CAVEAT EMPTOR

I have had to withdraw my offer on The Little Hoss Ranch.
During inspection we found the house had some foundation problems, and some electrical issues. I was all set to make a counter offer to the seller and maybe get all that stuff taken care of.
But when push came to shove it was my Financing that fell through. Since I have no current utility bills, and I do not have a signed lease contract between my landlord and myself, my credit rating is not as good as it was when I had those things going for me. final approval was going to take some time, and it looked like the best thing to do was withdraw the offer. Too many caveats.

I was surprised as hell last summer anyway, when they said a lowlife no count no credit bankrupcy foreclosure ex-doper slacker with bad teeth and knock-knees could get a loan and buy a house. After everything the country went through in 2008, did they not learn a thing?
 I feared for my country, that they would want to loan me $80,000.

In fact, they have about 4 bankers on it right now, staying up all hours trying to hatch a plan to get me a home loan.

So  I’m still in the game, waiting on new approval on some new scam to get Bulletholes $80,000 and in the meantime I am safe and happy living with my friend Angel Eyes, and we have cable, a couch, a stove and a pool, and I get up in the morning and the coffee is made and the birds are chirping and there is money in the bank baby, the money just keeps rolling in, and I get out of the shower I start singing because that’s what like to do in the morning….


“Sweet Caroline (bom-bom-bom)
Good times never seemed so good!
I’ve been inclined
To believe they never would”

And part of the reason I like that song is because I’m never quite sure what it means. What exactly is the singer inclined to believe? What good time never seemed so good? Good as what? When was that?
He don’t say and I can’t tell.
I kind of have an idea, but I just can’t tell for sure. Maybe you know. Maybe you think you know something for certain.
And that would be your first mistake!

All I know is it ain't over until the last brick falls

HEAVY WEATHER

OPINIONS VARY

found at ordinary finds

SHELLEY'S HEART

I left a comment on an old TYWKIWDBI post about the funeral pyre of the poet Shelley. I was delighted to find that such a great blog as TY's would actually use my comment to add to a continuing post today. I don't know how many visits he gets a day, but its a lot more than my little piece of ether here at Bulletholes.

Anyway, I used the funeral of Shelley as inspiration on a story back 5 years ago. Its a great story, though not as good as Treylawneys, and the best part is that the story is more true than not. True enough i had to change the names somewhat  to protect the not guilty. It ended up becoming a 5 part series I titled "The Chronicles of Fighting Joe Jarmack". Follow the link to see the original and the comments (CLICK HERE), or just read the text supplied below.

URBAN LEGEND
"Down here we had the Womacks, all big trouble and notoriously violent, with the eldest of the three brothers, Joe, being the most badass'd. One night Little Panama comes running into the local Foosers Hut and hollers that Fightin' Joe Womack has barricaded himself in the old abandoned Boys Ranch House for Orphans and that anyone going in there gets thrown out the second floor window.
Of Course the place empties out, and a caravan forms up to journey down Devils Backbone, a twisting turning roller coaster road that dead ends into the Boys Ranch where a crowd has gathered in the dark outside of the dilapidated two story wood structure.
Its pure Hugo without the hunchback, unless you want to count Cross Eyed Myra, who seemed to be everywhere all the time, just lookin' for a little lovin'.
Big Panama goes rumnning into the darkness of the ranchhouse and in like 20 seconds you hear a scream and *WHOOSH* here he comes flying out the second story window. Same thing happens to Zigger-zoo, Cherokee, Tubby and the Strackman. Then Truck-Bob hollers "torch the place" and someone comes up with a gallon of gas, its once for the Devil and once for the Christ, and the next thing you know this weatherbeaten old Ranchhouse is in flames, lighting up the hot August night. The crowd went wild!
No one ever saw Fighting Joe again, but the next morning his Saint Christopher medal was sifted from the ashes, still glowing red hot like Shelley's Heart and did not cool until it were dunked, hissing and steaming into the Boys Ranch Pond.
Today it is the site of the nicest little park and community center you would ever want to see. Its been deemed a State Historical Site because of the Old Boys Ranch for Orphans. But there is not one whit in tribute to the night that Fightin' Joe went down in a blaze of glory. The legend is that he still wanders the Park and surrounding neighborhoods, looking for his old girlfriend Mi-Mi.
When the wind is out of the southwest, breathing its way down Devils Backbone and blowing through the willows by the waters edge, you can hear ol' Fightin Joe howling for his lost love."
See also The Scariest House, The Continuing Chronicles of Fighting Joe, and Purcell's Treehouse, for more of this story. It remains largely unfinished, I guess.

