FUCK logic

what is poetry but a hit to the head, what is the point of sleeping in a bed
I can place words all across a page and you can look at them with your eyes and find yourself in a daze
now this trance you're in isn't over to begin and you might chuckle and you might grin
but the real one, the one to win is the observation that the magic ni this shit which sets things brainbound afloat
is the ability of words to find themselves in a sensical order with the light touch of their crafter.

Junk Mail.

A man named Archibald Leach just sent me an email with the subject line "ferret."

Stickers aren't always fun and games.

I drove past a Ford Expedition parked in front of the hospital on my way home from work today and I had to ride my bike back and take a picture of the stickers on the rear window:


Any way you choose to analyze it, the noticable absence of mom's avatar paints a dark picture indeed. Did mom and dad get in a fight, and dad ran out and scraped her effigy from the back of the SUV? Did mom go to heaven, and her sticker's absence represents her eternal spirit? Who knows, but any family who keeps a tally mark of survivors is pretty messed up in my book.

Books to steal after the bombs drop.

While at work I was thinking about what books would be beneficial as well as entertaining after the Apocalypse is triggered by crazies. You'd want to avoid books about people who attempt survival and go nuts, like Lord of the Flies, but you would want books about people surviving harsh conditions and still managing to find happiness and love, like Little House on the Prarie. Avoid books directly about a post-apocalyptic world because they will be of little value. Most credible authors that have written on the topic have no clue about what the world would really be like, case and point is the fact that no book about the post-apocalypse has stressed horses, or even mentioned horses for all that I know. Also, no post-apocalyptic literature is intended as a "how-to" guide, and none of those authors took into account the maniac zombies that will be created by the fallout.

Shit, I got plans, Apocalypse

Even though I'll be above the age of a college freshmen when the apocalypse hits I'll take the opportunity that the world is ending to take advantage of all the hot girls on earth lowering their standards and do some real freaky shit, picture included for visual learners.



Nah, for real though I'm sticking with Olmstead, that dude is so equipped to exist through the apocalpyse and into the post-apocalypse, dude always has a leathermen and hella handily crafted things nearby.

shit Monstro blog, four posts en un dia! que loco!

Post-Apocalypse, Post-Apocashmypsypse

My strategy is all about horses. Cars will soon become obsolete because fuel will become rare within a few months of the apocalypse. What will happen then? Man will still need transportation, and communication will be the key to survival, as it has always been. Go to a ranch that raises a lot of horses immediately after nukes hit the major capitals of the world! Your dominance of transport and communication will immediately reap large benefits.

The Post-Apocalypse: Your Ideas!

The most depressing thing about the apocalypse is that when it happens, we'll have very little time to appreciate it. I don't just mean in the sense that we'll all be dead. I think that many people will likely survive the apocalypse; they will therefore be living in the post-apocalypse and this is a state that will last much longer than its cause. The apocalypse will be much like an orgasm, in that a lot of effort and planning is put into its pursuit, and while it may be powerful, its fallout, both literally and figuratively, will stay with you much longer.

I can't begin to detail my plans for Post-Apocalypse survival. I've already been published in Whitman College's newspaper on the subject and have engaged in several multi-hour conversations with compatriots on the subject. That is why this post is a little different. I am opening the subject up to you all, the readers. I want people to reply to this post with their own favorite post-apocalypse strategies.

An example: Trade off electronic equipment of all sorts. In the first days of the post-apocalypse, fools will think that getting your TV for a wheelbarrow full of canned food is a steal, but a couple weeks down the road once the power has been turned off and generators are running low on gas, you'll be outlasting a rainstorm under your wheelbarrow, chowing down on cold spam while that jerk-off up the road is wet and pissed because he's never gonna know how Lost turns out. Dumb sunovabitch doesn't realize that they've just been making that shit up as they go.

A Troubling State of Things

So my father drives a 1983 Toyota Tercel, it is gold and very old. In fact I think he takes pride in the fact that he has had the car longer than he has had me, and probalby taken better care of the vehicle. That being said it is a certifiable piece of shit and when/if he ever decides to sell it, it will probably fetch no more than $500 to some guy like Clark or Garrett who can use the parts to help build whatever spaceship they are cooking up. Anyways, I should take the advice every professor I've ever had gives me and get to the point. My dad's car is a gold box, a piece of crap, and it has been broken into three times. The only thing of value in the whole car is the radio and all three times that is all that's been taken. The first time was about 10 years ago, then once a few years ago, then again last week. I think thieves target my dad's car because a) the radio isn't built into a fortress-like dashboard and b) there is clearly no hi-tech alarm system. I guess in a weird way when you pay more for a car or drive a really nice car you are sorta lowering your risk of it getting fucked with. The other hilarious but sad thing is that last week when my dad wanted to get the smashed-in window and radio fixed he looked up something sensible in the yellow pages and called and they were like "where are you RIGHT NOW?" and he told them and they were here within 15 minutes with a pane of glass and a new radio and this led both of us to make the observation that it is a sad and troubling state of things in society when there is the equivalent of a door to door fast food business for fixing broken into cars immediately and on the spot because clearly this has become a very sustainable and profitable industry. And of course they are probably in cahoots with the thieves.

agagahahhaah

there is a car dealership in Ohio that recently had to pull an ad campaign proclaiming "Jihad on the auto market" and offering free toy swords to kids waiting in the show room on "fatwa fridays"...ahahaha, why is this so funny to me? I can't make links happen but surely overlord Drew can prove I'm not totally insane.

Drew's edit: Aaron is insane, but here is the link to the jihad article.

Alaskan Revolution

Citizens of Alaska,

From the beginning of the settlement of our great state, we have prided ourselves on our independance. The last frontier our wilderness was called. From the rocks of Homer to the high rises of Anchorage, from the glaciers to the tundra, our beauty is unmatched. It is time, my friends, for our government also to be unmatched.

