CRAFTY

"... the serpent was more crafty than any of the wild animals the LORD God had made..."


Genesis 3:1


image gathered @ carabaas

WHAT IS HIP

"It’s got something to do with love. With having the discipline to talk out of the part of yourself that can love instead of the part that just wants to be loved. I know this doesn’t sound hip at all."
David Foster Wallace (very nice)
quote taken from crashingly beautiful
image from residualrandomtarian

MINNOWS

I woke up last night dreaming I was eating minnows right out of a minnow bucket. I had to get up and take some Alka-Seltzer and brush my teeth.
I didn't feel right all day.
I think I need to go fishin'.
Or not.

Or something.

EASY COME EASY GO

I have a boss who is invisible, except for the constant chatter.
He is like a hole in the air that creeps up behind you and suddenly there he is, boring you with some kind of policy he is considering implementing, or telling a story from his boyhood, only its a horribly boring story that makes your eyeballs itch and for the duration of the story the earth actually stops spinning and you can't wait for him to finish and leave.
"Grandpa had a penny collection he buried under a barb wire fence" he will say "But then he forgot where he buried it. Imagine all those pennies, 1930 thru 1965! Gone forever!"
I don't know what to do with a story like that.

No, thats not right. I know exactly what to do with a story like that.
"Grandpa was a Confederate soldier turned Union spy and managed to infiltrate the Gold Reserves at Phantom Hill. The Generals wife, Evita,  fell for him, and one night he got the keys and took the gold and the Generals wife Evita too, and he escaped down to Brazil like so many of them did, but the Carpetbaggers and Copperheads got wind of him being down there, so he left Lily (she had let herself kinda go, and wound up moving to Argentina with all the gold)  for a nice Catholic girl named Rosa, and they moved back up El Paso way. He changed his name, and she opened up a Cantina that had a jukebox that played mostly Marty Robbins stuff, and they popped out a couple of kids and he got into the bicycle repair business and took up moonshining during Prohibition."
I have no idea how to wrap that story up, but there it is.


But I know what my boss is doing. He's back here trying to get me to tell him one of my stories, which I do, because he actually has less to do than I do and I pity him for that.
Sometimes I wonder if I should turn him on to "Unremitting Failure".
Maybe that would help, because I shuudder every day when he silently appears at my desk for the 15th time and says his standing Joke--"Well, thats a deep subject"--I swear the next time he says that I'll slap him.
We had some business to go over last week and over a 3-Day period I managed to ask him if he had "a degree in Micromanagement", then pointed out to him that he was "over-reacting" and on the third day told him straight up that he talked way too much about what we ought to do. I believe my exact words were "you bludgeon me with it".
I think he called HDQ and they told him the same thing.
But thats not what saved me.
The only thing that saves me around here is that I tell a pretty good tall tale. I don't know what they would do without me.
Bore each other to death, probably.

This is a really dangerous and foolish post to do I suppose, but the fact is I like my boss and he likes me and we are very different kinds of people that manage to wotrk together pretty well. Tomorrow I will tell you about the lug nuts he and I spent two days working on.

HIGH ANXIETY

I work with a lady, I call her Ruthless, that anytime you start to explain why you did something she starts shaking her head "no" before you get three words out of your mouth. Its really unattractive and will only get worse with age, I'm sure.

Then the boss, Dan-O, he's a basket case all the time, and when confronted with a little pressure he starts scratching his head.

So we had some Upper Management people in a few days ago, and it was high anxiety around here, and the Regional VP asked me some non-consequential question about how I do my work.  I looked past the VP, and Ruthless and Dan-O are standing there behind him with terrified looks on their faces, Rachel shaking her head "no", and Dan-O scratching his head with BOTH HANDS.
It was too much and I just cracked up, and the VP asked me why I was cracking up and I just went ahead and told him just what I have told you here.

BACK TO WORK

CLICK ON THE IMAGE FOR THE FULL FORCE SHOCK OF IT ALL.

When I was about five years old I saw this movie. For the next 4 years it was all I could talk about. I didn't know the name of the movie, but I would ask Mom "Do you know the movie about the Vegetable Man?".

