Old Dude Stuff (2010)

  
De-criminalize marijuana on a federal level (Mr. President) and offer statehood to Mexico.




 16Sep10 - He came to me in a dream and it was as real as when I predicted it to others.  Barra
Obama will not run for a second term.  He'll decide against having a growing family in the White House for more than four years. He smilingly told me, "You're right."

27Nov11 - Guess my prediction and dream had no basis.

Third of June...already?! - eagle squats, mortgage and cash, after a weight workout, of course.  Phone xx-rays, opt for a buck-fifty Oscar vs fat-fifty quart.  Been homestone shakin' with a dimes worth of the seediest shit I've ever seen.  $40 an ounce.  I remember my best man breaking up a pound and complaining about the seed content.  It was so bad, he declared the next dude sells me a pound like this, I'm turning him in. 
     I never saw Blue Velvet.   I've been drinking Heinekin and it seemed to be a bit much for the buzz.  At the SEB, it's Blue Ribbon, two at a time first round.  Has been for decades.  But at the house...anyway, I bought a half-a-rack of Blue Ribbon.  Seven and change.
     A now deceased friend of mine offered me a Blue Ribbon at his house and declared, "Nothing tastes any better, Bo."
     With a squirt of lemon juice concentrate, nothing does taste better. So even though I'm coming late to the game, again, I'd like to join Dennis Hopper in one last toast based on one clip from a flick I never saw while he was alive.  You've seen it, so say it yourself.
                                       "FUCK HEINEKEN!! Pabst Blue Ribbon!"
We can measure the time a satellite circles the earth.  We can measure back from death to a day of birth.  We can measure the pace of everything we need.  We can only fathom the measure of the gushing speed of greed.

4Jun10 - Lost my reading glasses after the donut run and was walking around muttering and backhand-flipping the air as if moving obstacles out of my path.  Found them on the floor, right where I drop/left them.
     You can't put childish things things aside as long as an unfulfilled child's inside.

6Jun - You'll reach a time you begin checking o-bits for chronological peers.
           There's a decade or so when you slow because there are fewer than before.
            And you've passed some fears.
            It doesn't matter, every page is important and sorting the dead by age
            Is wasted energy best used to keep counting down on your "live-forever" guage.

8Jun - If you don't come highly recommended, you need to be amended.  Make amends before it ends.

The few women in my life were right on time and took an amount of mine before leaving.  I'd like to repeat them all, with a little less time for each one.

9Jun - The clouds keep coming by on rumbling rides, tied to the reins of stampeding rains.

10-6-10 -   An older German dude owned the property next to where I was staying in Merrillville, Indiana, and he used a series of ladders and cables and pulleys to keep the limbs of his trees from overhanging adjoining lots.  These were fully grown trees and he was sometimes 20-feet up.  I spoke to him about it when he was down, but his replies were thickly accented.  He smiled, though.
     Trees get out of  hand really fast.  I keep mine tied down, for horizontal growth.  I missed topping out the walnut and hawthorns, last year, so they are 15-feet tall and full of nuts and berries, which means no trimming until the birds have eaten all the red berries and the walnuts have dropped.
     There's a privit hedge bush next to my compost bin.  I keep it low enough to not interfere with the phone line.  I transplanted it from the southeast corner of the lot, when I first moved in.  Six feet from it, another privit hedge has grown.  I wrapped the larger one in strings and rope, intended to pull it into an arch, tied to the smaller one.  During the process, I uncovered a cardinal nest designed to take advantage of the dense cover.  It is just a loose jumble of sticks, hardly able to hold eggs.  But the parents are busy and they warn me away when I'm close, so the rope and strings are hanging.  Soon as I see the babies begging around, I'll renew the bending.
     Last year, I found a limb weighed down with a grape vine, across the island path.  I picked all the grapes and got about 1000 ml of tasty wine.  Since then, I keep an eye out for trees loaded down with grape vines, with the intention of cutting them down to get the grapes.  Yesterday, at the top of the path leading away from the lake, a huge limb had broken off and was covering a parking space.  It was covered with tiny green grapes.  I maneuvered the entire mess over the bank, with the vines still intact, and the grapes in a bunch, at the top, and the main limb (about 10-feet long-10-inch diameter) on the steep slope.  If those grapes ripen, I can peddle and pick without leaving the seat.

11Jun10 - Found a baby cardinal face down in the fish pond.  I'm not surprised if it was the only hatchling.  The parents didn't seem aware until I layed it atop the compost lid.  I see one of them fly into the privet, then out again, but they are mostly gone from the yard. I tied down the rope and string to continue with the bending.
     Been visualizing a conversation with the two oldest orphans from 421 E. 9th Street.  Last night I had it over a loaf of my whole wheat bread.  I guess it was one of those moments that only happens if you live long enough.

12Jun - The state has tried to eliminate the hole from my donut run.  Six 8-inch plank boards with warning and keep out signs at the bridge entrance.  Of course, I went over it.

15Jun - Just as I went over the barrier, yesterday, a chick yelled "Bad boy!" from a passing car.   The donut is not supposed to be a peaceful experience as I tangle with different state hassles.

     ...remember me?  I used to live for music.  Remember me?  I used to bring your groceries in.  Now it's Father's Day and everybody's wounded...first we take Manhatten, then we take Berlin.
                                            
Raccoon Creek has been a small muddy river for weeks, since May.  Many days of downpours.  Water table has to be higher than any year in the past five.

16Jun - A try got by me because "goodbye" came by.  I didn't grab it in time or gab a rhyme, just let it die.

     Went over the donut hole fence.  I can easily change my running time if I start getting static from lake nazis.  I need that island.  One large oak and one smaller one uprooted across the path, so the "danger" sign fit.  I'll have to bike my Neuton saw out there and clear those trees.  After hours.

Don' get tied up in a tight time-line.

23Jun - Moved my run back to do the donut hole before the state people show up.  "Bridge and island condemned!"  "Keep Out"  It's a rush going over the barrier and doing the island in a hurry.  A male mallard is keeping the white duck company.  The six pair of Canada geese and their offspring  (30 goslings) are still hanging around the lake.  A great blue heron was standing on the edge of a dock, watching me over his sloped shoulder, looking like a skinny-legged old man in a tailored faded jacket.

Great-grandmother Kelley was Jane S.  Her husband died at age thirty-one, leaving a seven-year old son who went to work picking slag from a pile of coal at the mine.  Formal education ended but his sister went to school and married a physician.  Mother lived to age ninety.  Nobody ever asked grandpa how old he was when different stories took place, figuring he was a man at the time, but he well could have been between the ages of seven and seventeen.  To his final count at eighty-three, women were his barrier to private moments: mother, sister, wife and five daughters.  His only recourse was long hikes into the hills.

Used to be monarch butterflies every summer, all over.  I think I've seen one but the three most common are swallowtails, tiger, black and zebra.

27th - Been hitting the donut earlier to miss the law.  Tried to get out and back prior to the opening hit of Below the Salt.  Left at 6:40-something, turned the radio on at exactly 8:00.  Dylan from Blood on the Tracks.  Used to wait for the finish of Keith's show at 11:00 before running on Sunday.  Feels good to have it out of the way, except for the scraped knee from tripping over a root hump while looking at the mirror smooth lake.

29Jun - Jumping a fence to cut the donut hole is way too much hassle.  The path is high weeds and the fallen oak tree is an obstacle, plus there's the elevated urge to get back over the fence.  So, I took the easy way out, yesterday, and ran two turns around the outer  rim of the lake.  "Icing" the donut instead of cutting out the hole.

5Jul - Visited my brother's lofted cabin on 90-acres of hardwoods forest just across the highway from his bike business. It's criss-crossed with a series of bulldozed 4X trails.  He took me a jeep ride and there is timber enough to be selectively cut.  If  I'd stayed on the Shoaitie long enough to have something like that constructed, I'd be eighty first.  My visiting sister and her husband were crashing there.  Veggie picnic and pics of five of six siblings.
    My neighbor (two houses between us) to the south is an amateur pyrotechnic.  His trees allowed that all rockets were elevated towards my house.  Two-stage, three-stage and no-explosion comets arching down at me from the firefly flashing night.  From the north, I could see a short but bright display of professional looking fireworks.  But from a westerly direction were many private detonations.  For one ten or fifteen minute period, it was as if someone on the other side of town was igniting responses to my neighbor Kaboom's homemade thump launches.  Twice, I thought it was over and began to go inside the house, and it started again.   Zimba stayed under the bathroom sink.
    The trouble with the security cam-gun is that more than a few criminals ignored the warning that they would be robotically shot immediately upon drawing a firearm or attack weapon to pull a robbery and commited suicide by merely drawing a pistol.  Of course, liquor and convenience store heists were eliminated.  You are on camera and in the sights of the store clerk.  You draw, you drop.  See you, again?
     The weed eater/metal detector elecro-magnet is extracting lots of iron and steel bits.  But it helps loosen the soil to search for any precious metal alerts.   Since the guages are all powered off the motor, they measure a more constant sensitivity.         
     I think gray puts the dirty in old men.  People assume that by the time one is gray they are out in the hay, and any allusion to collusion is gringy and grungy.  Any comment a gray hair makes to a new hair is considered too familiar and gets a minimum polite reaction.  Yet, gray doesn't dissuade dudes from doing what they've always done all the way to old, lust after nubiles.  I know.  Just did the dye lie and the smiles on my run were twice as wide.  Gray has a way of earning a type of patronizing respect which I don't expect.  Makes me grind on the bit to be judged by the gray.  Wanna play?  Bring your best shit.

6Jul - So, so long Maggie, it's time to meet again, to laugh and cry and try to laugh about it all.  Went to the SEB and had them raise a can to my first "x."   Two of the four people there knew Judy and drank with her when she was last in Wellstone.  I'm glad she looked me up to visit and renew some of the dozen years we had together.  It's sad to lose a link to shared years.

7Jul - Ode to Ju-Girl:  I'm glad you took the time to come back into my life but it makes missing you a test to stop the tears.  Even though lifetimes passed when I never gave you a thought, including the bills and babies years. That week long visit after you'd planned your last days now proves to have the most regrets about things I should have asked instead of ranting and railing about the dozen years we had...re-living history, not clearing it away.  Like that special year or two when my Dad wanted you sitting with him after a house-call pain shot he thought was taking him away.

     I'd like to thank Tim Weese, from Utah, for pulling over on his BMW bike and hipping me to the vapor lock which blocked and stopped the gas flow in my Tempo on the Nevada side of  Salt Lake City in 2005, or so.

    Angry husband said if he had the money, or hit the lottery, he'd pay to have the bitch burned like a Bible bush.

8Jul - L. Cohen choking me.  Put on Kris.  Bobby McGee. One of first two 8-tracks we bought.  I put on a CD copy and was going through each song when For the Good Times began.  She ran from the room and on from the house, crying.  Explained later it was playing "the last time we made love."  Whenever that was is still the last time, but I don't remember.

9Jul - I mourn alone and cry tears into my mouth.  Judy has been withdrawing money from her 401 since April to put into a fund which would be used to bring her own handyman to Wellstone and remodel my kitchen and bath.  Yesterday, I was painting waterbed room ceiling beams and imagined I was getting ready for her next visit.

10Jul - My grandfather Kelley's corn is legendary.  I remember leaf-in-the-table crowds of family slathering butter and salt and pepper onto beautifully full ears of corn so bright you could taste the yellow.  Grandkids gnawing with missing teeth, olders taking deep breaths to have one more and Ernest D. eating his with a fork.  Polly had to cut his from the cob before serving.
     Yesterday, I pulled the first ear of my "peaches and cream" bi-color.  3:33 in the 'wave with a block of butter dressing and it compares to grandpa's.  Mom and her mother used to fill a boiling caldron of salted water and the steam in the kitchen would have them both perspiring by the time they delivered the platters of corn to the table.
     Secret to the best corn is getting it from stalk to teeth in minimum time.  I have that time reduced to less than five minutes.  All the sweetness is there.  No time for the sugar-to-starch breakdown.  Taste buds change, but my corn may be better than grandpa's.

Had a roomie at 118 1/2 S. Ohio Avenue, named Tommy Taz.  Just an excellent fiddle player, classically trained but a total pill eater (twenty, forty xanex, chased with beer.)  His violin had a carved head in the neck, a bulldog or a bull, I can't recollect exactly.  I asked Taz what his fiddle was made from and he answered with a wide grin: Wood, steel, horsehair, tree resin and rawhide glue.
     Taz told of the time he'd been on a job for a short time and got busted and jailed on an old warrant:  "Hired, fired, barred, handcuffed and retired."

11Jul - Saw a scene while running which can only be described as "forked-up."   A small pickup was shrink-wrapped to a tree and the lawn around it was covered with white plastic forks stuck into the ground, tines up, to form outlines of a supine person and series of lines and circles.  Lots more creative than t-p'ing.

12Jul - Been knowing Fry since his early band years.  I was his dealer.  WE DON'T cut a disc and in the dedications mentioned Maxx and the Can-a-rama.  He doesn't visit since my neighbor busted him for possession but I've been to his crib for Texas-Hold 'em and his annual July soiree.   He's a t'ic, so when things clear out from the food, drinks, music, games and fireworks, he fires 'em up for his freak friends.
    This year, the party is at the country club, with scrambles, glow-in-the-dark putting and pool dipping.  I declined his wife's invite via e-mail and he called to re-invite me.  I declined behind the lack of a party-ending place to parch some pot.
     Fry doesn't read this blog but I was encouraging him to, with my Mexico as the 51st State rap and he went so red, I can barely believe it is him.  He is virulently anti-Mexicans.  Near the end of the conversation, he reminded me I'd gone 91-seconds without taking a breath and that he didn't want his son (three-years old) to have to speak Mexican to buy diapers for his kids from Wal-Mart and that "we" were taking back congress, followed by the liberals being out.
     I called him a fool, that liberalism is an evolutionary process and all humans would be liberal in the end.  He hung up, being the toking, music playing redneck that he is.  Guess I'll miss that annual time when I dress up to mingle with the swells who dress every day and go casual at Fry's lawn party.  Last year, I took a loaf of my bread which was sliced and added to the buffett, drank most of a bottle of Maker's Mark, did Fats for karaoke and won the cornhole contest with Fry's biker cousin.  At closing time, a black dude introduced me to "blunts."

