The Exurban Outdoorsman

My Dad and Stepmom run a Motel in upstate NY.

It is not for the upper crust. It is more for the pizza crust.

In the summer my dad would host a cookout and invite everyone.

One of the guys Dad was friends with took me with him to the Price Chopper to get some stuff for the party.

He put a few huge steaks in the basket.  I can't recall whatall else, but those few huge steaks with the bone still in.

While we were walking the aisles he told me that he was "part indian" and said he was a Powass Indian, as in po' ass...as in...no money.

It would not likely have been a memorable enough joke were it not for the next scene, in the register lane.

The cashier and the person behind us showed us substantial disdain and disgust when the high cost of those steaks was paid with brightly colored food stamps.

He didn't seem embarrassed, but I was.  I knew how to "be poor" and not draw the ire of wealthier neighbors who all know they are subsidizing our dinner.

As we were walking out, he says to me
"They see me buying fancy steaks with food stamps and they think - this is the problem with our Country, free handouts to lazy bums and they eat better than we do - but what they miss is that I've been eating plain noodles and ramen for the past month so that I could buy these steaks to share at this party, where I know others would not otherwise ever get the opportunity to eat this." 

He wasn't buying them for himself even. Fuck. We gotta stop judging. It sounds fine to say "no candy or soda with food stamps" but what about the birthday party, the graduation, the Quinceanera, the bar mitzvah?  

How about you mind your own fucking business and leave poor folks alone.  It's hard enough being poor.

What do we do with a problem like Patrick?

In a few months it'll be somebody else's worry, but for now - what to do?

Suppose we could not walk on Main St. - avoid him entirely.

We could show an angry face or an indifferent one.

He'd deserve it after the vitriol and searing burning words we heard

How could we not hear, not shouted but angrily growled

and at children no less.

Oh! the anger we feel toward the hurt those poor innocents must feel all too regularly

Wouldn't it be raging at a torrent for taking the homestead?

Doesn't that same water feed life into us?

We are a community.

When his thoughts are clear and clean

he seems kind

and tells us how nice of a dog we have

Should we tell him thank you
Should we tell him off

Should we ignore him, pretend he's a bus stop sign

Inside Patrick

Isn't there also a poor innocent 

that we would hurt were we to hurt

Game theory says

start kind and return like for like

Why must every victory be pyrrhic?

Americans have no idea what is coming.

They feel it...they sense it, but they don't have a clue.

We can't outsource death around the world and not have it drift back on a breeze.

When the internet goes out.

When the drones start shooting.

When power systems collapse.

When major cities explode.

When we can't get food.

When the water is no longer clean.

When going out is no longer safe.

When schools and hospitals all close.

Then, that's when we'll know what the rest of the world fears.

Then we will have our comeuppance.

It's not far.

One morning a plant appeared on a porch.

It was a single leaf standing up on a stalk that looked a bit like celery sticking out of a red solo cup.

That leaf grew until it took over an entire wall, 6' tall and 30' at least in runners and vines spreading in all directions inside the dining room. 

That plant had plans to take over the house.

The owners could not abide.

Wholesale slaughter, massacre.

The plant was trimmed to a fraction of its former glory

All hope for home domination lost

worst of all

seeing all those hard-earned leaves sitting in a maple sap bucket

the wasted photosynthesis

all the phototropic feet retracted like a measuring tape

now only the size of a slap bracelet

Alas, what's this

A new bucket of soil

full of mycorrhiza 

and now the sap buckets are multiplying

there are as many of them as there are shorn leaves

and ah

what luck

the loss of leaves was a brutality

but now they extend beyond the known universe 

of a dining room 

and into a living room

and a kitchen

and out into the unknown

It was so hard to see those leaves taken away

They were held close and nourished and connected

Only real growth could be achieved

through the culling and replanting

as the mountain touches the valley

An office building the entire floor is half height cubicles. The people inside the cubicles are wearing motorcycle helmets. Their hands are on steering wheels and their cubicle set up looks astonishingly like the drivers seat of a taxi.

These are the drivers of Irkutsk, they remotely drive for some of the best actors, most popular athletes and most powerful politicians in the world.

While the dreams of the first quarter of the 21st century of fully automated cars proved to be too expensive, dangerous and fraught with legal peril; a car driven by a professional driver in a completely perfect real-time virtual setting was the obvious next step. A world class driver based is Siberia with zero accidents on his virtual driving record collects upwards of $50 a day in official salary, but often double or triple that daily in tips via any number of cash apps like venmo, paypal and others.

