Archive for the ‘My father’ Category

About a year and a half ago, my uncle Larry was diagnosed with stage four cancer.  I wept as my mother gave me the news on the phone.  Anyone who knows Larry at at all would describe their relationship with him as at the very least, unique.  He’s a unique little bastard.  Unique, yep.  Indefatigable, ornery, lovable, loyal.

He and my uncle Skip visited a few years back and helped with some insulation in my sister’s house.  After that they rubbed it in my nephews beds.  When their skin became inflamed and the mad itch had set in, Uncle Larry advised them to take hot showers.

Unique.

Here’s an excerpt from a blog I wrote at the the time:

“He was a bastard.

He deliberately shocked me with the horse equivalent of a cattle prod. He told me he’d caught a frog and wanted to show it to me. With glee, he electrocuted me.

He once moved our Christmas tree into the front yard and decorated it with my mothers bras and underwear.

I woke up one morning with his socks in my mouth.

I watched him wipe snot on my mother’s neck from the backseat of my father’s Mercury Cyclone.

He visited egregious acts on everyone he ever liked. It really was his way of showing you he loved you. Really.

Ten or twelve years ago, the Hardings had a reunion in a small town owned by my uncle Tyke in Washington just south of the Canadian border. I brought The Fish, my new girlfriend at the time.

The Matriarch of the clan had just passed. My Grandmother, eighty nine years old. She was awesome. We’d been lucky enough to have her for the holidays.

There were color themed t-shirts indicating which family you were from. We were purple.

We tore it up.

A very small town. If you didn’t mention you were a Harding and therefore related to uncle Tyke, you got no service, not even a smile. Play the Harding card and you were royalty.

We tore it up.

One night we cousins got to talking about Uncle Larry and how we’d suffered his obstreperousness. His orneriness. We decided to act. We dispatched one of his own children to secure his motel room key. A younger Begat had caught a six inch fish in the creek that day; it was confiscated under rules of executive privilege.

We salted his sheets and crumbled potato chips in them. We removed all towels and toilet paper. We covered every surface with shaving cream. We turned the thermostat all the way up. I placed the dead fish inside his pillowcase. We returned to the reunion and drank with him.

We tore it up.

Last time I saw him was two years ago at another family reunion. He and my Uncle Skip are a pair. It occurred to me they may as well stick thumbs up each others asses. There was chaos that only the Harding clan produce or tolerate. I’m sorry now we didn’t visit much but it sure was nice to see him. I can’t honestly remember if he knows I was the mastermind behind that revenge.

He is sixty six years old and cancer has invaded his body. There are plenty of loving Hardings, In-Laws and Begats to do everything they can. They will.

I will come too. I will make sure he knows I put that fish in his pillow.”

Well, he beat it.  Lost his teeth and ended up around ninety pounds, but he whipped it.  His body was some seventy plus percent infested with death but he smiled, did everything his doctors told him and beat it back.  Cancer free.  As of two weeks ago his back was beginning to bother him but he was up to his fighting weight and treatment was behind him save for checkups.  Clean bill of health.

He was a jockey so he knew well what it’s like to break bones.  When he heard of my father’s recent injury, I was the one to tell him, he was devastated and told my mother he’d be here if need be for anything including to drive the forty foot castle to Yuma so they could winter there.

My mother called today.  It has returned.  The big C is in his spine.  Not fair.  Not fucking fair.  The universe has chosen to shit on this miracle.  He starts radiation right away and twelve rounds of chemo immediately after Christmas.

For the first time in my forty four years, there will be no Christmas with my family.  This is not so much because of my uncle’s illness as it is the result of my sister’s deliberate blindness and irresponsibility with love and family.  Life sucks today.

Drinks for my friends.

I rocked at Jeopardy tonight.  Even nailed the final Jeopardy question.  Rock of Gibraltar.

Shall we do a little politics?

First up, the alleged war between FOX and the White House.  Here’s my take:  FOX lies egregiously and irresponsibly.  Consistently.  They are shameless propagandists.    Therefore, they lose.  This President or any other has every right to neglect them, ignore them or even cast the occasional aspersion their way.  FOX is full of shit and any thinking, attentive American knows it.  It’s Obama’s prerogative.  It’s just that simple.  I kinda like that he’s dismissing them while saying he’s not losing any sleep over it.

Um, looks like the public option is alive once again.  Harry Reid says as much.  He told us yesterday he has the votes.  Turns out he probably doesn’t.  Olympia Snowe is blanching, or posturing as though she will, as I can’t imagine her blanching any more.  That bitch is pale.  Translucent.  Then there’s Lieberman.  Benedict Fliptop.  The little droopy eyed cartoon jowled prick announced he’d get behind a Republican filibuster on the public option.  You know he’s a former Democrat, now an Independent, allowed to retain his chairmanship of the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs by virtue of tacit agreement between he and Mr. Reid that he would play ball on domestic policy.  Just so happens he’s the junior Senator from Connecticut, the finest and most luxurious mall in the country for health insurance corporations.  He’s taken over a million bucks in the last five years from the medical plutocracy.

Without even a conversation, not so much as a memo, Benedict Fliptop should be stripped of his chairmanship and barred from even caucusing with the Democrats.  This should happen yesterday.  He should be made to eat peanut butter and jelly on the steps or dine with his stinky Republican abominogs.  If possible, he should be ejected from his DC residence, have his single payer health care revoked and be issued a shopping cart, a hoodie and fingerless gloves, maybe a few cans of Sterno.  This fucker needs to understand that it’s politicians like him what cause unrest.  His own goddamn state favors a public option by some 68%.  What an asshole.

Let the asshat obstructionists filibuster if the Democrats can’t get their house in order enough to vote for cloture.  Force their hand and make them embarrass themselves and their party on C-Span.  Mr. Reid, you boxed.  You’re tough.  I know because you signed and inscribed your book for me at the respectful behest of my mother.  Bring in the cots, order pizza and throw Senate decorum out the goddamn window, at the same time throw tomatoes and rotten fruit.  Roll up your sleeves Harry, get a nurse for the elderly members.  Make the Republicans actually filibuster.  This is one one of the most important issues of our time.  Popcorn and porn for the junior members and Geritol, sponge baths and plasma for the senior ones.  Do I need to remind you that what happens here is not at your convenience but quite possibly at our abrupt financial inconvenience and physical well being?

I joke but I’m serious.  If it comes down to it and the Republicans aren’t forced onto the floor for days and weeks to read from their favorite children’s books, we will be justifiably far beyond angry.  Shame them.  Make them pay for attempting to prevent what every citizen of the richest country in history deserves.  For five fucking percent of our defense budget this would be a done deal.  Get this done.  How long did you want to be Senate majority leader anyway?  This is a cruel joke.  The debate is for and by the stupid.

If we can pay for these ridiculous wars we can pay for the health and welfare of our people and that’s right out of my mothers mouth.  The very first campaign I ever worked in was for you as Lt. Governor, I think I was seven and you were a “Goldust Twin” along with Dick Bryan.  You simply must do everything you can and give this everything you have, or I will campaign against you next year.

Let’s talk about the war.  You know, that one in Afghanistan where more of our men and women have been killed this year than any of the other seven?  The one Darth Cheney has the prunes to accuse Obama of “dithering” over.  The one he and Dumbya dithered over for seven years and ultimately bequeathed this mess of way too much technicolor that mother Cheney made for us?  Darth Cheney has my vote for most evil, most ineffective, most dishonest and most destructive President never elected in the 21st century.  The epoch is young but we should pray he prevails.

My money is on him and I can only hope it’s how history judges him and his little dog too.

I have to tell you I don’t envy our President.  He inherited a shitstorm of clusterfucks.  The electorate is flirting with disappointment.  The village folk grow restless.  The goddamn unscrupulous Republicans are pouncing on anything that moves even if it’s in the throes of death.  They’re stockpiling pitchforks and fagots (no, like torches).  I admit my own handful of discouragements.

We would do well to remember however, that a mess this size took eight long years to manufacture and the public was complicit for at least five or six.  Most of you have just woken up and are still rubbing the shit dust from your eyes.  We may not be all about a rose garden economically but the entire worldwide system is no longer staring into the mouth of the dragon and withering from it’s breath.  Jobs is what we need but jobs is always the last to appear.  It’s dicey yet, but we are closer to some modicum of meaningful healthcare reform than we have ever, ever been in an effort nearly a century old.  Troops are coming out of Iraq and he’s doing his damnedest to figure out Afghanistan.  There is legitimate effort in Gitmo and I’m not sure we’re done torturing or wiretapping but I know we’re up to far less of it these days.  He’s reaffirmed his promises to the the Gay, Lesbian and Transgender community and I believe he will follow through.

You can’t always govern with the President you’d want, you have to govern with the President you have.  I for one am still absolutely confident we picked the very best man.  There is not a doubt in my mind.

Drinks for my friends.

I’m a little weary of politics.  What say we do something a little different?

You have no choice you fucks.  Ha!

I saw a woman today I haven’t seen for more than twenty years.  I remember her as being somewhat meek and a little mild.  She worked for me back in the day.  In my food service management period.  I was a teenage fast food restaurant manager Werewolf.  Pre-law.  Pre-med.  Pre famous record producer.  Post cartoon character.  Her husband worked for me as well.  He was always a sneaky little shit.  Slow eyed and devious.  I never trusted him and suspected him of abusing her.  Saw him at Costco the other day.  I have the absolute luxury of not being recognized in my hometown.  Looked right at him while he pushed his cart with same sociopathic countenance he always wore when he assumed he was anonymous.   The gift of anonymity works both ways.  I haven’t lived here for nearly a quarter century.

Nobody knows who I am.

Thank Zeus.

The Sunday afternoon dining at Costco is pretty goddamn something.  I’m not sure exactly what, but there were samples at the end of each and every isle.  Soups, pastas, pizzas and sausages.  Weird dumb people everywhere but the vittles were all up in my periphery.  I left satiated and thoroughly entertained.  Mother bought giant portions of things she required like double A batteries and Marie Calendar chicken Pot Pies.  I purchased six months at least of hair conditioner, thirty pounds of cat litter and some decent wine.

I see people I know all the time but choose not to talk to them.

I’ve been here in Nevada for too long but not long enough.  My father fell from a ladder, broke six ribs and a shoulder and is recovering slow but steady.  I’m back to pursuing the business I came to pursue.  Had a very good day today. The finance manager of the Washoe Indian Tribe returned my call to say he’s very interested in giving me a crack at the credit card processing for all four of their retail smoke shops.

I feel as though I’m in a state of suspended animation.  Time seems to pass so quickly here without a lot happening.  Carson City Nevada just may be the strangest place in the universe for me.  Despite any amount of anything, it’s indescribably weird.  People tend to be friendly but ugly.  Nice but dentally challenged.  The ugliest woman I’ve ever seen in my life works at the closest convenience store that carries American Spirit Ultra Lights.  Festooned with moles, blemishes, boils and a rather manly crop of whiskers, she is the most physically repulsive woman I’ve ever seen.

Ever.  Poor woman.  Sheezus she’s ugly.

We’ve spoken.  She’s very nice.  But holy shit, she may as well be the Elephant Woman.

The youth in this town are nearly invisible.  I never see the 16 to 25 crowd.  I don’t get out much because I’m still somewhat fiscally challenged and in lockdown mode.  Keeping my head down and working the phones.

I’ve gone two months without a haircut and pot and I’m rapidly advancing towards an early eighties Jew fro.  I’m not particularly susceptible to vanity but a man does not want to look an unkempt fool.  Keeping my nose and ear hair in check.

I wanted to look her in the eye.  Brenda.   She had no idea who I was.

Same woman has been cutting my hair in LA for almost a quarter century.  From short to half way to my waist and back again.  We grew up together.  Her name is Suzanne and I adore her.  We are very good friends.  She understands my misshapen head and unruly kinky, copious and curly prodigiousness.

So now it’s Brenda.  She worked for me.  She has blossomed.  The truth is, I fooled around with just about all the girls who worked for me.  I think actually, every single one of them.  A few of them, I wrote their high school papers and they brought me breakfast.  That was the deal.  I ended up with more than breakfast.   I crashed a car with one of them.  End over end off the side of a cliff.  We shared way more than breakfast too.  I loved them all in one way or another.

I wanted to look her in the eye.  Brenda.

I drove by the 70 x 24 foot trailer on the corner of Viking and Nye that I grew up in.  In my early teens we built a 25 x 40 foot addition on to it with a garage.  Property lines and zoning codes dictated that I’d lose my bedroom window but I gained a built in bookcase and my own bathroom.  We put a solid mahogany custom pool table and a wet bar in the giant room that was built “hell for stout” according to my father.  He constructed a massive two level deck behind it and sunk a twelve seat, kidney shaped hot tub in the middle of the lower level.

I could play my drums all night without disturbing my parents or sister.

No cable television but life was good.

The lot itself was a quarter acre and we all worked hard maintaining it.  My parents hated the weed choked portion that belonged to the city so we tore down the fences and cultivated lawn up to the road.  My mother had beautiful roses and desert shrubs.  Multiple trees including a crab apple front and center with a rock garden at it’s base.  Elaborate sidewalks all poured by my father with our infant foot prints and a front deck carpeted in astroturf, with an awning and siding to match the trailer that ran almost the entire seventy foot front built by my father.  Two driveways, one off either street, one leading to the garage.

It was a beautiful blooming yard in the summer.  Flowers, roses and trees all celebrating.  Often a race car being wrenched on in the driveway without a garage.  Men drinking Olympia or Hamm’s beer, thick and muscular tanned arms waving arc welder torches and spark spraying grinders while the sun made rainbows in pools of water and petroleum collecting on the sun baked asphalt.  The women sitting on the front deck smoking long feminine cigarettes wearing beehives and hornrims , flipping through Avon catalogs sipping mixed drinks and moving in and out while tending to the inevitably late Sunday supper.  Us kids playing and running in sprinklers, away from bees, perfecting a makeshift slip and slide fashioned from construction site visqueen.  Craigmont grape, black cherry and cream Soda, barbecued potato chips and the constant sound of a sliding screen door smacking closed and sliding open.

Watermelons and cantaloupe…………tater tots and ketchup……….

Flies in the hot kitchen despite collective effort.  Corn on the cob and potato salad.  Jello concoctions and vinegary bean dishes with awful flavor and texture.  I will never comprehend “three bean salad”.  It is vomit.  I’ll bet it’s worse going down than coming up.  Who eats that shit?  Old people with atrophied taste buds and dumb hicks who can’t know better.

Seriously, fuck me.  I’d rather sip from a bedpan.  Nastiness.

Moving right along.

Steaks, hamburgers and hot dogs.  Fruit salads with throat blocking coconut shreds, Cool Whip and mandarin orange slices tasting of tin.  Delicious homemade cobblers, pies and ice cream.  Yes, homemade ice cream.  Huckleberry and lemon-vanilla  you bitches.

Alive and thriving.  A real neighborhood with real neighbors.  A community.  A village.  Safety and security.

Winter holidays were just as festive, somewhat more decorous and far more elaborately decorated.  At one time my mother had an entire outside structure devoted exclusively and extensively to storage of holiday decorations.  She was raised with ten brothers and sisters.  Birthdays were never a big deal but holidays, Christmas in particular, were huge, in her childhood and mine.  She made sure.