Of course she didn't and I would try to tell her about it.

"There was a monster from Outer Space that landed at the North pole, and he got frozen in the ice , but the Army chipped him out of the ice and when the ice thawed out, he was the the Vegetableman; he was big, and he ate the sled dogs, and Army didn't know how to kill him cuz bullets didn't work until they figured out that he was like a carrot so then they decided to cook him"

I'm sure that I was wild eyed with my arms flailing as I described this movie, and then Mom would call me to supper and I would think about that movie as I moved my vegetables from one side of the plate to the other.

It wasn't until about 1982, when John Carpenter remade the movie that I finally found out that the Vegetableman was actually just called "The Thing". So much for the imagination of Hollywood in the 1950's. They really could have used a kid like me.
So after a 20 year wait, I got to see it again. It was funnier than I remember.


Dr. Chapman: Find anything, Captain?
Hendry: Not a sign. We poked into every snowbank within miles.
Bob, Crew Chief: Barnes flushed a polar bear.
Cpl. Barnes: Sure did.
Dr. Chapman: Scare you?
Cpl. Barnes: Not after I saw it was only a bear.

ROLLING IN THE DEEP

My roomate, Buckshot, kept playing the same CD over and over again when I first moved in with him back about October. It always delivered him into what can only be described as weeping fits. He is recently divorced from some "whore", as he chose to call her, but the weeping was a sure tip off that he still had feelings for her.

How we do love our sluts yes?

Anyway I came home one night to find him with that horrible CD playing while he was in the garage with a .38 revolver in his mouth.
I turned the music off and took him to the county hospital for a psych evaluation.
They gave him some pills and advised him not to listen to anymore weepy music.

It wasn't until the Grammy's that I was able to identify that CD as being Adele, and except for the names and a few other changes it might have been me out there in the garage with a pistol in my mouth over that damned CD.

Really, its not that bad. She looks a little like Devine to me, but her voice reminds me of Bonnie Raitt.
Picture snagged over at This Isn't Happiness.

Marfa, Texas

Welcome to Deer Taint Cafe



Try the venison, its the best in the city.

image courtesy of WTI

NIRVANA COMES TO DALLAS

Interviewer to Dave Grohl,
“What’s the most out-of-control gig you’ve ever been to?”
Grohl: ”Nirvana’s show in Dallas at a club called Trees in 1991 was the closest thing to a punk rock riot I’ve ever seen. It was way over capacity, Kurt got punched in the face, he smashed the monitor board to bits and then hit a bouncer in the head with his guitar. There was blood everywhere. We were told that the people who worked there were going to kill us so we got in a cab but it was mobbed and they smashed a window. I jumped back in the club, got a ride with some chick and we got into a car accident. This was all in the course of two-and-a-half hours!”

Cobains guitar used to whack the bouncer.

Live at Trees. I never really knew that Cobain was a southpaw.

All these gathered from my pal at West Texas Insomniacs  new Tumblr.

"I was trying to describe you to someone"

"…I finally ended up describing you as a movie I saw when I was a child in Tacoma Washington. I guess I saw it in 1941 or 42, somewhere in there. I think I was seven, or eight, or six.

It was a movie about rural electrification, a perfect 1930's New Deal morality kind of movie to show kids. The movie was about farmers living in the country without electricity. They had to use lanterns to see by at night, for sewing and reading, and they didn't have any appliances like toasters or washing machines, and they couldn't listen to the radio. They built a dam with big electric generators and they put poles across the countryside and strung wire over fields and pastures.

There was an incredible heroic dimension that came from the simple putting up of poles for the wires to travel along. They looked ancient and modern at the same time.

Then the movie showed electricity like a young Greek god, coming to the farmer to take away forever the dark ways of his life. Suddenly, religiously, with the throwing of a switch, the farmer had electric lights to see by when he milked his cows in the early black winter mornings. The farmer's family got to listen to the radio and have a toaster and lots of bright lights to sew dresses and read the newspaper by.