SHAME, SHAME, SHAME

I see an article that down in Florida, in protest for the Trayvon Martin incident, about 100 High School kids have ransacked a Walgrens Pharmacy, and several of them left their Student ID's behind. They should be easy to catch.
It reminds me of when I was 17.  I took a job at some kind of Catfish place, and my first night there as I punched out my timecard, I found the bank deposit bag by timeclock where the manager accidently left it. It contained 800 bucks and some credit receipts.
I did the wrong thing. I took it.
I got a mile down the road and threw the receipts out the car window. Cops were waiting when I got home. The man behind me had stopped and picked the receipts up. No charges were filed. It was 1974, back when kids got paid a lot of slack for doing stupid stuff.
I don't tell this one too often. Its probably not the worst thing I ever done, but I'm still ashamed after all these years.
Not just that I would be such a poor thief, but mostly of how easily I got caught.
And thats the most shameful thing of all.

"We do not do Bluebonnets"

I went to an Art Show this weekend in Arlington. You know, one of those outdoorsy things with tents set up for folks to display their crafts and hopefully make a sale. There is a stage set up for bands, and its all very festive, but no one really daces because the bands are usually cover bands doing bad versions of Fleetwood Mac songs,  and there is always a row of trailers where they are selling funnel cakes and sausages on a stick and turkey legs and other stuff that you wouldn't dare put in your body, but for today you will make an exception.
So you tour through the crafts, and stand there at the stage for a bit, tapping your foot and eating something sinfully greasy, and the sin drips from your chin in the afternoon heat.


My pal Gary Williamson had a booth there. Gary uses a unique process to create sculptures from scrap recycled paper, His company is called "Shatter'd Visages" after a Percy Shelly poem. Check out the link to his site, or to his Facebook page. I have a Melpomene done in Verdi Gris on my wall, and I like it a lot.

Anyway, there was a photographer from Austin. We stopped by their booth, and they had a lot of Texana stuff, and my friend Pam asked "Do you have any pictures of Bluebonnets?"
Bluebonnets are the state flower, and this time of year flourish along the roadways all over Texas. Everywhere you look there are cars pulled over to the side of the road, and folks all dressed up to get their picture taken in a field of these native wildflowers.
But the photographer looked at Pam kind of funny, almost offended.

"We don't do Bluebonnets" she said, matter of factly "We do junk cars and beat up cowboys. We do Lone Star beer and mesquite trees. We do Rusty Weir, Ray Wylie Hubbard and Guy Clark. We will even do the Alamo or the tower at University of Texas, though we prefer the Huntsville prison. But we do not, under any circumstances, do bluebonnets"

I assume they do not want to add to the 7 billion bluebonnet pictures already on the market, the way other photographers might refuse to do cute furry mammals..

I like that.

But maybe a shot of a graveyard, which also has bluebonnets, might be nice.
 

photo coutesy of  westtexasinsomniac

THE LITTLE HOSS RANCH

I haven’t said much about it, but I have been looking for a house to buy the last 6 months. All my stuff is in storage. I lived with Buckshot for a while, and the last month I have moved into a room with my friend Angel Eyes.


I haven’t written anything about that, I guess because I kind of have the Displacement Blues, this weird, sad, penetrating sense of not belonging where you are, which always leads you to feel homeless, eternally homeless, like you have never had a home at all, and that you are on an Exodus to Nowhere, and you may as well get used to it.

Even when I had my own place, it never really felt like home. That’s what you convince yourself of pretty easily when you start feeling the Displacement Blues. I have found my self quoting myself lately, that I haven’t felt at home in 20 years or so. That may be true, but it’s a terrible thing to say.