I think what I’m doing here, is writing a love letter to my mother.  Everyday for the past week, she’s been in the 38 foot home away from home, cleaning.  I’ve watched her clean every wheel, every window, apply wood wax to every wooden surface and take clean rags to every blind.  She’s dusted, mopped, vacuumed and wiped every surface accessible.  Her plan is to rent an industrial shampooer tomorrow for the carpets.  She is a house on fire.

She then comes in every single night and prepares a balanced meal for my father and I.

I help as much as I can.

She is a fart in a whirlwind.

She sets things for the meal in motion and then we sit outside and play with the the black canine tripod, throw her toys across the lawn, giver her treats, have a smoke and a drink or two and eagerly talk about nothing or things very important.  I find myself getting impatient for her to join me on the patio.  I’ve learned to make our drinks and just wait until she’s ready.

My mother always has something else to do.

I help with cleanup in the kitchen every night.  I wipe up and dry and put away and collect and wrap and stash.

Then I stun her with my prowess at Jeopardy.  We seriously discuss my appearing as a contestant.  “Goddamn you” she tells me because I’m good at it.  I’m really thinking I should look into it.

I wonder, wonder, wonder.  My mother is so bright and perceptive.  Such an active and adroit mind.  What does she think about while keeping herself so busy?  It can’t be the singular curse of an overactive mind because mine never stops and I’m a relatively lazy bastard.  She’s a thinker.  I know she is.  I know she’s churning.  I’m going to ask her about it.

So anyway, I found myself over on that side of town the other day, my spirits were buoyed a little by the beauty of the day.  A high desert Indian summer.  I’d been warned but wasn’t prepared for what I saw.  No lawn.  No growth.  No greenery.  Grey and black.  Decay and rot.  The slow and insidious violence of absolute neglect.  Like beauty and spirit and air had been sucked out.  Trees angry and twisted and dying.  Rotting crab apples littering where lushness used to be.  A sagging roof, curtains askew and windows like blank crazy eyes.  Like a horror movie.  I still dream there.  I hope what I saw does not go that far into my twilight.

It hurt my soul.  It took my breath.  I thought about me and my sister’s impressions in the sidewalk my father made.  I intend to save those.  I will get them.  I will knock on that door and pay the man whatever he wants to lose that part of his sidewalk.  I will do this before I leave this town.  All the magic is gone.  All that we did and built has been erased by apathy.  Everything is still intact in our hearts and minds and spirits.  What we did and who we are is still complete and golden and thriving.

Lonely is the night.

Drinks for my friends.

I have nothing to say.

I’ll come up with something.

I always do.

Mom says the old man had a very good day.  My services weren’t required and that’s a good thing as it allowed me to muck out the secondary master bath and bed suite I’ve been inhabiting for the last six weeks or so.  Cats are messy and so am I.  The fact that they don’t avail themselves of modern plumbing complicates any and all sanitary imperatives I might aspire to.

Did I mention I’m lazy?

I really liked Paul Newman.  Too bad he took the dirt nap.  Helluva an actor.

My mother tells me again she’s glad I’m here and tells me the time we spend together is a treat.  This makes me very happy.  I took the time to prepare her a very special hot dog today.  Mayonnaise, mustard and coarsely chopped white onions.  Ketchup, a sharp slice of cheddar, a quartered kosher dill and chunks of vine ripened tomato with an all white meat smoked turkey frank, a little lemon pepper and a secret ingredient.  Better cold than hot, trust me.  It’s all about texture with dogs.

Protein and produce on a bun.

She brought avocados so next up is my cold stew.

In as much as the path is obvious between now and then.  As clear as is the cartography, I’m still bewildered by how we’ve progressed and simultaneously regressed so consummately.  The vulgarity and naked ugliness of racism has reared it’s ugly head upon the election of a half black President.  Dichotomy and irony hold hands all while skipping to a mysterious and confusing Lou.

One step forward, two steps back.

What in hell are we up to?

I have no personal or particular reservation in declaring the seemingly idiopathic bowel obstruction to our otherwise facile and enviously intelligent new President’s legislative agenda, to be about not much else beside the color of his skin.  After all, I have never witnessed such virulent and obstinate complaint towards a pursuit of such humanitarian and compassionate endeavors ever.  I don’t believe any generation has in this country, witnessed such fuckery, since the Civil War.

The dissent is a cheap firecracker with a loud report.  It is bullshit.

We are a nation of reckless, feckless racist slobs.  To allow this sort of ignorant, irresponsible, irrational bullshit to poison what should be an informed and historically important conversation is a stain, a remarkable and embarrassing canker of our own device THAT WE HAVE CHOSEN TO COUNTENANCE in the face of logic and goddamn common sense, well, it compels me to hate Americans.  To loathe my fellow man.  To wonder just how fucking stupid we can be.  Where is the bottom?

Just how stupid are we?

We as a country and a society are on the verge of really fucking this up.  There are those of us too weak to stand and deliver and those so recalcitrant and so too ready to shit where they eat.  Between the two, we’re looking at gorgeous pizza upside down on the sidewalk.  What follows is anarchy from hell to breakfast.  Nine ways to Sunday.  A shitstorm of biblical proportions.  Whiskey dick chaos.  Cats and dogs fornicating and reproducing.  Such unions yielding dangerous and vicious progeny not unlike a Rick Baker rendering.

Forgive my skipping too much to my own Lou, but you feel me don’t ya?  This shit is getting refuckingdiculous.

I’m beginning to wonder if I shouldn’t just concentrate on selfish fun for a few years because it’s all going to end in some mad dash for food and sundries and weapons pretty quick.  The very same thinking would lead me to seek membership in a militia.

Future’s so bright, I gotta wear shades.

Upon monitoring our mainstream media, an independent alien of other than earthly origin would be justified in concluding that the most powerful of nations has lost it’s fucking mind.  One look at the Becktard or the Human Shitsmear and they plot a course for the next nearest solar system with the potential for algae or sponges and above ground agriculture.  Any reasonably intelligent expedition is probably only carousing the universe for a place to grow leafy greens and to bang loose humanoid bitches.  We are way to high maintenance for any discriminating extraterrestrials anyway.

The very idea of corn confuses them.  It’s tasty but nutritionless.  They just can’t wrap their advanced brains around it.  That we seek to make it a source of energy confounds them.  It does me too.  They liken it to contemporary politics in America.  It makes no sense to them on any level other than their understanding that with the right amount of butter and salt, we Americans find it palatable.

Think about that.  It really is analogous to the way we deal with politics.

This is why why they keep cruising the atmosphere in green or gray hotel room service enclosures instead of stopping in for a cocktail and engaging any of us on a Taco Bell level or making land at Burning Man.  Sometimes they probe us rather invasively, but they’re just trying to understand us and our seemingly corn based existence.  They understand for example that when we ingest corn, we eliminate it in an almost completely unaltered form.  Proof that no benefit is had from its consumption.

As good a reason as any to probe us.

Earth is a great place to visit but they don’t want to live here.

I don’t blame them.

I’m so sorry for the sandwich I’ve caused you.

Drinks for my friends.

I hear Tam stirred a little shit.  She called night before last to tell me I would be spending the night with Dad and I’d be wearing a mask because of my mosquito sized cold.  She announces it matter of fact.  This is what’s happening now.  Mom is spent she says.  Who am I to piss against the wind?

I’d had a minor but obstreperous summer cold so it was decided I shouldn’t sit with the old bastard at least until I ceased to leak the mucus.  The other morning I fell out of, yes fell out of, the shower.  I was standing on one foot scrubbing the other.  Pretty fucking slippery.  It’s a tiny shower.  For people under 200 lbs.

What new devilry is this?  Same kind my dreams are visiting on me I think.

I show up to the old place on Viking and Nye.  Dad’s got a German helmet on and no one else is paying attention.  Outside the weather is gorgeous. It darkens and everything that’s bloomed seems to flee before the wind hits.  Whites and pinks go first.  Children are screaming.  I smell maple syrup.  My fingers are sticky.

We’re at peace because the bright red shag really does work with the paneling in the master bedroom and the wallpaper in the bathroom.  All hells breaks lose.  Often it’s a hurricane, sometimes it’s an earthquake and about half the time the trailer ends up on it’s side.  Rogue waves.  The giant motor home plunges of a cliff into a violent ocean.

I try to call her back to see if she’s got a laptop I can use and eventually end up with my old man on the phone while he’s doing his best to push one out.  He sounds strong to me and I smile.  There’s no phone in the shitter, they handed it to him.  How cool is that?

I’m a private first class

Third behind my Mother, my Sister and the doctors.  I know, my math sucks already.  I see myself as third because I refuse to be last.  4th, 5th and 6th are available to my niece and nephews.  I don’t need to be the xo unless it’s cognac..  My youngest nephew Keaton,  might just be a Carson City analog of Sean Connery and Richard Gere.  This dates me, huh?  I suspect he’s smooth.  Across the board they’ve benefitted from their respective gene pools.  Big cool brains on them.  Their style is.  Priorities is.  No respect for the Mason Dixon Line whatever that means.  The Westergards are a credit to their race and I adore them.

I wonder if they think I’m cool.

Anyway, Dad still live and pushing.

Neither one of us knows what’s up between the women folk but he thinks Mom is on her way to me.  I’ve pretty much decided I’ll finish my drink, brush my teeth and head out once Mom shows because she is my CEO and I gotta be consistent.  My briefcase ready and my teeth washed, I sit sipping my Bombay.

She arrives home and parks where the driveway meets the road like she’s going to get the mail without even coming inside.

It’s still a small town, no more than sixty thousand or so but it is the Capitol and my sister has been well and beneficially involved in it’s downtown.  An old city, even for the West, so there is architecture and landmarks aplenty.  It’s both bucolic and sleazy.  The Sierra Nevada Mountain Range hosts the sun every evening this Fall and for every season ever. I can see just about all of town from my folk’s backyard.

This makes me think of Wednesday morning trash pick up so I haul it out to meet her.  No recycling today, it’s every other week.

She’s flustered and alludes to my sister being a pain in the ass.  I think I know about that.  I don’t ask but set to making her a gin and tonic.  My brother in law did the coolest thing the other night by showing up to the hospital with pre-mixed gin and tonics in a big jar.  Mom jokes she considered crawling into the closet with the jar.

Mom is rarely funny herself but has a good sense of humor.  She is my mother.  I adore her.  She rocks.

I help pack some food and include a small Tupperware with ice because she’s still got some of that pre-mix at the hospital.

I hung out with my dad yesterday, he was good.  He flipped me off a lot and told me I was a shitass.  My dad is very often very funny.

Mike Bacon called and wanted to hang and we did but first I went to see dad for the first time in three days.

They brought salmon, green beans and rice for dinner. We shared it.  So surreal.  I applied the supplied packets of lemon juice, salt, pepper, Mrs. Dash and tarter sauce according to the best of my culinary instincts.  He asked me which utensil I wanted.  I chose the soup spoon as I had eyes on his soup and he’d already confessed to giving up all soup to my mother for the last few days.

It was cool in that was what he expected.  He assumed he was sharing his meal with me.  We ate it together.  It’s not so unusual on any level but it touched me in a way I can’t really describe.  We also talked about how things freeze in your memory perfectly preserved.  And of course, we discussed the dipshit Republicans.

He told me it was best case scenario under the circumstances.  He really likes it there and he’s comfortable.  He told me it doesn’t fuckin’ beat home though.  He flirts with the nurses and has nicknames for all of them.  No matter who enters his room he flips them shit and simultaneously charms them.  They all stay and sometimes talk too long for my taste.  He tells me one is a lug or another talks too much or that his affection for another is sincere.  My father has his flaws but he one of the best judges of character I’ve ever seen.  To this day I would trust his instincts over my own.

Note to self, the head administrator is fucking creepy.

You know I like soup.  Even shitty hospital soup.  The concept of soup is both wholesome and genius.

The ice maker on the fridge just made a squeaky farting sound.  Kinda like souls squealing and kinda cartoon spooky.

I wonder if he was on his best behavior for me.

He always eats desert.  We had fun yesterday.  He was in good spirits.  Patty was there when I arrived and was reluctant to go.  This guy Patty is the coolest.  I think I’ve already told you.  My father and I don’t have much to talk about so I tell him the news of the world.

Two men were wiping at their eyes today.  One was Maury and the other was my father.  I just remembered this.  Morey Tresnit, brother of Joe, son of Bob, tells me he got my message and will fax Tuesday.  He tells me this as the sun is setting in front of his bar & grill, “Mo & Sluggo’s”.  I’m not really sure in either case why eyes were leaking.  I can only be sure there was pain.  A drunk told me I had great hair and hi-fived me.

Morey touches me on the shoulder when I tell him I’m there to meet Mike Bacon and asks me if I want a drink.

Mike tells me I’m in graduate school.  He means that’s where I am in life.  He thinks that’s how I should look at it.    He’s so painfully bright he dances around me and I hope I’m keeping up.  He points out things I did or said I don’t remember and it’s kinda hard to believe it came from me.  We’ve been friends since the fifth grade.  He shares all manner of things.  I think he tells me he’s gay because I didn’t ask and I’m almost sure he tells that truth one person at a time.

He dated Cecilia Martin right before pining for dudes.  This is huge to me.  You gotta understand Bacon and I just can’t help you there.  I can tell you things about him but they don’t define him.  Plus, Cecilia Martin was an absolute vixen by the sixth grade.

I believe she had braces.

He’s episcopalian and he says he goes to church.  We drank gin.  Bombay Sapphire only.  I think I bought two drinks.  Joe Tresnit, who lives with my friend Kelly’s dad, Reg bought a couple, Morey Tresnit who’s business I want, bought a couple and Bob Tresnit father with the one leg bought a couple.

We liked the gimlets the best.  Mike had to remind Joe how to prepare them.

A subtle but sublime pleasure to indulge in cocktails and conversation with this man I’d not seen in fifteen years at least.  Erudite, razor sharp and lightning fast wit.  He’s currently a candidate for Ph.D. in Victorian literature, his thesis to be centered around his own novel concept of “gentrifuge”.

I either spent twelve or eight dollars.  Maybe both.

Bacon took me to his athletic shoe of a rental car and gave me a small tin with Obama’s countenance on it’s sliding cover and a chunky little bit of green inside.  He also supplied me with a one hitter painted to look like a cigarette.  I’m no stranger to paraphernalia  but I never sold these.

I’ve just discovered an entire box of Twinkies.   What new devilry is this?

I can hear Beddy wailing a little in the bedroom and Billy The Tripod and I have enough of an understanding for her to sigh and act like she can’t hear it.  A very good dog.

I think a piece on the actual difference (s), between Democrats and Republicans might be in order.  Thanks for the reminder.  It will be challenging yet educational………maybe a little didactic.

Bacon said something pretty profound about re-branding the word ‘socialism’ into an “E. Pluribus Unum” kinda vibe, “Out of many one”.  They didn’t teach Latin here in the brush but I got it.  Pretty elegant and disarmingly simple.  I think it means nothing about leaders or demagogues but ideas.  I hope.  That’s what I got.  I think he was reminding me of consensus.  Maybe he was reminding me that we have one.  Could be genius and could be a fool.  Either one of us.