16Jul - Won a hundred on the Mega kicker.  Took about 33 $3 bets.  DeeDi and Pearl Gin stopped by last night for some bud and Blue Ribbon.  They left about midnight when I started croaking a cover of Cohen on the karaoke mic.
     Talked to the eldest remaining member of the 421 E. 9th St. household.  I keep searching for reasons my father was such an alcohol-induced jealously abusive husband, in an attempt to allay some of the memories I harbor.  The only feedback I get is "everybody drank, back then ( late '30's - early '40's)" and  ''Carrie Jane was extremely attractive with a man-magnet melting smile"  and  "she never messed around at all."  But cooking chili for the football team while he was in the war seems questionable, today.  Have to face the fact that now, seventy-years later, all the eye-witnesses can't be interviewed, so the history is all mine.  Time to plaster over the past with a new path.
     The new Ford F-150 Raptor has made street-clean pickups seem less conspicuous by having fender mud and splattered dirt as part of the paint job.  Ingenious.

18Jul - This is either Ernest Dwight or Jon Dwight's birthday.  I should know since I called Jon earlier this month to wish him one.  One is the 19th and one the 18th, which means there were three cancer males in the house we shared, along with seven other signs.  The entire household should be horoscoped to ascertain how it was aligned.  A hive of activity which attracted transplanted related bees from every direction.

22Jul - First sunflower bloom (on a 7-foot stalk) is days ahead of the others.  It has a purple morning glory next to it.  In morning sunlight they are electric LEDs.  The early lily pad blossoms are gone, replaced by the thick green leaves which appear as a thick rug on the east side of Alma.  On the west side is an entirely new growth of blossoms, smaller (tennis ball and  baseball sizes) vs the erstwhile softball sized blooms.   It is two separate growing seasons, something I never noticed in all the years I've spent at that lake.
     The white duck has a male mallard companion and they were with another mallard pair, hitting the water from the south bank as I approached.  Yesterday, I could see it near the island.
     Watched a great blue feeding in the midst of a flock of Canada geese.  They were nibbling grass as the heron bent low and speared bugs.
      Ohio tropics, 80's at daytime and 70's at dreamtime, plus plenty of rain.  If there's a seed or root system that's been dormant, it's sprouted or vined this summer.  My next door neighbor came over to offer me the mushrooms in her yard, since I'd gathered there before.  I invited her inside for a look.  The Maytag wringer reminded her of her childhood in North Dakota but the improvised shower from a straight hot water faucet hose was a puzzle.
     She couldn't imagine my latest project, removing the poured insulation in my attic so I can expose the beams in the upstairs ceilings.  In the '60's, I carried all my old newspapers to a bin on the other side of town.  The owner was grinding it up and adding boron as a fire retardant to produce insulation. Removing it in stifling heat after it has been covered with roof tearoff and decades of dust is something easy to put off until fall.  I've lugged out six 40-gallon bags.  The real fun begins when I get it cleaned up and vacuumed so I can remove the lathe board, plaster, layers of wallpaper, furring strips and ceiling tile.

23Jul - Seeing the old creep into youth is more easily recognized as we age.
Last night was the first time I ever saw a deer licking the salt block.  Zimba was rumbling and when I went to the door, the deer was just a dark form.  I flicked on the door light and missed an excellent camera shot.  They still nibble through my garden.  They chomp the side from the biggest green tomatoes, so I've been picking them.  There are ten volunteer plants from compost seeds.
     The current generation of rabbits recognize Zimba as a threat only when she is trying to dig them out of their warren (cinder block in front and greenhouse deck in back.)  They are aware she never charges, but stalks slowly and only breaks after the rabbit goes first.  Zimba is aware they run in a circle and has sight chased or hot tracked into every surrounding yard.
     Yesterday, an adult rabbit was stretched out in a sideways  posture, showing the lightest brown underbelly blending into the darker brown back.  To extend its hind legs and flop to the side requires that a rabbit feel safe, since in order to run, it must turn its body to push up with its front feet while retracting its back legs to then fold under in preparation for a quick exit.  I watched it from the kitchen window for a long time.
     When it moved, it came closer to the house.  When its ears got into the direct rays of a red sunset, they were translucent and looked like fall leaves with darkened veins.  Slowly, it came to the house fence and under it.  Digging a small space in the dirt, it stretched out again.  Now, its five feet from the house and just below the window.
     Then it went under two sections of wire to right next to the house.  I had to lean out of the window to see.  It either has a nest or is preparing one.  Or it is checking out escape routes.  Or it thinks the dog is really just to keep the cats away, so it is looking for other locations to hang out.   Actually, Zimba did pass a rabbit on the way to chasing a cat from the garden.  Priorities.   
     A few decades back, when I was running around Robinson Lake in Indiana, I'd catch the eye of a semi driver up on I-65, point towards them, spin around, do a couple moonwalk steps while holding an imaginary steering wheel, then turn back and finger-shoot them as they passed.  I got a rare horn in response.  It's alot closer from the bike path and I never do it if there is other traffic.   The semis are all local so I've probably "Michael"-ed the same driver more then once.



2Aug - July was a fly-by, must have filled up every day.
     Wore my PornStar t-shirt on the run and on a water mattress at the edge of the beach was a tan bare-backed sun bathing star.  I was running on the perfectly packed sand next to the water and she was facing towards the mirror image lake when I passed.  On the second  round, she was sitting on a white mat, on a grassy incline, facing me as I approached.  Her dark hair was dripping about chin level and she smiled.  Two strides closer and two different familiar faces faded, she was a stranger.  There was a red Chevy Cobalt with the door still open and the stereo playing.
     "It appears you have it all."
     "Yeah."
     "That your 'chine?"
     "Y'ah."
     "Aw-right."
I'd just run through a group of twenty-five tiger swallowtail butterflies, feeding along the beach.  Although these insects are associated with flowers, they can extract sugar from urine, a turd or damp beach sand.
    The planks blocking entrance to the island bridge have been covered with 7-feet verticle boards.  Do they know I've straddled over the planks?
     On my first turn the other day, I noticed someone had gone to the trouble of putting picnic tables into the swimming area of both beaches and one into the park boat.  On my second round,  I watched a young dude on a backhoe use the fork lift to undo the mischief in seconds.
     Met a four-foot blacksnake with its head on the path.  Figuring to get it across before a biker tracked across it or somebody walking, freaked, I pushed it with my foot.  It coiled tightly and prepared to strike.  I offered the bottom of my shoe and it bent its head back to an open-mouthed flat before striking.  It hit three times and when I pulled back it struck the side of my shoe.  I began circling it, thinking about a quick grab-and-toss, but it pivoted, following my movement, still in strike position.  I offered my foot again and it struck twice, hitting my shoe at both distances.  OK, buddy, take your time.  After ten or so yards, I looked back and saw that it wasn't going across in the first place.  Went back into the weeds.
    
                 BIG HERO, NOW

     She called him Mama's Little Hero
     From the day he was born.
     Even then, he smiled
     And that was her reward.

     She carried Mama's Little Hero
     Past when he could walk alone.
     She answered questions for him
     Like he was made of stone.

     In pre-school times
     The name sounded older.
     Later, it sounded childish
     And the taunts were on his shoulders.

     Times when he made her mad, she scolded
     "Mama's Little Hero's been bad!"
     But that was all before
     Mama's Little Hero went to war.

5Aug - When I was on Hawks Haunt with a typewriter and little else, I sent an article to READER'S DIGEST.  Can Marijuana Help You Handle Your Drinking?  Of course, it was rejected, given it was thirty-years, or so, ago.
     And, of course, smoking hemp is a preferred alternative for stress reduction.  Even casual alcoholics admit as much.  For an alcoholic trying to stay off the sauce, a steady ingestion of marijuana has never been tested, scientifically, as a medicinal aid.  Bag the donuts and coffee at AA meetings.  Speed isn't the drug they need.  Twist up a few numbers to toke on.  Mellow is the answer.
     There are still people from the sixties who keep saying the marijuana today is many times more potent than the marijuana "we tried, back then."
     Back then, as now, the largest percentage of marijuana smoked year-round in this country is Mexican marijuana.  The potency is about the same because too much is grown for American consumption to bother with isolating female plants and inducing them to produce more resin, which is the only way to make marijuana more potent, i.e., higher tetrahydrocannabinol content.
     Back then, as now, the science is to prevent fertilization of the female plant and, back then, as now, most marijuana has seeds, which means the plant was fertilized and the potency diminished.
     Even so, the most potent stuff ever grown may take effect immediately and for the first few minutes, the high may be more obvious, but one can only get so high on marijuana.  Doesn't matter if it is a couple hits off a joint or emptying party bowls all night long, one only gets so high, and then it diminishes.
     Most of the people who finally admit to having tried marijuana in college, never got high.  Somebody passed a joint and they hit it and rinsed it down with alcohol.  Then when they got outrageous on the amount of beer they consumed, they blamed the pot.
     Which is the same thing that will happen when it is legal, drinkers will start toking and blaming marijuana for the wrecks and fights.  Indeed, the addition of marijuana makes for a more intense drinker.  With less of a feral edge.

7Aug - Never hold a fart hostage, you'll only get shit for ransom.
10Aug - I worried over that 45-feet of dead-limb oak for half-a-year.  It was leaning to fall over the lake drive and into power lines on the other side.  It was close to campsites and the beach, so people were walking, biking and driving under it every day.  I expected it to fall behind a strong southwest wind coming across the north side of the lake.  Then I noticed it was marked for felling.  It looked so dead, but after it was down and sectioned, there was 40-feet of hard oak.  It wouldn't have been blown down in my lifetime.  At least not before I had time to run from under it.
     The white duck is constantly with three mallards.  She follows them in a line.  Today, they were crossing the lake to the island and from my distance, she appeared as a white tug pushing barges.
      There were no less than a dozen clamorous kids from two to seven, in the water at the 1st beach.  They were in a group with a couple adults, and there were more toddlers moving to join from a shaded spot occupied by three or four women.  On my second turn, there was only one couple, with a dad coaxing his baby boy to come a little further to get a hand. By the time I passed, he was being carried to where his wife was standing with a young girl.
     I've been switching back and forth between brands of running shoes, for years.  Nike for wear.  Asics for comfort.  Tried New Balance for fit.  They are all made in China (at least the ones I buy.)  I have a pair of Adidas that I bought as a second pair.  The salesman said they were the most comfortable shoes he'd ever worn.  I don't remember wearing them out, as a running shoe, but I do slip them on from time to time as a slipper.  I bought a pair of Rava MB's from shopadidas.com.  Buck-twenty, no discount.
     From the first time and every time you put them on, the fit is the first thing you feel.  These are the shoes made for the Chinese runners. 
     You can't replace the displacement of feet padding by building up the space in shoe construction.   At least, I don't know that it has been tried.   All you can do is replace shoes as soon as they quit compensating for thinner pads on the bottoms of your feet.  I'm replacing my other three-pair rotation of  running shoes with Adidas.
     Bacteria fingerprinting is easier than identification with DNA.  We all have our individual bacteria which we leave as prints.  Litter can be traced.  Could be the end of cigarette butts on the ground.  And everything else that's been touched and tossed. Litterbugs would have to think before, or it may be returned to their door.

12Aug - The hurry for BP to get that "relief  well" drilled is over with, the "cap" is holding.  In time, this well will be gushing oil, finishing the emptying of the reservoir.  Once again, BP doesn't waste money on exigencies when it interferes with probable profits.  Relief.  Reserve. Substitute.  It is still another deep well.

16Aug - I'm shaving with a Philips shaver. Norelco.  My grandmother bought me one for graduation.   "Hope you like candy,"  she said as I began to open the wrapping.  No doubt she was setting up an expression.  In my mind I went from candy to a man and Grandma Kelley was smiling a yard wide.  Nobody in the house was using electric, they were Gillette Blue's all the way; JD, Bill, ED.  From the straight razor, which Grandpa used for years, with the leather stropping strap that hung on the wall for decades after he went to safety razor, as a threat to grandkids that got out of his line, to Blue Blades.  Seems there was a more expensive Thin, but all I ever heard was Blues are just as good.
     Doesn't matter.  A man shaves a soaked skin face with something as sharp as a razor blade, or two, or three on a handle, there will be nicks and probably blood-letting cuts.  Especially, in the beginning, which may last for years because some men never do get the hang of a good shave, with any blade.  Obviously, the easier way is to do a beard which needs minimum outlining.
     Like George Hayes.  Gabby.  Cowboy sidekick all the way to TV.  Grew up with a George.  And I'm certain his friends teased him a tad because we all knew Gabby was really George.  George is gone, now, and I am just now remembering his beard.  It was like Gabby's!  I came back to my hometown after a thirty-five year absence and spoke to George on numerous occasions, for years afterwards, and never mentioned the Roy Rogers movies days when three or four or five of us would all walk up to the picture show and see two movies and cartoons for a a dime or two.
     The times I had no Norelco, I shaved with a blade and no lather.  Used to really freak those young cats out at Brandywine.  They'd walk into my room while I was shaving and leave.  Couldn't bear to watch a bare shave.
     A blade shave requires a mirror.  Electric shave is by feel.  One can walk, talk and finger-pop while plugged in.  And bearing down is the best with the smooth flow of screened cutting surfaces.
     The worst fact about shaving is that the best shaves are after at least a day of growth, or two day's.
So every day shaving means the least amount of hair is available to slice off.  So the slice has to occur closer to the ouch's skin.
     Two fawns crossed the path ahead of me, so I paused.  Two adult deer followed.  After they crossed, a young buck appeared.  He turned back and when I ran by I heard him snorting in the weeds off the path.  Male deer always allow the ladies and kids to go first.