Anyway, at long last I have made an offer on a house , and that offer has been accepted, and it looks like I am buying a house. There are three really great things about it:

Location!
It is only three blocks from where I go to my 12 Step meeting and about the same distance from the Buttermilk café where I go for breakfast on weekends. It is also only 2 miles from where I work. I haven’t rode my bicycle for a long time, but of I ever just had to, I could ride my bike to work again, the way I did for 4 years before I had a car. It wasn’t that long ago.

Its cute!
It’s a clean little house in pretty good shape, and has some personality.


And the price was in my range! I had started to look at home that were more expensive than I really wanted to spend, and then this one popped up. I will pay $100 a month less than my old apartment cost me.

And here’s something weird…I can look out my front window, to three houses down the street and see the X-Mrs Bulletholes house! She and her husband Jeff, the three of us, we all get along, and my daughter lives there right now but she is moving out, and she will have a room with me. It’s a pretty cozy little arrangement.

I haven’t written about my son too much either, because all last year he wasn’t doing so well, but he is in school and doing GREAT, and now when he comes to town we will all be very close, and like I said it’s a cozy little arrangement.

So lets take a look at this house shall we?

I told you it was cute!

 And it has little hitching posts to tie up yer pony when you ride over!

 And it has a nice big backyard, and I can't wait to have a garden again, and get my hands back down in the dirt.

It has a big back patio, and the previous owners had begun to cover it with flagstones, but never finished. That might be something I could do, and there are nice tree's with good shade as well

***

 The Kitchen is real Susie Homemaker style.

That floor might need level.

***

 The front room is large, with good light.

There is not really a formal dining area.

***

And they have turned the garage into a sunken den with a fireplace.

Its nicely done, with good workmanship far as I can tell.

********

So that's it! The inspection is coming up Sunday. Closing day, if all goes well,  is April 27. 

I think I'll name after my old Nursery School.

The Little Hoss Ranch!

THE BEST PENNY I EVER SPENT

I am spinning from the memory of a summer, the summer I said GOODBYE to Bedford Junior High; that summer of the horse with no name, when the 'heat was hot"; it was a T-Rex summer with diamond star halos' and limes in the coconuts and having a coke while you taught the world to sing. Late summer nights ridin' bikes with my buddies and singing about a long cool woman, ridin' down to Buddy Whittington's driveway to hear him hammer out some song we never heard of called "Big Legged Woman". The summer Kandi and I played spades during the heat of the day, listening to Patches and thinkin' 'bout our daddies.

The same summer Wayne Newtons daddy walked too fast; that summer of some guy named Daniel Boone singing that slap-happy song " Beautiful Sunday" and the horrible chorus is bouncing around in the hollows of my mind...

Hi, hi, hi, beautiful Sunday
This is my, my, my, beautiful day
When you say, say, say, say that you love me
Oh, my, my, my it's a beautiful day

Its killin' me, it really is...
And that dude singing about kissing a truck at a Garden Party, and 3 Dog Night singing that damn circus music, and that song with some kind of cowbell...too much cowbell.
Yeah, OK,  "the ink is black"... I get it.
And I'd wake up in the morning, and coming from my sisters room were the sounds of Donnie Osmond, and I'd start to sing along:
 "And they called it"....oh, never mind.
And some British guy named Gilbert singing about throwin' himself off a tower and all I could think was "Oh Gilbert, please do"
I had no idea it could get worse until I heard Sister Golden hair a few years later.


The only thing good happened that summer was 'Baby, I'm a Want You" and Myra and her Annie Greensprings Peach Creek wine.

And the 12 albums Columbia Records sent me for a penny.
I think I still owe them.

One of my first 12 albums from Columbia. They saved me.

ITS NOT SAFE HERE

Captured at Lake Whitney yesterday after the big rains.

THE WAR ON GOOD MUSIC

Last Saturday  we ran to Piggly Wiggly Supermarket for roast beef, and what are they playing?
 "Amanda" by Boston.
 ARE YOU KIDDING ME?
Not something from their first two albums that only sucked 100%, but the third album where they took suck to a new low!

You know what this is?
 It's Obama's war on good music. Of course, it could be worse. Have you seen Mitt's playlist?  He would be well advised not to even release the short form.