It’s this kind of confusion what makes pot great.

He spoke so calmly and sincerely.  He half asked if he was effeminate.  I shook my head.  What he is, is who he is.  He’s a sensitive and sincere man and a little hypervigilant.  In Carson City, Bacon is like a well dressed comedian from New York City.  Jewish maybe.  Carson folks have no idea but they like him.  He is as close to the ten to twelve year old that I knew, as a 44 year old could possibly be.  He looks you in the eye and with very little physical language, imparts crazy thoughtful observations and very perceptive conclusions.

He delivers wisdom and humor in the same voice because it is the same to him.  He’s advanced.

I am rich to have a man like Michael Bacon look forward to spending a minute with me.  He told me, me and his grandmother had made his day.  He is exceptional in many ways, but so foghorn, lighthouse bright it would be intimidating if not for the lack of ego and a completely unassuming honest look in his eyes and on his face.  I don’t doubt Master Bacon is what he his without exception.

Drinks for my friends.

I made a genius tuna salad.

I used albacore packed in water by Chicken of The Sea.  A little mayo, some honey dill mustard, bleu cheese (not Bob’s) dressing and some tartar sauce.  Lemon pepper, garlic powder, chopped white onion, dill, lemon juice, black pepper, but I resisted basil.  I felt the licoriceness of the herb would’ve upset the delicate whang and tang I’d so meticulously constructed.  I’m very pro basil.  Mother said it was a little runny but flavor solid.

A little fresh basil would’ve changed the calculus.  Fresh rosemary too.

I’m all about the herb.

I added more chopped white onions and another can of albacore and ran a handful of the mixture through my hair.  It informed mine own coiffure with bounce and volume. No chunkiness in my wig.  Nothing untoward.  Slick and glistening smoothness notwithstanding, I was pleased with it’s sandwich worthy texture and consistency.  Mother was ironing pants and otherwise puttering in a busy and random way.  My mother is blind shithouse loony when it comes household duties.  A fart in a whirlwind says my father. I was phoning clients while contemplating my culinary creation.  Relaxed and contemplative was I.

Wish I’d had a few green or black olives on hand, but they’ve just returned from the road and the larder is not stocked with the pre-holiday robustness to which I’ve grown accustomed.  Still, it’s an amazingly well appointed kitchen.  All flavors,  appliances gadgets and tools at hand.  I love fashioning anything edible in my mother’s kitchen.  I want for little if anything at all.

Olives and onions are flavor and texture, see. I used it for a sandwich on multi-grain bread and wished for some thinly sliced Swiss while she spooned it over fresh, vine ripened tomatoes from Pasco Washington for to take with her to the hospital.

Dad seems to being do much better.  Haven’t been able to pull a shift in a few days because of an obstreperous yet minor cold.  Feel shitty in the mornings, fine by dusk  but I’d like to look in his one good eye.  Really wanna see the bastard.  He’s doing much better by all accounts and there is far less reason to worry than the last hospital stay.  Tough old bastard.  More worried about mom.

Turns out because of my recent fall from financial grace, my concerned busybody and overly nosy aunt has decided, without evidence of any kind, that I must have a chronic and acute drug problem.  She’s convinced herself and a fingerful of her sisters that I could be bad news and they have nearly talked themselves into an uninvited and unwarranted visit to save my mother from me.  The aunt in question sent her son, my cousin, to check me out.  He’s the oldest of my fifty plus cousins and has seen plenty of trouble.  Thrown out of the Navy, convicted on what we all KNOW to be baseless child molestation charges involving his own daughter.  So yeah, prison. He was pissed about the mission but told me all about it and said once he looked in my eyes he knew I was good.  He called his mother, my aunt, and told her to back the hell off and leave us the fuck alone.

Michael is fine, he told her and so the rest of the retired overly concerned vultures, and offered to score me some pot.

I don’t mean to malign these women because they are each and everyone a love and really only concerned for their sister, my mother.  This is beyond the pale however.  Over the line and just plain irresponsible out of control cattiness fomented by one aunt in particular who would know who she is if she ever read this.  She won’t.  If she does, I love her, she loves me and I have nothing to hide.  She was wrong.

Way out of line and I am offended.  Deeply.

I could really use some green bud.  It’s been months.  Man, I could use but an eighth.  I don’t even have a goddamn pipe. He’s a handful and an asshole but he’s been fighting the good fight on my behalf for at least a week unbeknownst to me.  My parent’s raised him for most of his formative years.  He’s very loyal to them and therefore to me.  I believe him to be a flawed but good man.

It occurs to me I could say that about anyone including myself.

My sister doesn’t like him. She is often guilty of rushing to judgment, and she is a nuclear powered earth mover once she sets her sights.  It can be either or both, advantageous and/or deleterious depending on the situation.  I adore her.  She is a house afire.  Methinks she needs to settle down, take a breath and consider context more often. Who am I to piss against the wind?  I am the cautionary tale.

We fought on the phone last night and I hung up on her.  I hate that.  Hanging up on someone.  It’s a weak thing.   She tells me I’m a bad listener while refusing to hear me out.  A nuclear powered earth mover who wades into things convinced of her overview and the accuracy of her assessment.  It goes without saying that we both share a certain alpha dog proclivity.  It goes without saying that she chaps my ass in the most urgent and immediate of ways.

I find myself losing composure with her quicker than just about anyone else I know.

I love and respect her but she pisses me the fuck off despite always having the best of intentions, much like the aforementioned aunt.

Very much like the aforementioned aunt.

Tonight I sit here writing, her youngest son, my nephew, shows up with a plate for me.  It’s the other thing about mi hermana.  Her heart is the size of gigantic juicy melon that threatens to burst from her torso.  Wrapped elegantly in a soft cloth of sunflowers that secures a pale blue paper napkin, cookies, chips, applesauce and a sandwich on a gorgeous roll.  My sister cooks like an angel.  From a simple sandwich to an elaborate five course meal to a BBQ for a hundred and fifty guests along with ridiculous pies and pastries.  Anything of sustenance or comestibility benefits from the grace of my sister’s hand and her adept and instinctual culinary prowess.

I refer to her and think of her as “Pissy” and she really is the shit.  Any pun you imagine, I take responsibility for.

About five years ago, when my fiancee and I were busting, she called me at my office to ask about coming to LA for Thanksgiving.  I told her as much as I loved the idea, I couldn’t say yes because I’d just put my house on the market.  Two days prior to the holiday she called again and asked if she and her family “could come over”.  Hadn’t sold the house yet, so about five hundred miles later, her and husband and brood showed up with a fully prepared Thanksgiving feast except a brined turkey and pies that would require time inside of my oven.

It might just be my favorite Thanksgiving memory.  I got pretty hammered and slept late the next morning.  By the time I came downstairs, my house was spotless.  She’d even swabbed my entire refrigerator.  Coffee and breakfast of course.  I think of my sister’s face and my heart swells.  She is good smells, good vibes, happiness and unconditional love.        

A violent storm or a soft gentle rain with the smell of moistened flowers and grass.  An absolute force for good but perhaps too often willing to bulldoze subtlety and nuance. No one who knows my sister can possibly avoid loving her.  I know I do.  She is exceptional in so many ways. I know this to be true as I’ve been on it’s receiving ends.  Yes, both of them.  She has been my savior and a foil.  I want her to know, she is righteous, but not always completely right.  A stopped clock is on money twice a day.  Don’t wind your own clock, or it’s the best you and your clock can expect.

No thing or circumstance is even remotely as black or white as she sometimes perceives.  Grey is the day.  Most days are purple.  Neither blue or red. Gimme a break Sis, I know what I’m doing despite not being complete in your eyes .  Help me to do what I need to do as opposed to what you want me to be and do.  Stop fighting me and help me.  I’ll never be as antiseptic in your estimation as you would prefer.  I am me and you are you and we are all together.  I could just as easily battle what and who you are, but I think unlike you, I’ve long since learned that lesson.  Sometimes your righteousness is cloying.  I don’t doubt where your heart is but help a brother out.

I simply don’t want the same things for myself that you do.  We are very different.  Ketchup little tomato.

Come to think of it, if only I’d had some capers for that tuna salad……..

Drinks for my friends.

September 16:

Hard day.  He’s so strong but so fragile.  Never witnessed this kind of pain.  He can’t find a way to sit where it isn’t excruciating.  He struggles to suppress his cough because it tears at his insides.  He squirms and fights.  He writhes and stomps and cusses.  I finally end up demanding the nurse administer a morphine injection.  His eyes  wide and his mouth open without a sound. It spooks me.

He says he wishes he could pass out from the pain.

It’s just so surreal and crazy.  I don’t remember being this afraid for him.  I don’t remember being this afraid.  I’ve come to loathe hospitals.  It’s  horrible.  A beautiful hospital, expansive slate walled lobby, fountains and modern sculpture, abundant natural light and beautifully scaped desert grounds, yet I hate it.  I want to run away.

If only there were a bar or cocktail lounge.  A silent television, a bowl of snacks and some cleavage.

I don’t want to come back here tomorrow but I will.  On the way, I will pray for him to be better despite my agnosticism.

Mother is breaking down.  It’s too much.  I understand.  They have been married for fifty five years.  She was eighteen.  They are attached at the hip, the brain and the heart.  I do the best I can.  Hug her and hold her.  He will be ok, I tell her.  We both know he will come down another notch or two in terms of what he can and cannot do.  He has beaten his body hard against the rock of concrete as a profession for some four decades and now this.

He was never out of work and he never really missed work.  He piled into his beat up Datsun pick up every morning and was gone long before six a.m.  In four feet of snow or hundred degree heat.  Hangover being the lamest excuse not to show up so that never stopped him.  He came home and drank a cup of coffee, read the paper with one eye, hard hat still on while I pounded on my drums.  He stopped me only when mom pulled up.

His lifelong friend Pat Sanderson walks in and even through his pain, they trade insults the entire time.  Pat wouldn’t have known had my mother not run into his wife this afternoon in the parking lot.  Both named Jeanne, both of similar composure.

We had decided not to tell too many people yet.  Until he could, I don’t know, be more normal.

Mom was raised on a ranch/farm with ten siblings.  They ate what they raised or grew.  They were poor and are still remarkably close.  The love in my mother’s family is as rare as it is exceptional.  Her parents did something very, very right.  She began by typing marriage licenses in the county clerk’s office and ended up an administrative assistant to the Governor of Nevada and at one point, the Nevada State Legislature created a position for her in the economic development commission and appointed her to it.  Very powerful politicians are family friends.  Mayors, Governors, numerous state representatives and Senate majority leaders.

She’s a very smart and accomplished woman.

My sister and her husband carry on that tradition but far more focused on local.  Their hands in and on everything municipal.

He hasn’t pooped since it happened, so me and Patty joke about a suppository applied with a hammer.  A gay hairdresser named Larry to feed my dad and maybe help him with his reluctant bowels.

I love Pat, he once bit off a man’s index finger in a fight because the sonafabitch kept poking him with it.  This guy is the shit and he’s gonna show no matter what when he learns my Old Man is any kind of trouble.  Same as last time.  Understand my Dad was a hard working, hard fighting man and men like Pat were by his side the entire time.  Hard hats flying in bar fights, they’d drink beer from them afterward.

I’m often impressed by the men who hold my Father in the highest regard.  My cousin Derek came by too.  Rough hands and bandaged fingers.  I guess my sister told him.  Found out in the morning and stopped by after work, then headed to my parent’s house to empty the shit tanks and grey water from the RV my Old Man was working on when he fell.  He adores my Father and my Father adores him.  My cousin Derek is the shit.  Race car driver who wins just about every race.  Fiercely loyal.  We have little in common but we like each other a lot.  He shook my hand and hugged me hard.  He loves me because he loves my father and I have no problem with that.

I adore him and his wife, My cousin Marlo.  Her parents, uncle Tyke and aunt Bobby, rock.

I can’t stand it, I’m so frightened and weak.  I advocate for him.  I bully the nurses and doctors.  I rinse his piss jug and try to entertain him. We’re not at all that alike you know.  I’ve spent so much time with him in the last few years in hospitals when his condition is dire.

September 17:

Pat “Patty” Sanderson calls this morning offering to take a shift from one of us.  He understands that we do not leave the Old Man alone; one of us is there 24/7.  I certainly don’t need it, but my mother could use it.  I tell him I’ll have mom call.  When I ask her about it, she says no, too soon, family only.  You need to call him, I tell her.  My uncle Larry calls to say if we need him he’s there.  This phenomena of love and selflessness would be multiplied by a hundred but we’ve decided not to tell anybody yet.

I call before I leave for the hospital to see if I need to bring anything.  The answer is no and mom says it’s been a pretty rough morning.  Instantly I’m fearful.  In the shower I try to imagine what it would be like to not be able to clean myself and realize he’s probably used to it.  In the past few days I’ve fed him, held cups for him to drink out of and scratched him where he can’t reach, fought with nurses and doctors to get him what he needs or what I think he needs.

We’re very different my Father and I, but his vulnerability has allowed me to love him and appreciate him so much more than I otherwise would have.  That old testosterone impetus for conflict has disappeared.  The rivalry between Father and son, especially between two of such different minds, is gone.  I understand that I’m of a different mind because both he and my mother wanted almost desperately for my sister and I to be.  He’s always been so proud of me and my accomplishments.  His praise and pride, always  so unswerving and resolute.  Love runs very strong and deep in my family.  I am so very lucky.

Patty didn’t hear from my mom so he just showed up with his wife this afternoon.  Brings a card that sounds like a toilet flushing when opened.  If you don’t tell Patty no, he’ll do whatever the fuck he wants.

He and Dad share a hysterical story about locking some asshole supervisor in a porta-potty on a high rise job, hooking it to a crane and dropping it.  They tell me they dropped it five stories before slamming on the brakes, so the cable stretched and snapped back causing the shithouse to tumble in the air a few times.  The super emerged, speechless, shaken and covered in shit.  When he finally reappeared at the job site, looking to fire somebody, they were busy working on the cable brakes for the crane.  He never knew until some twenty years later that my Father and Patty had been behind it.  Patty invited the man and my Dad to breakfast one morning unbeknownst to either and spilled the beans.  Patty describes the breakfast taking place in a booth neither could escape from as he was on the end blocking the exit.

He tells me that whenever my Father had a problem with someone on his crew, he’d ask Patty if he’d heard the shit the guy was saying about him (Patty).  Patty would beat the hell out of him and the problem would be solved.

Often as a child, particularly before holidays, my Father had to “work late with Pat”, that’s what mom said.  She understood these two fuckers were likely out drinking, getting their asses beat or more probably beating some ass.

They talked about Freddie Crowley, Ozzy Ellis, Roy Deihl, Johnny Annas and Frank the crane operator.  All icons of my youth.  More than a handful of times, Dad would come home, his entire orange Datsun pickup, the ‘Pumpkin”, wrapped from stem to stern in knotted together rubber bands, courtesy of Frank.  I remember him as the rubber band man.  More than once he came home with a brand new hard hat crushed by the crane Frank operated.  No choice but to show up to the job the next morning with his beat to misshapen concrete encrusted hard hat from days gone by.  Frank seemed to be just fine with that one.  In retrospect, I’m confident Dad would show up with a shiny new one, like a ridiculous Hawaiian shirt, just to bait the bastard into destroying it.

