I know, I know, I need to establish the character of the rabbit Watership more.  It was so painful to write.  More detail and back story is needed all around.  I know.  You gotta admit though it’s gonna be good, as in horrible.  Here we go:

 

 

Man in picture. More.

March 3, 2008 – 5:25 am He slips inside. The key is smooth, the knob twists. He enters and shuts the door behind, very quiet.

He throws the bolt.

I see it in my head. The bolt.

I smell lamb and garlic.

Then I breathe shit. Overwhelming. No air in these fumes. He smells homeless. He smells like piss and puke and shit and sweat. It’s a stench so monstorous.

I gag.

I’ll retch. I’m sure.

I hear him begin to fill the empty ice trays on the counter. He turns the faucet off after the first one and he whispers….. too full. Very slowly he poors a thin stream into the sink.

He moves to the bathroom.

I see the spring loaded roll snap into place as I hear it.

My eyes are crusted. He’s rolling away from me. Out of my bed.

Crusty eyes and blurry vision.

Out of my bed.

What?

The front door closes.

My rabbit is dead.

His name was Watership and I adored him.

He’s been sprayed on the walls of my apartment.

His skin is on the floor. The carpet. Ears and all. He was my boy. His velvet nose.

He slept in his cage at night. His water bottle smashed on the marble mantle. He was so sweet and docile. Above the fireplace is a crude scrawl in his blood. It looks Japanese.

I think of that song by The Vapors.

There is fur in the wire around the door of his cage, he liked his cage, he came and went willingly, so I undersand he struggled violently.

He was soft and cocoa brown. His eyes were kind and he shuffled to rub his face on me.

Ever heard a rabbit scream? I have. Sounds like a baby human.

I break all the way down. Collapse. Fold. Fall. Lose it.

I scrape his remains.

Thoroughly. I collect them, all I can get or lift, and deposit them in a ceramic pot I made in grade school.

I don’t know what to do with bowl so I cover it in plastic wrap and put it in the freezer. I’m disgusted by it but it’s all I have.

His name was Watership, I adored him.

As I sit here, I miss him. He was innocence.

There’s a big piece of lumber always propped against the wall by my trash chute. It’s handy for forcing fat bags of trash down the maw. It looks vaguely nautical, like it should be on a medium sized sailboat. It’s been here for the two years I’ve been here.

I take it with me. Back to my apartment.

Hours after dawn and I still smell his fucking pigs.

I will wait forever for him.

He is fucked.

I’m not sure what he is. It doesn’t matter. I’m going to kill him.

As I read it, I realize how clumsy it can be but the concept is still disturbing if I do say so myself.  Again, it needs work, but it will make a fine and horrifying book.  Happy Halloween, here’s another.  To read the entire first draft, search under “Man In Picture” here at brainspank.  Off we go:

Man in Picture part two. The way we were.

February 24, 2008 – 4:01 am I’m a submarine, way down deep, hull compromised. Pinhole leaks will soon begin to gush. You’ve seen the movies. Once that shit starts, it’s the beginning of the end.

Now he e-mails me on all three of my accounts.
Nothing too sinister, emoticons and random puncuation
that I’m sure are supposed to correspond or be in
context somehow with sightings of him.

I haven’t filled an ice tray in weeks, but they’re always full. Lately, the toilet paper is installed properly on the wall dispenser. Something I never do.

I keep hearing the wind blow outside. When I step out
for a smoke, the air is still.

The radio turns on in the middle of the night. Wierd stations that sound like Hamm radio. Sometimes orchestras from the forties.

Constantly lately, what must be ancient perfume. Simple pungent notes. Disturbing but instantly nostalgic.

Then there’s the pigs.

I ask her if she’s noticing them. Not so much says she.

They seem to be everywhere. Iconic to a degree in American culture, she points out, smirk gratis.

Maybe I just notice them more. Everywhere from news magazines to National Geographic.

The ones in the Geographic have dirty tusks and crazy eyes swimming in violence. I smell them when I wake in the middle of the night. I hear their bifurcated hooves in other rooms.

They squeal and clack on my balcony.

They’ll eat anything you know. Anything.

The very next time I see him, his eyes are filled with
blood. Our entire encounter, he blinks once.

There’s a big ass Ralph’s across the street. Tremendous selection of frozen meals as well as standing at the fridge food. Good soup kiosk and a really good salad bar. Single males understand this food dynamic as well as the need for as many plants as you can possibly get down into your goddamn gastrointestinal.

Anyway, sometimes I start on the right because I’m in a hurry. When I start left it’s because I’m cool and I have a little time.

It was an afternoon copasetic as I entered left off the elevator with my smooth and noisless cart. I turned right after perusing the produce section and picking out some avacados, tomatos and onions. I proceeded down the middle north to south aisle. It bisects the store and aisles on your right and left.

He appeared at the head of the first one.

His eyes were rimmed with blood. His hair was more yellow. I thought of a naked corn cob. Right there, thirty five feet to my right. Not showing his teeth today and that’s a relief. Kinda, because the lower front of his face seems to struggle at containing them.

Next block down he’s at the tail of that one and thirty five feet to my left.

The next aisle is a block party. Fireworks bust and spatter in the night overhead. It’s the nexus of this retail venue, and at the same time, red and gold popcorn carts, clowns, balloons and herds of women in pastel stretch pants and heels.

I jerk left down the next lane and it’s just carnival games and frozen food. He’s at that end as I roll up on him while he stares at me through eyes full of blood. He blinks slowly and his lids are squeegees. Fresh red blood runs from his eyes and into his teeth as he begins to grin.

He’s got dozens of pigs with him. Some are hogs. Some are boars. Some are swine.

I understand that if I’m not his demise, he will be mine. I smell this fact when I flip a bitch in front of him and head down the road on the opposite side.

He follows me and it’s loud. He marches and brings his feet down hard. He constantly sucks drool back through his teeth.

I’m panicking. My heart in my throat as my brain screams about how life is fucking tough enough, why me today?

I glance back and his nose and ears have joined in the gush over his giant teeth.

Red blood streams into his maw like rivulets before a wash.

Now he’s ahead of me eating slices of pineapple from a can. Blood and fruit juice run over his chin and down to his shirt to look like sweat. I wonder if I have just minutes to kill this crazy motherfucker.

Or will it be another day?

He beats me to the register and I watch him bag my groceries. His shirt is a dark blue now and his eyes are bloodshot but clear.

I tell him paper & plastic and to pack them heavy. He does all that.

I still understand that I have to be this guy’s fucking hurricane.

In the spirit of the season, I’m re-posting some chapters from my first ever novel.  It’s rough and it really does require an extensive rewrite.  I had intended to revisit it this fall but my work and book about real life in the music business has eclipsed it’s relative priority for now.  I will do the rewrite, as it is a labor of love and I believe the concept to be sound and compelling and it scared the fuck out of me to write it.  If you care to, the entire work is available here at brainspank under the category “Man In Picture”.  It does gain speed and flesh as the story grows.  Trust me, it doesn’t suck, it just needs work.  I hope you enjoy it.

 

 

Man in picture.

February 18, 2008 – 1:10 am It was interesting. Fascinating. Kinda compelling.

I had fun with it.

For awhile.

Sometimes, it was like picking at a scab or the tongue constantly probing a sore in the mouth.

Still, enigmatic in the most consumate of ways.

Until he was standing over my bed on a silent night, when some sense caused me to open my eyes.

I think I first noticed him on a movie poster. Outside a shopping mall. One of those faux shelters for public transportation. Maybe on the side of a bus.

I remember thinking, after clocking his countenance out of the corner of my consciousness, that’s one creepy motherfucker. In the background of one of those visually exploding advertisements for some inspid action movie. He registered only after the fact, in my mind’s eye.

Weird.

Time passed.

I swear I saw him wearing sunglasses in a potato chip ad on the back of a comic book. I don’t really read them anymore, but I’ll thumb through them when I come across a display.

Not long after, he was an extra in a cell phone commercial on TV. I wondered at how many times I’d watched that one before I noticed him.

Tall, pale. Gaunt. Always seeming to stare right at me.

Then, he was pictured on packaging for disposable razors.

Then again, in the very back of an advertisement for a new amusement park ride on a plastic fast food cup. I’ve always kept those cups. They hold a lot and it doesn’t matter what happens to them. They make excellent mini trash receptacles for a coffee or bedside table in the apartment of a single male.

Didn’t hang on to that one.

I would catch a glimpse of him walking opposite me while driving. Of course, I looked back and checked my mirrors. Of course, nothing.

He had large front teeth, maybe buck toothed. Red hair in a sort of crew cut flat top. Pale blue eyes that were unbelievably bloodshot.

I could only imagine all these companies hiring him for these ads must have thought he was kinda goofy and cool somehow, they were infusing their shit with character or quirkiness, or something.

I thought he was scary as fuck.

He started to appear in my dreams. Still pretty innocuous, but more overt. Winking, saying hello to me. That sort of thing.

He kept showing up in different places.

In the audience on a talk show.

Blackjack dealer in Vegas once.

One day, he was pumping gas a couple islands over at a Shell station.

Early seventies GTO. It was green. He pulled out very slow.

I walked through a mall and saw him going down an escalator on a lower level grinning up at me before he looked down, sprinted the last few moving steps and disappeared.

He always bolts or turns away when I see him. He knows me.

Obviously.

He said nothing. When he placed his index finger on my sternum ever so gently, I swear I could smell dirt and grease under a long nail. He said nothing but looked right at me. Not through me, but at me. The sliding door to my balcony was open, wind clattered the vertical blinds. I could smell gasoline.

He grinned; a rictus affording massive and misshapen incisors. He began to drool, then sucked it back violently. He blew air past his lips and walked away, away from my bed and out my front door. I heard him close it quietly behind him.

Now I get phone calls at work and on my cell. HEY MIKEY IT’S ME JERRY!! Or, ANTWON!! Or, WILLIAM!!

It freezes me. I know it’s him before it rings, if I don’t answer the goddamn thing, he’ll leave a voice mail and I’ll be absolutely compelled to listen to it. So I try to take it on the chin and then hang up. Get it over with. I know when it’s him.

Get this, he always wears brown corduroy pants, blue suede Puma Clydes, a maroon t-shirt under a leather biker jacket and he’s pigeon chested. Yeah, it’s all lopsided and the fit of his leather coat emphasizes it. His shoulders are narrow and he’s very tall. Sinewy and long limbed. A glance at his hands tells that one of them would kill you if it got you by the throat.

About a week ago, I was at Starbucks waiting for my unsweetened iced crack and he was backing out the door and firing a gun at me with his thumb and index finger. I pissed my pants. I’m pretty sure no one noticed.

I had to go home. I was late to work. The boss gave me the look and pointed out my shitty performance lately. I nodded and apologized.

I don’t sleep much anymore. I’ve begun to obsess about pigs. They scare the shit out of me. Are you aware of how smart they are? They will eat any motherfucking thing. And we eat them.

This is bad.

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.

My girlfriend is here.  Picked her up from the airport tonight and she looked beautiful.  So cut & paste bitches.

http://www.alternet.org/workplace/143444/michael_moore%27s_action_plan%3A_15_things_every_american_can_do_right_now/

Couldn’t have said it any better.

Drinks for my friends.

I had my guinea pigs.

Bands and artists that suffered my inexperience.  I made more than a few really shitty recordings.  Sometimes there was some attitude there but I made some egregious sonic messes.  I’m as embarrassed over those recordings as I am over my contributions to my high school paper.  It’s true.  I was a dickhead.

There was a guy named Scott Thomas.  Huge talent but kind of a prick so I don’t feel so bad.  Jesse Montague, I got some of it right but some of it wrong.  The percussionist’s name was Jagoda (sp?), he spilled a bong into the console and smoked the power supplies but we did make some cool recordings.  She played and sang an entire chorus out of time without me realizing it.  Duck Duck Goose, I think I did okay by them, the guitar player had this tiny little 15 watt vintage amp that he got the coolest sound from.  Hard as fuck to record because I had to isolate the hell out of it.  It broke up as beautifully as a cameo broach and he had a lisp.  The gayest straight guys I ever met.

A band called Dumpster; have I told the story about experimenting with heroin with the singer?  A band called Eleventeen who would later become Eve Six.  My lawyer got me home early from vacation for that one.  Found me in Tahoe somehow when I’m not sure my parent’s  knew I was there.  Before cell phones.  Neverland with Pat Sugg, the best I’d ever heard a guitar player sound through Peavey amps.  Bill Kennedy was building the coolest record with them and it just never happened.