It was really a fantastic movie and excited me like listening to the Star Spangled Banner, or seeing photographs of President Roosevelt, or hearing him on the radio "... the President of the United States... "
I wanted electricity to go everywhere in the world. I wanted all the farmers in the world to be able to listen to President Roosevelt on the radio....
And that's how you look to me."

by Richard Brautigan,
"I was trying to describe you to someone"
from "Revenge of the Lawn"

For RDG and Souby.
I've never met them, but thats how they are to me.

All-Stars

 Bad-ass Astronaut.

STEP LIGHTLY

I saw the dove come down, the dove with the green twig, the childish dove out of the storm and flood. It came toward me in the style of the Holy Spirit descending. I had been sitting in a cafe for twenty-five years waiting for this vision. It hovered over the great quarrel. I surrendered to the iron laws of the moral universe which make a boredom out of everything desired. Do not surrender, said the dove. I have come to make a nest in your shoe. I want your step to be light.
— Leonard Cohen


I found this about the same time I found a discussion going on between bunch of straight people convinced that homosexuality was sin and a bunch of gay folks that felt pretty good about themselves, but who were way outnumbered.
You know, watching a bunch of Christians trash Gay folks is really unattractive, but thats beside the point here.
I've said it before- if I wanted to be gay, there would be some gay stuff going on believe you me, and I'd be good at it too- to me its a choice.

It seems to me that the “great quarrel” is exactly all about whether homosexuality is a sin, and whether a white lie is just as bad as flying a plane into a building, and its Roe vs. Wade till Kingdom Come, and this whole long list of abominations to god. The great quarrel is all of this intrigue over “the iron laws of the moral universe” , where people think they know what is wrong and right in Gods eyes. And we surrender to it and we debate it and we quarrel about it to the point that we think it’s OK to “hate a sin”, just as long as we don’t “hate a sinner”.


But hate is hate. Can you hate a sin without letting hate into your heart?

And we reassure ourselves that we have not blasphemed the Holy Spirit, the one unforgivable sin, according to the iron laws of the universe. And the message just gets further lost.

And in all this, the message gets so lost and distorted, the greatest commandment that you pointed out, it just got totally lost in the debate over the iron laws, because to me a bunch of straight people talking about whether being gay is a sin is just a lot of intrigue that sets us further apart from each other.
And the greatest commandment? Its really kind of meaning less to me when it gots down to it.
Its the New Commandment that appeals to me.
Just love one another. Thats all.
Step lightly.

SHIPS

See the painting of the ship over the mantle? I have this painting, passed down to me from my Grandfather. I've always loved the painting. The ship itself is not pretty, its like a workingmans ship.

Its very cool to run across this on the internet.

The model is Madge Evans, and the date the picture was taken is 1930.

 I wish I knew who the artist was.

You can see it better here.

Addendum: The artist is GG Reynaud. Thank you Gina.

MY FRIEND AT ASSORTED

Its her 1 Year Anniversary of doing the Tumbler blog thing!
SL is one of my best friends ever. She has been since High School when I would call her up in the middle of the night and tell her what I'd been up to and we'd just laugh! Or at school and sometimes she would be worried about me as I staggered down the hall bouncing off the lockers H-H-High-igh as a kite flies.

SL doesn't write a lot, but she posts a lot of great pictures and quotes and I look forward every day to see what she wants to share with us. This picture is one of my favorites, and you can follow this link to see the text she chose from the movie "Harvey" with James Stewart.

SL did send me something she wtrote a while back. She wrote it about me and I kept it and it seems as good a time to post now as any.

When The Grass Sings

In my junior year of high school, Tracy and I had math together just before lunch. As soon as class was over, we headed out for lunch. Our lunch routine consisted of, getting high on the way to Jack in the Box, and eating in the car on the way back. That left plenty of time to get into all sorts of mischief for the remainder of the lunch period.