We must ask ourselves a question: Do we want freedom from the oppression of a federal government that knows nothing of our ways? Our do we want to continue to bow to the tyrants in Virginia who've never seen a noble caribou? It is time for us to plant our feet firmly in the permafrost and declare an Alaskan Revolution!

Freedom from the constraints of a fascist rule! Freedom from the controls on our liberty! We demand self-rule. We damand autonomy. The Nation of Alaska must rise!

And a beautiful place it will be. Free enterprise will flourish with the removal of unjust legislation on horticulture. Society will flourish with the removal of unjust legislation on marriage. Our economy will flourish as we begin to sell our rich oil to the highest bidder. Flourishments will flourish.

And what will the 49 states do about it? They'll feel like fools marching an army across Canada. In fact, the Canadians will no doubt be sympathetic to our struggle and impede the coming storm troopers. And what Yankee army can fight through near twenty-four hours of light or darkness? Our uncommonly long and short days will confound them!

My friends, my fellow Alaskans, there is no better time than now to fight for what we want for our children. We must unite our passion for justice like the five fingers of truth, freedom, representation, self-actualization, and decency into a might fist to strike at the wicked federalists.

For Alaska. For Freedom.

Easily Accesible Alternate Realities

Today I went over to my friend's house in Marin County. To say "Marin County" to most of you means nothing because you are from Seattle, Portland, Idaho, other places. However, to most people in the SF Bay Area if you mention Marin a set of images will invariably come to mind for them. Marin is probably one of the wealthiest counties per household in all of America. Many celebs including Sean Penn and George Lucas live there and nearly all the houses are monstro-like in size but with 1/4 the occupancy and no vermin. I know Marin well because I went to high school there and after a few years away to gain some perspective I have gotta say there is no where else quite like Marin to find a bunch of people who are living in a totally different reality. Marin is a hub of new-age, hippie, progressive lifestyles and philosophies. The onus for this post came from a dinner my friend made me at her apartment tonight. She is in a holistic, organic health culinary academy right now and as she cooked the food (which for the record was unbelievably good) she launched into multiple lectures to me about how we are poisoning our bodies with the food we eat and how the answer is in refrigerating your grains and soaking your nuts and tons of other food health tips that seemed so insane to me I actually smiled and listened and considered them. This person also purifies her shower water and burns "essential oils" near her bed at night to help purify a variety of things I surely am not in touch with. The thing about Marin is the people there certainly do have the money to exist in these lifestyles and it may darn well be much better for you to live that way, it just isn't practical for 99% of humanity and that is where Marinites fail to see clearly. They are nearly militant about their way of life and how you actually cannot eat at Burger King because once you know too much you can't go back. Next time I'm in Berkeley I'll tell to the starving college kids on the street and get punched in the goddam mouth. I do however, love going over to Marin every now and then because for the $3 bridge toll I can zip across the Richmond-San Rafael bridge and without doing LSD, Acid or any other hallucinogen, fully immerse myself in a whole other reality. To close I will tell you a brief story about going over to this girl's house once a few years back. Her mom greeted me and I said hi to their dog, which is 15 years old or something like that and the mom told me how she has the dog on all these dietary aids and takes it to a therapist. She says all of this totally deadpan and straightfaced and it took me a terrifying to realize she was dead serious so I had to bite my lip hard. Then she waved a crystal filled with some fluid near my body and watched the fluid. "Good," she said, "your life force is strong." And she was dead-fucking serious.

No one gets to walk between the rain

I'm pretty fatigued. I spent today hanging flyers on rich people's doors in Piedmont for Gorilla Gutters for $8/hour. I was assured as a huge job perk by the people I did this for that I had to have "zero interaction with other people" and could listen to music so I loaded my ipod into my pocket and started walking. Since I just finished a 190 mile hike it was not really any trouble for me to walk around on sidewalks all day and since they were paying by the hour I planned to just do it all day. All the other people this company hired got blisters and tired after a few hours so they got sick of waiting for me to finish and pulled me in the afternoon. I was walking around a real wealthy neighborhood and I noticed that I think nicer houses have door handles as opposed to door knobs. What's the deal with that? I was also considering that if I told anyone excitedly that I worked as a day laborer for a low wage with the hope of potential but random bonuses they woudl think it was lame. I am, after all, a college graduate with a degree in politics, I should be changing the world, remaking it in a better way and leaving it far more well off for future generations. Today however, I got great exercise, got to listen to music and got paid. I see nothing wrong with that. Anyways, I'm going to see the A's clinch the AL West pennant tomorrow and for anyone who saw me over the years at Whitman you know how much I love the A's, they are the epitomy of what is great about baseball, that will be a whole different post when they slay everyone shortly in the postseason. Today is also the Jewish New Year, Rosh Hashana and it is also was the start of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan. With more disheartening news: that the hope for peace is in its usual place of the shithole I like that some common ground can be found at least in a common occurence. The title of the blog post is a lyrics of one of the songs ("No More") from the new Bob Seeger CD. The song has another profound lyric, It was 40 years ago when I was young/And the jungle not the desert heard the guns/Someone said they had a secret plan/And the rest of us were told to understand. War has been one of the most inevitable things in the history of humanity, it is just really fucking insane. Peace. Go A's.

Some Impulse.