I’ve got to go through my DATs as I have thousands of hours of the best LA had to offer.  Before it was over, we were out scouting them and bringing them in.

Salad days.  Golden.

Along came a band called Rat Bat Blue.  Dabro, Ace, Fraulein Sniffy, Alan the genius and Teddy on bass.  Dabro, Dave Abrahams, was the guitar player and the archivist for A&M’s mastering department.  We became friends because he was so damn friendly.  One of the nicest people I’ve ever met.  It was a bad day when Dabro wasn’t smiling.  They were all sweethearts.

We had fun and worked way very hard to render their vision.  All night long whenever we could.  Must have done at least twenty songs together.  Songs don’t happen in a day you know.  Sometimes not in a week.  They could play, all good musicians, with Alan on keyboards being a bit of a stand out.  Alan and I seemed to understand each other right away.  I can’t explain it but we connected.  He was a sorcerer with a grand piano.  Funny and smart.  That actually describes the band as a whole if I toss in the words talented and dedicated.

They were a stalwart team.  They were to be my first experience and example of such a dynamic in many ways.  I was to work with many famous ones that didn’t share a similar ethic and it’s absence was always a hole in the process as much as it was an indicator of an obvious expiration date to come.

Professional.   They never bitched about or maligned each other.  They were confident in their abilities and never failed to share encouragement and support.  They were very sensitive in that way with me as well.  They treated me like a member and often left a few hundred dollars on the console after we’d worked all night and I was the only one who had to get up to clean toilets and fetch fruit in an hour.

I was mixing them the night of the ’92 Northridge quake and had just gotten home to fall asleep with a beer between my legs.  So tired.  Still on the couch.  A 6.9, and I slept through it.  What woke me was the arcing of the transformers.  Not the sound and crunch, but the blinding flashes.

My ears shut down to this day when I sleep.  I hear them turn on right before I’m completely conscious.  They click and work with my eyes.  Weird, huh?

I wasn’t sure what to do but understood something big had happened.  I put on my shoes and wandered out to find a community on the sidewalk.  Battery powered transistor radios, blankets and candles.  Some woman remarked at the irony of such tragedy on a so beautiful a night.  She gestured at the stars.  It was then I realized it had been a quake serious enough to knock out all the power of the entire LA Basin.  A celestial show like that hadn’t been possible in Los Angeles for a hundred years.

I was in bed asleep inside half an hour and slept through all the aftershocks.

I’m an agnostic, yet I can’t help but say, God love you guys for your patience.  Thank you.  Rat Bat Blue certainly wasn’t my first but we lasted, I learned and together we grew.  The first female drummer I’d ever worked with, Fraulein Sniffy, Jeanne Thomason, she could play, she had pocket and she could tune her own drums.  I almost always asked drummers to hit harder and Jeanne was no exception, but neither was it a problem.  She was very solid.  Always there’d be a message on my machine from Jeanne thanking and praising me after we’d finished a batch of songs.

“Magicfingers” she called me.

Dabro on the lot, spreading the word about what a good job I’d done.  Smiling and telling everyone.  This band was instrumental, pun intended, in earning me respect and legitamacy.

The band’s style was pretty eclectic and they seemed to go wherever they wanted musically because they had the vision and talent to afford and accommodate it.  Ace, Michael Baker, was a larger than life front man with charisma, chops and style.  A funny motherfucker, with serious lyrical and melodic ability.  He had an informed and clever grip on humor and pathos.  I was often in awe of him.  He was the real deal.

Exceptionally good live.  Always a function of the band’s ability to play and a front man’s ability to deliver.

When Dabro first approached me, I was still green enough to be leery, but I accepted.  Understand these transactions had nothing to do with money.  It was about us helping each other.  One of the reasons I was grateful is they could play far better than I could engineer.  Like I said, they were patient and I can’t help but know they were grooming me for their needs.  I had no problem with that then and I don’t now.

Before we were done with each other, about a year and a half in, they were being courted by labels and the fish in my pan had gotten considerably larger and a little more supine.  We’d accomplished what we’d set out to do, we’d helped each other and I was glad to have held up my end of the deal.  They signed to Atlantic and Rupert Hine produced.  Rupert Hine picked up where I left off.

It always broke my heart a little when a band I’d helped for free got a deal and never even threw some overdubs my way but I loved these guys.  My heart holds nothing but fondness for them.  We had shared with and nurtured each other in a musical equivalent of graduate school.  They did at least as much for me as I did for them and it was without regret on my part.  We had a good time doing it.  They didn’t owe me a goddamn thing.

As is often the case, they got lost in a shuffle.  Atlantic just happened to go through a “consolidation” and they were never really heard from again.  I never heard the record they made and I can’t help but be curious to this day.  They were exceptional.

The thing is this, when you work with a band for that long and that hard with a common goal, you share something beyond friendship, it becomes a partnership that approaches family.  You get to know each other pretty goddamn well.  I was to join many bands in the years to come but this was my first.  I wouldn’t trade the experience for anything.  My heart swells when I think about it.  Good people.  Good times.  A lot of honest talent and sincere friendship.

Here’s an epilogue for ya:

I’m not sure how, but word got out at one point about a batch of three songs I’d completed mixes on with Rat Bat Blue.  Mark Harvey, the Harvinator hisself, studio manager and boss hog, approached me to say he was impressed and  asked me to engineer for him that very weekend.  Again, I found myself flattered and intimidated.  A piano vocal session with Astrid Young, sister of Neil Young.  I accepted.  There was no way I could let this man down.

I was nervous but Mark was cool and It went well.  So much different than my hard ass boss.  We had a pleasant afternoon.  I documented everything I did.  Brian Schueble was to follow up on what I’d done and told me later that when he first looked at my signal chain he thought I was out of my fucking mind but it sounded pretty good.  Brian was one of the good ones still much to my senior.  One of the best engineers to ever walk the planet and as humble as  pornstar with a tiny dick.  He would later spend time with me sharing his micing technique on grand piano with emphasis on phase and right left balance.

Brian is another one I owe.  Damn he was good.  He showed me how to make a piano sound like God.  He handed me the keys.  He taught me to fish.  Listen to Fiona Apple’s first record, that’s Brian.

So the buzz about these Rat Bat Blue songs somehow continued to escalate.  Some of the techs were even talking about it.  I know Dabro was raving all over the lot.

It’s weird being under the microscope all the sudden in the most famous and renowned recording studio in the world.  Discomfiting and confusing.  I’d had the light shined on me before for other reasons and this felt the same.  It itched.  It was sore.  I wanted a vacation.  Given the chance, I might have run for it.

But I knew the songs were good.  I knew my production and engineering was good.  It sounded almost the same as it did in my head so I knew.  If I was wrong I was wrong and so be it, I would never be right.  My colleagues and contemporaries listened and smiled.  It was good.  Nine out of ten dentists agreed.

One day, in the middle of my session, I forget who I was working with, Shelly Yakus, President of Recording, the big cheese, in his inimitable style, walks into my control room, folds his arms on the meter bridge, looks at me and waits for me to stop tape.

I stop tape.  He tells me he heard I did something special.  I tell him I think I know what he’s talking about.  He tells me he wants to hear it.  I say as soon as I’m done here I’ll play it for you.  He smiles evil and says take a break, then tells me to meet him in studio B and exits stage right.  I tell the band I’ll be back in fifteen minutes and head across the hall with my DAT.  I sweat making the easiest patch in the world and bring the DAT up on “stereo A”.  I crack the gain to twelve o’clock.  I’m not sure where to stand so I lean against the multitracks in the back.

His head curly gray head dances without rhythm and he doesn’t say a word or open his eyes for all three songs.

I hear it through his ears with all the flaws and mistakes.  It’s amateur hour.  We didn’t have automation.  It’s overdone.  Too ambitious.  The effects are out of control and I’m positive he flinches where I cut the half inch.  The band helped and did mutes and fader rides and everything because we didn’t have automation.  I can’t tell anything because there’s no meter to his bobbing head.  It’s like he’s listening to a disco version.  But I know he knows.  He may be a sonafabitch but Shelly Yakus is an icon and he knows.

I hate his dancing head.  He’s going to mock me.

I’m thinking about being grateful for his inevitable criticism.  How I’ll be gracious and humble as he points out the flaws.  He’s going to have constructive things to say.  It will be helpful.  I’ll be ok.  He’ll tell me how far I have to go and the bottom sounds disconnected from the rest of the mix.  The mid range is skinny and my balances are off.

The last song ends.  The silence is deafening.  His hands are folded and he’s rubbing his nose with both index fingers.  I hope he encourages me.  That would be nice.  Tell me it’s a good effort and to keep working because I’m onto something.

I don’t know what to do so I pull the patch cords, step close to him to mute the console and sit down next to him for my lumps.

Well, well, well he says.  I can’t help but look him in the eye, you gotta pick one, so I do, and I want it straight.  I pick his right eye.  I’m ready to own what he has to say.

“Congratulations”, he says.  He grins wide and kind, “You’ve figured it out”.  “I’m impressed”.

I really don’t remember what happened next.  Free beer to whomever was assisting me that day or anyone that can tell me who was.

I had just earned myself a whole mess of trouble but I didn’t care.

This chapter is dedicated to Keith Woods, may his soul and consciousness rest in peace.

Drinks for my friends.

I talked with my sister yesterday.  My father and I were outside spectating my mother washing windows.  I was on hand to lend a hand.  I did thus, having long since learned that my mother asks for help when she needs it, otherwise back off.  Tam showed up with flowers and we all sat out back on an incomparable, fall Nevada day and shot the shit.  Mom decided on a red beer and I fashioned my own with Worcestershire and capers that kept clogging my bendy straw, in spite of it’s palatability.

Tam tells me Len Semas is likely nothing more than a right wing operative funded by some notorious PAC and encouraged me to investigate some shit stirrer named Chuck Muth as well.  I’m on it.  She pretty much confirmed my suspicions.

“The concept of America as `One Nation Under God’ has become not only foreign to Democrats — it has become objectionable. They confuse separation of church and state with separation of God from state and they couldn’t be more wrong. This is a nation founded on Godly principles in Christian philosophical tradition.”  -reviewjournal.com

I would beg to differ there Len.  This nation was founded on among other things, the ideal that no church, organized religion and therefore God, influence the manner in which her people would ever be governed.  The Founding Fathers, a significant number of which were either atheist or agnostic, and many otherwise suspicious of organized religion, went to great lengths to instill and preserve that ethic in the documents drafted to, and presented before, the people of this country then so young.  It was the tyranny of the church, it’s inordinate influence as a heavy wrench and complicity as well as cooperation with and to heads of state, and it’s archaic and selective reason, we the people sought so specifically and vehemently to unburden ourselves of.

This is most certainly not a nation founded on “Godly principles in any sort of Christian philosophical tradition”  It is not and good day sir.  Please exit the goddamn building.  You lie and you fucking suck.

Get your Jesus of my penis Len.  Methinks you are a lying fucktard.

“ Semas, 57, says the local Nevada Appeal and the Reno Gazette-Journal are liberal newspapers that are turning off a Northern Nevada populace that is becoming increasingly conservative and favors traditional American values of God, family and country.” -reviewjournal.com (2004)

Hey Semas, your state went blue for the last national election.  You like apples?

I know I do.

“Semas admits he does not always practice what he preaches. He has been married three times.

Semas enjoys drinking, partying and “chasing girls.” His newspaper office, which is a 94-year-old building that once was the home of Abe Cohn, the businessman who financed famed American Indian basket weaver Dat So La Lee, is cluttered with liquor bottles from a past party.” 

“I don’t make up my mind by the emotionalism of news headlines,” he said. “I look for logic and consistency in positions. To me conservatism is logical, it is reasonable. The liberals want women to have a right to choose abortion, but they oppose capital punishment. There is no consistency.” -reviewjournal

Did I mention this guy is a fucktard?  Uh, Len, I’ll bet you support capital punishment and oppose abortion.  Anybody?

“Gays have the same fundamental rights of any citizen,” he said. “They need to quit complaining.” -reviewjournal

Orange Whip?  Orange whip?  Orange Whip?  Three Orange Whips.