One such bright, clear, windy November day, we were late…..very late…..when we emerged from my car. We were feeling really good as we headed up the steps from the parking lot. Afternoon classes were already well underway. The parking lot was empty, and the smoking area was empty, and it was so… very…quiet! As a matter of fact, the only other person we could see anywhere, was Bulletholes. He was sitting on the steps from the parking lot, completely lost in thought. As we approached, I asked him what he was doing. He looked up, his face just light up with amazement and he said, “ I am listening…..this grass….it’s like it’s singing!!” Tracy and I looked at each other, thinking apparently Bulletholes had had something different for lunch than we did! But we listened anyway, and Damn if he wasn’t right! The wind blowing through the grass made a whistling sound. It was like a snake charmer’s tune. Forgetting about classes, we sat down on the steps with him. Soon each of us was lost in our own thoughts, listening to the grass sing.


Stepping out of my car to go in to work today, I had many things on my To-Do List. As I started up the steps to the building, a strong wind sang through the trees and I flashed back to that day. I wish I had the luxury of time to just sit down and enjoy the song today.


Ain't she great!
Who says I didn't learn anything at school?

THERMOSTAT WARS

Buckshot asked me when I first moved in what I liked the thermostat set at.

“68 degrees in the winter is fine with me” I said.
“That’s good for me too” says Buckshot.

I didn’t think anything else about it really, except that I must be getting wimpy because I would wake up in the morning and be freezin’ my ass off.
November turned to December and December to January and we don’t get a lot of cold weather down here in Texas, but there were some mornings that rattled my teeth, standing in front of the mirror bare-beamed and butt naked trying to shave.

One particularly frosty morning I went downstairs to check the heater.
Holy Shit!
It was 63 degrees in the house! The thermostat was set at 62!
No wonder! So I bumped it up to 68 and didn't think much of it until the next morning when I woke up about 4am out of my covers and freezinfuckin cold and went downstairs and its back on 62 again so I bump it up to 68 and go back to bed. But an hour later I wake up and it’s still frosty as hell--I can see my breath -- so I go downstairs and that’s when I notice that not only was the stat set to 62, but the heater itself had been turned off!

The weather here in Texas changes real fast, and I figure that Buckshot is turning the heater off sometimes, and somehow the thermostat is defaulting to 62 degrees, so I just decide to start checking it regularly.

Last Friday night I check it before bed. Its at 68. I wake up at 5 am and I’m not really cold, but I go check it just the same. Its back down to 62! So I bump it up to 68 and go back to bed. I’m wondering how it keeps getting down to 62 and decide I’ll have to ask Buckshot what’s going on when I get a chance.

So I wake up at 7 am, and it seems a little cool, so I go down to check it.
What do you know! Not only is it back down to 62, but the unit is turned all the way off!
And that son-of-a-gun Buckshot has got to be doing it because he left for work about an hour ago.
So I called him up on the telephone.
“Hello”
“Hey Buckshot, have you been turning the heater down to 62 degrees?”
‘What’s the matter, are you cold?”
“God damn right I’m cold. My pecker looks like I’m six years old.”
‘Well go ahead and turn it back up if you need to”
“I did. But I don’t just have to turn it up, I have to turn it back on. Because somebody name of Buckshot is turning it off.”
“I’m sorry Bulletholes. It’s a habit. I turn it off in the morning to save on electricity”
“You know what Buckshot? You may as well set it at 78 if you are going to turn it off”
“OK. How about if we set it at 67?” he says.
“Buckshot, I’m freezing my ass off. How about 68 just like we said. And just leave it there. As long as the house doesn’t drop below 68 degrees, the heater wont come on”
“OK”. He sounds dejected, like he’s losing a ton of money.

So what do you think has been going on since then? That’s right. He drops it to 66, I reset at 68. He drops it to 64, I reset to 68. Yesterday it was at 67. I bumped it up to 68.
We’re getting warmer.
But I expect to come home one day and there will be a lock on the thermostat.

"Romantic Moment"

"After seeing the nature documentary, we walk down Canyon Road, onto the plaza of art galleries and high-end clothing stores, where the orange trees are fragrant in the summer night and the smooth pink walls glow fleshlike in the dark.

"It is just our second date, and we sit down on a bench, not looking at each other, holding hands. And if I were a bull penguin right now, I would lean over and vomit softly into the mouth of my beloved. And if I were a peacock, I'd flex my gluteal muscles to erect and spread the quills of my Cinemax tail.