I believe my Old Man was gratified and amused to bring home yet another brand new one flattened by Frank’s crane.

He ate a full pork chop today and his chocolate ice cream.  None of the squash or salad no matter how hard I tried.  He needs a good crap.  We watched Hardball with Chris Mathews and I read to him from the paper.  His humor is good and he flirts with the nurses.  He had a shower because he stank.  He is brave and big hearted.  We will get through this.  I love him.  He is still my fearless, pick a fight with the biggest guy in the bar, Father.

The Old Man is rising to this occasion.

Further reading: http://brainspank.org/wordpress/?p=637

Drinks for my friends.

Sorry but I did.

I would humbly refer you to last night’s blog:  http://brainspank.org/wordpress/?p=639                                                                                                                                                          You could always hit the back button and read it first.

What Max Baucus offered up to day at what admittedly is a moveable feast in the sense that it ain’t soup yet, was a shit sandwich or a turd taco or a fecal falafel or a serving of butt cobra carnitas, dookie dumplings, dung danishes, poop pirogis, bunghole bouillabaisse…………..sorry.  What happened was a most odious discharge from the boil infested ass of an obese insurance industry bureaucrat on a pickled cabbage, deviled egg, fiery chili and grilled onion slathered, spicy sausage diet.

It sucks and it blows with the ferocity of a furiously flatulent gale.  Tolja.

Had little fun there.  Hope it’s mutual.

Why so bad you ask?

The easy answer is congress, in the words of my father, is a scumbag.  He calls ’em like he sees ’em and he’s almost always right.

I cribbed and cobbled together the following from various sources including my memory, RJ Eskow’s piece on the Huffington Post, Olbermann, Maddow, Taibbi, my father et al.

You thought I was gonna read all 800 plus pages?  As my father would say, “in a pigs ass”.

a). Max Baucus is Judas.  He sold out the public option, despite being a vocal champion thereof less than a year ago.  He prostituted himself and our best interests to the insurance industry, just like I said he would.  I hold no bias nor do I harbor a moral or ethical imperative for prostitutes,  except maybe those who would knowingly infect their clients with painful burning crotch rot; that’s the kind of cheap hustler Baucus is and that is precisely what he’s done.

In it’s stead, Baucus proffers the idea of co-ops.  I’m not even going into it.  It’s bullshit.  A weak ineffectual and lame effort as substitute for a public option.  Dumb and intellectually dishonest.

Understand, without a vigorous public option, any health care reform legislation is worthless.  Bogus  Beyond single payer, the ultimate and most equitable solution, a public option, is the only realistic way to hold insurance company’s cloven hooves to the fire and make them bubble and blacken like a goddamn marshmallow.  We are smithereened without it.  No real reason to consider anything else.

I crap you negative.

b.) It allows the insurer to charge as much as five times more based on age alone, so much for affordability for everyone.  See, the idea is to spread and share risk so insurance is accessible for all of us regardless of income or age.  Level the playing field.  Apply some civil rights fairness to the process.

c.) If there’s going to be an individual mandate, the difference in premiums between potentially healthy and potentially sick has to be at least close to the same.  Insurance companies shouldn’t be allowed to discriminate.  It occurs to me that’s the implied spirit of health care reform.  They get more customers and a mechanism, by virtue of volume, to ameliorate profit and loss.  There is no methodology for the pooling of risk in this bill.  Nothing to foster responsibility and accountability on part of the behemoth bastards.

Again, the idea and spirit is to spread and share risk so insurance is accessible for all of us, regardless of  the relative waxing or waning of any individual patient.

Hey Max, it is profoundly irresponsible and egregiously stupid to mandate Americans buy in to a health care system without any realistic reforms.  Look at my thumb, sheezus you’re a stupid worthless fuckhead.

d.) Poor families, not impoverished ones, would be mandated to pay as much as 13% of their gross income for insurance or pay nearly half as much in penalty.  Either way, all monies would be mainlined into the veins of the insurance beast.  Fuck that.  Seriously, fuck that shit.  That’s enough to bankrupt many if not most families and the beast doesn’t stand to lose a goddamn thing.  If they don’t cover them they still get their money, one way or another.  What it does is spread mayonnaise or peanut butter on the dick of the beast and supply starving puppies and any activity that occurs beyond companionship is at the discretion of the two mutually consenting parties, you know, the emaciated puppies and the beast with the skin tone sequoia erection.

At the end of the day, what really chaps my ass, is how lacking the bill is in innovation, boldness and real quest for change that yes, we can believe in.  No controversy, nothing groundbreaking not even a single attempt to tip at even one windmill.  It bolsters the status quo.  It safeguards avarice by the big dogs and does less than little for the poor and middle class.  It is antithetical to the spirit of reform we so desperately need.

It’s crap.

Gamesmanship, brinksmanship and clownsmanship.

One step forward?  Not even.  Two steps back?  Obviously.

My father would say, “In a pig’s ass.”

Drinks for my friends.

For the past month or so I’ve been inhabiting my parent’s house in Carson City Nevada, by myself.  I’m here on business in the town I grew up in to hopefully take advantage of old contacts.  It’s not going too bad.  My folks are retired and travel as much as they can in a 38 foot motorhome more luxurious and better appointed than most apartments I’ve lived in.  It has a satellite dish for the all important NASCAR contests along with at least three televisions, it even has a washer and dryer.

Yesterday they arrived home after months away.  Mother has a kidney stone(s) to be dealt with via an ultrasound procedure.  I’m hoping it will be painless.  Otherwise they wouldn’t have returned until early December.

Not far from home they met heavy weather.  A sandstorm that compromised an awning on my father’s beloved rig.

My father is seventy seven years old.

We had a pleasant supper of tomato basil bisque and BLTs; we’ve been blessed simultaneously with an affluence of tomatoes of exceptional caliber.  My folks brought home bags of them and my sister dropped off gorgeous heirlooms along with peaches and handmade olive oil soap yesterday morning.  My family understands a good tomato.  A nice malbec followed by  a peppery shiraz.  Great conversation.  I adore my parents.  Bright, well informed, kind, compassionate, loving and remarkably open minded.  We caught up on all things family, my Mother’s nine siblings, politics and specifically the dumb fucking racist Republicans.

In case you wondered, I’m a product of progressive non-biased thinking.

My father mentioned casually how my mother would no longer allow him on a ladder.  My mother and I discussed how well he’s doing after a series of illnesses.  About two years ago he was hospitalized after a colonoscopy revealed a substantial tumor.  There were complications and by Christmas, things were more than dicey.  Before that he’d torn a rotator cuff after a night of getting shithoused with my cousin Derek at a NASCAR race in Phoenix.  Sometime after the surgery, he injured his back after falling from a ramp while helping to construct a porch for my cousin Dee Dee with my uncle Fred.

My old man is one tough sonafabitch.  No shit.  One eye lost in a barfight some 45 years ago.  A retired concrete foreman that coveted the idea of the bigger they are, the harder they fall.  He was fond of proving it to himself.  Left home at 12 years old after completing the sixth grade.  Honest, brave, fearless and a firm believer in hard work.  The kind of man that might not make cops obsolete, but certainly lawyers and courts wouldn’t be necessary if all men had his honesty, ethics and ideals.

I stayed up late writing a new A&M chapter, basking in the warmth of my parents return and writing another chapter for the book about my time in the music business.  Nostalgia fueled my muse and I went with it.  I was very happy to see my parents.

I was awakened this morning around eleven or so by mother.  She was asking me to move my car so she could get her car out.  There are two other vehicles so I rolled over to face her a little confused.  “Your father has fallen off a ladder and I need to get him to the hospital”.  I think I said “fuck me” out loud.  I rushed to pull on my pants and t-shirt and made my way to the driveway.  As I pulled my car out and away, I flashed on the blood I’d seen on my mother’s blouse.

I walked towards their hoopty Buick in the garage and there he sat in the backseat, head bowed, feet not in the car yet.  I touched him on the shoulder and said something like what the fuck happened?  He didn’t really raise his head as much as he raised his eyes.  He was in pain and a little confused.  His face was bleeding from where it had bounced off the cement.  “I fucked up”, he said.  I asked my mother if she had her phone and she didn’t.  I rushed to fetch it off the counter.

As they pull out of the garage I knuckle the window and give my old man a thumbs up.  He gives me one back and says take care of my puppy.  My mom echos it, take care of the puppy.  Billy Jean The Tripod Lab.  No worries I tell them.

I was left with my thoughts for hours.  His hips must be fine because he was ambulatory.  The head bleeds profusely, but their didn’t seem to be an inordinate amount of blood so hopefully that’s not a big deal.  His ribs I thought, he must have cracked some ribs.  That’s gonna hurt.  I understand that as well as I can without ever suffering it myself.  It goddamn hurts.

A few hours later mom returns.  X-Rays and a Cat Scan but no word yet.  We’re both hoping it’s just cracked ribs.  He’s in a lot of pain, they give him morphine.  She collects some pajamas and a robe and heads back.  I call my sister to tell her what’s happened.  No way I was gonna call her until I had some info.  She wants to head out immediately and I advise her to wait.  Let’s just see what the tests tell us.  Probably just cracked ribs I tell her hopefully.  He’s tough.  Hold tight.  He’ll be in a world of hurt but we know how tough he is.  She says she’ll shower, prepare a meal for us all and be ready for my call.

After five p.m. and no word from mom so I call.  She can’t get a signal at the hospital but calls me back minutes later.  Six broken, not cracked but broken ribs and a cracked shoulder.  No internal injuries and they’ve stitched up his head.  He has asthma and the doctors are worried about his blood oxygen as it’s excruciating for him to breathe deep. He’s on oxygen and they want to keep him for a few days.  She says she’ll be home once he’s comfortable, settled in a room and has a morphine drip.

I call my sister and in her inimitable style, she says a meal will be cooked and she’ll head to the hospital.  I tell her she doesn’t need to do either because mom is there and I’m an adult now.

Uncle Larry calls just to chat and I fill him in.  I love this man.  The orneriest bastard I’ve ever met.  Woke up with his socks in my mouth once.  Liked to blow his nose and put the tissue back in the box.  Decorated a Christmas tree with my mothers undergarments and left it in the front yard.   A former jockey, he liked to shock me as a three year old with his homemade version of a cattle prod.  Despite all that, he’s among the sweetest men to ever suck air.  I got him back but that’s a story for a different day.

He recently kicked the ass of unbeatable cancer through sheer force of will and an indomitable spirit.  We all thought he was a goner but the little bastard whipped it.  It was grim and he somehow handed the big C it’s ass.  He said to me, “goddamn I hate to hear that”.  As a onetime jockey, he understands very well the pain of broken ribs.  We told each other we loved and he said he’d be in touch.  I’m sure he will.  Probably everyday, even though my old man hates to talk on the phone.

Not long after that, the doorbell rings and it’s my brother in law Todd and my nephew Keaton with a basket of goods.  Two different kinds of ice cream, sliced peaches, cucumbers in vinegar & oil, bread and a hamburger helper casserole.  At the same time, sister Tammy has arrived at the hospital with a prepared meal for my father.

My mother is exhausted and tells my sister he’ll be fine, that she doesn’t need to stay.  My mom says to her, “You have to work in the morning”, my sister says, “Well, that’s why I’m here now”.  She then shouts down some nurses who want to remove some sheet from under my father they used to transfer him from the gurney to his bed.  They insist, she stands her ground.  He’s in pain and my sister is not having anymore.  Period.  There really is no use in fucking with my sister.

As I write this, she’s either snoring or watching my father intently in his hospital room.  She will spend the night in a chair and go straight to work as she did for weeks two years or so ago.  I arrived to give her a few much needed nights off.  My family does not fuck around.  My sister, well,  she is fierce and sincere with her love.  Intrude in the way of my sister’s love, loyalty or affection at your peril.  She will mow you down.

I am lucky.  I see a hospital room in my future with the man who made me goddamnit.

Drinks for my friends.

I hate reality television but I love a trainwreck. Donald Trump is a douchebag. He doesn’t even drink. I’m a little intrigued by Dice Clay, Rodman and Tom Green. I couldn’t possibly care any less about Joan Rivers or the other women.

Joan does look like a particularly bad movie vampire/transexual. A caricature inspired by less than elegant impressionism. I look at her and wish my penis was detachable. The bitch is scary ugly.

I hate it already. It’s insipid. I made it to the first commercial break. Thus far the only redeeming aspect of the entire egregiously contrived clusterfuck is that it will benefit various charities.

An adversarial demarcation is drawn between chicks and dudes. I’m confident it would have been more compelling to mix gender. I’ve made it to the second commercial break. The teams have been charged with the task of making and selling cupcakes. How inspired.

The drama ensues. It’s riveting. I wonder what I may be missing on another channel. I think about my toenails and how they’re getting a little long.

The tension and suspense is so thick I begin to wonder if the sushi joint across the street is still open. If not, the little Mexican place probably is. Can’t get a beer at the Mexican place though. Then I understand I’m not hungry.

I decide to smoke a bowl. I learn Dice is a blowhard and Rodman is a moron. Enlightenment.

I think about calling my mom but I just talked to her yesterday.

Chicks win, dudes lose. Dice gets fired. I will admit the end sucked me in a little. Now I feel dirty.

My mom and I are pretty close. I admire her. Both my parents have a work ethic I’ve rarely ever even glimpsed in another adult. Both in their seventies, open minded, generous and compassionate. It’s not like I grew up Brady but I consider myself pretty lucky. Good people, excellent parents full of love.

So I turned 44 a few weeks ago. Over Christmas when the prodigal son was home, the subject of my birthday did surface. My mother comes from a family of eleven siblings. My father from four but he left home when he was twelve. Birthdays were never a big deal in my family. Christmas, Thanksgiving and Easter were Mardi Gras by contrast.

Sometimes I wake up on my birthday and don’t realize what day it is until half way through. I usually get a card from my folks with a few passages underlined, a sincere handwritten note from my mother reaffirming my parent’s love and a check enough for a decent bottle of hooch. When I was a kid I got a good book or two, H. G. Wells or Jack London and a cake. My sister calls early and leaves a voice-mail singing an off key happy birthday.

Anyway, like I said, it came up over the holidays. I told my mother, in all seriousness, what I wanted for my birthday, was an autographed copy of Harry Reid’s book “The Good Fight”. My mother and Harry are old friends. She worked for him back in the day when he was an Assemblyman in the Nevada State Legislature. He went on to be Lieutenant Governor of Nevada under Governor Mike O’Callaghan. O’Callaghan’s daughter babysat my sister and I for a time. He, the Governor, actually had a wooden leg.

She smiled and said she’d see what she could do. I knew she had taken me seriously.

Harry’s was the very first political campaign I worked in when he ran for United States Senator of Nevada.

He lost to Paul Laxalt by barely six hundred votes.

Harry Reid is now the Senate Majority Leader. One of the most powerful men in Washington. Laxalt, a Reagan crony, took the dirt nap some time ago. Harry’s from a little town called Searchlight. He used to box. He’s a Mormon.