22Aug - There were yellow fire lane ribbons across both ends of the Raccoon Creek bridge and it freaked me, for a second, then I stepped through them to continue to the lake.  Next time, the nearest end was down so I broke the four strands of tape on the other like it was the finish line.
     A white egret was sitting on the dead branches of the collapsed oak off the island.  At first sight, a reflection appeared in the water below, but then I could see it was the white duck.  That snowy one must have been wasting his best rap on a duck that wasn't about to try to fly away from its mallard family.
     Between the second and first beach, is a food trailer and a shed.  Running from the second, these structures block one's complete view of  the first beach.  I was running and had just cleared the trailer and shed, providing a full view of the beach, including the furthest bench.  A young girl was standing in front of it and a lady with a beach skirt was behind it.   From my side view, she seemed white, even against her blond hair. She was nude but it didn't register.  I thought "alabaster," then "body suit."
     Within steps of when I saw her, my regular route is to turn towards the beach.  I banished the thought to continue forward to keep looking and turned away.  I shot a glance back just before reaching the water edge and she had on a shirt to match the skirt.

May Day - The first was to noon before I caught it on the screen.  Enlisted, discharged, separated, arrested...are all May dates.   Sister gave me a car and the first question I asked, "Is it May?"
 2May - Too bad grandpa didn't live to see Ali.  He would have gotten to see big speed, the best in boxing.  Even in the pugilistic world, the argument was always "can the best little man beat the best big one?"  Smaller men stay in the argument by virtue of hand speed.  Muhammed is probably the only big man with a developed lightening set of gloves backed by heavyweight power and height.  Could absorb speed by quicker coverage.  Like sugar cane and Floyd.  Mosley knew he was going to get his ears boxed and jacked it up to match while slamming for a knockout.  Really did connect and got excited with wild attacking.  Floyd peeked, protecting his jaw, lasting out the round, like the master used to do.  Mosley shot his climax strength and won't be in it, again, while Floyd racks up point rounds.  I left it at seven.  Never would have left The Champ's.  He always found ways to show his conditioning in late rounds with punishing flurries so wicked, he could throw in trick shots.  Too fast to record, live.  But I watched him get layed out the first time and in my heart I knew he would lose a decision for that one blow.  Mick and I were in shock all the way home from Toledo.  Home wasn't really where we wanted to go.  We'd imagined a few drinks of celebration in some bar but he just drove, drowning in a double sorrow behind Notre Dame getting caught from behind by Southern Cal on the radio going to the big screen.
     "Shanghaied!" used to be the worst abduction, drunk, dragged and chained to a ship docked in the East China Sea-port.  Today, we're Shanghaied by choice, dragged-out and drinking, paying homage to the Dragon on the East China Sea-shore.  Putting on an exihibition that cost more billions than their recent Olympics.  Only place where poor people can still be cleared to make way for display, in numbers we can only compare to herding Native Americans.  But in China, these numbers are the real strength and know they are the backbone of the expansion, and believe it is China's, so it is their's.
     Saw my idea for sale by DR.  For a couple thousand and change they have a rig to turn a pickup into a dump truck.  Of course, it fits over the bed but has simple power controls.  The load can be slid to the gate, slowly, for easier off-loading.  Ad says US made.

    I'm the original OWDFO, Old White Dude For Obama and still have the 2x6 foot sign that proclaimed it and I'm still in awe.  The man didn't go sans a plan and he is working it in a hurry.  This country won't be able to beg him to stay, and they'll try.  White house for kids for more than one term is eight years of unreal in the middle of really important reality years.  I think he'll exit with an active country on the way to it's final evolutionary end, along with the rest of the world.  I'm staying in the safest place on earth.  Still some clean water and air and no natural disaster prone history.  Look at the map.  The Gulf of Mexico is going to be permanently impounded before the well is emptied into the water.  Not to mention river traffic trying to get around the clogging muck.  Any hurricane churning and it's lapping onto N.O. waterways and new paint jobs.  Aquaculture drowned.

May voting day.  Be just a quick bike ride but be something I didn't plan in today.  May has been very productive.

4May -  Paramahansa Yogananda, thank you.
                     Paramahansa Yogananda, thank you, Jesus
                      Paramahansa Yogananda, thank you God
                         God come to me, let me be one with thee
                           God be in me, let me see
                          God come to me, let me know
                            God be in me, let it show

5May - I pray every day.  Today, along the path with wildflowers glowing in golds and blues as inspiration until you want to go dig 'em up for your yard.  And a half-dozen goslings and black duck on the lake.  In one hundred-yard stretch there were spiritual sounds in a line from robins, mocking bird, oriole and catbird announcing eggs in the nest.
     God doesn't strike people down for bad stuff they've done or may do.  God hasn't the time to squash your chintzy ass; there's a universe to get the human race through.  You recognize when you help God.  There're plenty of ways to hinder.
     6May - Meant to bike down to get a half-a-rack of cervezas for Cinco de Mayo, yesterday.  Been cranking Cohen through the karaoke speakers, upstairs.  Haven't been this enamored by lyrics since Kris, then Leon.  Hardly seems possible at this stage, to be able to dial-in an album of songs.
     I put some vinegar into a "Corelle" saucer and put it into the microwave to get rid of the stubborn scent of the popcorn I burnt through the bag, days ago.  I punched up three-minutes to make sure it boiled before letting it steam.  Soon, it boiled dry and through the container and by the time I opened the door, there was a growing laser-glow.  The saucer continuing to melt through the bottom was like a torch.  As the inside cooled, the glass continued to break apart.  Some of the bottom came with the final chip of glass I had to chisel off.
     People who have seen both sides of the coin, prefer the wealthy surface, not some reminder of before.  People with money are different from the rest of us poor.  Like Aunt B said after giving me the addresses of my half-Jewish cousins at each end of LA, "If you're not talking money and making it, to Joey, he won't have much to say."  But I was in a hurry in the '78 hummingbird,  just to touch some bases along the way.  Had no intentions about hanging around or needing a place to stay.

7May - In the very merry month of May...Who shall I say is calling?  This verizon shit about not recognizing my ID-password could bring on an oldtimer's disease consideration.  Still get the news page and they can hide the E-mail section if they choose.  It's like the spectrum lamp I was trying to cobble to functionality when it slipped and dropped lamp first.  Ordered a bulb from Cerritas and it wouldn't light.  Did I get a bad bulb or did I permanently ruin the lamp?  Ordered a new lamp to see.  Paleo put a heavy hand on it, years ago, and stripped threads at the base, trying to swivel the top.  I had it drywall screwed to stand at one spot but rearranged and decided to really fix it. Yeah, I did.  My eyes will be happy when they see the new light.
     One of those x 'o's who get high and call was in town for three days, called but didn't visit.  Said she'd rather leave wanting than wanting more.  She's so country.
    
8May - I use a washing machine much like the first one I ever saw, wringer, at my grandmother's.  On wheels to be portable.  Plugs into any 110 outlet.
    My parents lived in second floor rooms of a hotel above a bar.  The woman in charge was on a friendly mission to collect rent and keep things comfortable.  She'd wheel a wringer down to us and my parents would do the laundry.  I remember my dad, leaning over the tub with a cigarette dangling, smoke floating up into his sweating, squinting eyes, feeding the rollers.  I was probably placed close enough to see but out of the way.  The woman had a daughter younger than me and she had the run of the halls on every floor, way past my border at the door, and she used to bring traps with live rats "from the celler."  I really wanted to see that celler.  My mom was freakin' and pulling me to her and hurrying the girl on.
     There were way scarier scenes inside our apartment.  Some dents from there are still as obvious to me as ones body-worked away but still seen by trained eyes.  JeffryLad is one of the best and has rebuilt bodies from crashes.  He can spot work done on an auto, any part of it, which to the majority appears to be perfectly fine.  It's like feeling the memory of  mental crushes. We smooth out our dents, in time, but the ugly is still there, to us, and it pulls us to dent others.  Those of us who have witnessed close encounters with an out-of-his-mind-on-alcohol parent can readily repeat it if prodded while drunk and getting drunker, towards others.  I don't regret all the times I fought back at some perceived slight or bullshit aggression.  I've kicked some asses because I'm not waiting to get hit.  They were all him; drunk and showing off for his drunk buddies.  Mistaking manners for matter.
     One time, in Madison, Wisconsin, a dude pulled up and asked if anybody wanted to fight and we all three said yes.  We were airman and had just begun to share some chewing tobacco.  The dude parks and jumps out headed for me.  I'm backing fast into an entryway to a business and reaching a point to where his momentum alone can push me through plate glass.  "Hey, hold it, let me get this chew out!"  He stopped and I started feeding him both hands.  I was hitting and he was backing, all the way to his car and when the cops came, I had him bent backwards over his own trunk.  The cops couldn 't believe it.  Tex couldn't believe it.  The half-Indian sergeant from Waco couldn't believe it.  Tex saw the dude at a restaurant on State Street and stole his coat from his car.  Brought it back to the base and there wasn't  anybody big enough to wear it.  When he did an eye-witness account, nobody believed him.  Alcohol had minimal impact, in this instance.  We were walking, he was driving.  Rule prevails, did everything I could to keep from getting hit.  Especially true at my age, so be advised, I'm hooking first.  Don't start no rootin' and tootin' and there won't be any cuttin' and shootin' and bragging is a poor recommendation.  I've been around so long I've heard your story before, probably from you.  So try something new.  In the meantime, it's a lifting day and nothing starts until I get that out of the way.

NINEMay - Sad-eyed lady lyrics from Dylan on Below the Salt, the virtual coffeehouse.  Comes in on a deep toke hiss.  Warm up to a donut run in the sun.
     I have glads transplanted from a neighbor's dug-up throw-aways, four times.  Time before last, they were in plank boxes beneath the east windows until the scrapped-together construction gave way to critter digs and dog follows.  They've been out front in a strip for over four years, I'm guessing, and last year was the first year I noticed the orchid gladiolus.  They look like orchids, when the only wild orchids are way too far south to compare.  Of course, I've seen them for a decade, but last year I googled 'em and really looked.  Couldn't wait for this year.  The buds were early and bloomed just inches above the tips of the leaves.  Bright white!  For days, in morning sun.  Then gone to wither and dry...replaced by the stand of orchid ones coming on a foot away.  I never documented the subtle color plan until now.  I have 15 corn plants standing in my garden.  And seven hills of beans, a row of peas, radishes, carrots, chard, collard greens...all in weed free plots.  That's just the first planting in the first third of total space.   The herbs in the greenhouse have been going into skillet dishes for weeks.  Coriander, rosemary, sage and thyme...I think.  they're from four pots Laurie made sure I had before she left to live in Dayton.
     My mother was the last one standing able to reach deeper than anyone else into a furthest back past and I forgot to ask.

10May10 - Except for a canary, a goldfish and a paraket, there were no pets in the houses where I grew up.  The first two were when it was just me and Mom.  I remember when they died in a house which has been razed for a trailer.  My father had little to do with us in the brief visits and I was asleep during the time he slept and left.
     I grew up hardscrabble free to get a flashlight and go hunting for stray cats during mating fights.   Just to see them battle.  Sometimes, two would be so interested in trying to back each other down, they would end up attacking in a flurry of fang and claw, right in the beam.  These animals did not have homes.  Every year they were different and unclaimed.  Cats were not pets, to me, just wild sneaky things that ran and I chased.  Ones that didn't run were scary, the way they seemed to look into you.
     The dog that adopted me to run with the Klondiikes, was a cat chaser and would climb a verticle trunk for six-feet up to tree one high in the limbs.  One time a stray began following us into town from a farm and Brownie wasn't having any.  But he was keeping up with me and the kitten was aways back.  Then it ran up through some high weeds and it was on.  I couldn't see anything but the battle was vicious.  They fell down a creek bank and by the time I could see from a trestle, Brownie was standing in shallow water, howling in pain, with the cat on his back, clawing his face.  Then he clamped on a paw and pulled it off.  He was a "brindle bull dog."  The only description of pedigree everyone agreed on.  Brownie was beagle-sized, solid muscle with a bull-dog muzzle.  An older Brown came by and saw the end and said, " A dog that will kill a cat makes a good coon dog."
      Every bone was broken but the feline was still alive and Brownie was limping away.  I remember it as a pitch from about 25-feet and one jagged edge of the rock raked the skull and the cat was dead.
      Since then, I've lived with cats in the house, but it was shared with their true owners.  Cheech and Chong were the first from a friend's litter.  I was tight with them.  Cheech would actually retrieve a ball of scrap paper.  Three times, max, but still impressive.  Outside cats, no litter boxes.  Outside cats are the steadiest killers of all.  Domesticated felines are stalking every movement.  Bird, mole, mouse, bug, chipmunk, rabbit, squirrel, frog, fish and butterfly may end up in the claws and maw of kitty.  Chong used to line moles along the bottom brick step after a night of hunting.  I guessed she was travelling at least three blocks from home.  And if there is the scent of fish or chicken scraps, a cat will chew and scatter garbage, anybody's.  I do not want them in my garden, digging to cover.
     Pedigreed Ridgebacks are of two types, those accommodating of cats and those chasing anything that runs, especially cats.  Zimba's pedigree began at a pound.  We share a "rather not" about cats.  We have next door neighbors with cats on the scurry in a hurry when the dog is out.  I think about people in areas with cougars and coyotes, trying to enjoy the outdoors and being attacked.  I believe a good sized stone or stick for a weapon and Zimba, we could back either one down or a couple of the yacking canines.  Running or biking in places in stretches like I used to do at 29-Palms, I'm going with a Ridgeback hound. They can keep up and back it up.