Len, like Sarah Palin,  appears to be be tragically less than fond of homework.  Here’s an invitation to all the northern Nevada locals to help me out a little.  This guy is a stupid dangerous liar.  I’m really curious about where his funding comes from and the stink I know to be hypocrisy.  Help me out here.  Traditional searches don’t reveal much, but any individual this obtuse is as dirty as a drain diver in a sewage holding tank.

C’mon kids, I’d like a cub reporter……….

I’m not lazy, just busy.

Drinks for my friends.

I like to go to lunch.  By myself.  I really have no problem eating alone.  I like myself.  I’m never without something to read.  Typically I have an appetizer, any salad not based on iceberg lettuce and a decent pinot grigio or sauvignon blanc.  Maybe a rose’ if I’m familiar with the appellation and know it to be dry and fruit forward.  I like to take my time, read and watch people.

I had a nice payday today, but things being what they are, I found myself at Arby’s.  I was out plying my trade here in the state capitol of Nevada and I loves me some Beef & Cheddar.  When you’re on a budget, improvisation and compromise becomes a soft mantra and Arby’s has pretty good lemonade.  Free refills.  I told myself I wouldn’t be needing my briefcase, just business cards and my cell phone.  I realized I had nothing to read.  There’s always something to read in my briefcase.  Damn.  Fortune visited me when I clocked a newsstand out front.  As I was ordering my sandwich and beverage, fortune graced me again as I noticed a local magazine pile on the counter.  The “Sierra Sage”. It appeared to be of heft enough to last my humble lunch.

I have a tendency to like these kinds of regional unassuming publications.  A sort of Carson City version of the LA Weekly I naively imagined.  There was a community calendar, a crossword and a charming personal obit.  An advice column and some letters to the editor.

There was a woman in her mid sixties with enormous breasts sitting across from what was probably her niece or daughter.  A man with unruly gray facial hair, red suspenders and an impossible amount of food and sauces in front of him with a young man who appeared to be distracted and uncomfortable in every way.  Three teenagers so painfully awkward I wondered if I’d ever lacked that much cool.  A woman about my age slathered in face paint, an ill fitting pant suit and what was likely a permanent scowl.  I imagined her chain smoking menthols.

It didn’t take long to realize I was perusing a publication of the worst kind of right wing narrow mindedness and conservative propaganda I’d ever stumbled upon.  I was blindsided.  Assaulted even.   The featured article, written by the publisher, one Leoard A. Semas, which the table of contents list as beginning on page 4, where an advertisement appears for subscriptions and a house for sale, actually begins on the front cover and continues on page 29, earnestly attempted to tackle the convoluted issue of health care by stating:

“The problem with the current debate on health care is that it is not about health care at all; it is about yet another transfer of power from the citizen to the state ……………..Two things are certain regarding health care in the U.S.  One, the system is far from broken.  Two, a takeover by the federal government is not the way to fix it even if it were.”

First off Len, you beg the question; just exactly how is this a transfer of power from citizen to state?  This smacks of the paranoid government takeover rhetoric and indeed you resort to that post haste.

Far from broken Len?  Over 62% percent of all bankruptcies in 2007 we a direct result of medical costs.  75% percent of those 62% had health insurance.  The amount of bankruptcies rose by nearly 50% from 2001 to 2007.  “….the odds that a bankruptcy had a medical cause was 2.38-fold higher in 2007 than in 2001.”  -The American Journal of Medicine (a clinical research study).

Hey Len, “Profits at 10 of the country’s largest publicly traded health insurance companies rose 428 percent from 2000 to 2007…….”  -AFL-CIO.  This Len, when the number of insured has shrunk, some 14,000 plus a day and the people who have coverage pay more for less of it.  Hey Len, how is our system far from broken?  Can you give me an example of how it functions well?

Inside the front cover a letter from the publisher, Len Semas again, reveals he’s been under the weather and recent publication of the Sierra Sage has been suspended as a result.  Congestive heart failure, heart surgery to install six stents and an episode with kidney stones.  How’s that insurance working out there Len?

Despite the glaring editorial/layout errors, you’ve got a pretty slick publication here Len.  It’s printed on glossy paper, full color, nice graphics, photography and a what can only be described as a dearth of advertisement.  A publication like this in a fast food restaurant for free in Carson City?    I think I may have to check up on you Mr. Semas.

Oh and by the way Len, you responded to a letter by some ignorant round headed mouth breather named Orlis Trone about Sarah Palin by saying, “She embodies, intelligence, charisma, capability, enthusiasm, and common sense.  Worse, she is a “regular American;” and that is the ultimate fear of the elitists that largely comprise the Left”

First, yes, we are way smarter than you.  I love that you all think that’s a bad thing somehow.  Tell me, does it suck as much as I think to be as dumb as a stick?  Nevermind, you wouldn’t know.

Let me tell you something Len, if you think the biggest fear we as progressives have is Sarah Palin, I invite, I beg you to indulge yourself in that fantasy to your little heart’s content.  Yes, by all means, that stupid, self centered, intellectually challenged, two dimensional, media prostitute is the boogeyman of the liberal left.  Good luck with that.   Please, please run her in 2012.  Please?  Us elitist, liberal left wingers can’t wait.  Maybe you can run her with Glenn Beck or Michele Bachman or Michael Steele.  All excellent candidates and pillars of the conservative cause if you ask me.

Stalwarts.  Overflowing with integrity, righteousness and honesty.  The best and brightest the Republican party has to offer.  Cough.  She, they, well that’s a serious and formidable challenge right there.  Cough.  So bright and capable.  Cough.  They’ll uh, give us a run for our money and uh, lend the whole process dignity for once, cough.

Now, I gotta tell ya Len,  I think you’re full of shit.  I think you just might be some right wing shill funded with your own or some other spurious and shadowy largess, propagating an agenda that would embarrass you.  I could be wrong but I’m sure a little digging is going to unearth some things you’d rather your readers didn’t know.  You people, your kind, disingenuous patriots, are always hiding some odious hypocrisy.

One other thing, if I’m not mistaken, a son of the great state Senator Lawrence “Jake” Jacobson owns the the Arby’s franchises here in Carson and Minden.  Jake was a man who existed and legislated in an era before partisanship was allowed to become so cancerous, toxic and polarizing.  He was a good man, a Republican, without enemies and he counted democratic state Senators and assemblymen as close friends.  Keith Ashworth for example.

I worked for the Nevada state legislature back then and had a serious relationship with a beautiful young woman who happened to be a niece or cousin of the aforementioned son.  I’m assuming the same man owns that franchise today.  I won’t ever darken the door of that Arby’s again.  I may be courting pettiness here but it’s so irresponsible to spread that kind of disinformation.  It’s dumb.  It’s not free speech or opinion, it’s lies.  You’re fomenting lies Mr. Jacobson and you should be ashamed.

I am disgusted.  Piss up a rope.  I will do the best I can to encourage others to boycott you as well.  You should know better.  Think globally, act locally.

Drinks for my friends.

There are so many more stories between those days and the days I’m itching to talk about so maybe I’ll go back and tell some more, fill it all in a little more, regardless, you the reader, will never be the wiser.  There’s no real reason to tell you this.

Whatever.

We’re gonna dance around with this chapter a little.  Got ta, got ta, got ta go see Ben.

If it seems to  have taken too long for me to rise to the occasion of what I expected of myself, it didn’t take very long to get what I wanted once I figured it out.  It was equal parts unwilligness to follow the years long path a typical assistant engineer takes to get a shot at the show, as it was not at all congruent with my aspirations once I finally began to understand what I was doing.

Fuck all that.  I understood the big picture.  I’d seen enough.  Paid my dues.  Fuck all that.  I was busting.

I had a plan.  I was developing mad skills.

There was bullshit.  Shitloads of it.  Nonsense.  I’d be cutting through that.

I was a quarter century old.  I’d produce record and mix my first record before I was thirty.

The fact was, I could hear it in my head and knew how to put it on tape.  Or I knew I could figure out how to.  I had come to understand top and bottom and volume and chunk and circumstance enough to make it so.  I witnessed famous engineers and producers making huge mistakes.  Both in coaxing performances and being clueless while getting a sound.  I witnessed Bob Ezrin leave a turd in the punchbowl with a band called El Magnifico.  An A&M staff guy named Brian Schueble had already nailed the El Mag vibe.  He had already given the band their sound.  He understood them.  Their record was shit and I understood the biggest reason for that was because Brian didn’t do it.  I witnessed Mike Clink fuck up a band called I Mother Earth while I won his confidence after he’d thrown me off Gun’s & Roses two years earlier.

No one was any more or less fallible than me.

It’s a very delicate and elusive thing, the relationship between band/artist and producer/engineer.  As often as not, the band needs nothing more than an engineer with an opinion as opposed to an engineer and a producer.  It’s a fact, I’ve been there.  Foment an atmosphere where they are relaxed.  It sounds simple but cheer lead them into trying harder and reaching further.  Explore harmonies and percussion and other melodic instruments.  Musicians are creative animals and the man behind the glass and in front of the knobs must and should make them comfortable with experimenting.  That man must also contribute and suggest, make the band try things they oppose even if they don’t work because it pushes open doors to other possibilities.

I did the same with a brilliant band called Agnes Gooch.  There’s a story there for later but I’m here to tell you that I understood them and they did there best work with me and I think you’d know their name if it was left to our mutual muse and device.  We fucking killed it.  I joined that band and we did excellent work.  Goddamn they were special.

I punched the same sixteen bars for CC Deville one night for eight fucking hours.  Julian Raymond producing, Phil Kaffel engineering and CC on blow and guitar.  It was a cover of Hank Williams’ “Hey hey good lookin” for some Pauly Shore movie.  From eight at night until four in the morning we did nothing but the same solo over and fucking over.

I punched every note, every space, every nuance.  I could have played it myself by the time we were done.

Nobody stopped the little prick.  Julian was a sweet man but a worthless producer.  Philo was a good engineer but a bit of a prick who always looked like he combed his hair with a sharp rock.  CC was an obnoxious, whiny, coke fueled, Brooklyn accented self absorbed piece of shit.  That Julian didn’t stop the whole thing after an hour or two made him guilty of manslaughter.  It was profoundly ridiculous.  I doubt Julian ever made a dime for Disney or The Mouse (Hollywood Records).  Seriously, every time I worked for Julian, he sucked.  Indecisive and no control or vision.  The whole thing could have been done in any shithole in LA with a multitrack, a decent mic pre and a decent mic.  Instead, CC Deville was allowed to masturbate for eight hours without shooting his load because he was hoovering coke every other take at a studio like A&M at hundreds of dollars an hour on top of engineering fees etc.

Vulgar and insipid burlesque.  The kind of stupidity and waste of resources endemic to a place like A&M; a situation among hundreds that taught me me lessons I wasn’t necessarily supposed to learn.  How is it people don’t get embarrassed in the middle of shit like that?

I’d been engineering on my own.  I was taking all comers.  I was a whore.  You got a polka band?  Bring it.

I was confronted with my first horn section, my first concertina, my first stand up bass and my first violin, mellotrons, organs and Leslie’s etc.  I stood in front of these instruments, listened to them and heard them in my head the way they should sound.  The way they wanted to sound, so I figured out how best to be honest with them and still allow for them to speak in a song.

I took it very seriously.

I had ceased to fuck around.

I was faithful to them.  Honest with them.

I became somewhat expert at guitars and amps and distortion.  How an amplifier breaks up, how different ones behave and how to drive them differently to get what I heard in my head.  Hundred watt Marshalls tend to suck because you have to run them so hard before they bust up.  Fifty watt heads are much easier to make crunch.  Give me a 50 Watt Plexi and a 4X12 loaded with aged Celestions and I’ll go gay.  A Vox AC30 with a Tele or a Moserite.  Class A always runs hot baby.  I loved experimenting with voltage regulators, powers soaks etc.  Vintage Fender Bassmans were a favorite.  Hiwatts,  I adore a Fender Twin.  Boogie dual rectifiers.

My penis on a hot tin roof.  A wall of Ampegs.

Single coil, lipstick or double coil humbucking pickups.  Always check between the bridge middle and back pick up positions for every part.

I always brought my own cables because they made such a huge difference.

Tube or solid state.  Tubes in the pre amp or actual gain stage?  Is it a hybrid?

There is no finer perfume than a hot tube amp.

A/DA flangers, vintage MXR distortion, Wah pedals, Big Muffs, DOD ……..the variables were infinite and a geek’s dream.