The largest obvious cost with setting up a digital driving enterprise is setting up the lightning fast Internet connection with multiple redundancies required to safely transport human beings in cities around the world. The power costs are tremendous, and the servers require cooling to such a degree that locating the centers in naturally cold places only makes sense. At first marketing and advertising - simply convincing people that it's safe to get into a car with no driver was considered a non-starter, however; as the roads became more treacherous and dangerous with human drivers paying less and less attention, and cities and states having less traffic control available to support, made this an effectively negligible issue.

Driver training costs are relatively cheap. The virtual training environment can perfectly mimic real-life scenarios as well as allow drivers to virtually drive alongside another more seasoned driver so that the senior driver can take over in case of emergency or failure to comply with rules or policies.

Of course there are additional emergency protocols in place. Should there be some sort of an emergency such as loss of Internet connection the cars can safely self-navigate to a safe parking spot and wait for reconnection or resolution of any issues. And of course, all cars have passenger-controlled emergency stop and escape buttons. 

In interviewing drivers, many say that they feel blessed with the opportunity to work in other cities and visit other places, even if it's only virtually and during the workday. The quality of the video and the ability to interact with the passengers is just as real as being in the car with them and having the added tools made available from augmented reality such as weather and traffic avoidance and warning indicators makes us all better drivers than we could be in real life.

The early idea of having specially designed cars to work in this field, made it only marginally successful and only in the biggest cities what really made this takeoff was the aftermarket conversion kit that you could buy on Amazon for less than $1000 and self installed just by watching YouTube videos.

My favorite architect is hunger

My favorite sculpture is a tree

The way I live

The way I die

Is you beside with me?

i've lived in a trailer

and slept like a king

I know that to a better poet 

the port of Morrow would have to somehow find reason to rhyme with sorrow

but sea otters were cracking shells on their back

and the beers were cold 

and heroes were drinking and snacking 

in lobbies of museums 

that shouldn't have existed

The Pacific Ocean is a fantastic sculptor

but too bountiful to design

Silly camel humps awash

Is you beside with me?

1. I greatly respect Authors who don't use their real names. When I send postcards, they are from PostCardi B.

2. Mom buried treasure (nickels, dimes, pennies) in the snow, so my little sister and I could find them and feel rich.

3. Edward had me get his cat from a commune-style farmhouse while nobody was home. It might be the most exciting time of my life.

4. My newest Cover Band plays both the Cranberries and the Cherry Poppin Daddies, we are called the Cranberry Poppin Daddies. It works because we're in New England.

5. Looking for creative ways to get people to get rid of their pennies in mass. Fuck Pennies. 

6. My Children's music Death Metal crossover band is called CAR KEYS, and we'll do Carcass covers.

7. Pete tried to grow mushrooms in a 2 bedroom apartment in Greenfield. It was quite the operation, sadly a failed one.

8. A Children's book "Things Have Gone Wrong" explaining why things are the way they are in America.

9. Asking someone "Who is your favorite sculptor?" should sound far less ridiculous than "What streaming service is that on?"

10. Me And Mean Enor is the Title to something important but so far nonexistent

11. New Invention, still needs some work - Carbon Fiber Stilts with internal gyroscopic support

12. New Business Model : The Enshitification of Shit - Tiered Toilets

13. New WMC Product requires Manufacturer - Culebra, Puerto Rico car windshield ice scrapers

14. I think T-Rex got his arms that way by trying to sneak up on prey too many times

GoJo, for those who've not worked real work in their lives is a pumice soap that comes in different strengths. The orange gojo is really mostly sand with some soap mixed in to keep it flowing out of the pump, and to keep it orange.  GoJo will strip oil, grease, paint, blood off of your hands.

Uncle Wayne was a mechanic and a rough man. He washed his hands with GoJo.  You will not have smooth hands, you cannot with this stuff. They will be tough as old oak bark and as rough, but clean.

The story of Uncle Wayne is one of wealth, violence and subjugation. It includes real buried treasure, real attempted murders (plural), addiction and death.

There is no redemption, not yet anyway.

"Is Diane there? Don't lie to me! I'll come down there"

I wonder when he worked her over, bloodied his hands...was it just the same as swapping out a tranny?
He certainly used the same GoJo to clean up. Both were careers for him. Did he love the work equally?

I used to talk so much shit about Boston.

"Not a real city" 

"Closes at 9"

"Nobody goes out in Boston"

That sort of thing.