11May - Joe "Codger" died in the VA hospital in Chillicothe from where Dad retired while he was dying.  They knew each other most of their lives esp. after Joe and his brother John began running a cab and service station.  I remember them as huge dudes always hurrying.  Joe gestured towards me in the back seat when I was about eight or nine and asked, "That your boy, Bill?" and kept pumping gas and looking at me.
     Fifty or so years later, after receiving a card at graduation from Joe, County Commissioner, I was in Vinton County painting a house when a friend of the owner came to visit.  He said he knew me and my parents and kept smiling for me to recognize him.  Turns out he was Johnny, about a hundred pounds lighter.  He turned Joe (who had also quit smoking, walked for exercise and was way thinner) on to my neat paint jobs.  I did every bit of painting either brother had done after that, for $6 an hour, for a decade.  They hired me away from the Steel Breeze, probably because of his ubiquitous cigar.
    I've hauled Joe to hospitals and doctors in four counties with his back.  He enjoyed rides the most in the F-150 even though I had to push him into place near the end.  Last time I talked to him was a cuss-out behind his calls for me to go run for him.  "All-right," were his last words to me.
     He was a regular out-patient at the VA, even though his actual military service ended after basic because the war ended.  Once I was getting ready to walk him to the truck and while I was putting his wheelchair into the bed, he tried to get his walker closer to the door and took a header into the jam, ending up face down and bleeding, before I snatched him to his feet, "Goddammit, Joe!"
    I suggested calling EMS and he insisted I drive him there, instead.  He wanted enough treatment to continue to the VA for his appointment.  They put a gauze bandage around his head to close a wound which required nine stitches in his scalp and another bandage to cover the abrasion on his forearm.  When I wheeled him into the waiting room he looked the part of a wounded veteran.   He was a red-neck Republican aware of my liberal Democrat philosophy.  People wondered how we put up with each other.  In the end, we didn't.  He was only a decade my senior.  Grandpa always said, "Nobody wants to be eighty, Harson."

12May - 13May - chipping sparrow, white-capped sparrow, purple finch, mourning dove; all within a couple feet of each other, in the backyard grass, easy spotting with the nocs through the kitchen glass.  Sans binoculars, the rusty cap, biker black headband and raspberry juice color are absent.  Robin abandoned a fully constructed nest next to where cardinals had a litter, last year, in the front tree hedge. Rebuilding in a tree next to back of the house.  Starlings chased the pair of red-bellied woodpeckers from Mr. Joe's tree across the street.  Used the same tactic as the ones that took over the red-bellied woodpecker hole in the tree of the neighbor behind my house.  There were battles which went to the ground, but it seemed the starlings were working in threes.  Two would busy the woodpecker pair while a third starling went into the hole and occupied it for long periods of time.  After fighting off the woodpecker trying to get inside, the outside starlings would harrass the woodpeckers long enough for two starlings to switch places inside the hole.  The peckers are worn down after a couple days.  Eventually, one finally goes in to do battle with the occupying starling.  When it happened, last year, the woodpecker had to back out and the starling was holding on to a wing, hard.  Counting the space above my neighbor's soffit, that's three starling digs for years to come.
     I watched it happen sixty-years ago, on 9th and Vermont.  The yard was bordered on the southest section by six huge trees.  "Sterile walnuts" grandpa called them.  Every year, flickers would drill a hole in one and the starlings would take it over.  But it might not be for more than a year, because screech owls used to nest in the flicker spaces, too.   I climbed a tree and reached in with a gloved hand to extract an owl to use as a live decoy to shoot crows.

14May10 - In '57 on this date, I was in Ashland, Kentucky, awaiting enlistment in the military.  It seems really sick, today, embarking on four years of wasted opportunity to keep studying for a degree for free.  Instead, I wasted the study time, the diet time, the body-shaping time, most of the four years, drinking and smoking and chasing tail.  May as well have been a dog chasing my own.  And all the plans for shit not to happen failed.  The next dozen years were marriage, kids, buying cars, a house, divorce...long ways from going to Australia or Alaska.  Join the Air Force, your life will change dramatically.
     Fact is you can't trade it for anything, your life before got you to your present instant.  After that, the past doesn't matter.

16May10 - Rain, rainbows and clouds are the themes for Below the Salt.  Discharged forty-nine years today.  Speed bump memories remain.  Keith ends it with Stones, Gimme Shelter.  What a way to start a Sunday.  Go ahead Ben.  Yowzer, yowzer.  NPR, man, couldn't do without it.

17May -  Started watching a set of Twin Peaks CD's.   Indian character, Hawk, lodge room number 315, Air Force officer with alien connection (after listening to the professor rant about Obama releasing all the info collected about outer space visitors) all  began to have me looking forward to the next episodes.  Have no idea what year these were on TV but Mom used to tune it in and I connect none of these with then.

18May - Don't talk to cobwebs, speak to the spider.

20May - If you don't own a Neuton pruner/saw, get one.  Unless there is never to be a case where you want a dependable tool to do the work of a chain saw sans gas, sans the hassle.  Imagine seeing a tree, day in and day out which is dead and supporting dead limbs above your head.  Not mine, I've been running on the other side of the path, for years.
     Today, I put my Neuton in my Sierra Club backpack and collared my dog for a walk to that tree.  It was leaning at quite an angle and I had to reach to make the direction notch.  About ten-inches thick where I made the fell cut.  I checked the path at first hint of cracking and returned to finish it.  It crashed and broke into sections which I tossed aside before turning the main trunk off the path by lifting and walking the main limb 180-degrees.  I used a branch to sweep the asphalt clear for people.
     Never saw a soul the entire short time.  As I was about to leave the path, I bent over to put some mushrooms into my pack.  As I straightened, a bike went by leaving an expensive scent.  Her tanned legs were so dark I could only imagine how far.  A brief ten minutes before, she would have had to slow for my project and I could have shown my prowess.  As it was, the only thing she saw was my back end.  Probably wouldn't have wanted to hear my saw sales pitch, anyway.

27May -  Spill, baby, spill!   BP was in a hurry for more before safety measures were ready so they bribed the time-consuming inspectors with cheap tricks.  Which is all BP has to offer, as shown by the attempts to slow the flow.  At the speed of greed.
     Oh, my dove, my starling, I hunger for your lunch.
     Doves are seed and grit eaters.  Starlings are entomophagous.  Robins are, too, but earthworms provide nearly 100% of their diet.  The healthiest lawns need the castings from worm activity.  However, the search and pull method Robins use doesn't eliminate enough worms to make a difference.
     Starlings devour more insects from a lawn than all other birds.  Starlings are meticulous and will bury their heads deep in the blades where they pry and peck by opening and closing their long beaks. When they find more than they can consume, they notify other starlings to come and join in.
     Starlings communicate constantly.  When there are edibles that one starling finds, more will show up.  When a flock of starlings are feeding, there is always a lookout in a nearby tree, communicating the approach of danger.  At the signal, the entire flock flies away, together.  Then they filter back to the feeding area until the flock is on the ground, guided by the lookout signals.  Sometimes, it appears as a drill and the flock flies and returns, two or three times before finishing the dish.
     Starlings waste no time on the ground and are constantly discovering and uncovering insects.  If it finds a sticky insect, a starling will drag and pulverize it in dry dirt to abrade it before swallowing, and then swipe its beak back and forth to clean off the goo glue.
     I used to call them rats with wings, due to they fact they congregate to devour street litter of fast food tossed and driven over.  If there are bits of meat, they get that first and then the greasy bread or salty chips.

     May 28, 2010 - Starlings do not build nests.  They cram nesting material into a crevice.  The process is fast and the longer the piece of straw or string or scrap, the better.  When a space behind a loose board of a residence is chosen, the longer pieces of nest material sometimes stick out from the bird's entrance, so starlings have a reputation as "messy."

     May 29 - Had to dig out a keyboard from the stack of old ones.  The one that came with this unit quit doing quotation marks and capital L's.  Showed up with "messy" from yesterday.  This Compaq is much snappier and the connections are audible.
     Dudes asked me about gays in the military.  I told them, "Long marcher or short stepper, what the hell's the difference once a foot is blown off?"
     Actually, in 1959, I had a queer roomate in the Air Force.  Duffy was from Lynn, MA, near Boston and he liked to say, "You don't know beans until you've been to Boston."
     We worked in the personnel office and Duffy would pick out the best looking young dudes checking onto the base in Youngstown.  He'd invite one's who could fit into his clothes to come to his room and try some on, to wear until they could get their civilian wardrobe together.
     His hair was always longer than the rest of the airmen, but he had the personnel sergeant shmoozed to approval.  When I transferred to Madison WI, Duffy followed shortly afterwards and asked the 1st Sergeant if he could bunk with me without even asking me.  Just checked in and set it up, then moved in with me and Hastings.

Memorable Memorial Day - Decoration Day in the old days.  I remember people came back from all over to dress up grave sites of relatives.  Major parade to the cemetary for speeches and band music.  Used to put bottle caps in my bicycle spokes and get in the parade.

You can play your cards just right,
Always knowing when to raise or sit tight.
But the devil's in the dealing, understand?
While you're hoping death deals itself a losing hand.

This story should be a song
 But the words would be wrong
And the sadness too strong
And to tell the truth would take too long
And it ain't about you and me.

Shoulda had the professor lead me through the flash process before he split.  Went to the SEB and Danny was the only one there, and he was mopping the floor behind the bar.  Looked like some scene from way many years back.  He'd finally taken down the blue tarp partition, so I retrieved my MAXX shades, which I left on the bar back in the fall.  He put them on the back bar shelf and closed it off  for winter.  Heats with a coal stove,  Owns a coal mine. Says all the illegal immigrants can go to California or New York and "leave us alone."
     My neighbor busted Birdwell.  2nd DUI:CDL gone.  Third generation truck driver.  Hauled wood all the way to Cincinnati and made big pieces of cake.  But dumping asphalt was the real gig, sitting still, then bustin' a move back to get another load to dump into the spreader.  Paid by the load.  I was helping the wolf load in Bidwell when I met Birdie.  One time we got stranded behind not knowing how to switch to the full gas tank.  I believe Fee re-rigged the lines to get us going.  A dude comes by and I'm rappin' to him and asked if he's from  Bidwell.  We call it Birdwell, down here.  I call my friend "Birdwell" ever since.  Since then, I've been able to ask people from Bidwell if they ever heard it called Birdwell?   Every one laughed at the absurdity.
     It's like that time I ate aminita muscata 'shrooms and was rushed to the hospital in Red Bank, NJ.  Stomach pumped, psychiatrist interview, overnight stay recommended.  Professor says he's heard the story more than once, and it's bullshit.  The mushrooms I ate will not kill you, they're trippin' fungus.  So, perpaps I do have the story all wrong.   The real fear was that I may have a massive psycho-chemical freakout and really be a problem.  It seems so, now, the way Michelle called her husband at work and put me on the phone.  Max, in a few minutes, your liver will begin to shut down and everything after that is critical.  OK, OK, fire up the ambulance.  She was my boss for the attendent gig on the bus of autistics to the Johnson and Johnson estate in Princeton and back to get them after a day at a school full of stars trying to reach inside the barriers.  Of full-grown males worse than anything in a bar full of drunks.  Brian is head-butting, today, watch out for him, the young fox told me as she lead him to his seat.  I waited just ahead of where he was being seated.  There was no glass, it was boarded over.  He tries that with me, and I'm in his face to erase his smile, I'll put him in more pain than any he can give himsef.  I dare him to even try to headbutt me.  The chick was in shock but getting off the bus.  You can ask the stacked blond driver.  I had that boy asking for candy by telling me his name.  She watched in the rear view mirror and told me how amazed she was.  Fact is, all that candy furnished to appease them wasn't a treat for just them.  I didn't eat with them but I certainly took the leftover home.  Of course, this story, like the muscata, may have been way different.  For all I know, Brian was seeing how far he would have to go to trip me out.

     Recently acquired three new cds, Cocker, Cohen and Russell.  They are all I hear when NPR is turned off.  Some of the kind of listening to which I can easily slip inside the lyrics again.  Cohen is a very recently acquired taste thanks to Kieth Newman's virtual coffee house. Tower of Song was Tally-man's Song the first dozen times I heard it and it is still difficult to sing over without saying it wrong.  Fact is, I'm working on lyrics to The Tally-Man Song.   It's the song you don't want to hear.

    What happened to the jock stars who know how to pick up chicks?  Are they so out of touch with the world outside the sidelines that they lack simple tactics of "speech" that bucks and rides can assist?   Even with a fraction of his wealth and attention, I could do better than needing straight shots and a cop to stand guard while I exposed myself before a jerk-off assault and walked away like I'd just thrown a touchdown pass.  Probably to that smokin' receiver that's glad he won't be touching any of your balls again.  Just for the record, I'm certain that if one of my buzzes could be transported back to some athletic moment from the past...pshaw, I would have been better for it.  It's kinda why I don't do road races, anymore.  Too intense leading up to it and just jacked to the maxx until the end and after.  I race on donut runs if anybody else is jogging.  I told Tris (she ran Boston in three and 22) I'm glad when she's going in the opposite direction.  Good I can't keep up, I'd be rapping my ass off or just revelin', she's such a dear deer, and her nails are always perfect.  After she passes, I bust ass to just keep her in sight.  She does the donut, occasionally, and is cutting the hole out before I reach the outer edge.  But she is fifty years younger than me.