I hear Obama is waging a war on Religion too.
We tried to go to church last Sunday but couldn't.
Snipers!
WAKE UP AMERICA!

REAL ESTATE 2008, A RETROSPECTIVE

This girl I know, man, she has been in Real Estate, and then Collections and Credit and now she is a Mortgage Broker. She has always been a real go getter. She can make the Earth and Heavens move. She's drivin' down the highway, weavin' in and out of traffic at 70 miles an hour and talking fast to a client:


'I can get you a 6.75 with no points and that's gonna' save you 58.64 on your monthly; or you can pay the points and go to 5.25 and that will save you 126.71. If we wait, I might get you in on a 4.85 No Down/Deferred and that will save you...hmm....lets see..."(now she's using a calculator, changing lanes and passing an 18 Wheeler that's carrying coffins, that right COFFINS, talking on the phone and sippin' a Red Bull and quoting Amortization Schedules)"...that will save you another 48.33 on top of the 126.71 and you'll get cash back. Yes, cash back. That's better than the EZ-Qualify, Zero Balance Floater we talked about before, and if we can get that in before the Bankruptcy you should be able to claim a Homestead, file for Zone 11 and get the Tax cut."

Now she has exited the highway and is screeching to a stop at a red light, and I am hanging onto the dashboard for dear life. I don't know what I find most amazing; how she does all this math in her head or the way she works a calculator while talking on the phone and driving, or that there is such a thing as an "EZ-Qualify, Zero Balance Floater" that will save someone who is currently filing Bankruptcy $200 a month on a house they are currently purchasing; or is the most amazing thing that President Bush just finished allocating 7 Billion Dollars to bail out the Banking Industry and someone is buying a house and getting "Instant Cash Back"

What I'm thinking is that they should put her in charge.

Heres a real nice foreclosure.

GO AND SIN NO MORE

"In one experiment, just telling a man he would be observed by a female was enough to hurt his psychological performance."

"I'm the man that broke the bank at Monte Carlo"

“I was ready to play on,” Johnson said. “And I looked around, and I said, ‘Are you going to do a fill?’ I’ve got every chip in the tray. I think I even had the $100 chips. ‘Are you guys going to do a fill?’ And they just said, ‘No, we’re out.’”
He says he learned later that someone at the casino had called the manager, who was in London, and told him that Don Johnson was ahead of them “by four.”

“Four hundred thousand?” the manager asked.
“No, 4 million.”

Click here for the full story

WAITING TO INHALE

I still have a book from when I was a boy called "Underwater Adventure" by Willard Price.
I've read it about a million times I guess, and there is something like this device in his book that was written in 1954.
The protagonist, Hal, or maybe Roger, rides it while searching for sunken treasure and is chased by a hammerhead shark, stung by a school of jellyfish, dragged through fire-coral and ends up with an octopus stuck to his back. Isn't that exciting?
And probably safer than a Cruise Ship.
Thanks to TYWKIWDBI for reminding me of this book. I may have to read it again this weekend.
Its a great book!

MITT

Has anyone else noticed how much Mitt favors Max Headroom?
He even ACTS like him.

COWGIRL IN THE SAND

Source~ West Texas Insonmniac

SPLENDOR ON THE HURSTVIEW BRIDGE

Me and that bridge, the Hurstview bridge that passes over 183, we go a long way back. I hear they are tearing it down next week to widen the freeway.

See, when I was 16 I had this pretty little girl friend, then one day she broke up with me and I was all heartbroke. It was like my world had ended. She had told me she was babysitting down the street from her house that night, and couldn't be reached, but being all heartbroke and forlorn, I wanted to talk to her real bad. So I spent a couple hours going through the Hurst phone book and calling every house on her street, asking whoever answered the phone if my girl was babysitting there, and sometimes my pathetic little story would come out, and the old man that had answered the phone would advise me:
“Damn, son, just go out a git you another girl, Hurst is full of pretty girls to call.”
It didn’t do any good, and I just kept calling every house on Oak street. I guess I must have missed one, because by the time I got to “Zystroski”, I had not found her.