Now, #1 is stupid and not remotely true.  Boston is a huge city that has everything a good big city has, from book stores, to libraries, to coffee shops, to public art.  The architecture is astounding, and the contradictory nature of old with brand new is refreshing.

#2 about Boston closing at 9...probably an exaggeration, but who cares? I go to bed around 9.

#3 How the hell would I know if people go out in Boston or not? I don't live there.

So I talk all this shit about Boston, because it can be a pain in the ass city for outsiders.  I don't need to reiterate the myriad challenges with navigating modern cars on horse cart paths and one-way roads 4 lanes wide. Plus people in New England mind their own business to the point of rudeness.  This isn't specific to Boston, but they are the center of this self-centeredness to my eyes.
In two days of bumping around Boston, here is what I found to be true to me:

• Boston Public Library is a gem of a building, beautiful and useful.  Public bathrooms real nice.

• North Station has accessible public bathrooms with urinals all caked in vomit.  Got the job done.

• The Aquarium movie theater building has really nice public bathrooms, very clean with Hammerhead sharks hanging from the stairway up.

• Trillium makes an incredible West Coast style IPA.

• Boston folks got some real fucking nerve - The Atheneum was a private club founded by and for slave traders and opium dealers, still open today...don't worry they got a painting of an abolitionist and a 12" plaque.  It's ok now.

• Cheers is only cool from the outside.  The inside is a bar.  Not a special one.

We are interactors not simply consumers, when we look we also see and we have tools to seek like auricular muscles. 

There's an episode of Seinfeld, where George uses his squint to see extra well. I think this is the equivalent of that squint to the ears.  

I would like to be tested to see if I can hear better while I'm activating my auricular muscles which I can do and 90% of the world cannot do because they don't have control of that muscle.  I know I have control of that muscle because I can wiggle my ears.

A great name for a hip hop star from Florida would be MIAMMO.  Another great hip hop name is feat. 

On the album it will say "song by Bae Slayer feat. feat."

When it feels to me like I'm the only one who does the G-D dishes in the house, I find it helps to say to myself...

"Myself, all of us...listen, we're not doing dishes - we're giving our kitchen friends a bath" - try it some time.

The rich can only stay rich by convincing the poor of the lie that the rich are not at fault for poverty.

If anything is going to destroy America's infatuation with obscene wealth, it's going to be the exposure of the obscenely wealthy for who they really are, and how wealth can corrupt otherwise decent people. Look at Trump. Look at Elon, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Peter Thiel, or Bill Gates. They are all scumbag assholes.  Why would anyone want to be like them? Do any of them seem happy because of their wealth? Do any of them seem to be living a "dream life", and if you can't buy a dream life with 10's of billions of dollars, how can it be done?  It clearly can't be bought so there must be another way, if there's any way at all.  If there's anything obvious in our society, it is that wealth does not equal happiness, but being broke and hungry really sucks too. Love the one you're with and love what you've got in your wallet...it's all we can do.

"SIR! You're brand of hooliganism in particular will not be cottoned to!"

How could it NOT be appropriate to ask someone what % dickfat their new boyfriend is?

---a found poem---

Do Doo Doo Do

Criminal

Deep Blue Sea

Fishing after he

Be ye fishers of men

Fishers from Maine

Fisher cats reign

Hardest choice they'll ever make

Name of the boat

They dream and write it in

notebooks

much the same as young women fresh with love

I don't want a boat

I want a friend with one

...and I've got one now.

Much like the invention of the camera did not obsolete painting, it did obsolete painting as a means of creating an image for strictly representational purposes. 

I believe the same can be said of AI replacing the need for humans to think about work or to have institutional knowledge. rather, we will be allowed to use our minds to think whatever thoughts we want because we won't be expending mental energy thinking about these institutional questions.

What's critically important though is that we know how to ask the right questions, and we know how to check the answers for validity, honesty, accuracy, and truth.

I believe the next 6 to 18 months will be a race to learning how to feed these large language models the right content, and to ask the right questions to solve some fundamental problems that we haven't had the mental capacity as humans collectively to solve, although individually all the knowledge is there, we haven't had a unifying mechanism to make all of that data available in one place and to be synthesized in a way that accurate and useful information can be gleaned from it.

There will be people who feed garbage into these models and then swear that the AI says something completely bullshit, so we have to understand that these models are not error proof and infallible. They're only regurgitating the knowledge we feed into them. 

• When there are barcodes on pears, something has gone wrong

• life on intoxicants

a children's style board book with drawings

Querida Culebra,

La isla mas bonita en todo el mundo.

He estudiado hablar espanol durante 2 anos o mas porque quero entenderte mucho mejor.