A Les Paul, Strat, Explorer, Flying V, Rickenbacker, Moserite, semi acoustic, hollow body, acoustic with steel or nylon or both.

Six or twelve strings.

The thickness of the pick or plectrum, the gauge of the strings.  Where on the guitar the player strummed.  The size of hands and fingers.  The ridiculous shoes worn that day.

It’s kinda about the way you combine all the elements and the combinations were infinite.

Just turn every knob until it breaks up somewhere between barbarian and princess or love of self.  Only then do you add microphones.  414s, 57s, 421s, fet 47s and make sure all the diaphragms are lined up.  Phase is everything.  Use a flashlight but them there diaphragms need to be like ducks.

Before the sun sets, tone comes from hands and fingers.  Ignore that fact at your peril.

I tuned drums even.  Showed the drummer from Everclear how to do it himself.  He thanked me for it years later after a show in Vegas.  I was a shitty drummer, but my kit always sounded awesome.  I understood the kind of heads best for a drummer based on his kit and how he played.  The size of his sticks and how hard he hit.  light medium or heavy batter for the snare.  Ambassador, Emperor, Pinstripes or Black Dots on the toms.  The lighter head on the bottom, the thicker head on top.  Tune the bottom head a little lower, sometimes a little higher.  I spent inordinate amounts of time moving various blankets with various textures back and forth in kick drums.  I built gynecological tunnels and used sand bags, bricks, weights from the sound stage and gaffer’s tape.  I miced it inside, out side and way back, while pounding the shit out of the way back one with the most brutal compressor I could find.  An 1176 with all the buttons pushed in.

I made compression my friend and my bitch.  It’s an ugly muscular mistress with copious facial hair.  Ya just gotta keep it’s head between your knees and below your waist.  Compression done wrong will eat your genitals.

I really digress.  Sorry.

But goddamn, recording is a crude and manly art that begs a feminine touch.  Pricks.  Bitches.  Fags.

All necessary.

Once I understood the tools, and it took a while, but once that epiphany occurred, I had no interest in playing it the way everyone assumed it was to be played.  Studio C was my epicenter.  It was where potential wizards and obvious dipshits were first assigned to study the craft.  The idiots got fired.  I spent thousand of hours in that room as an assistant.  Mostly Demos for the record company but also working with the ‘B’ listers like Quiet Riot, Peter Criss and Alice Cooper.  Older luminaries like Mel Torme, Solomon Burke and Don Cherry.

I ended up being the last engineer to record Don Cherry alive with the Watts Prophets.

From Gospel to hip hop to metal, it was an excellent education.  A solid, real time crash course in just about everything.  I got a brainfull everyday.  I was a shitty assistant but I was learning to be a good engineer.

I understood there was no way I would survive as an assistant engineer.

I understood I didn’t want to.

It didn’t take long for me to figure out that I could do what these outside engineers could do at least as good and probably better.  At the end of the day, I was right.  I did it better.  Much better.  I heard it in my head.  Took a while for me to pull it off.  I befriended most of the A&R staff and earned their trust.  It didn’t hurt that in the beginning, no one on either side, the recording studio and the record company being separate entities, paid much attention.  The deal was, the A&R department had first dibs on the room (studio C) from nine a.m. to five or six p.m., five days a week.  That’s when demos got done.  The smarter, more adventurous A&R people took advantage of the free time in a world class studio to literally sound out artists with any potential.

Those smart ones I courted with a vengeance.  I made friends with them.  Before long, I was scouting bands and bringing them in under their auspices while they handed me projects.  Pierre Vudrag, Jeff Suhy, Michael Whitaker, Teresa Ensenat, David Anderle, Amy Brokaw (daughter of Tom)………

They just wanted a decent engineer they could trust and maybe spend an afternoon away from the desk and phone playing house and or record producer.  At the same time I began to have some facility as an electron director, I became an earnest student of the socio-political mechanics and egos of young ambitious record company wannabe heroes, lazy but talented musicians and older and wiser record execs.

I made friends.  I began to be a salesman.

Thus I was able to avoid dancing with more substantial egos of the famous engineers or producers by assisting.  I worked with plenty of the good ones but successfully avoided most of the assholes.  I never once assisted Shelly Yakus, Niko Bolas,  only once for Don “Dry as a bone’  Smith…….I did learn tons from Dave Thoener, Ed Stasium and Paul Hamingson, Thompson and Barbiero, Bob Clearmountain, Keith Forsey, Mike Shipley, Jimbo Barton, Tony Platt, Boll Dooley, Steve Barncard ……..

The rest of the twenty four hour cycle and weekends, the studio was free to book the room for profit.  It was such a technologically advanced complex that most people made the mistake of underestimating the little 32 input API without automation.  It was the red headed step child.  The truth was, it was an amazing sounding console and the compliment of outboard gear available in a facility like A&M, made Studio C an absolute asset in the hands of any capable engineer.

My contemporaries were damn fools for not realizing the room’s potential and assuming it was amateur hour.

It was a brilliant venue for overdubs.  But I tracked twelve piece bands, grand piano, horns and full on rock bands, all live, with very pleasant and thickly rendered results in that little 10×15 foot room without a single iso booth.  I used the “Dance Hall”, an equipment storage room down the hall with the master fridge for fruit and perishables.  It also housed some ancient power grid.  Hello sixty cycle hum and phase horror.  I used the guard shack even further down the hall.  I ran cables all the way out to La Brea Ave. on a Sunday for vocals.  I put mics and instruments and amps in the public bathrooms and in the other studios before or after they showed up or went home.  I recorded in the lobby and the live echo chambers.  I made the asses of the office bitches itch by using the mic closet for isolation with amps so loud they couldn’t hear the phones ring.  It was often a dorm room carnival with the phone on the console ringing and us not answering because we knew they just wanted us to turn it down.

Fuck them, it was a recording studio.

We recorded vocals live on La Brea Avenue.

I routinely blew up speakers.  A percussionist spilled his bong into the console and smoked the power supplies on my watch, a story that made it all the way to New York, where my assistant tried to tell me the story without realizing who he was telling it to.  I set him straight.  I had no respect for impedance, voltage, wattage or amperage.  Voodoo bullshit.  When the woofers in the NS10’s were toast, I muted the console, pushed the kick drum fader all the way up, cranked the line amp, twisted fifty hertz all the way to the right, master buss fader and console gain on overdrive and flicked the output toggles open.  Turned down the lights, started the multitrack and watched the little fuckers cough sparks.  Called the techs for a swap.  Learned that from the Kill Bennedy.  Seems like it was always Mad Dog Mannon who showed up with a fresh pair.

He looked at me funny for a decade.  Fuck you Mannon, I always liked you.

By the time I was done, that whole nine to five thing meant dick to me and eventually, I meant dick to management.

I was pushing other people out of the way.  Merely a way of life in a high pressure, high stakes environment.  Borja, Bogosian and a sweet man named Steve Smith who always wore a suit because he was engineering at A&M yet still honked a fatty from his endless briefcase supply. They all would see their gigs dwindle because of my ambition.  These men all taught me well and as importantly treated me in a way that was far more humane and kind than I was used to.  Good men.  I did blow with Borja in the gardens of Yamashiro and Mr. Smith always got me high while I drove him home.  Bogosian took me to the apartments of strange women during the riots and I always got laid.

Good men that I owe thanks to.  Before it was done, each knew they could trust me should they need to step away from the session.  I engineered completely for each of them before it was over.

I became better than them.  I did, no shit.

Inside of eighteen months, I’d taken over the bulk of the A&R departments business, drawing salary and benefits from the studio, between $25 and $35 an hour from the record company and vacuuming the best training any aspiring engineer could possibly hope for.  Most studios weren’t anything like A&M but many were like Studio C.  A new band every week or sometimes every few days for what felt like a forever paradise.

I ate, drank and slept it.

Along with my partner Alex Reed and a few complicit A&R guys, we’d eventually come to control the Studio C schedule for years.

Golden and ripe.

Once I’d figured this out and began to be able to make things sound like they did in my head,  the whole paradigm changed.

I went to town.

We started making records.  No one but Alex and I saw it coming.  Every band we recorded, we saw as a body of work with at least one one radio single.  I recorded and mixed a band named Wink, Michael Lockwood was the guitar player.  He now plays for Aimee Mann and functions as her musical director.  Back then, the singer named Roxy, did a head stand in the ice chest and the band paid me with a brand new pair of sixteen hole oxblood Doc Martins.  I have a Polaroid.  I still have those boots and I wore them on every record I ever made.  A plexiglass drumkit I barely got a handle on, good God it was hard to contain, a genius and kind guitar player, and a junkie singer.  I think we did a seven inch vinyl single and that would be my first produced, recorded and mixed by.

It sounded awful.

Thank you Michael Lockwood.

I kept at it.  I could hear it in my head.  It didn’t take long for me to hear and understand what the engineers I assisted were doing wrong.  I could hear it in my head.  Competent engineers.  More than a modicum of skill.  But they just didn’t get it.  They’d turn it up and make the paper NS10 woofers dance but that was easy.  Make ’em dance with clarity, thump chunk and chaos how you mean and then we can have lunch.  No shit.  That’s what is.  Sorry, but that’s what I did because I heard it in my head.

I figured it out and Alex Reed came along because he was way far from stupid and he knew I needed him as much as I was gonna need anybody.

Alex became my assistant one summer and he asked me to help him with an actual record he intended to make with friends of his from Berkley.  I’m not sure how much I contributed because I was suffering the slings and arrows of being a professional assistant engineer at that point and I really lacked both courage and conviction.  I was more than a little spent and beaten.

I ended up getting drunk a lot and trying to teach him to engineer.  To his credit, a fine record was made.  It was to be the first for both of us.  A band called Love Nest.  A very cool quirky record.  I still like it very much.

The truth is, Al thought I was the biggest most arrogant prick he’d ever met.  It’s true, he didn’t like me at all.  Ironically, we share the same birthday but we are about as different as the sun and the moon.  He was painfully bright, knowledgeable and both subtle and diplomatic.  I was loud and forceful.  He taught me far more than I ever taught him and he learned what I had to offer at a pace that humbled me.  I miss him.  We talk, but not often enough.  Music was our bond, we are otherwise different.  Almost entirely.

I have still, as much respect for him as anyone I ever met.  Alex Reed is is an example to me.  His mother passed while we were working together.  The very first time I was called upon to produce, record and mix a record, I said yes knowing Alex would agree to be there with me.  We made records together and you just can’t know what that’s like unless you’ve done it.  We slept in bedrooms, shitholes and fleabag motels.  We were more than the sum of our parts.  We did four times as much musical good together as we could have done by ourselves.  God love you Al.  I trust you are well.  We did the best we could.

Drinks for my friends.

The far right neocons persist in marginalizing themselves with hate and irrationality, taking with them the entire GOP, Christians, evangelicals, conservatives and moderates.  It’s a spectacle.  A spectacular one.  One buoyed exclusively by vituperative vitriolic invective vehemence.  Pardon me but brainspank literally loves alliteration and it just happens to be entirely true.

I’m trying to tell you it lacks substance entirely.

They’ve abandoned facts and reason completely for fear, anger and hatred.

Republicans used to be wrong, not unreasonably stupid.  Not so unapologetically obtuse.

Misguided perhaps but not insane.

What the fuck happened?  Whatever it was, it took place on my generation’s watch.  The elephantine have always been more racist, a little more greedy, a little too covetous of power and influence, a little too hypocritically pious and a little too lacking in compassion for the plight of the average American. That at least has been my perception.

Over the last two decades however, they’ve morphed into the political equivalent of little Regan from The Exorcist.  Pun firmly and resolutely intended.  Nasty, pea soup projectile vomiting, head spinning, cartoon effigies. When called on their bullshit, they hide behind an ugly wrongheaded nationalism thinly disguised as patriotism.  Naked ugly jingoism.  Ironic the “isms” they so casually toss at the rest of us.

They leave scales like fish wherever they go.  It’s true.

My generation has witnessed the emergence and fortuitous exorbitance of such profound and disgusting dicktards as Ann Coulter, Rush Limbaugh, Bill O’Reilly, Glenn Beck  and Sean Hannity.  Elected representatives like Santorum, Ensign, DeLay, Palin, Dumbya, Grassley, Bachmann, Cantor, Gingrich, Joe Wilson and John Boehner.   Birthers, Deathers, Teabaggers, Tenthers and Twelvers.  Michael Steele, Joe The Plumber, Dick Cheney and Fox fucking news.  Each and every one on this incomplete list of a uniquely American cavalcade of contretemps is a lying, obfuscating, shamelessly and hypocritically unpatriotic goddamn piece of shit.