I got the impulse to write suddenly as I was preparing for bed this evening. I wrote a rather verbose e-mail message to a few of my close friends about a situation in current events that is causing us much strife. After the e-mail was successfully typed and skimmed from grammatical errors (I never misspell) I sent my digital correspondece into the rubber-ducky-river-race-to-benefit-cancer that is the internet. I am once again abusing hyphens, and I apologize, it just feels good and Hedonism is so "in" right now. Anyway, after the e-mail was sent my writing urge was not satiated. I began to think about brevity, and how much meaning one possible sentence could have; how many ideas could be contained within one sentence and suddenly leap out at the mind like a jack-in-the-box once that sentence is heard. Then, as if my life was scripted, one inexplainable sentence popped into my head. Life is an interesting fabric. Why the hell did I think of that? I ate some undercooked chicken for dinner and I did drink two rather strong cups of coffee this morning. The sentence on the surface bears almost no meaning; it borders on nonsense. I started to think about it, and wanted to share it with a friend to see what effect this seemingly meaningless sentence had on them. There were none available. E-mail is too slow, a telephone is too personal, and my Buddy List was as empty as the 4th grade birthday party of the kid who pees his pants at recess. I was then slapped in the face that I had the ability to inquire using that ever so useful pocket utility Google. I clattered out "Life is an interesting fabric" into Google, and several pages popped up. It turns out these pages were uninteresting because Google searched for web pages containing each word independently, not each word in sequence. The advanced Google user that I am, I put the sentence in quotations and slammed down the "enter" key like a brass slammer flips over an entire stack of pogs. None. No web pages containing the obviously unique string of words "Life is an interesting fabric." A meaningless sentence.

Now, hopefully, next time you go to Google and type in "Life is an interesting fabric" you'll be referenced to this article. All of a sudden the meaningless sentence has meaning. As the theater production Harvey teaches us, if other people start to see your hallucinations too, then they just might be real. A rediculous trick, and I don't have a point, but perhaps you like the unique texture of silk, and find it pleasing to the touch.

My growing collection

A lot of people are unconscious collectors. The counscious collectors are people who make a concerted effort to increase their holdings. The other type of person may not even know they have holdings. Take my buddy Brian. He collects the remnants of given-up hobbies. The martial arts outfit he wore twice, the guitar he's played once, the RC airplane he never flew, and countless other forgotten joys. I know people who unconsciously collect everything from shoes and hats to travel books. My own collection is very conscious. I collect concert DVDs.

I think very few people actually start a collection with the intention of developing it; the collection just starts building up. That's how mine worked anyway. I guess there are probably some sad people out there who start their coin collections with those gift packs from Sky Mall. Not to digress, but I think it's sad when something packaged as a "gift" is bought for ones self. My collection started with a few concerts that were given to me, and a few more I bought myself. It wasn't until the last six months when I became conscious of my collection and began putting an effort in expanding its goodness.

The reason for my concert DVD collection is simple. I love music. Any regular readers of the blogue will understand that I have an almost spiritual (Drew's words, not mine) connection to music. It's not that I play it all that well, or that I have a preternatural grasp of music history and theory. It's that I geek out. Hard.

It only makes sense for someone who loves music to own concert DVDs. The digital nature of the recording allows for lots and lots of high-quality content, and in my limited lifetime, DVDs seem to hold up better than tapes and film reels. But all that is just the format, there's something so much richer about the experience of a concert.

No music fan will deny the power of a live performance. Certainly there are people who prefer studio work, and in the case of bands like the Beatles, you have no real choice, however for me, the vast majority of music is much more interesting to experience than simply to hear the sterile sound of recording equipment.

Today I bought The Grateful Dead Movie. This is a good example of what I like about the concert disc. First of all, the Dead are notorious for their live experimentation and improvisation. But one can always listen to any number of their live audio recordings. Jerry and the gang aren't all that exciting to see either; they don't dress up or jump around or any of that business. What the concert movie gives you, however, is the experience of the show.

A performance is more than just a band playing their songs on a stage. It is an ambitious recipe containing fans, technicians, and musicians: a whole show! You can't hear a show, you need to see it. And The Grateful Dead Movie is full of dancing hippies, wonked out lighting dudes, and of course Jerry and the gang. When I watch a good concert movie, I feel like I am not only hearing music, but experiencing a moment in history.

Seeing the English fans of Pablo Honey react to Radiohead's progressive shit off of The Bends at a 1994 show in Brixton. Seeing Jimi Hendrix light his guitar on fire at Monterey in order to one-up Pete Townsend's smashing act. These are experiences. I got 'em on video. My collection is growing and am happy as a lark.

Mental Refuse Dump

Ahhh what up bloggernauts monstronauts astronauts cosmonauts earth people from right to left town to town cap and gown, since I've been gone Pluto has gone the way of the Dodo, Croc hunter has died and I somehow got even more attractive. I have a few main points to make with the usual lack of what some would call "flow" and "cohesion" but I say you motherfuckers oughta be tried for rhyme and treason.

I read this article: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2006/09/15/BAG75L6BJK1.DTL and found it amazingly disturbing. Pretty much this is like what is fucked up with a lot of historical (and maybe current, these things take perspective, hindsight, etc.) U.S. foreign policy. Heralded to the tune of "scientific advancement" we have some invention that makes ants kill each other so they won't bother humans. That is like the US arming Iran, the Taliban, whoever to kill off its enemy del dia (sidenote: why is spanish never used to spice up sentences, it is always french or latin, fuck that) and then suddenly turn around some years later and battle those people with the newer round of weapons we haven't yet sold them.