Tienes libertad como en ningun otro lugar.

Me gustaria vivir en tu arena y beber los rayes del sol y mi cuerpo se volveria marron como el cuero.

Solo en mis suenos.

Pero los suenos tendran que ser suficientes.

Dear Culebra,

The most beautiful island in the whole world.

I have studied speaking Spanish for 2 years or more because I want to understand you much better.

You have freedom like nowhere else.

I would like to live in your sand and drink the rays of the sun and my body would turn brown like leather.

Only in my dreams.

But dreams will have to be enough.

When I was in high school there was an outbreak of Mad Cow Disease... Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy or something like that.

I wrote a song about it for my band to play.

Here are the lyrics as best as I can remember them 20 years later

Go to the store

I'm buying beef

I want my meat

I hate Chicken

Look at the line

Don't have much time

I need it now

I eat Mad Cow

I can't eat fish

Gills taste like shit

Just want Rump Roast

Raw Meat on Toast

too

Mad Cow Blues

I need to feed

On something that can breed

The world should be

All vegan free

It's in history

It's good to eat cheese

Get on your knees 

Udders I'll squeeze

Mad Cow Blues.

Cleanup of Note:

• Dip Firewood in combustible coating to make it transport safe

• Edible gummy cannabis pipe, smoke then eat

• Single serving ground cannabis in a weed leaf cup

• Single use bicycle chain lube for events

• Scrap wood/trash music shakers to give away at outdoor events

• lighter wristwatch with a fliptop face and piezo-electric igniter

• Catcher drone that is programmed to safely/slowly catch any person or thing (think footballs and bridge jumpers)

Found poem:

The 11th hour is a reference biblical

as is my wish to know thee

At this, the 11th hour of my fertility

of my capacity for rejection

of the hours of service in this establishment

Some purchase, perchance, perhaps

Peach on Peach

Stone fruits were exempted

in the garden

Years too many for serpent or cloven hoof

A mote, a single photon of joyous light

to capstone an existence alone

at this

The 11th hour

February 2, 2023 

In Bernard Shaw's Man and Superman I came to understand that a place is not always physical but also just an understanding or capacity for understanding.

I call this place, Culebra, my paradise while knowing full well the problems.  It is like loving a person wholly and completely while at the same time seeing every flaw.  If there were no flaws it could not be paradise because it would not be real and how could we hold both that a place was paradise but also unreal.  We feel the unreality and recoil.  When we try to cultivate the paradise into our lives we are attempting to maximize the positive attributes while diminishing the negative, but all of that is personally subjective so we all work at cross ends and only end up working in paradise...another obvious oxymoron? 

Or, Like love it is simply loving the light and the dark equally.

Before I learned my current perspective on the ways of the world...
I didn't worry about how a building came to be. I was simply joyous that it did exist.

That it had a giant yellow M glowing day and night.

There was warm food. Salty food. Greasy paper wrapped food. 

In October there was a Trick or Treat bucket happy meal.

I did not believe at the time that they were an evil corporation.

I'm not sure I knew what a corporation was, and the fries were certainly anything but evil.

Especially with some sweet and sour sauce? Lick the foil top.

When I was old enough to ride my bicycle to the restaurant, I just looked it up 1.3 miles each way.

When we kids of the neighborhood were old enough, and we had 60 cents or more, we'd make the trip to our favorite place.

My favorite place anyway.

Before I was old enough to work there and walk out of, we, Chad and I rode our bikes

On a cold bluster of a day, blisterskin touching metal cold.

What a funny idea I had.
Oh, how I laughed to myself.

A trailerpark Puck in a trailerpark glen of perfection

Here comes Chooch, all one year older and many years younger with his tray

and how funny it will be to see him sneeze

as I blow this handful of black pepper

From the plastic black shaker on every table

The ones next to the beige jobbies we would stand a nickel underneath and SMASH

as we were leaving so the next nice folks would have a free salty nickel 

I was in the booth, one leg in one out

My tray of food safely stored on the table

Here he came and I simply put my lips together and blew a gentle breeze

across the powered pepper in my palm

and into the membranes around his eyes and in his eyes and

in his mouth and up his nose

and did he sneeze

he did

he also dropped his entire tray of food

he also walked blindly, crying painful tears, into the mens room

he also came out soaking wet, like his shirt had been flushed

then he had to ride his bike home wet and hungry

crying over spilled milk is not a fucking joke\

when you are hungry all the time

dropping good food, salty greasy hard earned food

is not funny 

it is not the punchline

I am the punchline, 

or rather I deserve to be punched

because I laughed.