     Strictly speaking to the source of my drug of choice: make Mexico the 51st State.  Immigration thorn removed to Mexico's southern border.  Mexicans become citizens overnight.  United States grows geographically and the Mexican drug laws become US drug laws.  Soon, the drug marijuana will become just another herb in adult gardens.  Which is why I want all this to happen.  xx-ray's fat fifties for the double-x will become nickel bags.  Not the $25 per-ounce "nickel" bags from forty-years back, but $.05 for a baggie full.  My disposable income would increase by a couple thousand a year.  For a poor man, that's a bundle.  If all the true t'ics had a real choice where a vote would make a difference, their united vote would rule.  "True" t'ics are all those of you out there who would use it if it didn't cause a user the "criminal element" hassle.  Going to vote with a buzz can bring out the natural alertness to the mechanical movements of straights, the way they seem robotic and simple-minded.  Of course, it is quite clearly the way humans are, going through the same motions and speaking the same sentences and trying to keep well-oiled.  Speaking of which, Mexico wouldn't care if some rigs went up on the desert down there.  Those wells can be shut off immediately (compared to the Gulf disaster) after a blowup.  It's obvious we'll keep trying to suck the wells dry before putting the real effort behind alternatives.  We haven't even evolved from the absolutely deadly coal which is foul as soon as it is uncovered, by shaft or shearing the top off a mountain, and becomes really obscene when torched.
     T'ics are not helpless when under the influence.  We are not as docile as depicted, lying around on a layer of smoke, droopy-eyed and uncaring.  Fact is, it is easy to piss us off if you challenge us with simple-minded shit.  You know the kind when you ask questions alluding to our high with no real knowledge of  what's pot. It is the malaise adults sense in kids who begin using.  They can't handle the robotic simple-mindedness input to a brain introducing new scenarios to express.  Youths have enough going on in their growing brains.  They don't need enhancers.  Or depressors.

I have a hound that has the run of the neighborhood, sans collar, mostly, and she's getting older.  Like the other day she walked in front of a parking pickup, as I went behind it.  I mean Mike didn't even brake and she slipped by.  He's smiling because he couldn't have seen her until she was across, and I state "She better know enough to get out of the way."  She still stalks rabbits and puts them through their circle.  She still challenges any or group of dogs on her property.  And sometimes gets me up to chase something around the house in the middle of the morning, like out of chute #9.  I figure deer. But she limps a bit and needs constant attention to her skin thing.  But last night, I let her out shortly after letting her in and she went for something in the recycle sacks.  I yelled when she started moving all of those Gato Negro and bock beer bottles the professor left.  But whatever it was was fighting back and she went into that deep growl of death.  She dragged it to solid groud and started breaking bones, then tossed it into the air and made the final pounce to deliver puntures of no return.  When I bagged it and canned it, it looked like road kill.
     She was bred to hunt lions.  A pack could find a lion and chase it down, then hold it at bay until the hunters came to shoot it.  British having fun in the jungle with native service.  Zimba will chase any cat with the same intention.  She wants them to run and then wait for me when they tree.  My nearest neighbor has an old cat.  It has never run.  Zimba just walks around waiting.  The cat ignores her.  The smartest cats, no matter what age, do not fight unless they think it's to their advantage.  If a cat is supposed to go and I put the dog away to give it a chance, and it stays, it is Zimba's obsession to get it out of her celler.
     Rhodesian Ridgebacks have to be able to avoid being snagged by a lion, so they circle all the time.  If they get into direct conflict with a lion?  I figure it is the trait which was most difficult to breed in.  When another animal makes contact with her with scratch or bite, it's on.  One small dog was snatched and shaken, then tossed off the porch.  When it landed, it took a second or two to decide which way to run home.  Just for a little nip under Zimba's chin.  The other two cats she iced tried to hit and run while she was nose-to-nose and barking her lungs out for me to do something. The biggest one gave her two scratching jabs and never made it up the six celler steps. When she was finished, she tossed it back down to land at my feet.  The other one was on a stack of cinder blocks and kept trying to hook her while she was standing and barking.  She took the offer and pulled it into the clay under the house.  I had to drag it out. Roadkill.
     But you can ask my brother, with a cat in every room, going in and out, when we were there, I only had to tell her once, "No hunting! Leave it!"  She watched cats and never made a move to try to make them run.  But it wasn't his decision to put her in a fancy-all-shots-brought-up-to-date kennel.  In his old lady's eyes, Zimba went from "zee Preenziss" to the pound hound.  She's been fortunate that way, in Tennessee and CA.

Hallelujha!  Isn't easy to spell but I know how to yell it.  HALLELUJHA!!  Leonard is stuck on repeat and I am, too.   I should have been published or hit the lottery, by now.  Don't cha love it when these ancient beings are too old to really have a halleluijah moment left in 'em and it's all they can do to muster a "hallelujah," let alone go spend and really do a dream instead of wondering how in the hell am I going to spend money in volumes and not leave where I am?   Like Cricketeer said in the SEB.  I win you won't see me because I won't even cash it until I get to Cleveland, at the airport.  You fellers won't see me except on TV.
     The writing is obvious for me and I meant to sell it.  I love my shit, it entertains me...and I guessed someone would pay to read it...or some pure pipe dream.  Fact is, Carrie Jane (and it makes me cry to write it) told me for as far back as I can remember, "Maxie, you have illusions of grandeur, those are pipe dreams."   And the poor soul lived to really see me standing awake in some dreams from a pipe.   And in her house, too?  But in the end she put up with it (me in and out, hoboing around) just so she could put the needle in for the way I turned out.  One time I got a real job driving a road grader for Tommy Mahle's state job.  It was $500 cash every week and I handed her some cake for staying and she glared me down until I was shorter than her and growled between her teeth, "I don't want your money!"   Had  a brother used to hand her a thou, once a year and she always just smiled.  She could hear better than I could and used to tune the TV to a whisper.  It was the marijuana and the fact I didn't hide it.  "T'ic, you say you are?  Yes, you should have it tattooed on your forehead!"  But I'd swear that the pot would have passed if I hadn't come back a declared liberal Democrat.  Brother said Mom would vote for a chimpanzee if it was running against a Democrat.  Carrie Jane kept people entertained with a hidden dagger and I'm certain she pulled it out when my name slipped into her style.  Kid told me once when I was walking two grandchildren from my crib to their grandmother's...stopped me outside the door..."Now, dad, don't go getting her all upset."  Imagine, like I was going to try to piss her off?  In front of blood babies?

I'm putting everything on a flash drive and finishing Seamus and Little Wolf.  Hallelujah.   It's a very heavy tune and I try to get the jist of it, but Cohen is such a lyrics-genius...guess hearing it six or seven times, or perhaps more during the space since the first one would begin to sink but then the chorus just kicks it apart.  Anyway, it's just a click away, like everything else.  Somehow, it seemed to fit the part about Mom.  I always called her Mom.  Her life is a good example of being too old for a real hallelujah moment.  She wasn't completely free until she was free of Bill.  I easily go back to the age of four, so I saw her beauty and hip.  But she was mostly an ignorant country girl denied an exit by education or hooking up with a man who could get her out of the hills to see the rest of the world.  The first son he tied her down with is buried on her parent's plot.  I have no need to ever forgive being the next orphan in Ernest's home.  Except for Carrie Jane, we were all orphans, there was no place else for us.  Mom was in her childhood house.  I reason for protection.  Polly said once she worried more about her children after they were grown than she did raising them.  I got to observe some strong women and Grandma Kelley was a physical dynamo with a "shoulda said" response to every hint of a slight expressed by one of us.  Nobody had a perfect pedigree for her repartees.  On second thought, perhaps I should be thankful to him for providing some older "parents" to copy.




    27Apr - The Lake Alma swallows may have returned about the same time as the Capistrano swallows (Mar 19) but I didn't notice them until today.  However, a few scouts may have been skimming, earlier, but today is the first time I noticed an entire flock.  Temperature's supposed to fall to a killing frost, tonight, so there won't be much action action leaving the lake surface for them to feed on.

    Prof  Free split while I was doing the donut.  Census in Cleveland area.  Govmint gig, so I deferred to the possible test and didn't buy any for the past month. 
     It appears an electro-magnet metal detector incorporated into weed whackers would keep the landscape trimmed.
     We reach an age when sad lines appear within spaces once filled with sheer ectstacy.  
    

Two days after that 420 shit which I didn't really get into until this year via the net, but it seems right on time for the freaks to be and the ones like me.   It's a shame, somehow, to have had to last this long to see the freedom come to make the call to wake the fuck up, America!  Listen to the tetrahydrocannabinolic writer.  Marijuana is healthy and healthful and it should be free to choose it's own users.  The Professor says he used it to get all the way to a doctorate in ancient philosophy and that requires a clear set of sides staying alert to the point where the left hand does indeed know what the right hand is doing.  I blasted through an economics final behind a couple and splashes after a union meeting.  Ace.  But the accounting course which was most important was a failure after a buzzed study session. And all the study sessions were under the influence during that college attempt.  My personal opinion is that kids with any kind of idea what they intend to make of their life need nothing but the energy to continue to grow towards a goal and they'll need nothing else because nothing else is as intense as young lust to succeed and be known for it.  With something to show for it.
     Problem is it is difficult to have it nutured.  The same intensity can be easily sidetracked towards short-term goals, easy-way paths, or unguided and physically misguided directions.  Most early dreams are continually brought to dawns light with older shadows, looming and speaking in loose tongues.
     marriageisforfools.blogspot.com  This may be the hottest blog I read.

     Dij came buy with some Buds for you sans any brew and the HaWK flew over the keys.  So.  You ever wonder how many "so's" begin sentences?  Even "yo" is so, except it is closer to you and that's what so really is. "You, are we going to...?"   "So, are we going to...?"
     He was speaking about i-pods being broken into and programed to get all kinds of free stuff and I'm about half hip because I'm thinking I-Pad and ask what is an I-pod.  "Right here," he says, holding one in his hand.  So what's one worth?  $600 and they're available for $250?  With "jailbreak?" and other stuff.
      Judy gets drunk and calls to tell me she's saving money to bring her personal handyman to remodel the kitchen and bath.  After her mother dies, of course.  She's in a total care facility and could easily last another decade.  She keeps asking if I have spoken to any of our children?  I keep telling her their feelings for me are a miniscule step up the chart from their hatred for her.  They are removed from her will by name.  I tell her whatever its worth, they won't miss it.  She asks about siblings and I have to explain again that when I took her around them all was the last time I saw them, more or less.
     Probably the main reason I don't want her here, attracting the wives who forbid their husband's visits.  Surely brothers would check in if it wasn't for that female force?  Or maybe not.  It's been so long, darling, since I kissed someone new, but not so long I want it to be you.  Well, they can't shit me, I'm hockey proof, as mom used to say.  It's the t'ic shit.  It could be legal as liquor and my people would still not come around and chance seeing my bowl loaded.  Like I told Judy, "Fuck 'em, I got plans that don't include any of them!"   She usually starts saying goodbye about then.  But you know, most of my ex-ols call me and end up having me shouting.  It's like they don't really believe it is me until I turn up the volume and speed.  Guess it's what they are used to.  Or should that be speed and volume?
    

21 Mar - To whomever it was wanted the "good health" by law to be Obama's Waterloo, try Austerlitz.

I monitor sewer line submarines and it has taken a lifetime to learn the art of launch, beginning with construction material which for me is beans and greens.  After my recent scene of running high in the saddle and going level with the devil, my movements stopped.  For five days.  I am quite aware that even one missed low floater is problematic.  When it became three, I did a twenty-four hour food fast.  Didn't change anything.  The really uncanny part is there were no ill-effects.  No bloat, no headache, stayed busy.  Yesterday, I did my usual eating constantly between outside time.  Wasn't as difficult as I'd dreaded and today I'm happy.  Still taking the rest of the weekend off from either of my dailies.  Should google the connection of a trauma session to constipation.
     I was thinking about how gorillas make a new bed every day vs my waterbed which is always like new.
 
  1 Jan - I've been sharing my house with a mouse for a month or so.  I just brush away the droppings on the stove and countertop.  Since being taught by Grandpa Kelley the sure-fire way to trap them, I decided not to get rid of it even knowing there could soon be many.  In fact, I've been leaving pieces of apple for the critter to dine on. 
     This morning, I awoke to the distinct smell of burning hair.  Checked the pilot flame and used a flashlight to inspect in, under and around the range.  Didn't find any sign of the rodent.
     Then I decided to toast some bread.  The Sunbeam model I have was manufactured in 1956.  It has a heavy chrome finish and an automatic mechanism which allows a slice or two to descend as soon as the bread is dropped into the slots.  The only setting is for lighter or darker toast.  When finished, the slices are returned to the top.
     After three or four attempts to make toast, nothing was happening.  You guessed it, Ms Mouse had gone into the slot and tripped the switch.  Took some effort to extract her electrocuted little body.