So I decided the next best thing to do would be to just walk on over to her house, and sit in her front yard and wait for her to come home, where she would see my miserable ass, in the rain, sitting and waiting for her, and she would know then how much I loved her, and she would realize how unkind it was for her to put me through this horrible grief, and since she could not be so unkind as all that, she might take me back, and comfort and solace me in my time of melancholy, there, muddy sad and freezing in her front yard.
And maybe she would do that thing she would do, blowing in my ear and biting my neck because that really drove me wild.
I got to the Hurstview bridge. It was somewhere around midnight in the freezing rain, and as I reviewed my sorry life to this point I determined the best thing to do would be to just end it all, and just throw my heartbroke ass off the Hurstview bridge. It would be the ultimate demonstration of my undying love, equal to that like Dustin Hoffman had made in "The Graduate", pounding the glass in the Chapel, and running off with the stolen bride on a bus.

But something stopped me. I did not do a Billie Joe McAllister off  the Hurstview bridge, but instead walked through the drizzle the 4 blocks back home, and the next day I started taking the old man’s advice about calling all the pretty girls in Hurst.

So every day after 35 years I still pass the Hurstview bridge, and there are two questions that remain.
The first is this:
Am I the only one that ever thought of throwing myself off the Hurstview bridge?
And two:
Does anybody here really think she was babysitting down the street that night?
That’s really what I want to know.

.

BUGS HENDERSON

Much revered Texas Bluesman "Bugs" Henderson  fell to cancer earlier today.
He will be missed by many.

THE ACCORDIONIST

Photographer Robert Doisneau
I do love this picture.

And from his notebook~
" With the accordionist, the tone was different. Standing before folks molded by hard labour, who held their fingers clenched even when at rest, she luxuriated in a sense of idleness. Her cat-like nonchalance carried the slightest hint of cruelty. Back in the Middle Ages, the spell that woman cast would have sparked a bonfire."

THE BUNNY TRAIL

I was tagged for one of these Meme things (I haven't done one in ages) by my friend SOUS GIRL and it was lke 11 questions long, and you know thats too many questions for me, so I'll just do the first one. Go check it out and play along if you'd like click here.

1. What is your favorite childhood memory?
My favorite is my freshest one, whatever it is I suddenly remember today that I had forgotten all about. It might be the nighttime walks down the street when I was four, with my dad, and there was a creek under the road, and on the road would be 1000’s of toads eating bugs drawn to the streetlight there. But I have remembered that before, so it cannot be my favorite memory today.

Maybe it was about the same time that dad showed me how to catch a rabbit by turning a wooden box upside down, one end held up with a stick that had a carrot tied to it, and when the rabbit went inside and grabbed the carrot, the box came down and trapped the rabbit so I could see him the next day. Only it never happened, that is we never caught a rabbit, and I’ve remembered it before, so it really doesn’t count.

Maybe it could be like when I saw the movie Godzilla, and the next day was a foggy day and as I looked out the garage through the mist I could see in my minds eye, as you may be doing now, Godzilla coming up the hill from the creek where the toads and rabbits lived, through the fog towards me. Coming FOR me.  I’ve thought of that before, but not too many times, and I don’t know why something scary like Godzilla headed straight through the fog for you is such a good memory for me.

I think it was that same week that they took the training wheels off my bike, and I was scared shitless and crying too,--"momma no!"-- but when I got on my bike and took off it was eezy-japaneezy, smooth sailing as I wiped away my tears and turned into the wind, flying down the hill to the creek by the toads, past the spot where I'd had the bad Tricycle wreck the year before, then hopping the curb, shouting laughing and bouncing down the bunny trail , headed straight for Godzilla and I think I had forgotten that, but now I remember and its alright.
Yeah, its alright.

What a woman won't do, won't get done.

Right.

What a woman won't do, won't get done.
Woman has a busy day.
Gotta get up, nails, hair face. Talk. Shop, cook, clean.
Birthday cards, gift bags, All Occasion cards. Take a call make a call, talk, talk.
When you care enough, you send the very best and call just to see how you’re doing.
Talk some more. Check on this, check on that, decide on Birth Control. Call and talk about that.
Gotta bake those muffins, take 'em to people that don't feel good.
BusyBusy-talktalk.
I really love them all you know.