Fuck did I laugh, I laughed at the time

I laughed on the ride home

I laughed every time I told that story

I'm sorry Chad, that we called you names

that we picked at you more than anyone deserved

I loved Chad and I regret writing this

My buddy OKC,
I love you.

I've got an imagination. I'm sort of proud of it.

When I see the downtown/bricktown/tunnels of OKC, I feel as though my lack of imagination is stunning.

As in, I am stunned into immobility by my inability to imagine a place like you.

You are like so many humans I know, injured and sore and suffering from a hurt from long ago.

In modern medicine we have an idea of phantom pain - the source of your injury is gone...the cut has healed, the tear repaired, mended.

And yet, the memory of it is still there and we can't tell past from present for fear of future, so we are stuck living in this painful past.

But if you were only suffering, I would feel for you, but I would not love you as I do...
You, OKC are fucking HUGE.  All your sidewalks are build for women and men 10 feet tall and 3 feet wide! You have fun underground tunnels with seemingly no longer any purpose at all, except to provide a sheltered path under the streets.

You have money OKC, that's pretty obvious.

Your streets are clean. Your parks are capable of taking breath away. You have public art, gosh how I love you for your public art.

Oklahoma City, I've only visited with you once - and I'm not ashamed to admit that I visit a lot of places only once, because you are different.

You've found a spot in my heart.  You are unique and when it comes to cities, uniqueness is rare.

Growing up where I did, I had a certain sense of scale that humans live on and in...from the very ruralist cabin, to the tallest of buildings in the biggest of cities, but it never occurred to me that they could make the streets wider.

That they could pick up the trash before it overflowed.

That they could somehow hide the poverty that must invariably exist - where do they hide their poor and hungry and cold and dirty?

I don't know if I'd want more cities like you, because it is your differences that make you so stunning.

It's likely that if I ever get time to spend more time with you, that I might fall out of love with you.

This is most certainly infatuation with an unknown, you are the space alien of cities.
Thank you for that.

Thank you for showing me SCALE. More than anything at all OKC is about SCALE.

This is a two person play set inside the cockpit of an airplane, a 1921 Lockheed Electra 10e to be specific.

There is always airplane buzzsaw noise lightly in the background.

There is always light 1920's music also competing in the background, as if from a gramophone.

The play has tension inherent because it is an airplane, thus they are in the air.

There are two people alone in this confined space.

They clearly are not getting along.

They are never seen or heard from again...so what happened?

The title gives one answer, but is it the right/only one?

Why do we know about Amelia Earhart, but not the other man who was also in the plane when it disappeared?

Maybe it's not love.  

Maybe it's lust.

Mabye rather, its that gross feeling that something feels good, but in the back of your mind you know its bad or wrong but you don't know why.

New Orleans,

I write you a love letter, but I h0nestly barely know you.

It is puppy love at best.

But you took care of my youngest son when he needed care, and you gave him experiences I didn't.

That is reason enough to love you, forget the blown up streets and the terrible sidewalks and the remembrances of death everywhere.

A tarp roof section can be seen in every gust of wind.

I think places I've been are rough and tough and strong, but not like New Orleans.

In New Orleans a person could jump on you and stab you and you would die.

That can happen anywhere, but it feels likely in New Orleans...but not in a scary way - more like a roller coaster.

It's not like Las Vegas where everything is fake...here everything is very very real.

From the architecture spanning hundreds of years floating and bending and twisting in the wind, like a willow.

To the storefront VooDoo shops, which are fake ass voodoo but real ass shops for sucking bucks from tourists.

New Orleans, Thank you because never on any street in America prior to my visiting you had I seen naked people dancing on bars, visible to the street, and supported by most.

New Orleans, Thank you for letting my older son teach me a thing or two about being a compassionate human being.

To give away a cigarette to a man who asks for one is far more blessed 

thank to ignore or chide or belittle or deride.

To keep a pack of smokes, just to make new friends - that was a lesson, a genuine lesson, and we don't get lots of those in life.

New Orleans, where people can't be buried underground, and all the gates to visit are locked.

New Orleans, where music is one industry, next to sex and booze and fun.

I love you New Orleans, LA because you are dirty and gross but still so alluring.

I'm confused and sickened and drawn back and again.
There aren't many places in the world that I want to invest more time in, but New Orleans is one of them.