4 Jan - Went to my Seestor's for the bowl games, sans a bowl.  Larry's an excellent jock who became a politician; mayor, service director, councilman, councilman-at-large.  Couple of lifer conservative Republicans and one Liberal.  The outcome of the Rose Bowl had all Buckeyes smiling.  "Mr. Highlight Film"  finally has a breakout game against a flashy little dago who has his worst.  My bro'-in-law probably thought I was rooting for the other O.  Especially when he started that "Heisman warm-up" talk at halftime.  "Man, you got that boy way overrated!"   Everything he throws makes a receiver find the ball and come to it.  Holds the ball too long looking to run instead of pulling the trigger.  But he surely can gallop and has a stiff-arm move that stiffens tacklers to stop and drop.
     Tressel beats Michigan and can win a Rose Bowl.  I grew up with Woody Hayes.  He came to watch us play a Thanksgiving Day game.  I know people he recruited.  I've seen him coach, live.  If  Treesel gets the Bucks to #1 and wins it all, three-yards-and-a-cloud-of-dust will be replaced by three-points-'til-the- goal-posts-rust.
     Set three traps for Mary K. since the droppings are driving her crazy!  Caught one while we were eating and she nearly levitated off the chair when that "snap!" happened.
     I'm choosing to feed mine in one location to keep them from trailing poop around in order to find their way back. Trapping is too easy and I remember feeling a tad sad the last time I caught one in my house.  In a couple months, whatever entry they're using will be sealed from cellar level.  Zimba is aware of them and makes a sniffing pass at all the grates.  Her main obsession is the rabbits staying in the cinder block drain I constructed at the front of the house.  She goes out to pace and sniff and watch and paw every half-hour.  I'm sure the mice are aware that I'll snatch 'em up and toss 'em outside like a spider if they do any floor sprints.  Never seen one yet.
     Told bro' Brute about  my New Year's resolution. Just laughed.  It's snowing and stacking and I didn't want to talk price over the phone, so I just had a regular fifty delivered.  He says it was a drunken mess at the SEB and they were asking where I was?  Would you believe clean and sober, delivered door-to-door?
     Read about a tunnel-dweller in Las Vegas claiming he's there because he's addicted to marijuana and methamphetamines.  "Addicted to marijuana" has always put the jack in my backbone.  You can't quit.  I don't want to.  See?  Addiction is needing the effect of a drug to the detriment of everything else, like physical well-being and a satisfied mind.  The very things I feel after filling lungs with one-hits.  Things no other addiction encourages. Alcohol could well have been an addiction for me.  Marijuana helped me handle my drinking.  I believe marijuana and lively music can cure alcoholism. At least take off the aggressive edge.
     My advice is to save your lungs for marijuana.  It will extend your life.
     Did the donut on two inches of fresh snow; like running with new insoles.  There were fifty or sixty Canada geese keeping a pool of water from freezing at the lake.  In its own small section of unfrozen water next to the island bank was that crippled goose I've been seeing.  Within sight of the other geese, but obviously weakened and dying.  It was a pitiful sight with the snow forming lashes over its eyes and lines on its back.  I thought of ways to assist it but they all seemed more likely to get me soaked and freezing than to warm the goose.

5th of  '10 - The steady frigid days in a row would have put my bluegill into a solid tub of ice, but my Haystack heater keeps half the water freezeproof which leaves plenty of room on the centered rock for birds to drink or bathe.  Came back from Kroger with my Sierra Club backpack crammed.  Lady sacker said she didn't think it would fit.  It has to, here put it into the cart and I'll finish outside.  Ended up with the bananas strapped into the extra back pocket and the drawstrings holding the main flap closed because the buckle wouldn't close. Regular stuff; beans, greens, nuts, bananas, salmon, cocoa, powdered milk,butter.
     The heater has multi-thermostats which adjust to temp changes; ice-free surface when I checked.  Bluegill and bluebirds happy.
     A peer passed on this week and it unreeled me back to when  brothers George and Gary, Jerry and I were a large part of the neighbor hoods on the southeast side of town.  Central Graders.  He never seemed to be into kid stuff.  Like he would fight his sister on the way to school and it would be clothes pulling and screaming and then they''d straighten up and continue on.  I remember him telling about calling an adult square dance at a place his "Mom" took him.  He called his grandmother Mom.  I was telling him about the $4.50  I'd made on my paper route and he just chuckled, "I can make that in an hour with this."  He had a shoeshine box and was headed to the bars to offer Saturday shines.  I remember the time he begged for the life of a stray kitten two different kids with guns were being encouraged to shoot and they didn't fire.  When he was about nine-years old, his grandmother had a pet groundhog.  It wandered to the other side of the block and Curty killed it, not thinking in terms of tame.  That week, in Keaton's store, somebody asked, "What's the matter, Jerry, you look sad?"  "I am sad, he sniffed, someone killed Mom's groundhog!"  George, now Jerry.   Seems we'll all four end up back in Wellstone when it's time to die.
     Couple decades ago, Boyd tossed me a pair of Kamik felt liner boots and said, Here, pops, you might need these back in Ohio."  Indeed, I built them up with some used (Brute) Dexter insoles and two pairs of socks and went tramping with Zimba in the brambles off the running path, checking tracks in the three-inches of snow.

6Jan - Did the donut and the goose is still in it's outline-sized pool surrounded by ice next to the island bank.  Appears now it is blind.  Three days of 10-25-degrees in ice-bound water.  It's a goose down live (to death) testimonial.

7th - I did one of those I-80 winter runs from Salt Lake City to Omaha in stuff like is going on now.  I didn't have enough heat to deice the wipers and they were skating across the glass, clearing nothing.  The only thing allowing me any vision was slop rinses from semis.  Once, I pulled off and parked where I could watch traffic and warm the windshield.  Traffic kept moving, so I pulled back in.  My engine light came on and eventually went off.  Daylight arrived and traffic was down to 30-mph.  Seldom would some trucker drive by everybody like a Michigander in deep snow.  Everybody was crawling and concentrating.  I stopped counting at thirty vehicles off the road, including jack-knifed rigs with loads spead over the blowing, building storming snow.  I was ignorantly driving a '97 F-150XL which was a gallon low on anti-freeze.  Randy levelled it off when I took it in and seriously stated it was just luck the motor didn't blow up.
     Ford can keep riding the pickup craze by offering a dump bed.  With a big battery hybrid powertrain.  A real all-purpose vehicle hauling dirt, stone, wood, coal, trash and ass to dump.  Manual handle or push-button power.  Put it together in America with unmatchable specs for competitors.  Sell it to the world.  We'll be  the sheiks, wealth like hitting the lottery for all.  In relative terms, democratically speaking.

8th - Another consecutive all-year long snow day.  Entire county stay home for last two.  Still free-falling.  It has formed sort of an insulation over houses.  Every minute steel finger of frigid air has been blocked by a thin layer of snow which is filling up to close the needle-thin corridors around windows, doors and floors.  Zimba has her path made along the edge of the cinder block rabbit tunnels.   She believes she can find a way to dig them out and will back out and look to see if one has escaped.  Spends major hours each day going in and out to hunt.
Did the donut in ankle-deep energy-sapping snow.  Spread the wings out and placed the  head back over the dead blind  goose's  back, after removing it from the lake and leaving it on the bank.

9th - Two dudes arguing over a gambling debt and one pulls out three pieces and suggest the other take one in lieu of the debt.  The other says he doesn't need no stinking gun because look here, this iron is worth more than all three of yours.

11th - The donut is treacherous.  Running in ny own tracks is on frozen surface with slips that sprain ankles.  Running in untracked 3-6 inches of snow is just as taxing because of the "downhill" force which speeds the pace.

12th - Last person I remember who went for a TV show while a viable candidate was Jesse Jackson.  You Palin people can watch her political popularity wane.

13th - Clyde Shortiron asked if I'd seen Paleo's new ride?  Appears he traded the '97 F-150 in a cash for clunker deal on a bigger model.

14th - Anybody estimate the amount of exhaust pollution from idling engines to warm them up?  Wouldn't have that with an electric car; the heater is working as soon as it is keyed on.  Could even be thermostated to keep windshields clear while still.  More cars under cover, these days.  Air is lots cleaner since the lack of coal and wood burning heat.  The high school was heated with a coal boiler system which sprayed the snow with soot particles.  Laundry was dried on  a line, year-round, and I've seen washings which had to be done over.  Timing was important.  If the sheets were still wet, the soot would stick.  If they were frozen stiff, it would roll off.  Once dry,  they could move in a breeze and dispel most of the black ash dirt bombs.
     Two days this week, there was nobody else at the lake during my entire turn around to the island, around and home.  It was like running on my private estate, leaving the only tracks.

15th - Walked to the Home Center and bought a recliner I can get out of sans reverse dips.  Replaces three used chairs and lies flat out.  Under $400 (no tax) delivered tomorrow morning at 10:00.

17th - Times so tough, some has-beens do anything for employment.  McGwire really believes a steady job in baseball will eventually make his hits alright with record keepers?  That he is capable of doing it sans 'droids is mythical, at best.  Living a lie at its worst.  Employment as a hitting coach is throw-away crumbs.  Soul seller.

18th - For decades, the sump pump in the cellar of my house didn't work.  By some method, yet to be determined by me, water would rise to cinder block depth and no further.  There was ankle-deep water standing when I bought it. The only entry was steps from the kitchen.  Therefore, the replaced furnaces were shoved aside, instead of removed.  The first time I had to work on the pump was after a 3-midnight shift at the Mill's.  Opened the motor up and oil ran out.  I messed around in a messy job and got it to run.  Next day, I ask everyone I know if a submersible pump is filled with oil?  Nobody takes them apart, so there's no positive answer, but a maintenance man handed me a plastic bottle of clear oil with a long spout and says, "Here, use this."  I did and the pump worked for a long time.
     It took me years to have a setup for piping the sump water to the bathtub pool ten yards from the house.  It is still difficult to judge the amount of water which may flood in by the amount falling outside.  So, I kept making do with makeshift and got caught with my pants in the water, many times.
   Went from submersible to column when the Steel Breeze gave me one.  Changed the switch on it.  But there were times when the motor was underwater before I took action, so by the time I have a permanent system to deliver the pumped water, the thing sounded like it was shaking off rust everytime it came on.
     I'm certain I checked it just prior to shutting up for winter.  Yesterday, I took a look and the sump was full and water was streaming in from the end of six inches of snowmelt.  Would not pump.  Pulled it out and took it to the kitchen.  Took it all the way down to motor rotor. Sanded everything from stators to contacts.  Had Clyde Shortiron tell me it's shot.  He drove me to the do-it center for a new motor and had to buy the entire package.  $80.  $8 a year for sump pump which is way cheap.  Which causes even me to wonder why  I didn't replace it that first night and avoid all the incidences of  wading and siphoning and wasted energy?  Like standing in water, holding the unit while it's pumping because if it is placed into the pit, the motor will be under. Three different spellings of a name in one NFL game: Shonn, Shaun, Shawne.

20th - Kennedy Dam breaks in Mass, releasing votes from both parties.  Lost my Direction at the lottery place and put $38 on Discover at Kroger.  Hate that.  Right bike pedal broke free from crank.  Hate that even more.  You know that idea which suddenly appeared as the simplest solution to that problem you feared?  It was always there before your eyes.  To see it you just had to adjust your highs.

27th - Three swans were swimming when I did the donut, yesterday.  Last one I remember seeing was tame, on a private pond at Old Fort, Ohio, forty years ago.  Unlikely that trio of wild ones will still be at Alma, tomorrow.

28th - Didgeridoo stopped by after my run and loaded my bowl.  Then I went with him to drop off some paperwork at Athens.  He put in a Bowie CD from '73 and I couldn't keep from trying to sing "Ziggy" and Suffragette City.  Told Didge about seeing Bowie in the Toledo Sports Arena, back then, when he carried a million dollars worth of props for concerts.  Had two stories of scaffolding and a gantry crane with a spacecraft mockup for Major Tom.  Kasu and I had bleacher seats to the side and got to watch all the costume and stage changes.  Three dudes were sitting on the other side of Kasu and the one on the end fired a pipe and passed it down.  Everyone took and hit and I passed it back.  It came back after a re-fill.  On the third pass, I was the only one to hit it.  Two hits were plenty for everyone but me.  I was convinced I could see all the different partyers from Boogie Hall in the floor crowd, even pointing out Brenda and John reaching up towards the space capsule.  Strictly hallucinating.  Later, they all told me so, since they were in bleacher seats, too.  Panic in Detroit was a prize fight with gloves and a ring and everything.  Hell-a-bad concert!
     Heard Cheech and Chong on NPR promoting their "Make it Legal" tour.  Tommy stated pot prevents prostate problems.  Hmm, another reason to continue my t'icness.  Like I need one.

1Feb - Twenty-five pages into editing The All-American Hitchhiker and hit the "undo" key!  Old dude, indeed.  Perhaps, it was just an unnecessary lead-in to the scene which precipitated the letter to Reagan to "get the ear of the President."  In any case, that's where I intend to begin the story when I blog it again.  Which is the only way to rationalize the mistake.  Tried scanning to blog site but "oldness" blocked it.

3Feb - Received a spam message to check out a Santa Rosa blog and then had a comment blocked. Tsk,tsk.  A "bird" in one's hand to a Bush is so 2009.  Some Democrats don't have confidence in Obama to silence his detractors in the next three years and probably won't support him for four more.

6 Feb - NPR is defining my life.  Below The Salt on Sunday morning is programmed for me to receive.  Three hours of themed music guaranteed to feature a song which brings the memories in a wash of chills.  Last evening Garrison Keillor sang the lyrics to a poem which caused my daughters to giggle when reading it brought tears to my eyes.  Plus a song for his daughter describing the way things were "before you were here."   NPR people makes all of the rest of radio sound like "so what?"  Except for well-informed classic rock jocks, of course.  You show me someone who can keep NPR tuned and not learn something new and I'll show you a true know-it-all.  And the real beauty of the moment is if you are reading this, you can tap into it, future, past and present.  No trouble bagging my donut until eleven and probably for the day.  Four inches of frozen snow and slick where it's been tracked.  Besides, I'll be trekking through it to backpack groceries and watch the Bowl at the SEB.  Is she singing you're the poetry man?
     BtheS is from WOSU.org.  It's the virtual coffeehouse.