"And if she were a female walking-stick bug, she might insert her hypodermic proboscis delicately into my neck and inject me with a rich hormonal sedative before attaching her egg sac to my thoracic undercarriage. And if I were a young chimpanzee I would break off a nearby tree limb and smash all the windows in the plaza jewelry stores.

"And if she was a Brazilian leopard frog, she would wrap her impressive tongue three times around my right thigh and pummel me lightly against the surface of our pond, and I would know her feelings were sincere.

"Instead, we sit awhile in silence, until she remarks that, in the relative context of tortoises and iguanas, human males seem to be actually rather expressive. And I say that female crocodiles really don't receive enough credit for their gentleness. Then she suggests that it is time for us to go to get some ice cream cones and eat them."

Tony Hoagland

LOOK!

She brought condoms from Mars!

lifted from retrogasm a few years ago

FEET FLYIN' UP IN THE AIR

Liv Rundgren Tyler, maybe better known as Arwen Undómiel from Lord of the Rings.

Here she swings upside down from her mother's arms.
Her mother, Bebe Buell was November 1974 Playmate of the Month; an accomplished model and icon known for her appetite for musicians, including Barry Cowsill and David Cassidy. She lived with Todd Rundgren from 1972 through 1978. Liv was born an 1975

Liv grew up thinking that rock star Todd Rundgren was her father. But as she was growing up, Steve Tyler, lead singer for Aerosmith, began dropping by to visit, and Liv noticed that his daughter Mia Tyler looked enough like her to be her twin.

She confronted her mother, and was told the truth. She was 8 years old.

The truth about Tyler's paternity did not become public until five years later, in 1991, when she changed her name from Rundgren to Tyler, but kept the former as a middle name. Buell's stated reason for the initial decision was that Steven was too heavily addicted to drugs at the time of her birth. Since learning the truth about her paternity, Liv and Steven have developed a close relationship.
 
Someone had asked me if Tyler and Rundgren had known the truth from the start. I would think they likely did. Another person indicated they had heard the truth came out while 8 year old Liz was at an Aerosmith show. I had heard the same thing, but I cannot substantiate that.
 
Anyway, I think this is a cool story.

I HAVE NEWS FOR YOU

There are people who do not see a broken playground swing
as a symbol of ruined childhood
and there are people who don't interpret the behavior
of a fly in a motel room as a mocking representation of their thought process.
There are people who don't walk past an empty swimming pool
and think about past pleasures unrecoverable
and then stand there blocking the sidewalk for other pedestrians.

I have read about a town somewhere in California where human beings
do not send their sinuous feeder roots
deep into the potting soil of others' emotional lives
as if they were greedy six-year-olds
sucking the last half-inch of milkshake up through a noisy straw;
and other persons in the Midwest who can kiss without
debating the imperialist baggage of heterosexuality.

Do you see that creamy, lemon-yellow moon?
There are some people, unlike me and you,
who do not yearn after fame or love or quantities of money as
unattainable as that moon;
thus, they do not later
have to waste more time
defaming the object of their former ardor.
Or consequently run and crucify themselves
in some solitary midnight Starbucks Golgotha.

I have news for you—
there are people who get up in the morning and cross a room
and open a window to let the sweet breeze in
and let it touch them all over their faces and bodies.

"I Have News For You" by Tony Hoagland

POST-MODERN

A quick poll at TYWKIWDBI. I was worried i might be becoming more liberal, but I fell into the same group as last year.
Click here and take the poll and post the results for TY. Its a great blog he runs over there.
Interesting reading about the characteristics of the   different  "types".
I heard once people aren't normal.
 Numbers are normal.
People are typical.
What type are you?

Bulletholes On Sabbatical

There is no better way to get the ol' blogging juices flowing than to announce an end to blogging activities, or at least brief hiatus.

LONG LIVE THE QUEEN!