My mother has since retired from politics but she still dabbles. The Nevada State Legislature still has bi-annual sessions. Mom took a job this year at the front desk for the Assembly side. She loves it. She is seventy three years old, she knows these people and she is so happy to be involved. She works hard and is beyond dedicated.

She’s been the administrative assistant to the Governor and headed up the economic development commission. She took me to DC when I was a freshman in highschool while she worked on a Bureau of Land Management issue of particular concern to western states; the ‘Sagebrush Rebellion’.

I had access to Nevada’s legislature as a boy. I was allowed to sit in the gallery when the Senate and Assembly were in session. All manner of bills and legislation were available to me. I had run of the library.

I eventually worked as a bill clerk before I left home to study.

I can’t get over how tickled my mom was when she told me about it all.

Harry was scheduled to speak a week or two ago. My mother sent a brief note through proper channels saying that we’d always been supportive (not entirely true), that I’d worked for him when I was eight years old and that I’d asked for an autographed copy of his book for my birthday.

On the day he was to deliver his address, a Sargeant at Arms mentioned to my mom that someone had been by her office asking for her. My mother is a busy woman even if she’s not. It fascinates me that she never stops. When she does, she wraps a sheet around her forearm and pulls it over her head like a bat. Three to five hours later, she’s done.

A little while later an aide of Harry’s appeared to tell her that the Senator would like to see her. She was escorted into a private room and they talked about personal matters for fifteen or twenty minutes. Just the two of them. Uninterrupted. They caught up. No politics, somewhat to my dismay, but he already had a copy of his book with an inscription and an autograph for me.

He called for a photographer.

Later, as he entered the legislative chamber, shaking hands and exchanging pleasantries much like the President did last week, he bent and kissed my mother on the cheek on live television. When she told me the story she was just a schoolgirl.

Such is the magic of my mother. A sample of the blessing I enjoy from wonderful parents. To have played a part, to have been any kind of impetus at all in that day makes my heart sing.

Life is good.

Drinks for my friends.

Oil and pot. One syllable, three letters each. What’s the only difference? One’s legal and one’s not. People die, get kidnapped and beheaded at the behest of both. A simple product. A commodity. The bad people get rich either way. The terrorists are just as sexy.

Among the most dangerous and foolish of games.

The prison industrial complex. Mexican warlords. Where the money goes has not changed since Nixon. The only significant change has been the amount of money. Can you say exponential? The gleaming city is underwater. The levees have failed. The cash overflows. America’s Drug War is the second or third stupidest thing we’ve ever done. After slavery, Viet Nam and Iraq.

It may be the second or third most expensive.

Then there was The Pet Rock, The Osmonds and Spam as meat.

Lives lost and innocent imprisoned in numbers staggering and shameful. Pigs at the trough, persecuting, prosecuting and killing their own while they horde the filthy lucre. You want terrorism? It’s on your southern border and it’s blowing the fuck up. Terror not mutually exclusive with the North American continent anymore.

It’s state sponsored, by your state, by the US of A. As we speak, it spills over. Civilians slaughtered. Juarez, Tijuana, El Paso and San Diego. Every American city bends and groans under the weight of our archaic policies and a draconian incarceration non-solution.

Enforce, enforce, enforce.

We learned in the thirties that prohibition is wrongheaded and the furthest thing from efficacious mankind could possibly muster. Stupid then, stupid now. It gave rise to a brand of crime we came to call ‘organized’. I wonder why we called it that. Seems kinda non-nefarious. A non sequitur. What it is today, is bad news. Organized crime like this, is American made. Homegrown like Jazz and The Blues. Just like a gorgeous and unique art form, we are worldwide with the violence and the ignorance.

I worry about my parents. They winter in Yuma. They have the world’s best insurance but they still cross the border to save money on a few things.

This is where we are. This is what we’ve allowed to happen. It’s sick. The War On Drugs and The War On Healthcare. The conversation with my mother will be about their safety on the border, because of The War On Drugs and The War On Healthcare. Because they could be killed on a lazy Sunday.

This is bullshit. We need to shut this nonsense down. We reap what we have sown. Did you know Reagan dealt drugs? He also dealt arms to folks we’d all decided as a country we couldn’t do business with because they were brown and kinda socialist. Or was it the other way around? I forget.

Even in my world the clouds part.

Then there’s Our Man’s choice for Drug Czar (head of the ONDCP), Seattle Police Chief Gil Kerlikowske. I don’t know much about this guy yet but he looks to be pretty progressive. Alternet calls him “a relatively enlightened cop.” Seattle is goddamn liberal. They’ve lowered marijuana as an enforcement priority and have needle exchange.

Maybe there’s potential.

United States Attorney General Eric Holder has confirmed he will not be pursuing DEA raids on medical marijuana clinics. A policy shift that’s precisely 180 degrees out from the previous administration. It’s a waste of time and money and it foments distrust and fear. Smart move. Makes me smile.

Pretty big deal the aggregate of these issues alone. The departure they represent, despite them not being secondary or even tertiary to the electorate these days, it’s awesome. Forgive me but it is. It reveals a compassion and pragmatism people won’t recognize because it’s been so long since they’ve seen it.

Trust me, this is big.

My sincere hope is that it’s harbinger of things to come.

It he tells us he’s closing Gitmo, ending torture and the war in Iraq. Gonna wind down the defense budget a little, spend lots on infrastructure, healthcare and education. He seems to understand this is a long term deal. This is not your father’s President. His short game looks good too. Aggressive and decisive. Perhaps we should do something to revive the patient as opposed to speculating ad nauseum over what will be it’s demise.

If we could just stop spending money to kill people or be able to kill them better in the future. Not forever. Maybe for a few years. You know, a three year moratorium would just about get us out of this mess. It could work pretty well in the short term.

End the drug war, stop killing folks. Stop putting them in jail. Let the masses self medicate and get off your asses and allow America to cultivate hemp. Oil, nutrition and textiles in a crop requiring no pesticides that can be turned around every twelve to sixteen weeks. It’s illegal because it scared the shit out of Hearst (paper) and Rockefeller (oil) back in the thirties.

Good green bud has Pfizer horrified and vomiting.

Life is not a game and we’re not necessarily here to compete all the time. But when people succumb, when they become overly cynical and bitter. They have lost. They are losers on the human stage. They may succeed in some ways, but when they lose in important ways, nobody gives a damn.

Drinks for my friends.

She was an ugly woman. Homely. A tremendous lantern jaw with a prominent cleft in a hemispherical swell at the tip of her chin. Any attempts to restrain the growth of the spindly but wiry black stalks and the requisite follicles of her upper lip and below her ears, was futile.

Discolored craters in her cheeks partially filled by a face paste not nearly up to the job. She was more than uncomely.

Her legs, given the task of supporting her all but shapeless largesse, appeared impossible. Unlikely to support her bulk for an entire day’s activities. Like the stems on a giant piano that would no doubt fail to afford any ambulatory activity. Her ankles gave me specific pause. They appeared to be seconds from snapping despite being stationary.

She wore copious perfume, acrid and never adequate in masking the natural funk of her secretions. No matter the garish garment she wore, her back and under arms seeped stains and were an obvious source of her elaborate pungence.

She spoke loud, with shrieking enthusiasm. She shouted “gotdamn” because she was God fearing. Normal to her in her head. A menthol fueled guttural cough and a viscous chuckle.

Her teeth were grey, gapped and stained by cheap lipstick, coffee and cigarrettes.

She sold Avon. She was from Oklahoma. Her husband’s name was Melvin. He looked like a Melvin. He possessed a grotesque tongue. It was always on display when licking his thumbs to count money or shuffle and deal cards. An organ that escaped his maw to reveal scarring and sickly violet color. He eventually elevated himself to City Supervisor. An elected post. They lived in a trailer about a mile away off a dirt road.

She was an awful cook. Her yams were stringy and her turkey was always dry. Lumpy mashed potatos and gravy without flavor.

She was the sweetest woman you could possibly imagine. Her name was Arlene. They were hicks. Oakies. But very good people. She loved me because she loved my parents. Always very good to me. She had love in her heart.

Two daughters and a son. Mike, Barbara and Mary Jo.

I remember Mike losing part of his heel to a motorcycle. He later spent a stretch in jail. Mary Jo took it upon herself to become popular. She was a cheerleader. Possible in my hick town despite one’s lineage.

Barbara often babysat me along with her mother. Barb was smart and saw something in me I think. She read to me in Spanish and from the bible for the beauty of the language.

I always recieved Christmas presents from them but for a few years there were presents from the family and an exclusive present from Barb. Arlene was generous with Avon products intended for young men. Barb bought me board games and things she imagined would stimulate or encourage me.

I learned on my last trip home for Christmas that Barb had passed. She had abundant red hair and wisdom and humor beyond anyone in her clan. Welcome to haunt me. To be a ghost in my slumber should she choose. I always felt like we never finished.

Sometimes life is a well maintained pinball machine. Other times it’s a ball peen hammer on the glass. There’s always blood.

Drinks for my friends.

I used to try to get out of the house before I got too fucked up. Now I get as hammered as possible before I leave. It’s crazy. The strategy of poverty.

I’m contemplating the 7-11.

Always employ the interior of the wrapper as a resting place for your processed food in between bites as opposed to it’s exterior, a fuming petri dish of virulent germs. Never use condiments from the condiment bar at the 7-11 for the same reason. Me, I can’t help it. Don’t do what I do, do what I say.

I’m not shy about grabbing a fistful of napkins.

You know what? That iced coffee from McDonalds isn’t too bad as long as you get it unsweetened. I got Starbuck’s gift cards for Christmas.

When I was a little boy, four or five, I ran away to the local Safeway. I figured they had everything I needed. My parents were more than willing to help. I didn’t feel as though my needs were being met at home. I wanted more freedom. They dropped me off after hours. I couldn’t get in. Already there was a flaw in my plan. Thankfully, they took me back.

I really don’t understand overly spicy food. I like for the wasabi to cause my nose to run or break me a little sweat but I can do that by peeling an orange or standing outside too long. I like a little Tapatio in my noodles. Any thing beyond that confuses me at best. Pain in the interim. Then there’s the aftershock of the assfire morning constitutional.

Forgive me. I just really like to pick at this guy. He’s perfect.

How’s that for a segue?

More Dewitt:
“I deleted your idiotic comment from my blog. If you would like to re-post something a bit more respectful and less retarded have at it, but stop blog-dicking. Put it in line like everybody else.”

Admin:
“I like that I may have gotten under your skin a little. My purpose is to shine a light on your bottomless ignorance and fear, so either block me or I’ll be coming at you on the first page when I have something to say. Coward.

Come to my blog, I won’t censor you.”

Dewitt:
“Grow up. Third grade was a long tima ago, and you’re still a school yard punk. I have no desire to read anything you have to say. If you post obscenities on my blog they will be deleted.”

Admin:
“I’m no punk. I’m well informed, educated, have the courage of my convictions and most importantly, an open mind. Your’s closed a long time ago.

I thank the powers that be my parents aren’t anything like you.

You consistently object to my “obscenities”, yet never exhibit any inclination to engage me on any issue I take exception to in the crap you spew.

That’s cowardice.

Of course you have no interest in reading anything I have to say. It all flies in the face of your fear driven beliefs.

The truth is, you are are archaic and obsolete. You no longer matter. The world is changing without you. You are being left behind.

Honestly, it makes me sad.”

Moving right along.

Sheezus this Burris thing is odd.

In my mind the Democrats look like pussies. They knew who they were dealing with. Blagojevich. This guy is an arm’s dealer fucking peacock who’s got ice in his veins and a hairstyle that leeches intelligent thought to sustain itself. Have you looked at his eyes? Like binoculars in reverse, you can see what’s behind him only way smaller.

Shave the little bastard’s head and he’ll drop. Kinda like Sampson.

Still, the fucking Democrats couldn’t man up enough to smite this boy down in time to prevent him from swinging his own sword with precision.

He appointed a Jr. Senator for his state as he was not only privileged but required to do. What did they think this guy was gonna do?

Today they turned Roland Burris away. Shameful. I’ll be the first to admit this guy Burris is a little more than a little loose, but this was embarrassing nonsense. The newly sworn in Senate fucked this up. They should never have allowed it to get this far. Yes, Burris is a joke, but he’s an accomplished joke. The new Democratic leadership cheesed this one. Stepped on their dicks. Good job Mr. and Mrs. Reid-Pelosi.

The other side should be ashamed as well. You dickheads tried to turn this into some sort of racial imperative. I count on these assholes to do the wrong thing and they just keep doing it. Race. Sometimes it’s like mammals against reptiles. The big lizards are gone and the rest are small and stupid. Fuck you guys. How stupid is that? How fucking irresponsible? It makes me furious.

The body politic still disappoints, misleads and makes a hot mess of things. Yet it’s not even close to a push. Let’s just see what we can do. Really. Stay in the game.

Drinks for my friends.

What’s the rumpus?

So yeah, the Xmas vacation.  Pretty cool actually.  I brought the best bottles from my dwindling stash. Leonetti and Pejut.  Pedestrian tongues drank Two Buck Chuck or beer and they were happy.  I’m only selfish with my grapes to the extent of anyone’s ability to appreciate them.  Know and understand what you’re drinking and you can have all you want. I will only share my wine with them gullets that can appreciate it. I’m a dick like that.

Some still call me The Cock.  

I was asked to say grace at Christmas. Heh. I took it upon myself to thank the powers of the universe for family, friends and health, as well as the wisdom of the American people in their overwhelming support for Barack Obama as President Elect of The United States of America.  The caveat intended for my beloved uncle Tyke, an unapologetic Republican. 

At least they laughed. I’m sure they saw it coming.    

Dinner was excellent.  Culinary rockstardom visited upon us by my sister bearing an extraordinary mixed green salad with pomegranate seeds and an absurd pumpkin soup.  Dear cousin Marlow played an excellent solo with her fresh green beans, almonds and ham melody.  Otherwise, an excellent medley of turkey, mashed a’ tatas, gravy and various appetizers. Oh, and cauliflower in cheese sauce.

It was all I could do to not rub it in my hair.

Then there was the bloody roast beast with horseradish. Had to look away.

Among the pies were chocolate, pumpkin and a perfect pear and cranberry with crust to die for from my mother. She tells me she nails grandma’s crust better than any of her sisters. I don’t doubt it. I wonder if they know that.

Extraordinary people looking a little Norman Rockwell, yet moving at the speed of real life. Sharp, funny, pointed, loving and respectful. No matter where the day took me, no matter the people I was with, there was not just a glue of shared experience, but the bond of loyalty and acceptance. Dialog, debate and discussion almost all optimistic. Hopeful.

The first white Christmas in Northern Nevada in twenty years.  

Christmas eve, a study in silliness and inebriation.  I always have a party, but my father’s illness and the weather over the Sierras have conspired against it for the last two years.  I ended it at the house of my cousin’s Marlow and Derrick on the eve.  No worries.  I found myself in bed with cousin Derrick as well as Uncle Tyke.    

Decidedly outta hand.  Gorgeous.  Good to love and be loved. To be tolerated even. 

Visited the Madame. She was classy gorgeous.  

My sister the city planner, has changed the entire face of downtown Carson City in a handful of months and she’s managed to put an ice rink right on top of the town anthole. The rink thrives.