8 Feb - Appears Peyton lost sight of the intensity of the moment while considering the restrictions of the eight points needed to win.  Final score still seems unreal. But I told NO fans at the SEB those teams that party heartiest usually come alive in the fourth.  I had a TV, table and chairs to myself.  Which is the way I watched the commercials.  I'm howling laughs and looking around to see if anyone else is digging them and nobody is!  It was way weird.  Re-playing them is breaking tears against my glasses.
     Awoke with a stiffness in the back of my neck.  Painful  rotation.  Couldn't figure the source.  After a restless night behind one Blue Ribbon after another and major gluttony at the SEB, plus the strain to launch a fleet of sewerline submarines, this morning, it came to me.  There was a cheese ball ringed with Ritz and a bread ring tuna dip which I was encouraged to partake of after a half-time bowl (missed Pinball Wizard.)  Dipping and devouring while keeping one eye on the game put stress on that back collar of muscle for most of the second half.
     The bathtub birdbath bluegill pond is the only unfrozen water anywhere but the birds aren't flocking.  Must be because it's at ground level.

Another nine - First donut run since last Friday.  Bagged Sunday, stayed in same rotation, lifted yesterday, run today.  Wicked workout in six-inch accumulation of snow and freezing rain.  City won't plow, bunch a Republicans who are quite aware the only person using it 180-days a year is an Obama liberal Democrat.  I'm sure they won't interfere when I get 'er done before my next run.  Of course, the less hassle way would be to run the highway, which I did today, except for the north city traffic lane.
     Listening to a "bullying" case.  My memory is of a time, growing up, when bullies were individuals.  There were many more bully thumpers.  The intimidation factor of age or size or meanness usually was useless against one of those quick-hitters, kids who just mumbled and started hookin' and crossin'.   In the eighth grade, Bill jacked Sonny's jaw when he saw Ronnie get pushed down.  Sonny ran by me, holding his mouth and crying out with nothing but fear in his eyes.  Went all the way home, came back the next day. Nothing said.

10 Feb - I don't own a tv, so stuff like Grammy's gets by me but it flipped me out to see the Zac Band and Leon Russell while searching for lyrics.  I saw Leon live twice in one week, Pontiac Stadium and Toledo Sports Arena.  Dink is still holding all my Leon LP's.  I used to bring people to the house and turn them on to Mad Dogs and Englishmen.  Leon Russell is beyond the R&($)R Hall of Fame. His lyrics and talent have attracted the best  musicians to him and to his music.
     Ordered a Leon Russell, Joe Cocker and Leonard Cohen.  Keith Newman turned me on to Cohen this decade.  A Thousand Kisses Deep, Democracy Is Coming, The Tower Of Song....
     My sweet tooth is legendary so I keep no cake, cookies, pie, candy, ice cream or other pastries and tasties around.  I get my sugar by the spoonful.  Last week, I bought 2-lbs. of  powdered  intending to make chocolate frosting for a chocolate cake.  The recipe would have used 2-cups granulated and 1-lb. confectioner's (part corn starch).  Had I decided to bake it, the entire dessert would have been eaten within a day.
     I've been spooning powder for a week.  Mixed with cocoa and powdered milk, the mouthfuls melt and meld into smooth chocolate pre-mixed to individual taste.  I go as close to the bitter line as possible but seldom redo the mix if it leans on the sweet edge.  The cornstarch tends to pile high, so amounts have to be watched.  Chew up a couple walnuts until well masticated and spoon in some powdered sugar.  Or granulated.  Or either one with milk powder. Tongue Sundae!
     I feel the powdered is more filling.  The cornstarch, no doubt.
     Baked bread, today.  Like I never have before.  Forgot oil until first kneadng and worked some in, then turned oven on and never set the temp after recording time.  I don't even know how hot they baked but I put them back in uncovered on the rack for twenty and they're still a mess.  Heavily herbed so Zimba treated the crust like sweet bones.  I rolled pieces in powdered sugar after buttering. First loaf gone.  Yep, that powdered sugar is filling.

11201 - NPR tells me it was twenty-years ago Nelson was released after a lifetime behind bars and it moved me to tears, alone in New Jersey in a concrete house.
     Snow layered in frozen crusts to five-inches with showers still falling.  One rabbit left the cinder block tunnel, ran a small circle and returned.  Wildlife is hunkered down.  Zimba has to gallop in it, so she uses tire or foot prints.  She uncovered a lemon juice bottle from the covered bin and treated it like a green plastic Ski bottle.  Had a time taking the lid off.  Tossed, pawed,chewed, pushed across snow, buried and nosed out until there was a peak of snow across her bridge and finally got the closure off.  Had to crack the screwed down part.  Then the crushing began until it's flat.  Now she's working on a parmesian cheese container.  I allow her to bring them inside to finish.

13Feb - Last two donut runs were done on the highway. Cutting out the island hole was slogging.  Damned shame I can't call somebody, a brother even, who has an ATV with a small blade to remove enough snow from D-street to the lake for a man to jog on after this kind of constant snow season that's going on.  Since my last tracks are covered, it is strictly rabbit, deer and coyote tracks from the PDQ to Alma.  People do not like for pedestrians to be on the same surface as their vehicles.  Few drivers indicated anything but continuing a path to within inches of me before swerving away and then, most times, after I had already committed to the snow bank.  I felt free to spit in their path and enunciate epithets at their windshields or nod a thanks to those who gave me room early.
   I'm thinking of going to see Shortiron and asking if I rig up a plow I can ride behind his riding mower, will he drag it down the bike path?  Fair weather bike path, at best.  A decent pedestrian asphalt walkway, at truest.  Mowed on both sides all summer long, which is unnecessary and touched not at all the rest of the year.  Except by me, every other day.
    Freeble's on board. Wheels to get forty-pounds of dog food and a block of salt for the front yard to keep the deer out of my garden, plus Krogering with the black Pre duffle bag.  $50 worth.  He's talking CA in May.  Sweet Baboo says she wants to go.  When I hit the lottery.
    Which reminds me of Grandpa Kelley.  From the time he was born, he never spent a day without a full-time female presence yet he always seemed in charge of his life.  My strongest father/figure and I've had more privacy in a month than he had his entire life.  Obvious evolution after only two generations.  His was the last generation to pass the culture of faith, family and following to somebody listening.

14 Feb - Bagged the donut.  Another inch of falling snow so the highway was out, get run over in a second.  Took Zimba and walked the path to the lake and to the top and over the island and back.  Inside a charcoal on white snowfall ball just after tipping.  Her pace which was stopping for me to lift the end of a steel guardrail so she could get whatever critter was under it.  I kicked snow and rattled the metal and Zimba was steady ready but nothing broke so I kept walking.  Told her we'd come back and she finally came along giving me those dog-dirty looks.  She went under the guard rail at the dam until I had to unleash her.  Sniffed out a muskrat and pounced down through snow to the grass nest and below ending up in knee-deep lake causing a 'rat to do a quick exit underwater dash.
     Tough workout trying to find a path where old tracks are frozen or there is untracked sections of crusted snow six-inches thick.  Lots of times I was only sinking in an inch and walking three to five inches off the ground.  Then three more inches give in and you dead drop in mid-step and get a jolt that reaches to the teeth. 
     On a thousands of tax dollars worth of "bike" path which is mostly a myth.  Actually unsafe for bicycles due to the intersections with city streets and a state highway in dry weather.  Snow renders it useless for walking, biking being out of the question.  Frozen rainfall causes patches of black ice.  With minimum effort by the city, the bike path could be available year around instead of mostly closed down in the winter.  Obviously, few citizens care.  A place to stay fit by the most low impact methods in a paved, quiet, wildlife setting is cutting edge.  Here it is along the edge of the highway to mild-life fixes without leaving the vehicle.  I don't care,  I'm running on it every other day from the front of the year to the end.

16th - The wireless switch is still itchy.  Just lost blog about an hilarious session between me and Verizon.  The house is wireless and the prof is in class on his laptop.  When he's downloading, it jerks mine to "page not available."  Bought tv sports to pc deal which will probably push me to larger monitor. Old chick made an offer to move in if I'd install a modern kitchen and bathroom shower, plus let her cook.  Baby you'd have to get in line, I've had more than one of those offers.
     Snowfall amount could double to about ten-inches within a day.  No donut tomorrow.  I've missed more days off the path, the last two weeks, than all of last year.

17Feb - Snow pack should be doubled to about 10-inches by Friday.  Friesday, the Cactus and I referred to it when I was riding co-pilot to the coal-pirate.  He twisted 'em big as a ring finger and tooled that old dump truck around back roads in northern Ohio and high up in Michigan, like  Saginaw, until it appeared he was lost.   Then suddenly, he saw a familiar scene and said, "Right up here is an Amish I can sell a bin to."  A bin was about one-third of the load, divided by a crude wall of boards in side slots so it could be off-loaded as a section.  The weight was whatever a customer would believe.  Sometimes three bins would take all day and into the night and maybe the next day to sell.  One time we sold three truckloads of coal in one week.  I introduced Cactus to the term "hat trick."
     Recently he told me he'd done many hat tricks since I was riding with him in the '90's.   New truck and new customers, hauling from southern Ohio coal wholesalers to individuals still heating and cooking with coal in the middle of the midwest.  The dude never made less than $300 per load profit after expenses.  He knew his numbers and was seldom called.
     One time, Mr. Purdy pearched on the roof of a building as I unloaded a bin into his coal shed.  He said to Cactus, "That ain't no three ton a coal.  I know that."
     Cactus told me to take the top half of the bin boards down and allow more coal to tumble down.  He said to shovel until Mr. Purdy was happy.  Purdy was satisfied and Cactus still made money.  When he had to weigh a load, he'd try to get a piece of tread off the scale. Once he changed the reading and the customer caught it.  I was concerned we may get shot at before we could back out of there.
     He had a bad back and I usually did the shovelling.  One early evening I was loading into an Amish shed when a beautiful teenaged girl in long dress and bonnet came out with a glass of water.  I was way grateful and thanked her.  She took the glass back into the house and came back with a coal shovel and began working alongside me.  I started to protest but she was moving coal so I continued and the job was finished in half-time.  She just smiled and left.  I can still picture that pulchritude of polished pureness working with purpose.
   The coal pirate died this week.  He was the last of the three roommates I had at 118 1/2 South Ohio Avenue.  The other two died earlier.  All before they reached fifty.  Two of them deadbeated me.  Tsk, tsk.
     It's uncanny to me as well as a bird can see why the Carolina wrens are the only ones feeding on the peanut butter and chicken fat spread over a dry sunflower husk.  It's under cover, out of the snow, bird-type energy food and all the rest just watch; cardinals, black cap juncos, mockingbird, song sparrow.  A tufted titmouse got a beak's worth, but it was just passing through.

18 Feb - You remember me describing that battle between the starling and the red-bellied woodpecker?  Today, I witnessed a mockingbird attacking a red-bellied woodpecker and scuffling until red turned yellow.
 Took a shovel to the path with intention of opening a donut route.  D Street to the PDQ has been blown down to about an inch; good to go.  PDQ to Scenic Highway had been tracked deep by an ATV.  I'll use 349 from there to Alma, unless Starkey or Arbogast do the Scenic Highway to the lake section.

19 Feb - Full sun to run the ice path, gonna be slick as owl shit. Bagged it and did first garden burn.  Little start paper, carboard and fanning torched entire corn shock in a white column of smoke thick as snow, followed by flame and huge leaf ash shooting straight up into a high pressure sky. Was over before 'rica could facebook the neighborhood and 99% of the fallout is on my snow.  Even turned over a few shovelfulls for any early birds to scratch around in. Put the waterbed mattress roof on my greenhouse and lit the propane for a short time.  Snow melting in steady drips.  Long leafy shafts of coriander under the snow. Cilantro, fresh, already for strir fry beans and greens.  Pulled the bathtub blugill birdbath heater.  No way that blue dude will freeze solid this late.  If so, stir fry.
     Twenty-eight years ago, I bought the Shelter People album by Leon Russell.  Played to memory for five years. Dink still has the platter (keeping it for me.)  Today I played an anthology CD and heard some of those songs for the first time since 1978.  Boyd tuned up Shoot Out on the Plantation in his truck on Sirius one time in Santa Rosa and I about fell out.  Manhattan Serenade and If The Shoe Fits are not on this newest purchase.  Gotta get'em.

21Feb - Keith Newman turned me on to Leonard Cohen and I just bought a CD and heard Hallelujah which Keith tells me this morning that KD Lang did her version at the Olympics opening ceremony.

22Feb - Horoscope said to "chatterbox" today.  The professor is deep into online studies with his laptop and earphones so he doesn't want to hear it.
     On the Shoaitie, in a dirt floor shelter with an orange tarp roof, every station on the battery radio reported clear weather patterns.  Horse Mountain road was a mud aquaduct.  Rain was incessant in buckets to douche the entire landscape.  I awoke and checked the roof with a flashlight.  There was a bulge of water ballooning the roof to under head high.  When I pushed on it with both hands it didn't budge.  It appeared the tarp would not hold against the strain much longer as the rain was pounding even harder.  I was facing a flooded shelter without a roof in a mountain eroding downpour.
   I'm not certain how I managed to push small amounts to spill over the sides, but remember I used a series of  improvised posts to peak the roof enough to keep pools from forming.  Today, I did the same thing in my greenhouse.  The waterbed mattress I installed as a partial roof to replace that 4X6 ft. pane of glass which blew off, began ballooning with rain.  I did a quick calculation, sawed a section from the 10-ft. cardboard carpet roll and lodged it so as to peak the rubber roof.  The overfill opening in the bathtub bluegill birdbath has no place to drain since the ground is soaked to the grass.  Couple more inches and my pet fish may be trying to swim around in the yard snowpack.  That merlin I watched munching on a mouse on the highest stump of the sycamore my neighbor trimmed would like to see that spashing action.
     You know my battle with the city water department in the overcharge when I attempt to conserve water?  How the broads refused to keep my charge at the minimum thousand gallons by not billing me the same reading in consecutive months?  They've been pocketing money from cash payments!  Bitches. And not paying their own delinquent water bills!!  I heard years ago that a water bill could be wiped out by a 'script' pain pill.  Of course, this is just the tip of the lost revenue iceberg my classmate auditor Tom is trying to dissolve.  It is mostly ignorant criminals who believe they can keep pocketing public money and not get caught with their pants on the ground and their names in the newspaper.  I'm smiling.  Dream a little dream of me.
     I believe it is each individual's duty to human evolution to have some positive influence on their grandchildren even if it means waiting for the end of parental inteference.