And they all represent the contemporary conservative movement.  Bear with me, I’m getting at something here.

Worthless, toxic, poisonous entities.  Zero contribution to constructive public discourse.  Absent everything save prurience and avarice.  Giant boulders of sand in a smallish tub of Vaseline.  Kidney stones the size of a thumb in an already inflamed urinal tract.  Ugly and dumb.

Soon, they’ll disavow being mammals.

Take for example the rhetoric over the Nobel.

Some dickhead from Fox, Brian Kilmeade, wonders aloud whether Obama delayed the decision on troop deployment in Afghanistan to better his chances for the Nobel.

The Human Shitsmear announces that the “Nobel Gang have just suicide bombed themselves”.

Some asshat from Redstate said it was part of an “affirmative action quota”.

Glenn Beck thinks the Teabaggers deserve it more.

And The Human Shitsmear says “Something has happened here that we all agree with the Taliban and Iran about and that is he doesn’t deserve the award.”

Curiouser and curiouser.  Crazier and crazier.  From shrill and scary, to gangs of banshees on meth.

Thus they further isolate themselves and alienate the humane and honest.  As their bubble shrinks, it’s skin grows thicker.  They hear and see less and less of the real world.  Their shared view, ever more myopic.  They inhabit more and more the CAVE dweller acronym.   To wit: citizens against virtually everything.  Get it?

I could spend all day providing egregious example after outrageous foray into overt racism, lies, baseless smears, deliberate distortions, hypocrisy, mean spirited interpretations………but see, I already have.  I have been for years.  I’m not alone.  Not by far.  They are so very afraid and fear is a great force multiplier.

It’s a fact that the number of Americans who identify themselves as Republican is way down and there’s no end to that atrophy in sight.  Disdain for for their lies and misrepresentations grow.  The last two election cycles have borne this out.  Yet The Human Shitsmear still has about 20 million listeners and Fox yet enjoys better than twice the audience of CNN and MSNBC combined.  I can’t help but be ecstatic about the their self perpetuating and therefore self defeating dynamic, but they stall manage to kick a lot of balls and infect substantial consciousness on the way down.

I believe at least 25% of any given population is incorrigibly stupid.  Roughly the number that still supported Nixon.  Roughly the number that still supports Bush.  It’s a fact.  Show me what you’re workin’ with.

Ah but:

“The White House’s battle with Fox News reached a new high on Sunday, when Communications Director Anita Dunn went on national television to blast Fox as a partisan organization that functions as an appendage to the Republican Party.

“Fox News often operates almost as either the research arm or the communications arm of the Republican Party,” Dunn told CNN, adding, “let’s not pretend [Fox is] a news organization like CNN is.” Dunn also took her beef to The New York Times, saying in a Sunday interview that Fox is “undertaking a war against Barack Obama and the White House [and] we don’t need to pretend that this is the way that legitimate news organizations behave.” -The Nation

Fuckin’ A.

There are those who would say, among them David Gergen of CNN, that the administration can neither afford to engage the FOX network in the context of so many larger issues at hand, and that it is somehow unseemly or inappropriate.

I admit I understand, and even feel that on certain levels, but still I have to call bullshit on it.  This ain’t your dad’s TV News.  There are no rules, no decorum, it’s all changed and these guys are assholes.  They have no integrity, they’re in it for the money and they won’t quit until it stops paying.  Reptiles pure and plain.  They all spend time on a warm rock every day.

Never has a President been so embattled with zero emphasis on policy, ever.  They never ever even bother to introduce or even recognize actual stated, written positions or policies ever.  Ever.  FOX news and it’s cadre of asshole spokesholes is the worst example of journalism in this or any other civilized country.  They are the suicide bombers of the American Media.  They would never die for their beliefs but they willingly fall on swords of stupidity and blow themselves up with combustible bigotry all day long.  The key difference between them and the real thing is the lack of integrity and courage.  Truth and honesty.  The ‘real thing’ being fanatics with the twisted courage of conviction and journalists with truth as their ideal.  FOX falls no where in between even those two extremes.  At the end of the day, they sacrifice their dignity and self respect.  They wake every morning fresh, to plunge into ignorance, reckless hostility and enmity and lie after fucking lie after fucking lie.

For nothing but the filthy lucre.

I’m completely aware of the potential consequence (s) a protracted street brawl between the White House and an entity like FOX and I am fully in favor of this administration taking them on and cleaning their clock.  When they do their damndest to lie, call them on their irresponsible and misleading shit.  You think the brain trust at FOX can even approach the level of intelligence, wit and wisdom in the White House?  Me either.  It’s not like it will be heavy lifting or time consuming.

I know full well that there are way bigger fish to fry but this has a strategic component to it too.  Although the mouth breathers are a minority, they are a sizable and vocal one, and the most obvious and singular ringmaster is…….well, the Cartoon Network and then FOX.

Again, this ain’t your dad’s TV News.

“This ain`t no party, this ain`t no disco, this ain`t no fooling around
No time for dancing, or lovey dovey, I ain`t got time for that now”  -The Talking Heads

I believe it to be an absolute imperative of cunning and tactics.  Bring it.  And just maybe, for once, the Democrats will be seen to have a spine and a pair of testicles.  Wouldn’t that be cool?  Like punching the bully in the mouth so hard he falls down in front of the bus and the Democrats just once, walk up the steps breathing steam, proud and righteous.

That’s what I’m talking about.

Drinks for my friends.

 

 

 

 

The President of The United States of America was awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace today.

Wow.

“By awarding you its most prestigious prize, the Committee is rewarding your determined commitment to human rights, justice and spreading peace across the world, in accordance with the will of its founder Alfred Nobel. It also does justice to your vision of tolerance and dialogue between States, cultures and civilizations.  Finally, it sets the seal on America’s return to the heart of all the world’s peoples.” -Nicolas Sarkozy

Nice.

Obama himself admitted to not being certain he deserved the honor and saw it as less of a tribute than a call to action.  I can’t help but admire his lack of pretentiousness.  He is serious and sincere and if they would just let him do what we elected him to do.  What he came to do.  It is so painful to watch, overt cockblocking every time he puts a foot forward.  Nasty, senseless, painfully obvious obstruction for the sake thereof instead of reason or logic or common fucking sense.

It is clear to me that the Nobel committee intended to send the message that it liked the talk, but eagerly anticipated and encouraged the walk.  I’m confident that about sums it up.  There is no mystery here.  They realize the potential power for good America holds in her fists and understand that we now have a leader of the caliber, intellect and compassion to loosen those fists into hands for helping and shaping and lifting.

Seems as though we’re always at a crossroads, a critical juncture.  This President presides over the most persistently precarious positions and potential shifts of paradigm of any President in my lifetime at least.  The ill conceived placement of a single toe, and we stare nuclear holocaust, collapse of the world economy, famine and pestilence in a face so proximate, it’s collective exhale will wither the young, the infirm and most of the worlds crops.

Understand we flirt with disaster by the hour.

Most Hostess and Armour products will endure.  I think I’ll bury some to be safe.  Oh, and some Ramen.  There’s always a silver lining.  Something to snack on while we rot will mitigate the circumstances somewhat.  I’m hoping for blankets and comics until we liquify or sublimate to gaseousness.

Our man literally has the weight of the world on his shoulders.  He bears it, along with the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, with grace, dignity and humility.  What’s in play here is not just mutually assured destruction, but racism and bigotry and people with rotting teeth because they don’t eat their vegetables or brush their teeth or read the goddamn paper.

I am proud.  I am firmly of the belief that what stands between Obama, the American people and true, legitimate meaningful progress towards peace, justice and equity, is fear, ignorance, racism and stupidity so bold and heedless as to be unable to define itself, it’s reasons or it’s intentions.  These people are fucking nuts.

Our President received the Nobel Prize for Peace today.  The world roots for us and him.  After the eight years long nightmare we visited on the world by either endorsing or acquiescing to the Dick-in-Bush antipathy and odium for the rest of the globe, the civilized nations are looking to us and hoping, praying, that we will turn the destructive behemoth around.

That’s what this means.  This is what they’re asking us to do.  It’s why they did it.  Don’t be stupid.

It was no phantasm.  It was real and horrible and what it wrought will take decades to repair.  So western civilization is asking, beseeching us, to get back in the game of righting things as opposed to ignoring or tearing them apart.  We are all human.  Humanity is both our lowest and highest common denominator.  Above and beyond country, ethnicity, religious provocation or social and ethical imperatives, we are all the same species.  We are humans.  We are people.  All of us bleed, most of us love.

Still, people don’t or refuse to understand the import of such a momentous occurrence.

“It is unfortunate that the president’s star power has outshined tireless advocates who have made real achievements working towards peace and human rights.’’ -RNC chair Michael Steele

Like who fuckhead?  Rush “The Human Shitsmear” Limbaugh?  Michele Bachmann?  Ann Coulter?  Hannity?  John Boehner?  Joe Wilson?  Cornyn?  Cheney?  Rove?  Hatch?  Rumsfeld?  Condi Rice?  Palin?

Oh, the list is sooooo much longer.  More than a gutter, more than a ditch.  A landfill littered with losers just like you.  Guilty and stupid.

Not exactly a roster of live and let live, compassion or peace, love and understanding.  Fuck you Michael Steele you ignorant, sycophantic, Uncle Tom piece of shit.  What we have here is a very good day for America and whomever pulls your strings is more sad and pathetic than even you.  You suck as a human being and a puppet.  How do you and yours sleep?

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.

The talking heads were hard at it yesterday, pontificating on how Obama has yet to accomplish anything.  This pisses me off for a number of reasons.  Dumbya accomplished nothing good for the average middle class American in his entire eight years.  All he did was consistently kick the feet out from under them.  With the palm of his hand, he held skulls against any given surface and visited violent intercourse upon them dispassionately, save some boyish cowboy glee, from behind.

Primeval.

Archaic.

Yup, in the ass.  Clearing brush and evildoers.  Smokin’ em out.  Fucking retard.

He smirked and smiled all Alfred E. Newman, chuckled and believed his retardedness to be anointed, appointed and ‘special’, to carry out such an awful and dastardly thing.  God made him do it, as opposed to Cheney and the PNACs I guess.

I beg to differ.

The quintessential violent and clueless bully who turns out not to be so bad when it’s over.  Except he’s dumb as a stick.

Oh, and President.  Elected twice and all.  By us and and all.  Without prejudice and presence of mind and all.  I mean President of the US of A.  Dumb as a goddamn branch floating in a polluted river.

And all.

The clusterfuck that Obama inherited is arguably the worst any president has ever walked into.  The blind partisan obstruction by Republicans is easily the most egregious in our history.

A wounded cur, sits and drools increasingly intrepid and malignant.  Snarling and snotty and shrinking.

Still, she keeps barking and smacking.  Protesting everything that moves.  She just can’t stand anything that moves.  Anything that moves.  Oh, she can’t tolerate it.  Kill it, she thinks, the vicious bitch canine trained to hate toddlers and grandmas and the disabled.

You know, not since FDR has any president walked into such a shitstorm.

Bear with me as this is entirely different, from FDR, or any other presidency ever.  Waaay different.

Needless to say, FDR strode bravely into the worst of modern times.   Still, he enjoyed near total congressional cooperation.  At least to begin with.  All on the same page, all willing to advance what needed to be done.  Patriotism over partisanship.  Few questions asked.  Get this shit done.  It was bad and in need of immediate repair.  What follows is the golden phrase.

They worked together for the benefit of us all.

Our man faces the extreme opposite while enduring the same environment and circumstances.  No cooperation.  A stark and ugly deficit of good will.  Twice as hard and he’s black.  So six times as hard.  This man is hoping for eight years and despite my lack of religion, God love him, his family and all of their souls. Godspeed, good luck and pancakes with peanut butter and syrup for each of their souls.

I say to you, you fucking go.  You charge ahead and do as much damage and make as much difference as you can.  Bring it.  Show us your courage and we will fly your flag.  I care less that you are our first black President than I do that you are MY first inspirational one.  You speak to me and to we and it really could be you and me together.  You may stumble, but as long as you get up, we will will be behind you.  At your back.  Wanting and hoping for the the same things.