I’m here to talk about Uncle Tyke. Roland Emil. Sometimes I worry his eyes may be too far apart but he’s a crafty bastard and I can’t help but adore him. An excellent man despite being a shameless Republican. Uncle Tyke’s wife is aunt Bobby and she’s the shit as well. A devout Catholic who still manages to be completely honest and very funny. I adore them.

She was my smoking buddy but she quit. Replaced by daughter Marlow.

So, they begat Marlow and she chose Derrick. They all four rock. Marlow has gorgeous completely, an enormous heart, sweetness and honesty. Her husband Derrick slays me. I think he gave me the benefit of the doubt because of my father. I’ll take that. The respect he has for my Old Man, they for my people, makes my heart swell. I try to do my best towards them all.

This is a subject. These folks are real.

Derrick says, Hey you fat bastard, first time he lays eyes on me. Inside is the beautiful house he built with my father, his father and father-in-law-uncle Tyke. Inside, my little shit cousin Marlow puts out a delicious Christmas Eve spread. The salt in my ocean. No shit.

I ate with my hands. That just occurred to me. Hope I wasn’t offensive. Everyone else was doing paper plates. I’m sure I was loud and drunk but I’m just as sure I wasn’t the only one.

My feet stink like broccoli. Like babyshit. Lysol.

He drives a race car and can build just about anything this side of a nuclear reactor. Derrick. They tell me he’s pretty good. I don’t doubt it. He’s both fearless and egoless. I couldn’t take him down without a bat or a shovel. If I didn’t like him so much, I’d crack him with either.

My brother in law Todd worked up some powerful anticipation over three dollar roast beef sandwiches and dollar beers at The Carson Station. He did do the most remarkble thing by arranging to have Don Carlson meet us for drinks and then he and my sister held him there while I enjoyed pork chops with my folks. The overwhelming priviledge. Awesome. Marvelous. Thank you both.

My sister, who can best be described as a house afire, has taken it upon herself to broker my birthday present in the form of the brainspank logo on cousin Derrick’s race car. I understand the near matter vs. anti matter dynamic here. But to have my logo on a my cousin’s fucking race car. My sister, I still call her Pissy, is a genius.

Trust me when I tell you that she’s changing downtown Carson City at a rate that is making the old guys look really bad. She’s really starting to floor me. I’ll have to get published or this sibling rivalry thing might be over. I’ve been coasting on a gold record for a decade. It went triple platinum but that horse is dead.

She’s wicked, my sister. It’s not that she’s exceptional. It really is that she’s almost always exceptional. Goddamn Tam. Enough is enough. I’m here to warn you that your brother is comfortable as second superhero in charge. I’m reminding you that you may never enjoy the respite of second most accomplished sibling ever again.

I may choose to rest on my laurels.

You, as most accomplished sibling, have the burden of higher expectations. More Superhero stuff. I intend to get by with a few flourishes and self sufficiency.

I cannot believe the amount of food in my parent’s refrigerator and pantry. One can choose between a handful of different kinds of cereal, soup, crackers, chips, nuts, vegetables, fruit, sauce, spices, grains, pastas, vinegars, oils, syrups, mixes, dressings………….

The pantry is a huge closet with a divided glass door. Somehow it’s light is the most comforting in the house.

Three appliances. My guess is the one in the garage is long term parking.

I checked out Tam’s larder. Very impressive as well.

I spent more than a few evening’s end with the Tripod named Billy Jean. A sweet black Lab who lost a front leg while training with my house afire sister for a marathon. She assured me she would stay happy and spread it as best she could to all involved. She included a special promise for my Mom and Dad.

I made her swear.

I get home to discover my handsome refrigerator ceases and desists. The upside of being broke is that there wasn’t a damn thing in the freezer or the fridge. The downside will be a repair bill. It’s rough all over.

I hear that despite all logic, the universe continues to expand.

Drinks for my friends.

of all I know.

Spent the afternoon drinking with my best friend. A fine Saturday. I don’t know where my girlfriend is. Toto’s Hydra is an amazing record but the bottom sucks. I hear the mastering engineer on the new Metallica asked not to be credited.

The guy he hired to replace me, a man we all thought was a ringer, ended up nearly burying the business. A liar and a thief. Watch for me in dark alleys you prick. Terry.

You really can’t trust anybody. Well, I trust my Mother and Father, Sister, My Friend and my Girlfriend. Certain other people I’ve known for decades. Cats.

“you can’t trust anyone, trust me I have” -Agnes Gooch

All women have what I think of as a pooch. Unless they’re bodybuilders or prepubescent gymnasts. It’s the lower abdomen. Below the button. I spent time with a gorgeous woman who named her pooch “Gracie”. I adored her for that, among other things.

He’s a whackjob, my old boss and best goddamn friend. Within the last week or so he’s had to deal with his ex-wife crashing into the front of his house and turning other women away as a result. Someday he’ll let me write his book.

Crazy as a shithouse rat and one of the finest people I know. Showed me his guns, been working out with El Muerte. Ha!

So anyway, it’s been cold here in LA. It’s always weird when the sun is that low and still fat in the sky. Making heat in winter.

Not long ago I sought to impugn the character of my ex fiance’s new man by labeling him a giant vagina. I apologize for that. I’ve never met him. I imagine he’s a man of character and integrity because my ex is whip smart and has remarkable amounts of honesty and integrity. She has high standards.

Sorry about that.

I’ve been thinking a lot about canned peas lately. Nothing better than butter, salt, a little pepper, peas and the taste of the can. They should set it up so you can nuke it just like that. The way soup is these days. Peas or beans in a nukable container. Hot Pineapple anyone?

What else did I want to say.

The cats are golden. They make me happy because they can. Otherwise they’re horrible beasts that crap and pee everywhere. I put up with them because they are soft, furry and hysterically funny.

Here’s the the thing. They wear hats. Sombreros, porkpies and stupid red cowboy hats. Everyday I leave the house, only to return to a fashion show. It confuses me so I can’t really talk about it. Put yourself in my shoes. Walk in the door. Spotlight on a disco ball. The dignity of your felines compromised by the cheap and tawdry costumes.

A nightmare of pageantry.

It really is a bit much.

Nobody knows the trouble………….

Drinks for my friends.

Bear with me. Take your time. I had a lot to say.

Little explosions of pork fat in a heavy iron skillet. The fire is hot and I’m not sure, so I pull it off. Good move. The bacon just overdone but still sweaty and fatty. No aroma like that of fresh thick bacon. Most folks like it cooked this way. I use tongs to put it on a plate.

Motes bob and dance in rays of sun, a subject of birdsong, butterflies and dragonflies.

Man has almost complete authority over his own clock. Animals, from rodents to whales, have the sun.

I drop a fistfull of white raisins. Some diced yellow onions and a little butter into the cast iron.

Next up is to smack some eggs in the fat and put the skillet back on the crackling morning combustion. Beneath a canopy of primeval. This part’s easy. They cook like that, the eggs. Smacking and spattering. Hope ya like yours yellow loose. Quick and hot. Soft in the middle with brown bubbles at the edges. They’re done. Sea salt? Tapatio?

Someone else is doing coffee. I smell it. Raw like tilled earth. Berries.

Potatos cook the longest, garlic and rosemary. Moist in the center, otherwise crispy and taut. Steaming. Glistening with butter and oil. Fresh ground pepper. With potatos, I don’t play games I can’t win. The best way I’ve found.

Everyone stares up and around. Nobody looks at their food while they shovel it at their mouths. The savour does not compete with the vista, it compliments it, the ambiance of a deciduous forest in the chill of a late summer morning.

Have some champagne.

Next up, pine trees and a good classic novel. Some Fitzgerald or maybe Jack London. Twain. Capote. Then a nice clean spot to evacuate oneself and soap and water and towels after and what not.

I bring my own ointments and salves.

Maybe an afternoon walk.

I never would have made it as some pioneer or frontiersman. Maybe if I was some version of royalty. Afforded a certain amount of privilege and staff.

I just want to live in San Francisco.

Gin and chocolate.

I believe in mankind’s right to self medicate.

There is simply no reason in a country as wealthy as ours that people should go hungry, without health care or as much education as anyone can tolerate. I can’t stand it.

I’m gonna go out on a limb here and proclaim that a little socialism might not be bad for us. Not just to give the folks who fall through the cracks a leg up, but to headbutt the absurdly wealthy who have enjoyed political, social and economic advantage by virtue of obscene largess for so long, the phenomena has manifested a momentum of it’s own now centuries old.

It may also serve to highlight the perverted version of Capitalism and Democracy we have chosen to embrace. We are in a place where our adherence to and practice of “free market capitalism”, as is the contemporary model, isn’t merely foolish, it is reckless, dangerous and unconscionable.

Fear and spying, rendering and detaining, holding people indefinitely without charging them………what does that look like to you? An economy hit by a wave any fool saw coming, so strong as to temporarily capsize us despite our size, displacement and power? More waves on the way.

Rotting infrastructure and an attitude of every man for himself on twenty million lips at least.

Hated so much a journalist throws shoes at Dumbya’s melon inside the Green Zone? More on that later.

We are stupid and greedy. Not necessarily in that order.

Fuck anything that moves.

Make these prick CEO’s live in a motel for a season. Three months. Twenty bucks a day per diem. Introduce them to the miracle of cheap chunky peanut butter and applesauce on the same spoon.

Ssshhhhhhhhh!!!

I covet and admire the idea of self determination. So far, the concept and my practice thereof has allowed me to reap almost exactly what I’ve sewn. Can’t ask for more than than that. What I’d like to see is that degree of parity afforded to not just every American regardless of race, color or creed, but every human.

We could render organized religion obsolete by achieving just that. Wouldn’t that be nice? I think so.

Replace an archaic institution that withholds (religion), with a concept, maybe a mandate, far more inclusive and progressive that holds as a fundamental ideal, prosperity of the earth and it’s inhabitants simultaneously. I’m a goddamn genius. Give me a can of beer and a Nobel, bitches.

Anyway.

I honestly believe that the defining moment of Dumbya’s reign occured on this very day, December Fourteen, the year of our Lord, 2008. I’m sure you’ve seen the footage by now. To his credit, our President did skillfully dodge two well launched shoes from not very far away. We learn that this is some major insult in that part of the world. To throw your shoes.

An Egyptian reporter with a pretty good arm fired said shoes at Dumbya’s head and screamed:
“This is a farewell … you dog!” “You killed the Iraqis!” -CNN

Ha! That’s goddamn golden. Forgive me, but if he’d taken one right in the fucking face? I would have called paramedics before screeching sobbing laughter could consume me. Go ahead, picture it. Me laughing ’til I puke or him taking one right in the kisser. Sheezus. That would have been gorgeous.

Picture it.

In any case, it was just so perfect. Vicariously cathartic. This really should be the swan song for the dumbest man to ever be President of America. We should remember him forever as the guy ducking shoes thrown hard by a journalist at a press conference in the “Green Zone”, the safest place in Iraq.

Bush Sr. had, “Read my lips…..”, Clinton had “I did not have sexual relations with that woman……”, Nixon had “I am not a crook”. Dumbya, among all the other ridiculous shit he’s said and done will nonetheless be remembered for his physical adroitness in ducking angry shoe leather in contrast to his profound lack of any kind of mental acuity in any shape or form.

He still doesn’t get that he’s an idiot.

Meet your legacy you stupid sonofabitch. Beet the Meatles.

I just want him to know what a complete loser he is. It’s not just angst. Hundreds of thousands died because no one in this man’s life had sense enough to teach him banjo and take him to the river everyday. They took him to school instead. Millions of Americans made the same mistake and now we’ll pay for it.

I went to hand her the remote. She said put it next to me dear, I’m scratching my butt right now. I looked and she was. So I did.

The Holidays. Weird. Didn’t have the Christmas I was used to last year. The old man was sick. Very. Spent my time at the hospital or sleeping because I’m a pussy and that’s what I do when I’m afraid. He’s so good now I want to punch him in the mouth.

To know my old man is to understand that he’s the shit. He’s only afraid of one thing. It has nothing to do with him. If you’re smart you’ll guess it.

My brother in law, Todd, a man I’ve known of since we were boys, lost his Mother just a few months before. Her name was Dixie and I really liked her. She was a writer. I see her face.

Here it is again. The Holidays. I’m expecting something different this year. It will be somewhere between now and then. Holidays are always a little step back in time. We may all have a similiar lense for this one. I hope so. I’m looking for the love and warmth of family unmitigated by illness and sadness. He is well now. I think it will be big and special.

My ass is broke so the only gift I have is my etchings.

Not being able to buy Christmas presents used to scare the crap out of me. It nightmared me. I was a fairly prodigious giver. I’ll bring really good wine.

Life is good.

Here’s the thing. A well worn theme for me, forgive me if I bore you. The difference between humans and animals is not the ability to reason. It’s not love or compassion. If you’ve ever been lucky enough to share your life with an animal you loved, you feel me. The difference isn’t even a sense of humor. Every cat I’ve ever shared a house with has been funny as fuck and tragic all at once.

The difference is art. Animals don’t make art for the sake of art. Humans do.

I sit telling you this, one of my cats is high up in a ficus tree I’ve had for twenty years that has been dead for at least a year. My other cat sits next to me on a dilapidated red velvet sofa staring at her. If only they could talk and I could understand them.

Happy Holidays.

Drinks for my friends.

I’ve seen a spring.
I have.

We used to hike through the simmering sand and sagebrush to the closest mountain. Not far really, inside of a few miles. Other side of the airstrip. Hot and bright. Snakes in mind. Not much for a northern Nevada mountain. Maybe a thousand feet. Maybe.

Enough to pucker my starfish at ten years old.

The west face was closest, that was the side we climbed. A rockslide almost all the way up. Mostly volcanic I think. Pretty treacherous. The top was high enough to be cold with wind enough to make your jeans flap. It furnished an amazing view. Enough to put a choke in your neck when thinking about the same way down.

Scared the crap out of me.

The base of the mountain ended in a shallow canyon between it and a much smaller hill. Just behind the mouth of the canyon was a spring.

I clocked it’s greenery on the way up and wondered.

Very happy to be there after the way down.

Water pushing desert sand along with itself from a dark, half dollar sized hole at the bottom of a small pristine pool. This pool feeding a larger one under trees with cattails, reeds and grass growing lush. There were rabbits and birds and snakes.

Yellows, greens and blues with much sun and sky.

I had an epiphany that day. Frogs. The climb was the scariest thing I’d ever done. There was a gust of relief. Synapses lit up and dancing as I grasped the little oasis in a single swipe.

What I suddenly understood floored me.

We spent a little time. Maybe forty five minutes. Grateful to be there. I soaked it up. Moss, bees and dragonflies. Sunflowers and bubbling.

Was I a little late? I don’t know. Life’s complexity and requisite for balance began to reveal itself. An improbable ecosystem in an unlikely enviroment. Yet it thrived and sang. It vibrated and I knew why. I could see how and why it worked. It made sense to me. Scared me a little.

Pow.

I emptied a quart of sand from each shoe that day. That night I stared at the sky. I never stopped dreaming about that place one way or another. It allows me to contemplate the universe.

It frightens me now. It informs my nightmares. I’m sure it’s a scarier place today. Polluted.