23Feb - I've been doing the second draft on this site of The All-American Hitchhiker.  I accidently erased the first draft of 25 pages.   So I began on p.26 as the beginning.  Fifty pages later of painstaking editing was erased just minutes ago.  Not sure why I continued to "draft" to the finish sans posting periodic finishes.  It created some paranoia just re-living scenes.  Maybe the government really doesn't want the story told.  Maybe some one at Google hipped them to the 'script and were told to delete me again. So, even though I have flash drives ordered, I'm doing the next revision on my word processor.
     The beavers at Lake Alma have another destructive enemy besides the state authorized trappers.  I observed a stripped beaver sleleton on the snow, surronded by canine tracks.  Skull and one strip of skin with black hair had the only signs of any meat.  From all the indications I could find, it appeared a pack of coyotes pulled a beaver ashore through a narrow border of water between the ice and the bank, then proceeded to eat it to the bone.  There was no blood or sign of struggle in the snow, just dozens of prints and a stripped carcass.  Scary efficient pack of carnivores.
     Donut path is mostly cleared by atv tracks, blown snow and sun warming temps.  Considering an atv for next year with an attached blade for snow and Clyde Shortiron tells me they can be ridden sans a driver's license...like to the store or to the bar or bank?  Shore.  May have to try a deal with Mark or Bill on 35.  But for now, I found a deal for a bike pedal for "a couple dollars," within walking distance.  The streets are about bikeable.   I know I can ride it with no license.  The cop that busted me (to pedestrian as it turned out) is part of the RIF at the PD.  Sayonara Richie Rich.

24Feb - Set a sort of mark to start another project behind THE ALL-AMERICAN HITCHHIKER'S posting.  Knees under the keys every day to draft it to finish prior to posting.  First I erase the 25 pages on the first attempt and decide it was a message to begin at that point of the story and get 26-76 down only to erase it all again and I still don't know how a keystroke could make it all disappear.  So we're talking metaphysics and I'm searching for philosophical rhymes and reasons to explain it all.
     It's too good to go through again in the painstaking way which brings it back so strongly, to where it reads better. I'm paying to have it typed.  Then I'll have it where I can go through it faster and dial it in to a fine tune and then peddle it but not for free.  It's too good.  May be my one money maker.  Wanna buy it and end my quest?  I offered it to Tee Pee but he thought $5000 was too high.  No counter offer because he has no use for it.  Money is still no object, there is none.

25Feb - It has been brought to my attention that having lived with significant grandparents and having  had significant moments with another, allowed me an opportunity to see how many important pieces of culture previous generations provide.  It's like being a blip of the evolutionary process, as opposed to being a missing link.
     Early into the donut run, a beautiful white male, blue-eyed husky-mix began following Zimba as she was lagging behind me.  Next  thing I see, it's sprinting past me to turn and wait and go back to Zimba.  This continued to the lake, around the island and to the steep incline up to the exit road.  The dog would dart passed and sidetrack to hunt on the run, get behind and come flying passed to lead.  He went straight at the island bridge and by the time he recovered and spotted us we were on the island.  The snow was sluicing onto the  frozen lake like shaking a glass ball and the dog came dashing across to just ahead of us, leaping over the edgewater to the bank.  I unleashed Zimba and the male made those figure eight sprints to and past her which she fends off with muzzle bumps and snapping growls.  He was out of sight when we hit the final south bank path and I did give a couple whistles.  I was trying to get an ice sonar sound by breaking off the edge at the beaver lodge and there was the white dog beside Zimba.  I was seriously considering keeping him if he followed us back to where he first arrived.  Then I led himn to the beaver carcass.
     Leavings which Zimba squatted near, this mutt began chewing on, growled Zimba off for just looking and lay down to eat.  When I looked down before leaving the park, he was still lying there chowing down.  I'm thinking that canine is finishing stuff the coyotes left.  Good house-sized dog, too.

28Feb - Had to bag another donut, yesterday, so Zimba and I walked to the top of the island and back in three inches of fesh snow over the six inches of pack.  The stray white dog didn't eat much of the beaver skeleton.  Clyd e Shortiron came by to show me the Wheelhorse riding mower with attached electric snow blade which he traded plus a chain saw for a winch.  Told him it looked the perfect machine for clearing the donut path.

2Mar - I was having some pipe dreams about the Phillips Brownstone.  As an orphan living six blocks away, I used to be brought there for visits and was treated royally.  The negro maid used to call me little master man.  The refrigerator had an ice water spigot in the door, the likes of which I didn't see for another fifty-years.  Two other women in the house doted on me just to hear me talk. I was being offered sweets and treats every few minutes. There were three floors of space to explore and I had the run of the place, within reason for a four-year old.  The oldest lady taught me to expel snot from one nostril at a time when I asked for something to blow my nose into.  Then I was returned home to siblings, parents, grandparents and cousins, sharing space and  keeping quiet.  I'm thinking it should return to being the Phillips Brownstone.  I know I'd enjoy walking through it alone, again.  Or with family physically able to handle it.

5Mar - Way under-dressed for donut with west and north winds.   Except for the walk-in-cooler corridor with snow on both sides with some remaining ice and snow, the asphalt was clear so I could keep a get-warm pace.  I remember times when I'd be in Wellstone running along the edges of the highway to the lake and tossing all the trash into the road until it covered both lanes by the time I was finished.  Today, I kicked a plastic drink bottle from my side of the guard rail.  It sailed across to the opposite lane just short of the front right tire of an oncoming truck.  Once, at the bottom of Hamden hill, I kicked a botlle, top first, under a tire in the lane next to me and it exploded more loudly than a blown tire.
     The lake island is acually two oblong mounds, one half the length of the larger.  On the east end they are blunted by a cliff of boulders. Unless viewed while covered with snow the deliniations are difficult to distinguish.

18 Mar - Took a hard trip to the ground on the edge of the donut hole two days ago.  Bruised right ribs, skinned knees, chunk out of left forearm, big time jolt due to not getting my hands down in time.  Lifted yesterday and did aspirin all day.  I was going to bag the run, today, due to the fact I delayed it to assemble a TV stand for my Seestor and it took the professor and me nearly six hours,  but xx-rays brought a double f to the double x, plus some home-canned spuds, beans and apple butter, so I ended up taking  Zimba while dressed in a"city jogger" outfit.  Coller-button shirt, warmups with briefs and shoes I quit using for running.  Brutal.  Literally, weak in the knees from the blow to them.  Had to take mostly shallow breaths.
     The bitch of it is, it could have been easily avoided.  When old people trip, it's because they didn't get their toes up.  And tomorrow the real soreness sets in.

OneNineMar - Time for a food fast.  Swallow of orange juice, then old king cole.

22 Mar - Did a slow donut, today.  Be a week, tomorrow, since my ground thumping crash.  Still feel the effects.  
  27th - I'm certan I made an entry here on the 25th alluding to my youngest being 41 and remembering the age myself and how traumatic it seemed at the time...even told her mother when she called to see if I wanted to bet against OSU.  Hell no, how was I to know?  They'd lose two possessions in a row in the last few and be out-shaped in the end behind some Pearl Jams in the locker room.  I can see that entry in my mind but don't remember adding to it.  Must have not posted it and then closed it...that would be old dude shit.  Since the "hitchhiker" is done, no writing interests me.  It was so real making the trek again, I had to go through all the paranoia and stress, thirty-years later.  Now it's just loading odds and un-ends into my flash drive via my printer scanner.  And getting outside.  Lots of spring in the sun and lots of garden and yard to attend to, not to mention the foundation project.  With a quick trip west with professor free in May.

30Mar  - Did the neighborly thing and told mine I was going to cut away three limbs on the apple tree which were stressing my power line to the house. He's used to old people asking him to do, so he rears back in his front seat and says, "I'll go take a look at it, later."
       You don't have to look at shit.  I just told you I'm taking the limbs down, motherfucker.  And walked away.  He goes off his meds and starts ramming around in his sedan, pulls out a chain saw and goes up the tree.  Saw wouldn't start.
     When I return from my donut run, I get the professor and a ladder and my battery powered saw, knock it out  and drag the limbs to my burn stones.
     I'm on the way to recycle on my bicycle and he comes sliding around a corner, rolls down his window and says "We've got a problem, "  and begins pointing his finger.
     "Don't point your finger at me, boy!  Now what's your problem?"
     He threatens to put me in jail and for me to stay off his property.
     "I don't think so.  It's done. Just as I told you.  The limbs were on my power line.
     After some more rhetoric and my final "It's done, Frank." he spun away with Kiss my ass!

     Talking about how the price of marijuana will come down after the legalize it passes in
CA and spreads east.  Take away the criminal penalties and allow cultivation for personal use will bring the price down to like it was when I first started slingin'
     I was telling Dijerido that it cost $160 a pound and I sold $15 ounces of the same Mexican that's demanding $160 per ounce.  My bags were manicured, no stems no seeds no trash.  Lestoil used to stop on Saturday morning with his balance beams, before the Avon lady came, and cut a kilo in two, hand me a half and call it a pound. I have an ounce and a half profit immediately.
     Sold ten ounces by dimday to pay for the elbo, and sometimes $90 profit if I didn't smoke any.  More if I had two pounds. My stuff was the best buy in town, sold to everybody from bikers to the mayor.
     One evening, there was a group on my front porch.  The mayor was sitting on the swing between two ladies and a few other people were gathered around, on chairs or on the railings.  A motorcycle pulls up over the curb and across my sidewalk and parks.  The rider gets off and comes to the porch, standing to talk.  Wants to know if there is anything and I tell him a little later on.  He drinks and beer and listens for awhile, then leaves.
     Zoobah worked in the same foundry that I did and the next day we were talking.  I told him he could get an ounce after work and he asked about the stranger on my porch.  That dude says he thinks he knows you.  Who is he?  He asked how many bikes The Avengers have?  What!  Who is he?  He said he figured you all rode the same bike and kept switching around because everyone in the club didn't have one. I'll kick his ass, who is he?  Wouldn't be a good idea, he's in tight with all the cops.  Just tell me who he is. The Mayor.  Of the city?  Of the city.  That little fucker won't be there when I come to pick up my shit, will he?  Probably not.

Last of Mar - I suppose a rich man flashes his money, knowing everyone has their price.  A poor man has to flash his mentality, knowing everyone has their reasons for reasoning.  It is satisfying, somehow, to see the wealthy dig deeply and pay.  It isn't as satisfying to see a poor man's mental powers.  When we are angry, there is no room for God thoughts.  To avoid the wrath via bucks or meditation makes no difference to God.

     Had a daughter tell me there are worse things than sexual abuse that turn them against fathers.  I suppose constantly chanting I wanted boys instead of girls qualifies.  Figuring that men usually end up at odds with their dads, if not actually hating them, then it stands to reason women with mannish names could feel the same aversion to their old boy.  We all know it is way deeper than these lines.  And we know who the real fool is, tomorrow.

6Apr - Taking a break from my d-o-c is not any conscious effort to stop or quit.  After a few days is plenty of time for my mind and body to tell me they are most dialed in when toke-tuned up.  Yesterday, I did the donut, mowed the lawn and emptied my compost bin sans the boost.  Took a stir-fry skillet of fresh yard greens and black beans to enable me to make it to the recliner for a nap.

    Seems I have many second-generation connections.  Dijerido is a second-generation friend.  Used to drive around drinking and chasing and generally trying to stir something up with his dad.  Thirty-five years later, when I first began spending more time in Wellstone, I got high with his son.  We drove around smoking and joking and drinking Ski.
     Dij broke my mini-fast, this morning.  Walked in before I was even up and loaded my bowl.  Now, he's a grandfather and stopped on the way to babysitting a granddaughter.
     He was speaking to the natural gas which accompanies veins of coal.  Says when he was younger, he and his friends had a place near past mines where the natural gas came to the surface in mud.  They would light the surface of the water and it would stay lit, with a low flame.  He recalled hauling party kegs to the natural gas campfire.
     HARPER's Magazine, if you aren't used to reading, will make your head swarm with a thousand bee thoughts.  In Cambodia, a worker gets $.33 an hour to construct T-shirts for every brand Americans pay up to $50 to announce Aeropostale, Ambercrombie & Fitch, Southpole.  For Cambodians it is a way to escape starving poverty until the factories are moved to a cheaper location because the wages there are less than thrty-three cents per hour or all workers are temporary to start.
     Read the label before you buy it.  No "made in the USA," then consider the pittance paid for that prime time top.  Or you can say we need to exploit more workers because there are still so many willing to have any money vs none.  But I'm thinking of back when Packard automobile went out of business and a worker was asked how it happened.
     "Go look in the parking lot, very few Packards."
     Are American made T-shirts already Packards in our closets?

7Apr - My grandmother used to keep salt in an open ceramic bowl above the range for "pinches" in her recipes.  I use a similar container and this week I found some mouse pepper in it.  That's it, I set the trap.  It isn't possible to allow a free wild animal to become a pet in one's house.  They take the food and start a family.  Two juveniles and an adult, last night.  That's four, counting the one that electrocuted itself in the toaster.  It was getting out of hand.  Zimba would whine and sniff and stand, waiting for me to move something away from the wall so she could get after the mice.  She has no interest in dead ones.