Bring it and we will stay.  I will.  I will, you are stuck with me.

Fury, hatred and racism have once again become the dubious hallmark of the far right Christian wingnuts and an alarmingly malignant  component of the generic conservatives and workaday GOP.  The likes of Limbaugh and Hannity are so emboldened they simply lie these days.  By what?  Where does the courage come from?  Why?  Where do these fucks get off?

The public option has not the support of the majority they screech, it’s a government take over they wail.  I watched Cornyn puke it up yesterday morning.  He was lying.  They lie.  Over and over, again and again, on national television or whatever venue they happen to ass warm a seat in.  The money for their re-election is a greasy pizza with shitty crust but plenty of cash cooked and delivered by the folks who own and control over 16 percent of our entire GDP.

Let me tell you something.  Americans are goddamn dumb.  Gullible.

You losers who eat this shit should be ashamed.  Show up at the 7-11 after dark for your beef jerky and canned meat.  Slim Jims and greasy food for dipshits and protein starved mouthbreathers.  Watch your Springer and listen to your Hannity while you drive around in your ridiculous trucks feeling your genitalia are somehow more special than they should be.

Over two thirds of adult Americans want and wish for a public option.  I don’t believe a president has ever been elected with as vastly voluminous a majority as the one in favor of a simple public option right now and today.  It’s what we want.  It’s so simple.  But this is your government at work and it’s disgusting.  One of the biggest businesses in the history of man.  The precise and exact opposite is the truth and they know it as well as I and as well you should if you can afford to pay any attention at all.  Without shame or conscience they just throw tires on the fire, so everyone can see the thick toxic smoke.  Lie and lie, because that’s what they’re paid to perpetuate.  No different than your bought and paid for Congresspersons and Senators.

If we do not get this, it will not be ok.

I’m really not holding my breath because the Democrats have been nothing but a lesson in how to suck so far without regard to future endeavors at all.  Oh well.  I’m a little drunk.  Yer mama.

Drinks for my friends.

Obama wasn’t able to score the economic boon that would have been the Olympics in Chicago.  I kinda assumed it was close to a done deal and he was going there to seal said deal.  Turns out it was the opposite.  Turns out that’s why he showed, to try and save it.  This is our President and it’s why he’s our President.  The shining American city of Chicago placed dead last.  Sucks don’t it?  Not just because of the potential jobs and renewed  dignity on the world stage, but because of the mill grist his unsuccessful sprint to Copenhagen will avail itself of; we’re off to disingenuous right wing shovelry again.

They wasted not a second.  I listened to Hannity and the Human Shitsmear yesterday morning and they were having a field day.  Extended recess and shitty pizza for the retards.  Toxic glee. They pretend not to be cognizant of the guaranteed monetary benefits to be reaped.  They posture as though it were warrantless hubris.  They carry on exploiting the stupid and making a killing on the backs of the ignorant.  As shameless and vulgar a debacle as I ever have borne witness to.

That’s not entirely true, they’ve done so much worse.

Still, this sucks.

He tried.

I’m not about to say he fucked up.  He didn’t.  He did the right thing.  It was important.  It would have been instant jobs.  Enough to eclipse the current losses for months.  It is why he was there.  He understood it be an opportunity to salve his country’s considerable wounds.  Deep lacerations courting infection that he discovered only after walking in.

The irony is that it has more to do with the leadership for the previous eight years than anything else.  It was Dick-in-Bush that raped the pooch.  Our system for awarding visas is archaic and that is the least of it.   Whenever former leadership took a step, it was bad and stupid.  Unilateral wars and severely mitigating civil rights and ignoring laws both domestic and international for reasons unsound and flat out made up.  No wonder the world thinks we’re shit and I can’t blame them.  It isn’t Obama’s fault that everyone now knows we’re dicks.

Yet, everybody knows.

Can you say conventional wisdom?

Zeitgeist?

I could not and do not blame them.  We’ve been the biggest assholes on the planet for almost a decade now.  I’m sick of America and I live here.

I simply must be unpatriotic.  Un-American.  According to all the jingoistic rounheaded fucktards.

I pride myself on being well informed.  I am well informed.  I’m as certain of this as I am of adoring  large breasts.  Boobs.  Knockers.  Huge scoops of flesh and the sigh of brainrot.

Oh Lord, don’t strike me down.

Once again, our man’s biggest problem is the one who came before him.  Handicapped by the mentally handicapped.

The mess he inherited is more copiously voluminous, egregious and self inflicted than any man before him in recorded history.

Obama walked willingly into a shitstorm.

Remind yourself of that.  Often.

He knew.

George W. Bush wasn’t evil, just breathtakingly stupid, though everyone around him manifested inky terrifying darkness of a magnitude beyond 8.9 on the Richter-O’-graph.  This here is a mere symptom, a flesh wound requiring a band aid in the scheme of damage done and waste laid.  Obama is no ordinary President but I’m hear to tell you, and I endeavor to make it clear, that his circumstances may just be as extraordinary as the birth of this nation and the attendant violence that ensued.

I fear the violence that has yet to come.  I fear it because I know it’s coming.  I fear it’s inevitability and the uncertainty of how it will most certainly emerge.  The Rednecks Cometh.

They just can’t stand that a nigger and his wife sleep between the crisp white sheets in the White House.  An affront to their sensibilities.  So much so that they attack every common sense thing he does.  Maneuvers and criticisms are ugly and transparent.  Senseless and obvious.  Plain, overt, and embarrassing for the rest of us.

Were he to walk on water they would whine about his inability to swim.

I stole that but it’s completely true.

I think we should suspend the sale of Happy Meals.  Prizes in cereal boxes are shit these days so I’m not overly concerned there.  While we’re at it, Crackerjack treasure is shite too, so you know, whatever.  We have nothing to celebrate until Halloween, Thanksgiving and Christmas.  Those holidays are stained with dubiousness too.  We are so hopelessly flawed.

The most racist among us protest so vehemently that they are not, while they are nothing but.

We’ve got no reason to be happy about a goddamn thing.  Our tits are in a ringer.

This shit is way fucked up.

Drinks for my friends.

My father would say ” I don’t understand all I know about that.”

Me too, or me either.

How is it asshats like Boehner and Bachmann, Cantor, Beckerhead, Limbaugh and Hannity can be comfortable in their own skin inveighing against Obama for spending eighteen hours in Copenhagen, lobbying to bring the Olympics to Chicago in 2016?  If he’s successful, it will bring hundreds of thousands of jobs and billions of dollars to the beleaguered city starting the day after next.  They all know this, yet they pretend not too, hoping we won’t know the difference.  Understanding that the people who listen to them exclusively don’t want to know.

Preaching to and preying on the idiots.  How do they sleep?  With a diaper I’m sure.

They understand that’s why he’s doing it.  It’s a chance at a tourniquet and maybe the saviour for an opposable thumb or at least a pinkie toe.

There is no downside for the great unwashed.  As MSNBC pointed out this evening, Dumbya spent the better part of a week on photo ops and ass slapping in China as an embarrassing spectator.  This cartoonery, while embroiled in two worsening wars and seismic rumblings foreboding an impending economic apocalypse.  He spent a third of one of the most disastrous periods in American history on vacation clearing fucking brush on his own stupid ranch.  It was cool, Dick was in charge.  Bush vs. brush for well over a quarter of the entire time.

“Let’s have a non-alcoholic beverage, some chips and watch this here football contest.  Watch I don’t choke and nevermind that daily brief about imminent terrorist attacks.  Hell, I’m the President, have a  real beer.  You like deviled eggs?  Goddamn, I do.  We got whiskey here somewhere.  Sombitch.”

Obama takes a week in the Hamptons and they behave like he’s ignoring Armageddon.

It may have been Michele Obama who said something like, if he walked on water they’d say he can’t swim.  Yup.

You may get away with accusing him of spreading too thin but you can’t accuse him of not working his ass off for us.

I really need to keep this short, I’ve got plenty else going on, but goddamn it’s hard to watch.  As far as I can see, this man is killing himself, working very hard and with beyond ordinate, point blank results.  Iran agrees to let UN inspectors inside in a matter of weeks and publicly states a willingness to entertain outsourcing nuclear fuel enrichment.  That could mean never having enough on hand to build a bomb and never having to say you’re sorry.

That’s just this week.

That’s fucking huge but we complain or worry about his briefest of sojourns in Denmark.

Biden’s got a jacked up lid but I’m fine with him having the conch.  He’s a loose lipped cashier but I trust him.  I own what it is to have an unruly wig and loose lips.

Health care reform is steaming down the mountain and I for one am cautiously optimistic.  On this alone is far further than any President has ever come.  He plays it cagey but he’s too smart to not know what he’s doing.  He may be wrong but don’t think he doesn’t have a plan.

Get the fuck off him you shameless mouthbreathers.

Drinks for my friends.

Did ya guess I’m furious?

Where exactly does the rub lie you ask?

I’m a little at a loss for words here.  Don’t worry, it won’t last.

Heh.

It’s just that this is so important.  In a country as wealthy as ours, health care is not a privilege, it’s a right.  Fuck me, every living being deserves it.  How embarrassing that far poorer nations are getting it?  Until we can make it available to us and for us equitably and fairly, how can we even advocate for it with a straight face for anyone else?  It’s moral and ethical and shouldn’t be political but it is and that’s just ugly.  Fucking disgusting.  The very idea that it’s being debated in our corridors of power just confounds me.  We have the money and the resources and everyone wants it.

We stood up against the Nazis and humiliated Japan.

For this most humane of causes, we battle our own.  We fight those elected by us to advance our very best ideas, interests and needs.  The fight for what we deserve is with our own alleged democracy.  They mock us by allowing it to even be a contest.  What is right is clear.  What we expect is obvious.  Why they represent us is clear.  What we want is clear and still, the outcome is in question.

You inglorious fucking bastards.

Ahem.

We’re talking about the public option amendments proposed by Chuck Schumer and J. Rockefeller today before the Senate Finance Committee in the precipitously spectator friendly fight for health care reform.  Note to elected reps, you’re being watched.

Okay, I understand this is the first authentic punch in this fight.  I’m well aware that it was meant to be ceremonial; a shot across the bow if you will.  Schumer and Rockefeller admitted as much.  Both amendments pretty much went down in flames.  The reckonings were 15 opposed to 8 and 13 opposed to 10.  Chuck was all smiles for the post game, saying that they did better than he’d anticipated and momentum is building.  I’m a little lukewarm on Schumer but I admit to having a soft spot for him.  His assessment is likely more cogent and certainly better informed than mine.

Pisses me off when he defends Baucus though.  Shumer wishes they weren’t running those ads.  Buacus is a pawn and an officious prick.  He deserves it and we’ll be talking about it here in a minute.

Here’s what chaps my ass.  Max, four million bucks in campaign contributions from big pharma and big insurance, Baucus.  After a suspiciously protracted process of negotiation, Baucus puked up a bill so lame, so transparently in favor of not just maintaining the status quo but adding bulkhead after bulkhead to protect and enrich insurance companies at the expense of the common American,  I’m simply in awe anyone in what was once the world’s greatest deliberative body can pretend to take him seriously.

I harbor dark oozing contempt for this man.

Let me give you an example.  His bill mandates that every American, regardless of income level, purchase health insurance.  Any American citizen who does not not purchase health insurance would be subject to a fine.  Either way, whether an individual buys in or not, monies for premiums or penalties for not buying in, go directly to health insurance corporations.  No reach around, just straight up cash.  All it does is give access to the money of the forty or fifty million uninsured to the insurance industry they haven’t otherwise been able to get their hands on.  Needless to say, without a public option to foment reasonable competition for rates and service, his bill is nothing less than a totalitarian dictate to further enrich an industry that has been ripping off the average American for decades.

Max Baucus really sucks.

Max tells us today on national television that his job is to deliver a bill that will garner sixty votes on the floor of the Senate.  Bullshit.  Where is that written?  Where does it say that his job as chairman of the Senate Finance Committee is to do anything but deliver a fair and equitable bill in the best interest of his constituents and as committee chair, a bill that reflects the will of 65% of the American people?  Just what is with this sixty fucking votes thing?  It’s absurd.  It takes fifty one votes to pass a bill.  Sixty votes guarantees cloture and therefore prevents filibuster.  But it only takes fifty one votes to pass a goddamn bill and there are sixty of you spineless bastards.