Anyways, and this will actually have some semblance of a connection, I've recently been in the woods hiking for a long while and over the course of the journey some thoughts and realizations crossed my mind. One is that what we would probably all collectively deem "nature" is a very powerful force but in a weird sort of Jesus way. When I was hiking somewhere along the John Muir Trail I looked around and saw pretty much nothing but complete wild(er)ness around me. The only abberation to that was the thin slice of trail that wound its way through the terrain. That trail however, was to me a scar, a line marking a human cut beyond the slight impact that animal dwellers would make. A scar however might be the wrong term because scars are often looked at on the body as history and maybe something to learn from. You know, cat clawed half your face to shreds--->resolution not to make kissy faces in front of Fraulein any more. It seemed to me on this day on the trail though that nothing would really be learnt, maybe everything was backwards because from that scar, which actually now seemed more like an initial cut than a scar. From that initial cut I could see, just as I did as a young child in SimCity 2000 the towns and cities and industries and commerce building up from that initial plotting. And what does nature do? It turns the other cheek as it is encroached upon more and more. Finally, nature just peacefully walks off into the sunset when everything reaches a limit. The problem is that there is no way to know what the limit is, when you are nearing it or have reached it, I suppose you can learn to read signs, proverbial writings on the granite walls, but there's no science that can give you these answers my friend. Go to any big city and besides the created parks and corralled rivers, you will see no nature, nature has left. But then, yet again, another trick is waiting. Pretty much two years ago exactly I was in Washington D.C. interning two days a week at a magazine that I took the metro (underground subway) to each morning. To get onto the train at my stop I would ride an escalator more than 100 feet underground. Now Washington, D.C. would more than fit my criteria of a city that nature has run away from. But there, underground at the Tenleytown metro stop a ray of sunlight shown from far above and alit on a small patch of track. As I looked at the patch of light a tiny plant was growing out of the cement and very nearly winking at me.

Here is another thing that bugs me. All the time in school we'd read books. Fiction books, history books, politics books, etc. Now we are often asked to analyze these books in depth and encouraged by teachers or professors to take their words as holy. Now for the most part I am fine with that, reading a lot as a child is probably responsible for the vast majority of my reading/writing/intellectual abilities to this day. The things that irks me is that the books I have read are rarely put into perspective. By this I mean that if I am reading some political philosophy then I like to know something about the historical context it was written in, the author, what point in the author's life it was written, where it fits on a spectrum of popularity/ideology etc. What I often get is the expectation to read the book in a vacuum with the rationale that this is somehow more beneficial for me because then I can make my own judgements about it. Fuck that! I am not that fucking smart. The first (and only motherfucking) time I read Pride and Prejudice I didn't even know it was meant to be a farce or whatever and I was disgusted by it instead of wowed by its skill. Is that my fault? Maybe, but I am modern and suburban and liberal so I will pin the problem on others. I see nothing wrong in giving students or readers in general some hints as to how to read the book. I mean if you read Hobbes' "Leviathan" whilst knowing that Hobbes lived in a time of constant coups (Thailand anyone?) and instability it makes a whole lot of fucking sense and doesn't seem like the hard assed bad assed take no prisoners fubar philosophy that many might mistake it as. Learning about the 1960's as a kid in school without getting some basic understanding about how that (and it always blows my mind that for the most part these are our fucking parents) this was the first generation in America that had material and financial affluence in the country and a culture of plenty often leaves people spiritually deprived and seeking just leads to stupid ass misconceptions and stereotypes about protests and hippies and etc. Anyways, what got me thinking about this was this article I stumbled across today because I have been glued to my computer all day due to some intense back pain: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20060825.wxboat26/BNStory/National/ It's about the academic, author and other things dude Michael Ignatieff and it is pretty much an 18 page overview of his life, all the different parts of it and I found it so interesting because a) I think he spoke at the '04 Whitman graduation and b) I read one of his books in a politics class and I was realizing while reading this that it's so important to understand the context of a book because take all the bloggernauts for example, we have all changed a lot over four years and will continue to change deep into our lives. Just like Picasso's art has a blue period, cubism and so on we all go through phases and I sure as hell know that if I was writing a book every two to three years I would probably not agree or believe in half the shit I said in the past and that past version of myself would feel the same way about future work. Whatever, I've made my point, context is important.

Another thing that bugs me is that despite continually enforced massacres and genocides there is always a spider visible somewhere in my room before I go to bed each night. Maybe I need to re-engineer its brain chemistry so it kills the next day's spider and so on.

I'm gonna get 50% Jumago on you real quick: Bob Seger just dropped a new album, "Face the Promise" that is his first album in like 11 years. He is the fuckin shit. He sings like all he has been eating since 1995 is rocks, dirt and car parts washed down with Penzoil. Now this is mainly from reading other reviews but what is tight about the album is that he hasn't changed his style one bit to cater to more recent trends in rock and roll. He plays a classic kind of rock and roll that is very close to country music in some ways but the retardation factor comes in when critics lament that "Seger has gone country" since he is doing what he's done all along and goddamit, that is rock and roll.

movie time!

"Little Miss Sunshine" is a bomb ass movie, I may have noted that in an earlier post but it's the last movie I've seen in awhile. New movies on my list are "All the King's Men" "Flyboys" and NOVEMBER FUCKING THIRD is the date that "Borat" drops. This is going to be the film event of the year. Borat is such an amazing character, I know Jumago appreciates this and Borat's Wikipedia site is absolutely the best read of the year, move over Dan Brown.

It's still movie time!

My parents have Netflix and last night my mom and I watched "The Story of the Weeping Camel" which is a sweet film about a rural Mongolian family. Pretty much the only main plot that advances throughout the 1 hour and 27 minute film is that one of the family's camels gives birth to a colt it rejects and a musician needs to come to do a ritual to fix it. This only takes like half of the movie and the rest of it is just mundane family scenes with the fully Mongolian cast, the film is also in Mongolian and is filmed absolutely stunningly. At the end of the movie my mom commented, "That was good, just really slow" and she was right but she meant the latter part of that comment in kind of a negative way and it got me thinking that the movie was even tighter than I originally gave it credit for. Most movies assume you have the attention span you probably have, 3 minutes so something has to explode or squirt out of an orifice in that amount of time or you are done and won't pay attention to the product placements to follow. This movie paints a picture of the plodding rural lifestyle of this family and magically the pace of the movie seems to follow the pace of events that are being depicted even though that is obviously not true. Another subplot is that the youngest child wants a TV because he has seen them on excursions across the Gobi Desert into a small town. It was a good 1 hour and 27 minutes, didn't blow my mind, but instead implanted a foreign culture and lifestyle into that unexploded space.