WE ARE NEVER SATISFIED

That’s what my NA literature says about us addicts, and it’s true. I‘ve been in a real dither lately and it comes out in all sorts of ways.

One way is when the car in front of me wants to make a right hand turn. Do they not realize what this does to the traffic behind them? How dare they!

Another way I can tell I am not functioning according to Spiritual Principles is when I stopped for a coffee at the QT Store. They have really good coffee there, and I’ve really gotten hooked on it, so I stop every day. When I stopped on Saturday I noticed that the cups they had were different. Instead of having just a little sippy hole on the cover for me to drink my coffee from, they had upgraded to a cup that had a little stopper thing for the hole, and in order to get your first sip, you had to use your thumb to flip the little stopper thing and open the hole. What kind of design is that? Who thought of that, and why wasn’t I asked before rolling these piece of shit cups out?
What is wrong with me?

The NA literature also says that the core of my disease is my self-centeredness. I often wonder what is at the core of my self-centeredness.
That’s what I’d really like to know.

I go back and look at some of the horrible things I’ve posted the last week or so and I know there is something seriously wrong with me.
Who do think I am?
Rush Limbaugh?

THE RIGHT STUFF

"And the truck heaves and billows, blazing silver red Day-Glo, and I doubt seriously, Cool Breeze, that there is a single cop in all of San Francisco today who does not know that this crazed vehicle is a guerrilla patrol from the dread LSD.”
Tom Wolfe from "The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test"

Follow the link for the full intro to what Ordinary Finds describes as Wolfes funniest book.

After I saw this post Friday, I went home and watched "The Right Stuff", a movie based on Wolfes book of the same name. I'd never seen it before, even after all these years of it being such a great movie and all; and even though my nickname in the 8th grade had been "Rocket Renfro", ; and I had no idea that "The Right Stuff" would be so funny.

RED-HAIRED MAN AND SLUT SUCK FACE ON SNOWY EVENING AT HOT TUB

There is a back story to this poem some of you may be familiar with, which is written by the Editor of the small town newspaper that ran a few of my stories last year.
CLICK HERE for the backstory.

The short version is that she kept changing my titles. Click here to see some examples.

I asked her a few weeks back if I could post her poem (which I think is very good) and she said I could.
"I'm really pleased you like it that much " she said.
"Yes, I think its a great poem" I said "but I have to ask you one thing."
"Whats that?" she asked.
"I was wondering if it would be OK if I changed your title, the way you used to change mine? "
"No, silly" was her reply, so without further ado, and without having changed the title of her poem, I give you:

TRIMBLE
I saw a post tonight

From a friend who
Checked in at Trimble
Hot Springs and Spa
And I was reminded of
The time I went there
In the wintertime
With a guy - he had
a red beard - I met
Him at the coffee shop
He used to be a regular
But had moved to
Telluride where he
Drove a taxi and
Lived in an apartment
In an old Victorian
Downtown
So he liked me,
Of course, and
Invited me to the springs
And though I didn't
Care for him much,
One way or the other,
Because he seemed just
Too much into me,
I went anyway because
That was a time when
I was bored and trying
Hard to try hard
I met him at the springs
In the evening
And it was snowing
He drove an old BMW
His backseat was his closet,
From what I could see,
Clothes piled high
Around shadowy boxes
And boots and coats
Thrown here, there
A small accordian file
Tied with a shoestring
Or so I imagined,
Because it was dark
And I really couldn't
See very well at all
But anyway
I wore my bikini top
And shorts, flip flops
Slip-sliding on the ice
All the way from
The warm steamy
Dressing room, past
The Olympic-sized
Swimming pool, covered
For the season,
To the hot spring pool
It was cold, I tell you
My breath pretty much
Froze in the air
But once I got to
The pool and slipped
In, between clouds of
Steam rising through
The falling snow,
I was warm, and there
He was, red beard
Slightly damp, chest bare
Teeth glowing white
Through his smile
He was happy to
See me, I could tell
We stood next to
Each other in the pool
Making small talk
Learning about him
He learning about me
Our legs touching in
The murky dark of
Underwater, fleeting
At first and then
Deliberately, his hand
Finding mine, and
There we were, as the
Snow fell silently and
Other folks whispered
And cars passed on the road
Two strangers just
Sharing time and space
When we left
He kissed me
On the hand
And on the cheek
Softly on the lips
And said he'd call
When he could find
A phone, he did but
I never answered.