I could devote my life to getting to know the ins and outs of the people and the politics, but instead I just want to be another of your Johns.

it takes surprisingly little to change everything in your world

there is the idea of perspective

that you see things from your own skewed point of view

it builds inside you and your world adjusts to you and your whims

if my hair started to grow on my body twice as fast and twice as long

perhaps nobody else in the world would notice

maybe my suffering wife

but I'd notice

and it would bother me that something has changed

perhaps I'd be afraid of what it could mean

but then again its only hair and 

perhaps

that is normal

now that I think of it, 

I do recall

old people saying their hair grows rough in and on ears and in noses and at seemingly random

yet

if today 

my hair grew twice as thick

or a different color

or stopped growing at all

nothing in this world that I can imagine

will have changed in any meaningful way

but I would have changed

I am both interconnected with and 

independent from reality

saying the grass is always greener 

is saying that your reality desires more

and so it deserves more

and if you go to that more and it isn't there

don't give up and think 

I guess its all the same

instead keep looking

forever maybe

looking is fun too

and it keeps you from thinking

about why this hair will not stop growing

Fuck you Turners Falls.

Montague. Bullshit.

You bust your ass all your life and end up in places like Turners when you've failed.

You try and try and fight and struggle only to end up on a shit island.

But some people are strong like Turners Falls and some people learn to be.

Some people say Fuck You right back at ya without blinking.

I love you Turners Falls because you prepare people for a hard world and you accept them when they've failed.

A lot of places will not have you if you've not succeeded. They are greedy for only winners.

Turners is a town of losers. There's no shame in it, and it is stupid to lie about.

If you've found yourself in Turners Falls MA, something has gone wrong in your life.

That is OK.

Shit happens.

Especially on a shit island surrounded by hard fuckers that don't care because they can't.

Turners is a brickbat.

If you get hit in the head it was your fault for turning your back on Turners.

I don't enjoy Turners Falls.

But I respect it.

And I respect the lives that have to live there.

Fuck them and fuck you.

Great Falls Horseshit. 

In the summer of 1996, we were 16 years old, and between the two of us we had a free weekend, $80 cash, a full tank of gas, and a very limited grasp of the French language, so we decided to drive the 175 miles from home in Glens Falls NY to Montreal to find out if Canadian McDonalds really was better than American McDonalds.

The we in this story was me and my best friend Ryan. I had met Ryan a year or two earlier in the high school cafeteria. I had asked him to sit with us at our lunch table and he hasn't left me alone since. He practically lived at my house, a small trailer, where there were always 5 or 6 other adults living at any given time.

Having an extra mouth to feed was very normal in our home - the door was always open to anyone that wanted to come by. Ryan had an abusive father and, at least in our teenage minds, an evil stepmother, he preferred to hang at my house, eat my food and generally be an annoying asshole which is what a teenager is supposed to do. I remember a time when Ryan came over, took a full package of hot dogs out of the fridge, put 8 in the microwave, turned it on and ate the other 4 cold while the rest were heating up. Mom was upset that day and said that was supposed to be dinner.  We found something else.  I also have a really great story about splitting 24 tacos and a dozen donuts with him on a midnight bicycle adventure that ended with 4' of stolen sod from a taco bell, but that is for another time.

This is about a slightly larger adventure.

It was a boring summer day. On the previous 4 or 5 weekends we would jump into my beat-up pickup truck...and start driving south until we either found entertainment or ended up in the mall in Albany. This particular Saturday I had a romantic remembrance of a theme park my dad took us to when we were kids - Frontier Town! It had real horses, fake guns and tin badges, and I know only it was vaguely "upstate".

We jumped onto the highway and headed up...up and up we went past lake George, which Abraham Lincoln called one of the most beautiful places he's ever seen.   We went past Warrensburg - home of the world's largest garage sale and home to one man who got arrested for drunk driving a motorized cooler full of beers. We kept going past Ausable Chasm, a natural wonder worthy of a trip, and further still when we saw some hitchhikers and picked them up to drop them again in Plattsburgh for a Phish show, skipping past Frontier Town along the way.

When we finally reached the Canadian border, the agent asked where we were headed. I said Canada. He said good thing because if you were aiming for Mexico, you went the wrong way.  No passports, no inspection or questioning...just a snarky dick in the middle of nowhere.

Something they don't tell you about Montreal - all the signs are in French.  I didn't have a word of French, but Ryian's evil stepmom taught the language in our school, so I assumed he knew enough.  The signs said Montreal next 7 exits.  Well, we wanted to be the center of it all, so we took exit 4. There were signs for Park this, Park that, but in French, so we were winging it.  Almost immediately upon exiting the interstate we came to a booth where a man asked me for $20. I asked what for and he said for parking.  I asked where we were parking, and he just said "park". I gave him $20, and he gave me back around $6 Canadian, thinking I got one over on him forgetting exchange rates.