Peace.

Power Nap Kit!

Useless products that have no use are super fun. Check out the Power Nap Kit. It is basically a box of shit that tells you how to take a short nap. It comes with a couple of CDs to help you go to bed, and then the CDs also wake you up, in case you have drain bamage and can't use an alarm clock. There is an adult kit and a teen kit as well. The teen kit is more angst-ridden and mistrusts the adult kit. If an adult listens to the teen kit it actually makes them have a heart attack. Check it out, this is about as moronic as those food dehydrators from TV ads of our youth.

Just Peachy

So my friends and I are planning an extended trip to Thailand. I sat down with my cup of coffee to read the news this morning and I saw that there had been a fucking miilitary coup in Bangkok. I think we're still going, but now we get to shoot guns!

I have a disorder.

I think it is early onset Alzheimers. I forget to pay bills. I forget to post on the blog, I forget birthdays. Family birthdays...PARENT birthdays. The type of birthdays that if you forget someone doesn't talk to you for a while. I don't know if any of you have ever experienced being shunned by a loved one, maybe you aren't an insensitive butthole like somebody we know but believe you me it is not a wholesome experience. No care packages for Drew if I forgot mom's birthday. I forgot Mother's Day last year, and that was pretty wicked. In a bad way, not in a 7200-Stalefish-off-a-fresh-gnar-halfpipe way. Dash dash dash dash dash dash dot. That's morse code for the letter M followed by the number 9. Get it, M9? Secret codes.

Anyway, if talking in top-secret codes isn't exciting to you, you might be interested in the recent string of Pope effigies being burned all over the Muslim world. I don't have anything against the Muslims. I think they're great people. I think there are a few in certain places who happen to be nuts and have a talent for locating television crews. I always think it is funny that a television crew is always present anytime a Muslim-looking dude whips out a dummy to light it on fire, but if there is a Muslim baby and a Jewish baby eating some pudding together, the camera crews are like "What? No fire? The babies are alive? Fuck this, I'm going back to the embassy." Pyromaniac religious zealots who are quick to anger and express their anger through blowing up stereo outlets and burning mannequins aren't common, they just tend to show up when a large camera crew is dicking around looking for some nut job to light something on fire so Ma and Pa Kettle can be so terrified of the rest of the world that they lock themselves in their rural home in Kansas and take potshots at the mailman from behind an upturned couch. Thanks CNN, thanks a BUNCH.

Badass News Hero of the Day!

Last week, a Portland man was charged with criminal conspiracy to commit murder because he hired a hitman to kill his wife. The hitman was given the alarm code and then hid in the house 'till the woman came home. He hit her in the head "several times" with a hammer. She overpowered him and choked him to death. That's badass.

The Sound and the Fury

Football has begun. The excitement and rage that it can induce within my very soul is something that satiates the bestial core of my brain, and the smell of that leather ball makes my blood stir something indescribable. The ecstasy of cheering with thousands of others and being brought close to tears with those same stangers is a feeling that every human should experience, for it is the fuel of society. Religion and government have often tainted and manipulated this feeling, but sport holds retains its purity because sport has no aim other than itself. Sport has no agenda. The athletes might, the team owners might, but in its connection the crowd, the cheering masses, it is still just a game. A game that can make 50,000 souls beat to the sound of one drum, and that beat can drive an individual to accomplish great things.

That being said, Notre Dame is getting their asses kicked by Michigan, and I might have to get drunk before work.

Twenty-Three

Salvete Monstronauts,

Apologies for being absent from the Blog scene for several months. I guess I needed some time to process this next big step we're all taking. Whenever I sat to write something, I would just scrap it because it didn't bring me closer to any new truth or feeling. I have something to say now though.

I'm working full time at a high school right now. I teach, I administrate, I do a lot of varied activities. I wake up at 6 and work until 4 or 5 typically. A lesser man might say, "So this is the real world--I'm finally all grown up." Not I. As I read this blog, or in conversations with college friends, or in remembering the e-mails of disgruntled graduates of years past, I pick up the subtle or blatant feeling that old-age has really kicked in. Some of us have rent, jobs, serious relationships, loans to pay back, etc. All the fun of college seems a life time away for some recent graduates. The undertaking of new responsibility, coupled with shrinking "playtime," feels like how we imagined old-age would be.

To those who feel old, I say to you: start a career in teaching where the faculty is on average 15-25 years older than you.

I feel like a baby. Someone reminds me of that fact daily. I totally overcompensate by dressing professionally every day. My colleagues wear shorts. Still, when I wear a collared shirt, I'm told, "maybe you should wear a tie." And when I wear a tie, I'm told, "this is a casual work environment, don't feel compelled to dress up so much!"

I was taking stock of some vans the school uses in a shirt and tie one day and someone drove by asking where there was parking. I told her and she explained she needed to drop something off to the director of student activities. I said, "I work with her, I'll do that for you." To which she replied, "oh are you a student?"

Lady--I'm in a shirt and tie, with a clipboard, during class. I just told you I work here. I should be asking you what it was that got you into teaching, because it certainly wasn't your deductive skills.

Whenever someone points out my boyish looks, I want to snap back, "how much does social security pay out?" I find myself wishing I'd gone back to school, just to give myself a few more years to get some gray hairs or start balding.

Coming soon...the high school mixer I just prefected. 1500 kids trying to cope with their adolescence as the walls sweat.