The Democrats are so terrified of fillibuster they won’t bust a move without being able to prevent it?  So what?  Make the filthy Republicans actually filibuster.  Bring some sandwiches a cot and a laptop loaded with porn.  Have your aides set up a tent if you need to spank it.  Pretend you’re at the DMV.  Outlast them if it’s something you believe in and it’s the right thing for the American people.  You ARE the majority you know.  This is a walk in the park.

Why, why, why do the Democrats insist on being such pussies?  I’ll tell you why.  Because so many of them just as shamelessly beholding to the same forces as Baucus.

Procedurally, if Democrats stand together, they have enough votes to prevent filibuster on specific amendments.  What is the goddamn problem?  This is doable.  We have a majority in congress because the people have spoken.  65% of Americans favor a public option.  Between the congressional majority and the overwhelming majority on the part of the electorate, we have what I like to think of as a motherfucking mandate.

Fer fuck’s sake, do the math you retards.

It’s no secret that during the last decade profits have rocketed towards what Baucus and friends intend to be an apogee, while service, care and the number meaningfully insured has cratered below sea level.  Absolute power corrupts absolutely and dickheads like Baucus don’t give a mad fuck about being re-elected because his next gig will be with the very cabal of ruthless, greedy swine he’s now representing instead of the interests of the people who elected him.  The same can be and is said by me for Kent Conrad, Blanche Lincoln, Bill Nelson and Tom Carper.  Spineless, greedy sycophants all of them.

Cowardly inchoate vaginas that are looking forward the next cush gig.  Man, I hate these guys.

There is nothing wrong with prostitution as far I’m concerned.  It’s a contract, a transaction between two consenting parties.  You want to fuck for money?  Have at it.  Baucus however, is a filthy, disease ridden whore.  His entire reason is to let someone else screw you without your consent and get paid by them and you simultaneously.  He wouldn’t do it if it hadn’t worked so far.  How’s that make you feel?

Sucker.

He thinks you’re stupid.  He underestimates you.

Maybe.

Sucker.

Like I said in my last blog, shave a few points off defense spending, end the reprehensible, ineffective and exorbitant War On Drugs  and we’ll be swimming in cash.  Health care will be an “oh yeah, let’s do that” kinda type a deal.  Free cable and comic books for everyone.  The return of $4.99 buffets and all you can eat breakfasts.  We’ve got plenty of money, we’re just really stupid.

Sucker.

And for the record, fuck Roman Polanski.  He gave drugs and alcohol to a thirteen year old girl and raped her.  If I believed in hell, I’d advocate for him to roast on a spit there.  Guess I’ll have to settle for throwing the prick bastard in prison, introducing him to Big Jim Slade and tossing the key.

If more Americans believe in UFOs than oppose a public option, where does that leave me?

Drinks for my friends.

My mom is  so goddamn cute.  I spend afternoons at the hospital and she takes over in the evening through morning unless my sister can give her a night off.  Every night I come home and she’s packaged the breakfast for Billy Jean the Tripod Lab in a Ziploc baggy and left it on the kitchen table, the closest elevated surface to the actual dog dish outside.  I doubt she suspects I’d neglect to feed her but my mother is nothing if not thorough and organized.

I’ve been trying to leave the bag handy so she reuses it.

Let’s talk about Pot and it’s most auspiciously efficacious cousin, Hemp.

I assume you know that I’m a frequent imbiber and would go so far as to champion the Buddha as valuable if not imperative component of my creative process.  After all, every record I ever made I did so completely sober, under the influence of nothing more than coffee or deep fried fish sandwiches.  I like to get baked and write though.

This is not necessarily an issue of freedom of expression or needless and ultimately deleterious persecution or even the man keeping us down.  Well, it’s all those things, but it’s not my intention to bring them things to the forefront.  I hope to make you see, the issue is bigger than that.  Those are symptoms.  Side effects of the “War On Drugs”.  At the end of the day, it is an environmental, economic, health care and human rights issue.

Treatment for these symptoms, requisitely including a more equitable application of jurisprudence, would represent a sizable chunk from the asses of industries pharma, oil, timber and big stupid self righteous neoconservatives and right wing Christian zealots who seek to expunge mankind’s historical quest to self medicate.  This has been going on for as long history has been written.  The self medication bit I mean.

You may or may not be aware that this country incarcerates more people per capita than any other country on this planet.  States are going broke and one of the most insidious determinants is draconian state and federal drug laws.  States, municipalities and local elected officials are beginning to understand that the detention of non violent drug offenders is less than congruent with their fiduciary obligation to tax paying citizens.

It’s a useless mess.  A clusterfuck without moral, ethical or practical imperative.  The entire effort, from imprisonment to blowback and all the bureaucratic minutia in between costs us tens of billions a year.  Probably as much as fifty billion annually.  End it all, shave a few more points off defense spending and hello health care.  No more taxes worth contemplating.

Fuck me and you.  Seriously, fuck us.

Never has their been so wealthy a nation with such fucked up priorities.  We are a continent of jackasses.

What it is, is bullshit.  In 2008, total arrests for possession and or intent to distribute marijuana totaled 847,863, more than twice what they were in 1980.  Total violent crime arrests for the same year totaled 594,911, up only 7.98% from 1980.  One simple statistic speaks volumes about our priorities.  Pretty fucked up when you consider they’re not hurting anybody.

Some more simple truths about pot: Well over 40% percent of us have done it and no one has ever, ever died from it.  Ever.  Well over half a million a year die from abuse of perfectly legal drugs.  About 20,000 expire prematurely from illegal drugs.  People who smoke pot don’t beat their spouses, start fights in bars or knock over liquor stores to support their habit.  Regular marijuana use is no way linked to a propensity for schizophrenia.  Marijuana smoke is no where near as damaging to the lungs as is tobacco.  There are at least as many arguments to be made for the beneficial effects of marijuana on the brain as to the contrary; evidence shows that it may even mitigate the negative effects of binge drinking regarding oxidative stress or excitotoxic cell death.  Have some martinis and pack a bowl, I say.  Just because you smoke pot, doesn’t mean their exists any greater likelihood you’ll become a junkie, a blow hound or a crack whore.  Pot is a terminus as opposed to a gateway drug despite the disingenuous propaganda we are so often forced to gag on .  Anti-marijuana ads foisted by the government only encourage minors to do bong rips and at some two billion bucks, we’re looking at another huge waste of time and money.

I really need some pot.

I’m of the opinion that it would be far more pragmatic to tax and regulate, if only to keep the Devil’s foliage out of the hands of minors.

Money is being made, but it benefits none of us directly with the exception of employment in the prison facilities and therefore the communities where they exist.  See, who knows the cost in broken homes, families and lives?  Who can guess at the damage done to society?  No one knows how unfairly it’s been used as a tool against minorities.  That it has been, is not in dispute.

I’ll tell you one thing for sure, non violent drug offenders may go to prison relatively innocent, but they emerge as criminals.  Tens of thousands every year.  Their future’s so bright………

No single aspect of the “War On Drugs” can be demonstrated as successful.  It’s an egregiously expensive, colossal failure.  Nothing has been accomplished, save making matters much, much worse.  Anyone looking for an example of government failing the people, need look no further than the “War on Drugs”.

We figured out as a nation as early as 1933, collectively, that prohibition of alcohol was a spectacularly dumb idea.  It gave rise to organized crime and people poisoning themselves with bathtub gin.  Why then, do we still fail to recognize the damage wrought on society by prohibiting any and all other substances that have at least as storied a history as alcohol?  The answer here is the Daily Double.  The answer here is money and power.

A  simple corollary.  Cause and effect.

In the early part of the twentieth century there were two very powerful men.  Two very powerful families.  Two very powerful industries.  Oil and textiles.  Petrochemical and paper, rope etc.  The “etc.” wasn’t yet a big deal, but the speculators could see that it might be.  The fusion of the two was predicted to be tremendously, obscenely, lucrative.  Technology, science and chemistry, although in infancy, was about to bust out, hire hookers and buy everyone in the know a brand new house and car.

It did.  All that and more including a delicious bag of salt and vinegar chips.  As a result of fossil products and pulp from trees, America volcanoed from the agrarian age into an industrial one and began to dominate world manufacturing of products, finance and military power.  Don’t forget the experiment of alcohol prohibition had as it’s impetus the notion that sober workers would be more productive.

That went really well.

The men were  John D. Rockefeller and William Randolph Hearst.  Magnates of oil and paper respectively.  Hemp, not marijuana, represented the single largest threat to their empires ever.  An incredible natural resource was hemp.  The strongest natural fiber known to man to this day.  Beats the shit out of nylon et al.  Makes cotton look Fisher Price.  An entire crop can be turned over in twelve to sixteen weeks.  A non flowering plant that requires no pesticides that thrives at almost any latitude and is actually good for the soil.  Anything can be fashioned from it.  Clothing, oil and fuels, paper, lotions, soaps, waterproof incredibly durable concrete, foods rich in protein and antioxidants.

Hemp remains the world’s best kept secret.  Schwarzenegger recently vetoed a bill allowing for it’s cultivation in California.  Woulda been huge.  Our best hope as the world’s fifth largest economy and this Austrian diphshit vetoes it despite it’s evil cousin being perfectly legal and everyone smoking the shit out of it in his state.  The original reason gone and he still lacks the courage to step up.  Beyond Arnold outing himself as a giant vagina, what does this tell you?

So they demonized it.  Back in the day.  They produced propagandic films depicting depraved negro jazz musicians raping white women immediately after smoking it’s demonic and potent cousin of specie, cannabis sativa.  Early model Ford’s fast motioned off roads into ditches, drivers and occupants flying like drunken acrobats in an era before seat belts.  Everyone who came in contact with it either lost their fucking minds or suffered a fate they didn’t deserve and didn’t see coming.  The aftermath of a single vintage 1920’s joint (marijuana cigarette), was littered with destruction and carnage.

No wonder post 1950’s generations came to view such nonsense as high comedy.  Then there was Manson, hippies and Vietnam.  The subsequent first cultural war in America.  A story for another day, but without those neanthropic landmines, I imagine we’d be a lot further along and better off.

If you think about it, it really was the first successful attempt to manipulate the masses in this country through an organized regimen of fear and loathing.  Unfortunately it was and has been extraordinarily successful.  How sad.  This was their prototype for what they do now every day.

I could easily make the case for the legalization of all drugs.  It’s just that I have reservations.  I’ve done just about everything under the sun including heroin and meth.  Meth can ruin a life in weeks.  It’s the worst  recreational substance I’ve ever seen.  On the other hand,  William S Bourroughs survived and thrived as an opiate junkie for fifty years or so.  I have to be honest and tell you, I don’t know where to draw the line.

The facts are exhaustive.  And the fact is, it’s patriotic to support legalization of marijuana at least.  It would do us no harm and a world of good.  Hemp too.  Let us build and rebuild using the most intelligent, efficacious and viable resource nature has ever provided.

We simply must abandon this puritanical zeitgeist.  It makes no sense, defies logic and it will be our ruin, it prevents us from all manner of practical things and exists as an excuse for spending our way into oblivion.  The traditional precepts of God and and country are archaic, obsolete and fucking absurd.  We are smarter and more practical than this.  We remain the wealthiest country in the history of mankind and stand on the verge of fucking it all up because of superstition and fear.  Enough is really enough.

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.

A composition:

The difference between Republicans and Democrats is painfully obvious.

Republicans are greedy sociopathic reptiles who don’t give a mad fuck about their constituents but love to suck corporate dick.

Democrats are spineless douchebags, who lack the courage to get down in the mud and fight for their constituents but love to suck corporate dick.

Evidence being the massive ongoing struggle for any meaningful legislation despite significant majorities enjoyed by Democrats in both houses of congress.  A pathetic, ridiculous and vulgar burlesque.  Shameful and stupid but an attestation for Democrats being far more inclined to think for themselves or someone else as opposed to conventional party wisdom or lack thereof.

All on embarrassing and inept display.

Libertarians don’t care about anything, they just want commerce to flow.  Anybody who wants to suck dick should be allowed with a particular deference to profit.

If you’ve been paying attention to the main stream media of late, you know that Republicans want to save us from socialism despite not understanding the concept, and Obama’s government lusts like a pizza faced adolescent army in neck braces or orthodontal head gear to takeover our health care so we can be killed off at their convenience.