We parked on a side street and started walking.  We found McDonalds and learned that the food IS better there - poutine and Canadian bacon fries...mmmm.  

We wandered and had a good time meeting punk kids outside a free live show, discussing how backwards they were compared to us NY'ers.

When it got dark, we decided to head back home. We found the street where the car was parked but it wasn't there.  There were no cell phones, and besides I hadn't asked my parents if I could go up to Canada.  We decided to walk around until we could find someone that could help us find out what had happened to our car.  It was completely possible that I parked in a No Parking zone since I couldn't read the signs. When we got to the other end of the street, I noticed that the next street over looked Exactly the same, but my car wasn't there either. Then the next street and the next...the park was shaped like a wagon wheel with the same street repeated over  and over stretching away from the center. About 36 streets later we found the spoke we had parked on...just in time too because it started to rain. Then pour.  Buckets.

We navigated back to the rotary that would get us home, but neither of us could figure out which exit to take between the French signs and the pouring rain...then the weird noise. It was like a wee-woo wee-woo sound and some blue flashing lights.  We drove 2 or 3 more laps around the rotary before we realized the sound and lights were the police trying to get us to pull over.  He said something to us in French and all I could muster in return was "I'm sorry". He said, "where are you going?" I answered "America" and he said GOOD and pointed at an exit.

We drove south and started to see signs for the US Border, but I thought I had many miles still to go, then I see a stop sign to my right...oh shit 80kph.  I slam on the brakes, and we slide - first 45 degrees, then 90 perpendicular to the road. We slid up and onto a median, taking out a sign and getting thoroughly stuck. A border agent came out of the booth right nearby and found we had all 4 wheels off the ground - the belly of the car in 18" of mud. He said, "I'll call a tow truck", and I said wait...Ryan how much money do you still have? He said $10. I checked my wallet and had $40. I told Ryan to put that $10 in his hat and not to mention it again. I explained to the agent about how we only had $40, and he said fine.  The tow driver came, pulled us off and said $80 please. I said we only had $40. He said call your parents. I said at 1AM? They don't have $40 either and they're hours away. He yelled a lot and swore at me in French, I think. Then he started rummaging through the truck with his Maglite.  There he saw my entire music collection, 40 or so cassettes in one of those big red soft-side cases.  He said he'd take the $40 and the cassettes and I could come back with the $40 to get my tapes back.

We were back on the road and Ryan said, "Why'd you have me hide that $10 - it might have been enough to save the tapes?" and I told him that our gas tank was on E.

We stopped at a gas station, put all $10 in and got back on the road.  Around 3am we made it to Lake George about 20 miles from home, when the gas light came back on, but we rolled into Glens Falls on fumes.  My parents weren't up yet. The car showed no damage. We had survived.

The next morning, I got into the truck to drive to school, made it about 15 yards when I ran out of gas.

About a month later I had a long talk with my folks about some mail including a traffic citation from Canada and a request to pay $150 for a destroyed Stop sign.  I never did get the cassette tapes back, and I'll forever mourn the loss of that live Pixies show, but at least now I know what McDonalds tastes like in Canada.

Hey there, Erving,
To talk about you is to talk about the past, because that is all you have left of human civilization

and that is why I love you.

I love you Erving, the way we love ancestors that are so far gone they couldn't have ever been assholes that hit their wives.

I love that you are still there, despite having little reason or purpose for people.

Remember when I say mean hurtful things about you, my love, it's always the people peopling you, not you, not the land that upset me.

You are rugged and rough. You are a land of thin soil over shale and boulder left by a passing glacier, except where you touch water.

When you touch water, Erving - you are majesty. You are the reason humans take up oil painting and watercolor and photography.

We abhor the idea that the sunlight is fleeting that the leaves will not stay in place or in color. We are wistful and want to hold on.
But, just like you loving Erving, we can't hang on.

Life is motion. For people, 100 years ago, life moved in Erving...but it kept on moving

like the Mighty Millers and Keyup brook it wouldn't quit, and like a bend in the kill a town got stuck.

Who would guess that paper wouldn't always be critical?

Who would know that the company store can also fold?

Who might have foreseen that international capitalistic competition could prove too much for fifteen hundred or so souls?

Who buys a death bed? Dwight asked that and when I meet people who move to Erving, that's when I know the answer.