Thrift Stories

There is a comic shop in downtown Walla Walla. I like comic books, but I don't like the comic shop. The comic shop is a beacon of my refusal of adulthood. I go to the bar to feel like a man, but I go to the comic shop to feel like a boy, and for some reason I am deeply, deeply ashamed of this. As a result, whenever I go to the comic shop I look like the video tape of the U.S. Senator slinking into a titty bar; scanning both directions in a raincoat and hat and I slide in the door. Once inside it is a haven because I have never been in that store with another customer. Only myself, sometimes a companion or two, and the owners. I like it this way. I think comic book stores are set up this way. I doubt I could buy anything with some other stranger there; I would feel that same sense of shame as I felt sneaking into the establishment in the first place. I feel like the guy who is trying to casually read the erotic coffeetable books at Barnes & Noble. I don't care if Marvel has the entire cast of X-Men signing autographs in the nude while having an orgy with each other, I still wouldn't be caught dead in the comic shop with other people, especially during an event where there might be people that I know.

To help diffuse the shame of my comic shop visits, I usually dodge across the street to the Humane Society thrift store. This is also gives me an excuse for having my car parked in front of the comic shop. I figure if I spend $3 on a comic book I could at least spend another $3 on a crappy t-shirt to help out some ugly sad-looking dog live another day. Today when I entered into the all too familiar thrift oasis, I saw the usual crowd. When I say "usual crowd" you have to think about the type of people you usually see wandering around state fairs. So, unusual for society, but usual for the Humane Society. I have a nice little flight path when I hit the thrift store that minimizes my in-store encounter while maximizing my scoping out of the wares. I slip past kitchenware and clothes pretty quickly, loop through electronics, and head upstairs to the furniture. Today when I was browsing old suitcases I saw a woman rifling around in the La-Z-Boys decorated with coffee or blood stains. For a second I thought she was testing the comfort of a chair if it were to be used as a pillow until she moved to the next chair and I realized she was checking the chairs for loose change. I was struck by a moment of clarity, a "life lesson" had happened, if you want to use phrases that are commonly found in Chicken Soup for the Teenage Soul. I couldn't decide what was worse; that this woman had resorted to checking thrift store furniture for change, or that this woman seemed to have misinterpreted the mission statement of the Humane Society thrift store. Yes, this woman was desperate, but she was technically stealing from a charity organization. I couldn't decide which was worse, so I pushed the woman down the stairs and lit the chair on fire. Better to remove a psychological predicament than to sort it out in a store that smells like old shoes and cat urine.

Fusion Rock

From the late 60s into the mid 70s, rock and roll evolved considerably. It incorporated jazz, classical, and eastern influences while moving toward a higher level of instrumental precision. Here's some on that.


“East-West” – The Butterfield Blues Band (1966)
Formed in Chicago by singer/harmonica player Paul Butterfield, the Butterfield Blues Band brought the gritty Midwest blues sound to California in the mid ‘60s. One of the most important groups in setting the tone for experimental and acid rock, by their second album The Butterfield Blues Band were incorporating jazz and Indian music into their sound. An attempt to fuse eastern and western music, the song “East West” rides a droning groove as on a sitar, rather than a more traditional western chord progression. Guitarist Mike Bloomfield, who would later break off to form Electric Flag, is on fine display on this track, soloing almost constantly throughout the thirteen minute track.

“Flute Thing” – The Blues Project (1966)
The American jam band tradition is clearly rooted in the blues. Although one hears little blues in The Blues Project’s music, their improvisational aesthetic owes its ancestry to blues guitarists. Formed in the musical stew of New York City’s Grenwich Village in the mid sixties, The Blues Project’s members came from rock, folk, and jazz backgrounds. On “Flute Thing”, off of the band’s second album, bassist Andy Kulberg takes up the title instrument and leads the group through a psychedelic jazz journey with effective piano compliments.

“Spinning Wheel” – Blood, Sweat & Tears (1969)
After leaving The Blues Project, Al Kooper was looking for a new band in which his jazz influences could be more fully realized. Wanting to use horns as much as a traditional rock band used guitars, he formed Blood, Sweat & Tears in 1968. An incredibly tight band, the group sold more than six million albums in their first 3 years. “Spinning Wheel” would become one of 3 charting singles from their second record.

“Dark Star” – The Grateful Dead (1969)
It's impossible to consider the Grateful Dead’s music without considering first their historical context and mythos. At the center of the band is Jerry Garcia, a bluegrass guitarist who moved to Palo Alto in 1960 and soon formed The Warlocks with members who would help the group become the Dead. Tapped by author and LSD pioneer Ken Kesey to be his house band at the notorious bay area Acid Tests, The Grateful Dead became synonymous with the psychedelic experience. One of the first groups to experiment with oil lamp light shows, the Dead’s jamming was exploratory and expansive. Moving away from the mainstream demands of short, self-contained pop songs, the Dead produced their concert recording Live/Dead in 1969, which opens with the 23 minute long epic “Dark Star”. For the short attention spanned, listen to minutes 7 through 10 for a taste of the Dead’s free-flowing genius.

“Soul Sacrifice” – Santana (1969) [or something else by them]
The most visible member of the Latin-American jamming contingent, band leader and guitarist Carlos Santana combined hand percussion and tribal chanting into his rock and jazz arrangements. Renowned for his six-string skills, Santana plays on “Soul Sacrifice”, the last track off his first and self-titled album, like a jazz saxophonist before taking off on a blazing solo.

“Miles Runs the Voodoo Down” – Miles Davis (1969)
Miles Davis is one of the most important figures in American music, contributing in some way to nearly every musical evolution from the 40s to the 80s. As a trumpet player, he has no equal, playing with a lyrically melodic style, assisted by his careful use of the mute. On his 1969 release Bitches Brew, critics have argued that he at once gave birth to and killed jazz-rock. With help from virtuosic pianist and keyboard player Chick Corea, Davis created the epic “Miles Runs the Voodoo Down”, a funky guitar heavy track which takes listeners from twelve-part jazz glory to the edges of noise-music chaos.