The first time I remember my gaze landing on the big picture. The powerful gift of cognizance despite the self.

See what I’m saying?

Drinks for my friends.

“We don’t smoke marijuana in Muskogee;
We don’t take our trips on LSD
We don’t burn our draft cards down on Main Street;
We like livin’ right, and bein’ free.” -Merle Motherfuckin Haggard

We would ride our bikes to school. Fifth and sixth grade. All the way across town.

The schoolbus was far more convenient, yet riding a bike to anywhere wasn’t far when I was thirteen. Time was a factor. It was fascinating. From east of town. From sand, weeds and sagebrush to old oaks, cottonwoods and pines of the west side. Six or seven miles apart. Always a headwind blowing from the west. Always. Everyday. Every goddamn day.

Like it blew to keep us away.

Gliding through office and government building parking lots I would later work in or have cause to enter. Jumping curbs and sending shopping carts careening down loading bays.

Eventually, we stopped going to school on the days we rode our bikes. We just explored. I learned the beginning of everything back then. Time no longer a factor. I began to spectate. I understood it was important to observe. Watch and learn.

Nothing too serious. A few days a month. Sometimes we took a cab. We earned money by visiting his mother at the grocery store. She gave us cold currency for the coupons we clipped. Completely illegal but she took it right out of the register. She was every bit as confused as we were. Not at all a good mother.

We’d walk away with twenty or thirty bucks a piece. Mad cash for a twelve year old in the 70’s.

I remember smoking pot for the first time with him and his mom. We watched Carrie and the first Rocky movie on cable. All of twelve years old and we were doing bong hits with his mom while mother and son passed a Benson & Hedges menthol back and forth. She was the first woman to cause me to notice misdemeanor eyebrow tweezing abuse.

Not a bad woman, just not equipped to deal with two teenagers on her own.

There was an older sister with huge boobs named Tammy. The third girl to live on our block by that name, my sister being the first. In the middle was a girl belonging to Tim and Mary but overseen by Fred and Mary. I actually kissed her once while she was in hypoglycemic fugue. The third, not the middle. We stole a bottle of Ten High whiskey out of a truck at the end of the block and she drank most of it. We all made out with her.

Then there was the stepfather, Bill. A large unpredictable man with a baby face and a history of being institutionalized. It was a four bedroom trailer and he had his own room. It was always locked. Cool Budweiser poster on the door.

I was smart enough to be wary of the man. I avoided him. I understand now he was bipolar. Effusive and friendly one moment, red faced and raging the next. He wasn’t always around. Sometimes he was in the “hospital”.

It being a trailer with weak internal doors, my friend and I soon figured out how to access Bill’s room. What we found was fascinating.

Guns and ammo. Lots of guns and lots of different kinds of bullets. Everything shining. Neat as a pin. Beer posters and porno mags. It was his paradise. He smoked a pipe and there was evidence everywhere. Cleaners and scrapers and multi-tool instruments that looked like nail clippers. All the attendant paraphernalia……

There was a twin bed and somehow his pillowcase was the same as mine. It was the exact same Star Wars pillowcase as on my bed.

I lifted bullets and powder from that room for my own experiments. I think he even had blasting caps. Drove a lime green faux wood panelled station wagon. It was the the impetus of my pyromaniacal season. It ended up being a long season. I wanted my own fort in the desert filled with porno mags and guns.

I ended up blowing a lot of shit up.

To this day he is one of the most dangerous and unbalanced men I’ve ever met. But a giant vagina nevertheless. I always knew that if things went south to black, I could call my old man at the other end of the same street. Realistically, there was six to eight inches between the two and probably sixty to eighty pounds.

Dad would have shown up in his workboots and his concrete caked hard hat, he never took it off until he showered before dinner. He would have kicked the big whiteboy’s ass or scared the living shit out of him. The next morning, well before the sun, he would have read the paper while smoking a cigarette on the toilet in our only bathroom. lit the furnace, and gone to work pouring concrete on some highrise in the dead of winter in the high desert.

I think it’s pretty obvious why I hung out there. The most interesting lives on my block.

We’d steal chewing tobacco and donuts from the blind man stands in the government buildings. A few times we found kitchens in office buildings and helped ourselves. I can only guess there were no security cameras in those days. I remember being fascinated and somewhat in awe of the amenities provided to office workers. Cool.

Somehow we avoided real trouble. I think because we became excellent thieves. We were shitty liars so we did our best to not end up having to lie. It was only when we had to lie that we got caught. We stole all the mail on our block once. I think we both ended up talking to Carson City’s finest on that one.

Somewhere in this time I had a bully. His name was Ron Dalton and I’m still confused as to how or why I let him push me around for as long as I did. Skinny little prick with a sour face straight out of a Beavis and Butthead episode.

I stood up to him one day and that was it. He was a giant vagina. It was that easy. I burned way more angst over it than I should have. I was a giant vagina too. I should have just beat his ass. Years later, his older brother pulled a knife on me and a friend we called Thos B. Right there in CC in the House of Ormsby.

Somehow it was a walk in the park to shut him down. He was at least as dumb as his brother. I actually got him out in the parking lot and got it away from him. We didn’t struggle, he gave it to me. Ask Thos B.

Anyway.

My friends place was filled with cheap paneling, avacado colored appliances, gold shag carpeting, bad linoleum, macrame, orange plastic ashtrays and knitted stuff.

Plenty of juice in the fridge and granola bars in the pantry. Far less supervision than my house.

If you lived in a Double Wide in that era, there were two huge windows at the front of your trailer facing the street. The windows were bisected by an architectural artifice intended to conceal where the two halves were joined. These windows were always so big as to bathe the forward most chambers with as much ambient light as could be.

When I was twelve, I put my hand through one of those windows and lost a chunk of flesh from my right wrist and muscle from my thumb. It all took place at my good friend’s trailer. He called the ambulance but sent them to my house. Told me he was looking to get in as little trouble as possible. This, despite the front of his trailer sporting the random graffiti of my sprayed blood.

We wrapped a roll of paper towels around my wrist and hand and pointed our bikes towards my place.

The ambulance ride was something.

There’s a lot more I want to tell you. Ketchup packets are an enviromental disaster but it’s the best ketchup there is. I’m now forty three. These events were thirty years ago. I imagine there’s plaque in my arteries and my teeth are gonna start falling out eventually.

I have no children and that’s ok because I never really grew up.

I entertained the notion but it’s just not for me.

I twisted and cheated but mostly in my younger years. I spent some formative years way off the map. I am flawed. I have regrets but I don’t lose sleep. I never really fucked anybody. Not nearly as hard as I’ve been, for what it’s worth.

I bought a house once. It was beautiful. Me and my fiancee lived in it for over two years. It makes me sad to think about it. The Bean died there. We painted and landscaped to make it our own. I still smart when I think of that cat and that life. I think her death was pregnant with things I could no longer avoid.

The whole thing certainly seems to have marked the end and the beginning of many things.

It’s always ending and beginning.

What to do with melancholy on any given day.

Sometimes I wish I could start over. I’ll bet that’s not uncommon.

Did I tell you about the five cars waiting for us at the county line and being issued foam slippers and an orange jump suit? Making the front page of my hometown paper?

Um, there’s plenty more. Lots more. Yep.

Life’s been good to me so far.

Drinks for my friends.

Tired of this shit.

Joe the fucking plumber.

That they foist such a clueless asshole on us thinking he will somehow convince the great unwashed, by virtue of being an ignorant member thereof, is maybe more of an insult to them and us than the selection of Moosewoman for VP.

Sheezus.

Joe The Plumber.

Seriously, in the past few days, this dipshit has hired a publicist, begun to negotiate both a book and a country record deal and announced he’s considering a run for Congress. That this man, who’s name is not Joe, no plans to buy a business he claims falsely is worth a quarter million annually and he’s not even a goddamn plumber, could somehow matter to the electorate disgusts me.

He’s an idiot. I would love to debate this guy.

My father would tell you this guy doesn’t know his ass from a hole in the ground.

The Republicans have a sweaty fist full of candy and that’s it.

Kids in a candy store without adult supervision.

Today, the would be Clown Princess, took a pathetic swing at Our Man with the revelation that Obama is allied with some guy named Rashid Khalidi.

Fuck off. They just don’t get this.

Khalidi said Wednesday, “I am not speaking to the media at this time, and certainly not until this idiot wind passes.” -CNN

Asked why the McCain campaign was bringing the matter up six months after the article appeared, an aide replied, “Because we are one week away from potentially electing Barack Obama.” -CNN

Such obfuscation is certainly not in the spirit of change.

“I don’t know what’s next. By the end of the week, he’ll be accusing me of being a secret communist because I shared my toys in kindergarten. I shared my peanut butter and jelly sandwich,” Obama said. -CNN

It’s bullshit. I cover my eyes and hope to find the time and place for a nap. Or a bowl of pasta. Raisin Bran Total. Grits with lotsa butter and pepper.

This brings us to Our Man’s “infomercial”. Audacious? Maybe, maybe not. Let me just observe though, that it was golden. Not about him so much as the message was about us. For the umpteenth time I was reminded of the power and subtlety in this man’s possession . Adroit intelligence, a nimble mind and an obvious compassion that extends to all of us. Not just Americans. It was actually pretty cool.

McFuckstain shows up on Larry King still pissing and moaning about how much money Obama has, where he got it and that he wouldn’t participate in Doubtfire’s favored architecture of town hall meetings. Dude, he kicked your pasty ass is in fundraising. Get over it. See, the Republicans hate this because they’re more than used to being the party with overwhelming amounts of money. They haven’t lost the battle for filthy lucre in decades and that is the impetus for their pathetic.

Goddamn they’re sore losers.

You suck! Shut the fuck up!

It is the calmness, the composure and the confidence exuded by Our Man, his surrogates and even his wife that I find so impressive. This guy is smart and he knows it. He owns that he’s twice as smart as the opposition and he doesn’t gloat. He just keeps coming.

They lie, distort and twist. He smiles, tells the truth and takes another step forward. He doesn’t blink. He’s fearless. He knows exactly what he’s doing. They throw a bowl of spaghetti at the wall as an experiment to see what sticks. A small amount of noodles and sauce ends up on his suit. He brushes it off, wipes his hands with a napkin and keeps coming.

He casually sips lemonade from an icy glass, wipes his lips with the back of his hand and takes a seat behind the desk in an office called Oval.

Drinks for my friends.

Know what? This shit is making me crazy. The mainstream media has just devoted an entire day to whether Our Man was sexist when he utilized an expression that I’ve even heard from my own Father’s mouth. My Father wasn’t talking about women, he was talking about Republicans.

They want you to believe they’ve never heard the expression before?

McCain has used it and so has Clinton.

I don’t care what he meant when he said it. It was either innocent or excellent swordsmanship. If he meant it, he wasn’t being sexist, he was calling her a dipshit.

Fifteen Minutes is all she has. Perhaps more of an empty suit than Dumbya. Been nowhere done nothing, disingenuous hockey mom from Wasilla Alaska. Had to look up the spelling.

This is fucking ridiculous. It won’t last, but please.

When Doubtfire first announced her, I was confused. Dumbfounded. I gathered my thoughts and faculties and arrived at the judgement that it was the most cynical and profoundly ridiculous move in contemporary politics I’d ever seen.

I was right. It is. I admit I’m mouth breathing over the interest, sensation and spectacle surrounding the entire debacle, but I’m here to tell you, it won’t last. She brings nothing. She has nothing. It may look like a brilliant move this week, within two weeks, it will be over save for the shouting.

I’m hoping sooner.

Our Man played his bishop on the chessboard with Biden. McCain took a pawn out of his pocket, painted with sparkly nail polish and placed it on the board with a reluctant palsy. He realized it was plastic and it’s weight confused his geriatric hand. He briefly forgot what he was doing when he noticed the rest of the pieces were made of marble. He took a drink of his diet soda and struggled to remember.

Despite it all, the great unwashed did a standing O and then executed a near flawless wave. Tens of them.

As I write this, a private jet lands on some tarmac in Alaska accompanied by the theme music from Top Gun. Top Gun? Sheezus. Seriously, it’s live on CNN.

By the way, She’ll be relying on a teleprompter to address her home crowd. So far, they’re not willing to let her work without a full body condom. What does that tell you?

Empty boilerplate rhetoric, POW regurgitation and talk of a tough “maverick” delivered in a breathless rush from a cheerleader running for student body vice president with the crutch of a teleprompter. Fuck me.

A heartbeat from the Presidency. You have got to be fucking kidding me. Seriously America, work with me here. It’s about the top of the ticket until the top of one of the tickets could die at any moment and his chosen successor sucks donkey dick.

Did I say that or think it?

Enough!

Drinks for my friends.

Doubtfire can’t help it.

Yesterday he stopped at a clinic in Bakersfied to have something removed.

Bakersfied?

To have something removed.

No worries.

“Bakerfield is a scumbag” -my Father

The media is all over his attack ads. CNN plays the one with Paris Hilton. Gasp. It’s all true. He’s the biggest celebrity in the world. He’s against offshore drilling and he’s gonna raise taxes.

All true.

The way I understand it, the world loves Our Man because he represents hope for a less unilaterally aggressive America and perhaps a more cooperative one. A smarter one. Less reckless. The world is weary of our retarded bull in it’s shop of very valuable things.

He opposes offshore drilling because it’s best hope is to be a band aid on a sucking chest wound sometime in the next decade. It’s an exruciatingly stupid way to treat a symptom. It does absolutely nothing for the problem and by the time it pays off, we better have a whole helluva lot more going on.

To wit and for purposes of reiteration, it’s really fucking stupid and pointless. Like finding change in the dryer eight years from now.

We may already be fucked from hell to breakfast. Nine ways to Sunday.

And yes, he will raise taxes. We are punk ass broke. At this point, if America sought to buy a house, she couldn’t qualify for a trailer. Maybe a tent from Costco. Listen carefully now, his stated intention is not to raise YOUR taxes. He’s going to take the tax cuts to the rich away. He says his intention is to shift the burden from the middle class. He says this because he understands that a robust middle class is key to a healthy economy, infrastructure, social equity and national security.

I’m not gonna stand here and guarantee his rhetoric, but let’s be honest, McCain doesn’t have dick. He’s foisting ads with Paris Hilton in them? The man is sweating profusely. You can’t see the actual moisture accumulating because it’s concentrated in the gluteal region.

In the audio trade we called it “buttsweat”.

He’s got nothing and he knows it.

Outmatched. Outclassed. Outsmarted.

At what point does a man as proud and accomplished as McCain step off? Walk away?

He can’t, of course.

The Republicans would implode entirely. Poor bastard. One of the last columns in a crumbling party. A party that asked for it. A party that bought and paid for it. Fools.

What I see is a man who understands he’s beaten. His opponent, clearly better than is he. He knows it. He’s lost the fair fight, unspoken rule being fists and feet only. Now he’s behind the dumpster reaching for a pipe to swing.

Sad.

I’d like to commend Stephen Colbert for acquitting himself with grace and talent, singing with CSN tonight while handling the high harmony of a four part, traditionally sung by Neil Young on the song “Teach Your Children “.

Way cool.

Drinks for my friends.

Adrenaline and panic get him off me.