CHAMPAGNE

I worked for Romanian Executive Chef named Gaspar. He was brutal. He smelled like Paprikash always, and when you looked into his eyes it was like looking into a well. He could make you feel like crawling through the grout to get away from him.


He would come into my Kitchen, take a look around, and in his thick accent ask:
“Esssstifff, (That’s how he said “Steve”) Essssssstiffff, how eees zee kwalitee tonight?”
And I’d smile and try to say positive and say “Great chef, everything is great!” and he would shake his head and mutter under his breath “Ohh shure, Essstifff, shure” and he would look at a plate in the window, and shake his head and just saunter away. And for the next day or two you would expect him to call you to his office and fire you.

Well, I got tired of it and decided to just go ahead and quit. I walked into his office and announced “Gaspar, you Romanian Bastard, I’d like to give you my two weeks notice, but if you want to shoot me out of here right now, that will be just fine by me”
Gaspar leans back in his chair and very calmly says right back to me:
“No, no, Esssstifff, you go ahead and vork out your two weeks, and on your last day ve vill have Champagne!”

Like I said, he was brutal.

TEXAS INDEPENDENCE DAY

“I have said that Texas is a state of mind, but I think it is more than that. It is a mystique closely approximating a religion. And this is true to the extent that people either passionately love Texas or passionately hate it and, as in other religions, few people dare to inspect it for fear of losing their bearings in mystery or paradox. But I think there will be little quarrel with my feeling t...hat Texas is one thing. For all its enormous range of space, climate, and physical appearance, and for all the internal squabbles, contentions, and strivings, Texas has a tight cohesiveness perhaps stronger than any other section of America. Rich, poor, Panhandle, Gulf, city, country, Texas is the obsession, the proper study, and the passionate possession of all Texans.” ― John Steinbeck, Travels With Charley: In Search of America

Thanks to Assorted for the image

CAN I HELP YOU TEAR SOME FENCES DOWN

SEX DRUGS AND THE MONKEES

A RETROSPECTIVE ON THE DEATH OF DAVY JONES

The Monkee’s were like a “Gateway Band” for me. After the first album, “The Monkees” in 1966, I bought a tambourine. I beat the hell out of that tamborine, singing "I'm A Believer" at the top of my lungs. Then came “More of the Monkee’s” and I took my allowance down and bought some Maracas.


Davy Jones looked so good playing the Maracas, and he always got the girl. But it was Peter Tork, the really goofy one, that I was busy modeling myself after.

By the time “Pleasant Valley Sunday” came out on “Pisces, Aquarius, Capricorn and Jones”, I was beating the bongos pretty darn hard, and I was only 11 years old. Over the next year or so, I had completely given up my musical sensibilities that were so deeply rooted in Mary Poppin’s “Spoonful of Sugar”, and had moved from the Monkee’s to the Partridge Family, with a huge lust for  Susan Dey. . I advanced through the soloists like Neil Diamond, to the edgier Norman Greenbaum; I decided that even though "Sugar Sugar" was the sexiest song ever, the Archies were pure bubble-gum and fell for the mysticism of Tommy James and the Shondells; discovered the Hollies and had to hide my Frijid Pink under the mattress along with Sly and the Family Stone; down I went from ‘Chirpy-Chirpy-Cheep-Cheep” to “Indiana Wants Me”; deeper still to ”Me and You and a Dog named Boo” and it was no great leap from there to the really hard stuff, like T-Rex's "Bang A Gong" or  Chicago's “25 or 6 to 4”.

It was gradual, I barely even noticed the decline- hooked on The Beatles, and Three Dog Night, and god help me…the Grass Roots!

It wasn’t too long after that I traded in my bongos for a bong, and Tony Orlando and Dawn for Led Zeppelin 3.

And it all started with the Monkee’s.
Trouble with a capital T.

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.