“25 or 6 to 4” – Chicago (1970)
One of the top selling US bands of all time, Chicago was formed by R&B club musicians who joined forces with a DePaul University horn section. Since their formation in 1969, the band has released 30 records with their jazz-meets-traditional rock sound. Opening with driving guitars which give way to the signature horns, “25 or 6 to 4” became Chicago’s first Top 5 hit when it was released on their second album.

“Didja Get Any Onya” – Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention (1970)
Frank Zappa is one of the most prolific and talented American musicians of the rock & roll era. Releasing over 60 records over his four decade career, Zappa has been a composer, band leader, guitar god, satirist, and storyteller. On this experimental track from his ninth album, Weasels Ripped My Flesh, Zappa plays with jazz hookswhile moving through the parts of the song with abandon.

“In Memory of Elizabeth Reed” – The Allman Brothers Band (1971)
What the Grateful Dead was to the San Francisco sound, The Allman Brothers were to southern rock. Bringing a mature jazz sensibility into blues-rock jamming, brothers Gregg and Duane Allman (keyboards and guitars) formed the group in 1969. Within a few years they were playing regular shows at the famous Fillmore East. Recorded live during this period, “In Memory of Elizabeth Reed” shows how the band can groove, while still allowing the soloists to have room for experimentation.

“Meeting of the Spirits” – The Mahavishnu Orchestra with John McLaughlin (1971)
Formed around former Miles Davis guitarist John McLaughlin, The Mahavishnu Orchestra is the missing link between jazz and prog-rock. The ultimate fusion group, they rocked hard while maintaining an almost academic level of musical sophistication. On “Meeting of the Spirits”, the first track off their debut album The Inner Mounting Flame, intimate passages are juxtaposed against searing guitar solos and driving hard rock, all filtered through a sense of melodrama.

“What is Hip?” – Tower of Power (1973)
Tower of Power got its start playing around the Bay Area in the early 70s, honing its horn driven funk rock sound. With the addition of vocalist Lenny Williams on their 1973 self-titled album, the band scored a hit with “What is Hip?” The driving bass work provides a frame upon which the band shows off their technical chops. An extremely tight outfit, Tower of Power is still a major touring act today.

“Chameleon” – Herbie Hancock (1973)
A virtuosic pianist who was playing with the Chicago Symphony by the age of 11, Herbie Hancock began experimenting with jazz legend Miles Davis in 1963. Drawing on the early funk sound of Sly Stone and James Brown, Hancock made fusion jazz that became a sound unique to him. A pioneer of electronic music, his Rhodes keyboard and organ playing is untouchable. In 1983 he helped bring turntableism to the mainstream with an electronic post-rock album featuring Grand Mixer D. ST

Old man, look at my life.

With Matt's recent post about his Alzheimer's running crew and my recent transition from 22 to 23, I have been thinking a lot about age. What to do with one's life when life starts to slope downwards, towards the chopping block. Towards the black tunnel at the end of the gray tunnel of life, with sometimes a bright light at the end if you were good and paid your taxes and gave candy to trick-or-treaters. It's hard to get motivated about life when you start thinking about it as a whole, as a big picture that was painted by a half-retarded one-armed version of myself. Does anyone look back on their life and not think about what a mess it was, like looking back after taking a shit in the woods to see that there is actually just shit all up in your pants? That is life. You think you are shitting in a hole but really you are shitting in your only clean pair of trousers. Good luck finding a stream to rinse that out in. Good luck explaining to your friends why are walking with a strange gait and that "mossy" smell is following you around everywhere you go. Good luck with that, because that is life, and you have to eat the whole thing, even if you have to sit at the dinner table all night long. I know you don't like green beans, but life is fucking green beans. Life is pickled green beans. You don't even like raw green beans, but God cooked life (the green beans) in vinegar, and now you have to eat those vinegar-ass green beans whether you like it or not, because if you leave the table early (suicide) you aren't going to get any dessert (heaven). Dessert help you if you try to claw a living out in this world, the thing you are going to be clawing out is your shithole in the woods. Finding a nice shithole under a tree is about as lucky as you can hope to get these days, since all the prime real estate is on the moon, and last time I checked nobody has the wherewithal to build a base on the moon because nobody has the stones to roll the bones and build a freakin' moon colony. Life will sometimes give you the stinkeye, but you have to poke that shit out with a stick if you hope to be given an inch, because an inch is all you will get, you freakin inchworm bitch. Life is a big old fat robin bird waiting to eat your inchworm ass right out of the hole because he is the early bird, and the early bird will make a meal out of you with a side of coleslaw because it is DAMN CERTAIN that he always gets the worm.

I'm down with Jesus.

Sometimes I talk to religious people about the practicality of their faith, and they get offended when people like me take deities off of their most on-high pedestals and try to bring them down to Earth. I try to think about what Earthly indulgences the holy beings we worship might enjoy to partake in. The Greeks and Romans did it, and they had flourishing societies. At what point did our gods grow out of eating a good meal or watching a sunset? Who knows. My question is, do you think Jesus would like go-karts?

I think he would, and I think that is a question that good Christians should contemplate. If you worship Jesus you might as well think he is a cool guy to hang out with. What if Jesus came over and he wanted olives on the pizza, but you're like "I hate olives" and Jesus was like "Don't worry man, I'm chill with olives." You would totally think Jesus was awesome. Then it would be easy for him to say "You know what I did with that pizza? You should resolve your conflicts in the same way. Do as I do" and then he would totally school you in Mario Kart 64, because 1) He loves go-karts as already established earlier and 2) being holy, he probably has holy reflexes, meaning he would be an awesome gamer. The point is that parables in the Bible tend to get people confused and focusing on the wrong parts because they are antiquated. Like when Jesus raised Lazarus from the cave. You tell people that story, and you get questions like "Why a cave? Who gets buried in a cave? Were there bats in the cave?" and then the point of the parable is lost because everyone in Sunday school wants to go watch Batman all of a sudden. People need to think about how Jesus would be cool nowadays, because anytime someone backs you up when suckers are fronting on you, you are totally down with them, so that is how you can make people down with Jesus. It makes perfect sense.