She’s a pile in the corner.

Small and bent. Folded.

This is not happening.

I shake my head hard.

Everything comes up the same.

In dreams you can’t ever scream or run or fight back.

Not today. I’m fucking nuclear.

Thermo.

Some ridiculous laugh volcanos from my neck. I have no fear.

None.

I fly off my back. I wail, kick and rage. I beat, muscle, force the fight, with fists, knees and elbows, into the bathroom. Lights on because he’s been playing with the fucking toilet paper.

The wet sound of flesh beating flesh. Sickening. Smacks and gasps.

A cloying steam of violence. Like fresh paint.

I swing and swing and scream and swing.

Against the wall. His neck a bundle of cables in my left hand. My right fist an anvil. I beat his face with it again and again. I swing my sledge, his mouth sprays fresh blood across the wall and the medicine cabinet. Again and again.

A tooth dances and rattles across the faux marble vanity.

His blood is humid. It thickens the air. He stinks like wild mammal.

Jacked up incisors lacerate my knuckles but I can’t stop swinging at them. I fucking loathe this fucking thing. I’m going to kill him with my hands. I’m bashing them in.

I will kill him.

I pound and pound.

He turns his hamburger face back after every blow to mock me.

On his knees by my toilet. More blood than I’ve ever seen from a man not dead.

He takes the beating and keeps smiling. He keeps smiling. He laughs like some mildly amused retard. Picture a Down syndrome kid with a Rubik’s cube.

My shoulder burns. I start to kick him.

The eyes spill too, joining the river beneath his nose and mouth.

He smiles as he pushes blood through his remaining teeth with his tongue. Wringing a sponge. It runs from his chin to his shirt, down over his crotch to splatter on the tile.

He has yet to fight back at all. I go cold.

His eyes find mine. Blue pupils suspended in blood. He’s locked, frozen. Staring straight through me.

He laughs like emphysema. A death rattle with mucus and mirth. I’m caving his head into raw meat while he sings a soliloquy minus any fear at all.

His eyes stay empty.

A demon version of the Rope-a-dope. I could beat his head off his neck and he would infect me with viruses that madden and fibers will squirm from sores on my arms and torso like thin white worms. No doubt the pain will be excruciating.

Biding his time while I cave his head in. Not bothered in the least. A lazy chuckle.

I picture the knife and spin to find it.

He’s not long for this mortal coil either. We’re tied. My end is his. His will be mine. I’m about to end it. He doesn’t know this. Somehow I do.

Cold War Policy. Mutually assured destruction. Quid pro quo.

He’s on me in a heartbeat. Before I feel it, he’s bitten a chunk from the back of my neck. It burns. Sickening pain. My stomach rolls hard. I feel air on the crater he’s made in my back. Maybe the weirdest physical sensation I’ve ever had. My own blood starts to flow down my body front and back.

He sucks at the the wad in his mouth and spits it on the floor. It lands with a slowmotion smack a foot in front of me.

I can’t believe it’s my flesh when I see the size of it.

He pounds the back of my head so hard, I go blind after every blow. He’s going to kill me.

Outmatched. I wanted to beat him and die last.

No chance here. High noon bitches. The difference between high school and the NBA. I’m about to die.

I throw my last elbow and manage to knock him off my back. Blind panic. I’m thinking the green dagger. I swim on my belly to my suitcase. Knees and elbows bang tile behind me.

It’s open.

I can’t believe the amount of blood on my hands.

He chuckles low through mucus and viscera. My hand finds the box. Somehow I have it by the hilt.

My calf in the grip of a reptile. I roll with the twist but my ankle snaps like balsa. On my back with the knife in my left hand.

My leg shoots fire. I can’t get up.

He hovers, bleeding on me. To own what I’ve done to his face…… His jaw dangles, my flesh hangs from it. How he took that chunk……..

Left eye dark, impossibly dislocated cheekbone from a countenance shredded and bloody. I flash on any gore I’ve ever seen. Fish guts on a plank to a deer without skin hanging from a rafter outside my bedroom.

All face angles are wrong. What I see competes with everything I know. What I’ve done to his face supplies me confusion and madness.

This amount of violence I’ve committed gives me pause.

It ends up being just enough.

To distract me.

He’s on me swinging so hard and fast I can’t see. He takes the knife from my hand. He plunges into me over and over.

I can hear it.

The sensation and abrupt pinch, blooming into a chrysanthemum of dizzying pain while still being stabbed and I can no longer breath.

There is no God. Yet I pay for my sins.

A dozen or so wounds and the blade shatters. The green inside burning me so that grey smoke clouds agains the ceiling.

A stink of hot grease and flesh.

I was very young, the backseat of a Mercury Cyclone with my family, headed to Reno. A Camaro with a paint job of red and grey primer, rocked past us on the the four lane blacktop. Faster than I could process, the Camaro crossed the double yellow and cars began to fly as high as the power lines along the left side of the highway.

My mother inhaled in confusion and horror.

My father didn’t hesitate. Tires smoked to a stop in the gravel and he’s running across the blacktop to stuff his shirt in the back of some dead man’s head. Somehow we had blankets and he was back in a hurry for those. My mother began a relay of helping her husband to help the smashed bodies and checking on us, telling us not to look.

Eighteen or nineteen dead or at least that many vehicles involved. It was the most horrifying thing I’d ever seen. People in impossible positions all over the road. Bodies opened with that much violence and velocity, spill awful amounts of red. Every glimpse out the backseat window, the gore made me panic a little.

A man wearing a suit visited our house a few months later on a Sunday. He had a handful of money in an envelope for my father. He was there because he believed my father, a stranger, had saved his life. Dad didn’t hesitate, he thanked him and pointed out that he, the stranger, just might be in the same situation some day.

In his mind, he’d done the right thing and it was long since finished. He was not happy to see this man despite the man’s gratitude. He had done the best he could. He wasn’t interested in revisiting it.

I lose for failing to do the right thing. For choosing the wrong thing, one way or another, over and over and over again.

My sins. My recklessness. My fault. My mistakes. I pay.

I’m a bird hitting a window.

I flop and blood runs from my mouth. I’m helpless. I spasm and convulse.

My organs fail one by one.

Breathing stops. I’m bleeding out.

Panic surges like vomit.

My eyes are fixed. I can no longer blink. They begin to dry, my view clouds.

I am dying.

I often dream of catastrophe. Airliners plunging from the sky and exploding. Giant waves destroying civilization. Mushroom clouds and troops backlit by the sunrise of a detonation running along some ridge.

Seconds from death, I piss and shit myself.

I fucking hate that I’ve shit myself again.

My thoughts cease and I am dead.

Various sources.

America closes in on one million foreclosures.

Indymac is the third largest carp in our country’s history to reveal it’s pale belly in the polluted waters of American finance.

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac in trouble and needing a federal bailout they will get. Two companies responsible for over half the mortgage debt in this country. Five trillion dollars.

Lists of vulnerable banks contain as many a hundred and fifty. Google the Texas ratio. At what point does the FDIC become FEMA?

Two million refugees from Darfur and and four hundred thousand slaughtered. Twenty first century genocide. A half a billion in aid a year from the US as opposed to to ten billion a month we spend in Iraq. Bin Laden used to live there so we favor their government with a blind eye because they occasionally share what kind of underwear he wears, his favorite Starburst flavor and pictures of his enormous horse package.

Over four thousand dead and thirty thousand horrifically wounded Americans by Iraq. Some estimates put Iraqi dead at over a million with some four million refugees. Meanwhile, we’ve blown the entire place apart.

National debt approaches ten trillion dollars. We had an actual surplus eight years ago.

A trade deficit approaching four hundred billion a year.

Nearly fifty million uninsured.

The Earth’s filthy nectar, which literally fuels everything we do, is imported by more than seventy percent. The price of that dirty ambrosia has risen nearly four hundred percent in the last seven years.

In America, the rich continue to get richer and the poor continue to plunge.

There’s a seventy five percent chance the icecap at at the earth’s north pole will be gone within the next three years.

Twelve percent of the electorate still believes Our Man Obama is a Muslim. Over seventy percent who voted for Dumbya in ’04 still believed Saddam Hussein was responsible for the events of 9/11.

“Most people are dumber than dirt.” -My Father

“The best country in the history of the world, and we’re going to fuck it up.” – My Mother

The stock market has been on a well oiled slide for a while now. One of it’s nipples went turgid last week because oil dropped three days in a row. First time in seventeen years. It’s because speculators knew we were gonna talk to Iran. They hoped we’d make nice. It’s a wash so far. We’ll see.

I encourage the stupid people to hold their breath.

I’m thinking it’s time to stock up. Get myself a gun.

I just jacked the sound on the local news. A story on corn ethanol. I’m not kidding when I tell you that a cutaway shot showed cars travelling backwards. If we go nuclear and corn ethanol, I think we should store all the nuke waste at corn ethanol stations.

Stupid fucks.

Forgive my pessimism. If you look at the numbers………..

My point is this. The Evil Empire is not looking at the same numbers we are. If they were, they’d pay attention and do something, like come up with better explanations for not giving a mad fuck.

Drinks for my friends.

What follows is an e-mail from my uncle to my mother.

He’s an inlaw, married to Mother’s younger sister for a few centuries. This particular uncle is like all the others, blood or not. Remarkably capable, intelligent and manly men with an absurd sense of humor, an abundance of optimism and the ability to do just about any damn thing.

Despite most of them being clueless Republicans, my mother’s family are medal contenders for the Olympic coolest group of people competition. Some are stranger than others, but all are people I’m very lucky to know. Eleven siblings all married at least once as well becoming successful engines of procreation.

I’ve participated in the binding and torture of my cousins and I’ve purposely been electrocuted by an uncle. To single any of them out is just foolish. So many colorful people. Reunions are the most impossibly organized chaos anyone could ever wrap a brain around. They involve things like cooking omelettes in plastic bags and cousin Rod wandering around with endless amounts of Patron. Fill your ziploc with your favorite ingredients and hand it to stoic uncle Jim. He doesn’t say much but hands you an omelette ninety seconds later. Take a pull off Rod’s bottle, it’s tasty.

Find cousin Derek and see if he’s started drinking yet because if he has, you can too.

There will be huckleberry pie and ice cream.

An existential yet delightful surreality.

Every goddamn one of them is nuts and I’m sure they think the same of me.

Here we go:

“so what’s your summer schedule.. any date when your going to be here??
Sharon went to Spokane Tuesday,, and come home yesterday, thinks she likes the idea of shopping with your Sisters.
say’s her back is out and needs to see the chiropractor but i think it an excuses to head down..
DD had dentist appointment yesterday so she was in Spokane also.
Skip and Mitch stopped by on the way back from working up north.. then DD got here so they went over and seen her place.
Skip is going to help her put the cedar on the front deck ceiling.
Diana was here Sunday and stayed, then over to DD’s and decorated and stayed Monday night. Brian Orr was over Sunday and we had dinner at DD’s while we were setting there two bear run by the back window.. don’t tell Shirley !!!
we had a moose and coyote go by last week..
Every thing is nice an green course with all the rain what else could it be.. oats looking good.
i made deck for Dawn’s side door and took it down two weeks ago, and yesterday i cut the step risers so will take them down today and get the steps started.
Dawn is off today, getting ready for graduation tomorrow night.
Brian will finish the steps tomorrow , he is off.
Went in Tuesday and helped Carey install the upper hydraulic cylinder on the excavator.. was a heavy mother.. weighed 700 lbs.. had to use 2 chain hoist and 3 come a longs to jockey it into position, was never so happy when we got the top pin in.. was afraid the damn thing was going to spin on our jury rigged stuff and drop in the hole.. but its done now and Carey is finishing the basement dig..
as soon as this gets done the builder is putting in the footings.
he is having everything done but the electrical,, were going to do that. think we will take the MH up and stay for a few days when we do.
guess Scott is coming over this weekend to do Steve’s plumbing rough in.. just hope he don’t meet some of his old gang and get to partying.. DD kind of worried about that. he’s been doing pretty good on the coast.
headed up to Rice tomorrow with Russ. he is building a road and were going to use the cat to load a disc i bought. he also bought an old plow.. so will try to load that also. have to get done so we can get to the graduation by 7 but found out Sharon has some other stuff she wants to do also , so might have to hurry..
have an old laptop that i got running with radio last week, set it up for Tudor and Ken to use. Sharon took it in when she went down, but couldn’t get it to working. i will check it the next time i am there.
Ken has been doing some scraping at Jakes,, been taking old sign stuff apart and selling the silver, brass, and copper. guess he was getting a pretty good price on the silver, but took a sample into another place. then sent it out for assay and found out it was worth twice as much as he was selling it for.. so he lost a few bucks. but still has some to sell so is changing buyers..
Sharon said he even has Tudor doing some stuff and is paying her.. quit an operation..
Well that’s about it, have to get my oatmeal on and get ready to head out
See ya
Tell Doug hi, and were working on a list of things we need done when he gets here.
talked to Jim yesterday, they had a good day at the store opening,, they got another load of inventory in and its blocking the esle so they were headed down yesterday morning to stock it.”

Drinks for my friends.

Festooned: Covered in. Dripping in. Shit.

Harbinger: The shit is on it’s way.

Egregious: Potential for making the the thing in question shittier.

Deleterious: It will turn the thing in question to shit.

Quantum: I don’t know shit about this.

Pugilist: Someone who will beat the shit out of you.

Magnanimous: Someone who is probably full of shit.

Vituperative: Someone who talks a lot of shit.

Naive: Someone who doesn’t know shit.

Callow: Friends with the guy who doesn’t know shit.

Ubiquitous: This shit is everywhere.

Unconscionable: The legal equivalent of “This contract is bullshit.” or “Nigga Please”.

Earlier Friday afternoon, she told the editorial board of the Sioux Falls, South Dakota, Argus Leader that “My husband did not wrap up the nomination in 1992 until he won the California primary somewhere in the middle of June, right? We all remember Bobby Kennedy was assassinated in June in California. I don’t understand it,” she said. -CNN

Let’s talk a little about the Pantsuit stepping on her dick today. I’m a little conflicted because I don’t really give a shit. Wanna buy a bridge?

Did she literally mean she’s staying in the race because our man Obama might be assassinated? I honestly don’t know. She did say virtually the same thing back in March.

Robert Kennedy Jr. said, “I have heard her make this reference before, also citing her husband’s 1992 race, both of which were hard-fought through June,” he said. “I understand how highly charged the atmosphere is, but I think it is a mistake for people to take offense.” -CNN

I can only say this. Regardless of her intentions. It was an incredibly stupid thing to say. I apoligize for thinking she was smarter.

It reminds me that she’s been bitching about being victimized by sexism in the media.

You’ve got to be fucking kidding me.

At the very least, it belies a breathtaking degree of disconnect. Over and over, her desperation surfaces like a fish unable to right itself. I am weary of the spectacle.

My father is prolifically fond of pointing out the size of the lie she told about drawing sniper fire in Boznia. He’s the best judge of character I know.

Go away Hillary. If it’s in the cards for you to be VP, so be it. Please, for now, hide thyself. The only thing you accomplish now, is the collection of scorn. It will only get worse. America deserves for you to tip the fuck out the door.

Drinks for my friends.