60 YEARS TODAY!

image courtesy of this isnt happiness

THE DOPECOW

There is this really ugly cow that I have been trying not to write about. This cow comes to a roomful of addicts and the cow is the dope, or its not the dope,  or it is supposed to be bringing the dope, but its really not like that at all. I don't know what the cow is, except it is a killer. The cow comes into the room and the room is huge but the cow (its an ugly cow) is no bigger than a medium sized dog, with teeth like razors and iron hooves for paws, and its mangy, and places where the flesh is rotting right off the bone, and one eye is bulging and the other is sunken in so far there is really only a soggy blur of a socket. Like a bovine Cujo on a mean batch of crank.


It’s a dopecow.

And the dopecow has no dope, which is a real disappointment for the addicts. The dopecow is angry, and mean too, and starts attacking everyone, gnashing with all these broken rotted teeth, and everyone starts attacking the dopecow back, and they are kicking it, and some have baseball bats and are hitting it, and the battle surges back and forth across this huge room. Finally someone comes up with a big baggie, and we put the dopecow in the baggie to suffocate it, but even that doesn’t work and now there is an angry dopecow in a baggie (but the cow is not the dope) that still wants to kill us all. it wants to kill us all, but we cannot kill it.
The dopecow can't be killed.

This was a dream I had before I ever went to an NA meeting. I had about two months clean I guess, but had not gone to a meeting when I had this dream. My dreams are seldom this ugly.  I have wondered for three and a half years what the heck this dream was about.

I was at a meeting last week, and the topic was about how we will always be addicts no matter how long we stay clean. The dream came back to me, and for the first time I may have realized what the dream was about.
The dopecow represents addiction, and the solution to the problem was to get out of that room.
We will never beat the addiction on its own terms, because those terms are insane, but through the 12 Step Program known as Narcotics Anonymous, we do recover.
Anyway, I’ve wanted to write this for a few years now, and I’m not sure that I’ve written it the way I’d like to.

Just for today: I am an addict every day, but today I have the choice to be a recovering addict. I will make that choice by practicing my program.

"These things can enlarge the soul..."

"If you need to visualize the soul, think of it as a cross between a wolf howl, a photon, and a dribble of dark molasses. But what it really is, as near as I can tell, is a packet of information. It’s a program, a piece of hyperspatial software designed explicitly to interface with the Mystery. Not a mystery, mind you, the Mystery. The one that can never be solved."


To one degree or another, everybody is connected to the Mystery, and everybody secretly yearns to expand the connection. That requires expanding the soul. These things can enlarge the soul: laughter, danger, imagination, meditation, wild nature, passion, compassion, psychedelics, beauty, iconoclasm, and driving around in the rain with the top down. These things can diminish it: fear, bitterness, blandness, trendiness, egotism, violence, corruption, ignorance, grasping, shining, and eating ketchup on cottage cheese."
Tom Robbins

THE EVILS OF OBAMACARE

Just sittin' back, enjoying the evils of Obamacare.
My insurance premiums went up by $3.50 a month. But my medicine went down. It went down bigtime. From $2000 a year to $1300 a year. Thats a lot of money. Two different prescriptions went down $20 bucks a month each while the dosage went up.

 My Conservative friends are sure Obamacare is giving me placebos and sugar water. I got to tell you, I feel fine. My medical costs have gone down. They want to repeal it, but poor me, with as little spending money as I have, am able to pump an extra 700 dollars a year back into the economy on things like chinese dishtowels at Walmart and magic shoes manufactured in Burma to wear at Buddy Shows.

Then my daughter, The Water Baby, she is having headaches and stumbling a bit, and being forgetful and stuff. We went to the emergency room two weeks ago. She had a CAT scan that turned up nothing. She is having an MRI next Monday.
Due to Obamacare, the taxpayers are not picking up the bill- she is a full time student and works part time- because due to the evils of Obamacare she is covered on her mothers insurance nowadays, and the insurance pays for all this. Good care too, without signing up down at the county government level and standing in lines and filling out tons of paperwork.
But my Conservative friends- they want to repeal it.

Anyway, say a little prayer for her....I'm not sure how concerned I should be.
And say a little prayer for Mitt Romney, the architech of Obamacare, that should he get elected he will not repeal Obamacare.

My Magic Sunshine Trippin' Shoes.