Profiles in Alzheimers: Andy

This is the first part of what I hope will be a continuing series of essays on residents of the memory care community at which I work. Names have been changed.

I was in the back lounge this afternoon talking to Andy. He's largely immobile and prefers to stay in the back away from the noise and activity of the main lounge. We had interacted several times over games and activities but this was the first time I had any extended contact with him. I had heard stories about him from my co-workers. He is notorious for ordering other residents and employees around, assigning tasks and reprimanding people for tardiness. We think he may have been a military officer at some point.

When I sat down in the chair next to his, I greeted Andy warmly with a smile and a handshake. Many Alzheimers patients do not put out a hand in greeting until you put your own out. It's like they don't remember what to do when greeting someone, but once reminded of the action it comes back immediately.

Andy shook my hand and asked my name. He is mostly deaf, so after complaining that my speaking volume was insufficient he demanded that I write my name on a slip of paper and give it to him so he could start the meeting.

I wrote Matthew Jumago on a page from my notebook and Andy took it and looked at it carefully. He interpreted my name as Martha Newbury, Martha Yaeger, Max Jamaica, and Arthur Atagrie. He settled on Arthur Newbury and then spoke up telling the room that Arthur Newbury was here to answer any questions they had about the management.

When no one responded, Andy told us all to form a line to go through the building looking for problems. He asked Ron, who has long hair, if he was a guy or a woman. Ron said he's a guy. Andy said "Good, I don't have to explain nothing!"

No Censorship!

Ah, the different faces we show the world. I had a glorious experience with self-censorship yesterday when my uncle visited me in Walla Walla for an evening as he was passing through Washington. There is nothing quite like the tireless examination of your bachelor pad for anything that might be considered morally corrupt by your family members. Throwing sex guides into the clothes hamper, tossing crack pipes into your hollowed-out Bible, and shoving Thai whores into closets and wardrobes is all part of the preparation I must go through anytime family visits me. The one thing I still do not attempt to hide from my family is my alcoholism and that is only because I am usually sauced enough by the time they arrive in the afternoon that I can go without booze for several hours. They just think I'm acting silly, and it reminds them of the old days when I was in elementary school and I would stumble around the house knocking things over and cursing at the pets. I think that was caused by the scoliosis medication. Remember scoliosis?

Blast and Curses

The other day I purchased a lighter shaped like a double-barreled shotgun. It is a lighter-sized shotgun, not a shotgun sized lighter, which bears clarification when discussing replica items not made to scale. The shotgun that the lighter was fashioned after must have been of exceeding quality judging from the intricate metalwork of the stock and trigger, replicated on the lighter using cheap silver plastic. In my imagination I picture a British noble on a foxhunt using my lighter/shotgun to hunt foxes, though the gun shoots bullets instead of flames, so it is more like a real shotgun, the shotgun used to model the lighter. To hunt with a shotgun-shaped lighter would be an exercise in stupidity and a blatant diregard for a fox's distaste of flame-spewing tacky knick-knacks. There was a lot of dashes in the sentence, and I apologize.

The lighter, as glorious as its heritage may be, has gone dry after only two days of mild use. I don't smoke; I bought the lighter for the novelty of it. I am well aware that real shotguns suffer from a lack of ammunition storage, but I did not expect my lighter to go empty faster than my dad did after he got his tubes tied.

It was only after my purchase AND the hasty loss of lighter fuel that I realized how idiotic I would look whipping out my shotgun lighter in public to assist a distressed hobo with lighting his cigarette butt. I have a hard time believing that any tobacco-savvy young female is going to have her hormones boiling over a guy who pulls repica antique shotgun lighters out of his back pocket. Sometimes being a nerd sneaks up on you.

Comeuppins anyone?

I have been out of town for several days attending the Bumbershoot music festival in Seattle, sorry for the recent lack of updates.

So I am sure all of you have heard that Mr. Steve Irwin, the infamous Crocodile Hunter, has been killed by a stingray in Australia. The stingray, according to news sources, was startled and stabbed Mr. Irwin through the heart with its toxic-barbed tail in an act of self-preservation. The Crocodile Hunter, being the hard case that he is, actually pulled the stinger from his chest.

There are many news articles that are mourning the death of Mr. Irwin, so this will not be a continuation of the same. For many years I have wondered how the ol' Croc Hunter has survived for as long as he has. I am not saying that he deserved to die. However, I am sure everyone can agree that at one point or another you have seen Mr. Irwin perform some feat with a wild animal that makes you think "What the fuck is this guy thinking?" The fact is that this dude created a persona for himself and part of that persona turned him into a disrespectful risk-taker that fucked around with animals for the sake of entertainment. Early Steve Irwin clips show a more subdued, run-of-the-mill nature show host who kept his distance and informed the audience. I believe that only after his show "The Crocodile Hunter" took off did Mr. Irwin decide that the way he was going to differentiate himself was going to be the high-energy animal handling that he became famous for. The problem is he was fucking around with real, live animals and he probably started to forget that. Take one look at the film Grizzly Man and it becomes less surprising to see that Steve Irwin suffered a similar fate.

Think about it this way. Steve Irwin, with all his entertainment value, had a method of animal handling that 1) must have been highly abrasive to the wild creatures he was interacting with and 2) required him to take unneccesary risks for the sake of television entertainment. If someone randomly ran up to you in the street, tackled you to the ground, and begain to examine your molars with a magnifying glass you would probably go nuts and start beating the shit out of your assailant. Steve Irwin did this to wild beasts under the guise of "educational television" when all he was really doing was making a spectacle out of himself and the creatures he violated on a regular basis.