo hard sometimes. I woke for good about four, and started getting ready togo.

I wanted to get there early, and talk to mom simplybecause I haven’t in a while. She’s nearly retired but not quite, and my stepfather is getting Bert-like in his immobility and his inability to hear. Myyounger sister drifted in next, and finally my older sister with her husbandand the Mercer Niece, and the nephew who we aren’t quite certain about yet. Butoddly, we started having a good time. There was something about the day, the jokes,the good food, or maybe we were just tried if it not being fun, who knows?Okay, now this doesn’t sound hysterically funny but my brother in law found acoin while digging a fence post hole and thought it might be worth something.My sister cleaned it up and it turned out to be a quarter from the year 2000.She kidded him about thinking it was pirate gold and we had a good laugh atthat. He and I went to the store later and I suggested he take the quarter and geta jewelry store to turn it into a necklace and give it to my sister Christmasmorning but we’re going to get one of those gift boxes from a fancy storefirst.

Okay, maybe the Pirate Gold Quarter isn’t something thatwill cause most people to literally hurt themselves laughing over, but that waswhat we had. And finally, something was enough for everyone there just to loseit laughing about nothing for a while. Oh, that and my nephew came out of thekitchen too fast and let fly a piece of mom’s homemade and most excellent lasagna.It made a horrific zombie movie splatter, but that too was funny. It was evenmore funny when my nearly deaf father in law quoted something my younger sisterhad said earlier, which she hadn’t meant for him to hear, and she called himout for pretending to be deaf, and that was hysterical.

No, really, I’m serious, it was funny as hell.

So on my way back home I stop to get some gas and thewoman at the counter is chatting on an phone with her kid and she tells the kidthat Santa just walked in and because it’s one of those face to face chats sheturns the camera on me and I can see the kid grinning back out of the phonelike she just captured a photo of the last unicorn. I’m practicing being a nicerperson and one of the things I do is compliment the help in stores and atrestaurants on their accessories and she tells me the earrings were a gift fromher son who is still howling with glee on the phone.

The split Christmas was defeated by the Santa Hat and thePirate Gold Quarter from the year 2000

Take Care,

Mike.

2 am

2011-12-16T18:42:00.001-05:00

The Creative and the Dead

2011-12-16T17:17:00.001-05:00

It is an odd thing, creativity. I cannot explain it. I wishsometimes I could but the paradox is I have something that allows me to putwords together that will express many things, but I cannot tell you why any ofthis is happening or how it happens. If you play a musical instrument I cantotally understand why you spend hours on end, days, weeks, or a lifetime,practicing a song that you will never quite feel happy with no matter how itsounds, yet be totally at peace with the universe as long as you’re trying. Ican tell you I am right there with you if you’re trying to put enough paint ona canvas to sooth your soul and another layer or a scrapping of a layer, or thetotal destruction of the entire thing, all of it, makes perfect sense. I canunderstand you if you’re pouring through a thousand photos of the same moment andone, only one, that one, is the right one. What I can’t do is tell you whynature made us thus. Why is thus? What is the reason for this thus-ness? Thankyou, Atremus Ward.

I knew a paint artist who was a beautiful woman and itwas like a shackle around her neck. When done up proper she could strike a Marylynpose with the very best of them. She on occasion wore this shimmering goldenevening dress that would drop jaws. Eva didn’t want to be beautiful. Eva wantedto be an artist and she wanted to be a good one. But fate was cruel to Eva. Shecame from a German family who produced lawyers and doctors and people ofrenown. Worse, Eva married an American man, a man in the Army. Eva was a “GIGirl” in her own mind, and tainted because of that, even after she left him andmade her own way.

Here’s the thing about Eva that drove her hard, and droveher deep; Eva’s parents kidded her about her art in a way that hurt, deeplyhurt, and I’m not sure they meant to do it. I went over to Eva’s apartment onenight and she was half naked, totally drunk and teetering on the brink ofmadness. The painting wasn’t working. Nothing was working. She was coughing upher soul she was crying so hard. In a language that was half German, partlyEnglish, and mostly artistic, she told me how when she was a baby she hadsoiled her diaper but her parents hadn’t noticed her. She took some of theexcrement and did a finger painting on the wall with it. Her parents rememberedthis when she told them she wanted to go to art school. “Your first paintingwas shit” they laughed, “what do you think the rest will be?” That tauntwhipped her, lashed her, put a fire into her, and beat the straight hell out ofEva every single time she touched a brush.