Meanwhile, Republicans seek to kill pizza faced teenagers or adolescents in head gear for profit if possible.

Libertarians take no exception.

Responsible parents everywhere insist children wear helmets these days.

If you choose the contemporary Republican model,  you see them as unrelenting right wing, neoconservative, intolerant evangelical Christian zealots who are afraid of anything homosexual or any other religion.  You understand that they believe they know better while enduring a fusillade of common sense and science to the contrary.  Book burning and creationism and the like.

Retards at the Roundtable.  Scopes trial as blasphemy and all that.

I remember a time when what was contested was ideas, philosophy and policy.  Discourse was just that.  Polite and respectful.  It was about issues.  Then something happened.  That something was William Jefferson Clinton.  Far from perfect, but charismatic and smart as all get out.  He presided over the longest period of economic prosperity America had ever seen.  He left us with a massive surplus and a balanced budget for the first time ever.

We were cookin’.

The Republicans though, they did hate.  They began to investigate.  Afraid Bubba was Jesus, a special prosecutor named Kenn Starr was appointed to investigate Hillary’s real estate dealings while she was a member of the Rose Law Firm and they came up with dick.  Pun to be intended.  Nothing.  Sand in hand they kept on…… and discovered Bubba got a blow job and so they impeached him.  Never mind that it was none of our business.  They spent tens of millions of dollars, more than on all investigating into the events of 9/11, to shine light on a Jewish woman unable to remove a stain from a dress.

First one ever I hear.

And that is really why we are where we are.  It will all go down as the darkest and silliest period in American history.  Yet it’s sordid smell means we are less likely to forget it than UFOs, Elvis or pick a disease.  Let us hope the legacy will not be merely that of a cautionary anecdote, but rather a lesson about a forest instead of individual trees.  Otherwise, America will not be America come one hundred years from now.

Tom DeLay is on dancing with the stars and it offends me.  He’s paired with Cheryl Burke whom I think is the hottest thing since Georgia asphalt.  Goddamn, the woman is gorgeous.  Delay grins his lying rictus and looks as he has the breath of a sewer rodent.  Creepy with a ‘K’.  I really don’t like this guy and I’m a little jealous.  Never watched the show and don’t intend to but that woman is one ripe gust of feminity

Share a smoke, Make a joke
Grasp and reach for a leg of hope
Words to memorize, words hypnotize
Words make my mouth exercise.
Words all fail the magic prize
Nothing I can say when I’m in your thighs
Oh my my my my my mo my mother
I would love to love you lover  -Violent Femmes

Democrats are communist, anti constitution, caped crusaders who want to steal from anyone who has anything and give it to anyone who has nothing no matter how big of a loser the loser happens to be.  I’m not really a Democrat but I tend to identify with them and that sucks on many levels.  Giant dingbats who somehow manage to keep their self righteousness in place while failing at everything they attempt like pre-pubescent soccer players who get a trophy for simply showing up.

Democrats seem to “fail up”, almost as much as Republicans although not quite so deliberately.  Max Baucus may be shocked to see the hand entirely up his ass and into his mouth via x-ray, but John Boehner would consider it as much business as usual as his spray on tan or morning knuckle and back shave.  I fucking hate that guy.

They are different, Democrats and Republicans, but they are all still politicians.  The qualities they share are a moral and ethical bankruptcy, a willingness to feast on or make a meal out of any cock connected to money, and an instinctual fondness for anything other than the absolute truth.

This is why reasonable reform of any kind, be it health care or of industries financial or military, is in perpetual jeopardy.

Nothing can change until we have reform for our system of campaigns and polling.  Zero corporate money.  None.  Entirely financed by the electorate.  Firm start and stop dates for campaigns and equal air time for candidates.

No meaningful change before that one.

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.

I kinda like that Obama called Kanye a jackass.  Know why?  Because he is.  I like this side of him.  Obama, not the jackass.

Kinda like how he handled Joe Wilson’s retarded outburst.  Kinda like him sinking an unscripted, non-rehearsed three pointer in front of a 60 Minutes camera crew.  Kinda like his speech about Reverend Wright when everyone anticipated some sorta Mea Culpa.    He’s so fucking cool.

Wouldn’t it be the damn dickens to eavesdrop on the pillow talk between he and the first lady?  You know that would be some funny and revealing shit.  She’s hot.  A long limbed beauty with a booty.  What really informs her sexiness though, is her intelligence and subtle strength.  Michelle Obama possess a certain physical grace, but it is her emotional deftness and intellectually adroit approach, evidenced by the shine of her smile, the shimmer in her eyes and the subtle edge of her tongue.  She comports herself likes she’s been America’s first black First Lady since she was eighteen.  A beauty Queen with a big ass brain.  I adore her.

Were I Obama, I would have chased that until the road ran out too.  His wife speaks volumes about him.  Not so much because he was able to make an honest woman of her, more to do with her allowing herself to be exclusive to him forever.  He was no doubt an impressive man when they met.  A conspicuous education, but the pedigree potential of a hospital administrator or assistant DA maybe.  He wasn’t exactly presidential for reasons obvious and reasons less than.  Feel me?

I doubt that Michelle Obama is a woman who takes any shit, not from her husband and not from anyone else.

I have been impressed with her from day one.  They appear to be a gorgeous family unit.  I believe with all my fibers that we are lucky to have them in the White House.  When she said she was proud of her country for the first time, I understood exactly what she meant.  You bet.  Fuckin’ A.  Me too.  First time in a long time.

I wonder how the average American woman estimates our president’s hotness.  He’s tall and athletic, but he looks a little goofy to me.  That is until he opens his mouth.  The greatest orator of our time.  It’s not just rhythm, cadence and lilt, it’s substance and yes, soaring inspirational rhetoric.  I venture those who would despise him do so because they are confused by his charisma and threatened by his prowess.  A half African American president who embodies the antithesis of their previous stumbling and bumbling champion in every single way.

Smart, where Dumbya was well, dumb.  Articulate where Bush was um, dumb and lacked eloquence altogether.  Lucid as opposed to clueless.  In control and on the case, whereas monkey boy spent a third of his tenure on vacation, pants around his ankles, while Cheney and company did whatever the fuck they wanted.  Before, during and after every national disaster on their watch.  You, know, murder, torture, war profiteering, hurricanes, stage four financial cancer and stealing candy from babies of war veterans.

Humans with compassion and wisdom instead of a carnival of assholes.

Big stupid toast and the sigh of brainrot.  Superman vs. Karl Rove or Max Headroom.

People Magazine vs. National Geographic.

This compare and contrast is exactly why they hate him.

Politics certainly ain’t what it used to be.  I remember disagreeing on policy and issues but this game of vilifying one’s opponent with the powderless ammunition of nothing but perceived or exaggerated moral or ethical imperatives is nonsense.  It’s a cheap and tawdry counter to the people’s best interest.  There exists no legitimate place for it.  Manchildren like Beckerhead, The Human Shitsmear and Hannity propagate it for nothing other than profit.  They have no shame.

Elected officials purvey such less than fine filth without conscience or even a single eye towards consequence.  They don’t give a mad fuck what happens should we not enact  new law dealing with the inequities and egregious avarice of contemporary health care.  These people would oppose anything at any cost to defeat the magic negro, regardless of the total due to their own constituents.  They will, without reservation, break the backs of the same people who elected them, to hand our first progressive half African American President a Waterloo.

Such singleminded, disciplined adherence to demagoguery reminds me of only one modern regime.  Irony is it’s the same one they consistently and ignorantly hurl at any and all who endorse what is best for everyone including them.  It just keeps going round and round.  Where she stops, nobody knows.

It’s wearing me the fuck out.  Conventional wisdom, common sense and the responsible polls, eat me Rassmusen, tell us the majority of America is overwhelmingly in favor of what this administration attempts to advance.  It’s what we voted for.  It’s what we want.  We delivered a voluntary popular mandate.  What happened was, we espoused free will.

So they lie, they obfuscate and they conceal and confound.  And not a goddamn thing gets done because Democrats are almost as filthy and far more spineless.  Obama tells us change must happen from the top down, not the bottom up.  Ketchup little tomato.  We don’t like the way you fight.  Even democrats wonder if you’re a sissy and that’s just  an emasculation proclamation.

I guarantee you a fighting force if you just announce the charge.  What are you waiting for?  Stop fucking around with Republicans and wiping Blue Dog asses and while you’re at it tell Max Baucus to blow me.  Why aren’t you out in front proclaiming the Baucus bill is utter shite?  Why?  Kick this ludicrous circus out of town and get on with it.  You wanna be the next Jimmy Carter, with a majority in both houses?  You have a majority of both citizens and lawmakers.  A mandate entirely different than Dumbya declared.  Your detractors hate and fear you and that will not change no matter what you do.  Let’s go goddamnit.  Time to get on with it.

Let’s do as much damage as we can and not worry about what happens next.  Just like them.  Time for rubber to meet road.

Bring it.

Drinks for my friends.

Newsflash for you right wing, neoconservative fear mongering, Red scare foisting douchebags:

The word “czar” is an adaptation by journalists, the mother of which is a necessity for brevity.  It’s merely colloquial.  Contemporary parlance, a euphemism at best for an adviser appointed by the president whomever he or she may be.

The idea that this is some novel and pernicious design on the part of Obama and his administration to foment communism is fucking absurd.  If this douchebaggery were visited upon liberals, we’d recoil in horror,  feeling our intelligence raped and our sensibilities violently maligned.  Then we’d call bullshit on it.  We would do this immediately because we’d understand it to be really fucking stupid.

But you know, the great unwashed just sucks that shit shake through a straw and ponies up for a month’s supply.  How is it so many asstards exist, live and breathe in America?  What kind of people are we growing here?  This is ridiculous.

Dumbya had 47 of them there dastardly czars.  Obama has 32.  The shorthand usage first occurred under Nixon and really came into it’s own under Reagan.  Drug czar, energy czar etc.

And, don’t you know, the communists kicked out the czars.  Look at my thumb, gee you’re dumb.  Not just misdirected, but extraordinarily fucked in the head.

Again, fear and desperation championed by Beckerhead and The Human Shitsmear.  Congratulations  you dolts; a little kool aid with that shit shake?

“Right-wing extremists live in a politically parallel world where everyone they know believes the same as they do. They don’t like established facts so they come armed with their own.” ~ Gary Younge ~

I’m a little worn out these days by circumstances other than politics, but this kind of crap still really chaps my ass.  Again, that such a bullshit meme is allowed to penetrate into the mainstream baffles me.  How and when did people become so goddamn dumb?  Is it something in the water?  Didn’t we manage to get most of the lead out of the air and out of paint on children’s toys?  Insipid, callow and shallow.

Worthless and weak.

Some 25% percent clung to Dumbya ’til the very end.  Even after the shit hit the fan.  To this day, the volume so overwhelming, the proverbial fan is so clogged with gore that a vapor of ozone from it’s failing engine rises above it all to sting any inhale over the heavy pungence of rotting sewage  About the same number stood by Nixon.  It is safe to assume that at least one of every four people one encounters might just be so intellectually challenged that truth is tertiary.  These people don’t understand just how stupid they are and in fact take an ignorantly sanguine pride in and of.

I do the best I can but it’s not good enough.  Cultures bleed.  Dogma is relentless.  Indoctrination is all the sudden ripe and healthy.  Into the mainstream miasma and malaise, racism and bigotry, afford white heat as we are confronted with society’s lowest common denominator marching ignorantly in numbers exaggerated while boiling and seething only to direct blind stupid hate into an otherwise honest and logical national discourse.

We are polluted by this phenomena that has only dared to rear it’s ugly head because for the first time in a decade, the inmates have lost control of the the institution.

What do I do?  It just keeps coming.  Every onslaught more illogical and less rational than the last.  With every 24 hour news cycle it gets ever more ludicrous and uncouth.  Nancy Pelosi stands up and warns us in no uncertain terms that it’s all leading to violence and the retards mock her and accuse her of stoking the very fire of violence she cautions us against because she brought it up.

We show up with fire extinguishers so they bust out with napalm.

We’re not really interested in harming anyone and they are happy to  reduce us all to carbon.  They just don’t care.  We do.  Therein lies the rub.

They are crazy from fear and confusion.  We are worried for humanity, justice, compassion and humane equity.

None of it makes any sense beyond the fact that they are blind shithouse stupid.  You go Patty.

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.