You have no idea how many stories like this I have. Youcannot know how many times I’ve sat and drank with someone who had some idea,some vision, some mad idea of creativity of some form, yet that person was anisland surrounded by those who understood creativity nearly as well as they didLatin. Sure, they liked pretty pictures, or photos of horses, or novels by “realwriters” but as far as someone close to them having something like that inside,well, that’s another tale. You can’t make a living doing that. You’re wastingyour time. There ain’t no future in it. Yeah, but what do you do?

We take casualties like blind Kamikaze pilots on atequila bender flying into a hailstorm at night. You see why now, don’t you?Then some moron guns down a fledging writer like Kelly Fleming in a senselessact of murder and we lose a young one for nothing. But we’re going to lose somefor nothing anyway. We lose them to “good jobs” and we lose them “a future” andwe lose them to derision and we lose them to drinking, and we lose them todrugs and we lose them to suicide. You grow old burying the bodies, countingthe loss, and mourning the dead, but what kills you, what really kills you, isthose who give up. You watch someone with mad talent put the brush down toraise the kids while her husband takes up bass fishing as a serious hobby andyou drink yourself into puking at the thought of that form of death. You watcha poet reduced to coffee breaks scribblings on a legal pad because that’s allof her life she has left once the bills get paid and you wonder, really wonder,how in the hell do you measure that kind of damage? You talk shop with someonewho hasn’t written a word in a month and you realize the light is growingdimmer in a life once a’fire.

Please, please, please, do not misunderstand me. I am notsaying, I would never say, those lives lived without the creative are not fulland productive and wonderful lives. But think about how you would feel if youheard about someone who was pressured by society, friends, and family, to quita good job to write a novel. That would seem like a crime, perhaps, if anengineer was told to stop designing convenience store signs to be a poet. I’mnot asking the world for a whole lot here, I don’t think, to allow what naturehas given to those who have it, to be able to live a life that expresses it, nomatter the medium.

I can’t find Eva anymore. All her stuff is gone. Herwebsite doesn’t exist anymore. More than anyone else, I know what this means,and it cannot be good. One more is gone, dead, scared, or talked out of living.Not Eva, please god, not Eva.

Take Care,

Mike

"Everyone Dies Alone"

2011-12-16T16:35:00.001-05:00

The Teachings of Shan Yu (Firefly/Serenity -... by mnemosyne23

Christopher Hitchens: 13 unforgettable quotes

2011-12-16T12:03:00.000-05:00

The prolific Christopher Hitchens gloried in being quotable, particularly when he was at his most irascible and incendiary. His collected bon mots – in books, online essays and magazine articles – run into the hundreds, but here are a baker’s dozen of the best:

1. “It [Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize] would be like giving someone an Oscar in the hope that it would encourage them to make a decent motion picture.”
2. “Hatred, though it provides often rather junky energy, is a terrific way of getting you out of bed in the morning and keeping you going. If you don’t let it get out of hand, it can be canalized into writing.”
3. “A good liar must have a good memory. Kissinger is a stupendous liar with a remarkable memory.”
4. “Cheap booze is a false economy.”
5. About Sarah Palin: “She’s got no charisma of any kind, [but] I can imagine her being mildly useful to a low-rank porn director.”
6. “If you gave [Jerry] Falwell an enema he could be buried in a matchbox.”
7. “The governor of Texas, who, when asked if the Bible should also be taught in Spanish, replied that ‘if English was good enough for Jesus, then it’s good enough for me’.”
8. About Mother Teresa: “She was not a friend of the poor. She was a friend of poverty. She said that suffering was a gift from God. She spent her life opposing the only known cure for poverty, which is the empowerment of women and the emancipation of them from a livestock version of compulsory reproduction.”
9. “Everybody does have a book in them, but in most cases that’s where it should stay.”
10. “[O]wners of dogs will have noticed that, if you provide them with food and water and shelter and affection, they will think you are god. Whereas owners of cats are compelled to realize that, if you provide them with food and water and shelter and affection, they draw the conclusion that they are gods.”
11. About George W. Bush: “He is lucky to be governor of Texas. He is unusually incurious, abnormally unintelligent, amazingly inarticulate, fantastically uncultured, extraordinarily uneducated, and apparently quite proud of all these things.”
12. About Michael Moore: “Europeans think Americans are fat, vulgar, greedy, stupid, ambitious and ignorant and so on. And they’ve taken as their own, as their representative American, someone who actually embodies all of those qualities.” — his description of American filmmaker Michael Moore.
13. “The four most overrated things in life are champagne, lobster, anal sex and picnics.”

Where I stole this from