A mixed bag of thoughts -

• ...My dad was complaining the other day on the phone...not about raking, but about raking RED OAK leaves specifically. That is some serious level New Englander (even if he is in Upstate NY).  They are large and light and rigid, they float easily and do now squish down the way a Norway Maple would.

• ...Oh Lord, I want to be a Cucumber - When the saints come marching in.

• I want to visit the Normal RockMediumWell Museum...oh baby I like it raw.

• What kind of people don't care that they live in DEAD PLACES?

• I want to make a t-shirt for OLD ORDURE BEACH.

• Our home is rhomboidal.

• JUST THE TIPS trash removal service - you pick up trash for free in populated areas with a QR code sign for easy tipping.

• A character named Ol' Shitter Nips

I was not born with Pizza Hut in my mouth.

Every slice I ever got, every chance to enter under that architectural gem of a hut roof, was hard won (by someone).

Before I could read, the McDonalds french fries in the Halloween Bucket Happy Meal came from Dad and Mom's job, and child support, but that worked in both directions, so maybe a net 0?

As soon as I could read, I would read the classified ads in the newspaper - the Post Star.

I would look for ways to get something free or a great deal.

There was a rich guy that sometimes answered requests for money for worthy causes...I think I wrote him a letter once, but not sure what I didn't have that I felt was missing.

I was never hungry, just hungry for different or for more.

Somewhere along the line our school participated in a national reading program called Book It sponsored by Pizza Hut. 

For every book you read, you would get "a personal pan pizza".

There was a ceremony in the cafetorium.

There were medals, I think I might have won or at least been in the top readers.

I didn't cheat. I read all the books.

I wanted those pizzas so badly.

On my way to the ceremony, I remember thinking...how will we get all these pizzas into the car?

Was I disappointed when I got coupons?

I was.

But they were even better than a carload of pizza I learned because I could have pizza for a very long time.

And I did.

I still read a lot.

I don't eat Pizza Hut any more...

But I am glad that being hungry made me smarter and happier and not just hungrier.

Silver linings and all.

My distant friend Saratoga,
I love you.

I love that in our youthful jealousy we called your students Skidmorons.

I love the record store that used to be at the end of Pearl St. that had pixies singles from europe.

I love the rich assholes that line your streets, but you play no part in it.

You are a dirty upstate NY town, no matter the pearls.

I love you Saratoga for being exotic at only 3 exits down 87.

I loved that before I reached my teen years, I knew how to bet a trifecta and a quinella. 

I love that a good bet at 13 got me the gear I needed to take up snowboarding, that and a summer roofing job.

I love that within your borders you have not one horse racing track, but two - one for horseback riding and one for harness racing.
I love that when I was a kid I was told without question that the harness track was as rigged a race as any could be.

The horses all knew before the gate which was to get the lei, and which the elmers factory.

I love and appreciate that you held my Dad's place of work for many years - Ball Metal.
I loved touring the factory and seeing beer cans move 1,000 a minute down the line and the giant rolls of flattened aluminum.

I love your stinky water and your forgiveness for those that killed and were killed upon your soul lo these many years ago.

Saratoga, I love you still for your dumpy slot machine casino with awful food court and cigarette smoke. Aging like an IPA.

I guess most of all I love that you showed me how to spot a phony, Saratoga, and taught me to read through gucci bullshit.

Thank you Saratoga. I love you.

-C

My buddy Lake George,
I love you.

I love the time, as teens, we were jumping from your cliffs deep in the woods when a monk full in robe ran us off God's Property.

I love that in those days, Hassan could skate like a pro and lived in a converted church with secret passages.

I love that my Dad is so proud of the rooflines and Ipe wood decks of your Millionaire's summer getaways, and his vista, beyond which even the owners will never get to see.

I love you Lake George because your water is so clear and clean that it was long drank without chemical filtration.

I love you despite killing all those poor old people when the tour boat sank.

I love you the way Abraham Lincoln loved you when he said you were the most beautiful sight in all the world.

I love that I can stand inside your perfect circle, where I used to skate, and feel my voice resonate and vibrate inside my own brain.

I love Fort William Henry which is just a nice reproduction as the original was burned to the ground...the cannons sure sound real.

I loved you when we stole the bench seat from the million-dollar mile shop, spraypainted and abused it for months and returned it to its home.

I loved you every time in high school when we jumped the fence at the fallen tree in the woods behind Great Escape, and when we lied and stole and cheated all the games and rides and food vendors. I hope you can forgive me this, it was done with genuine love.

I loved you Lake George when you had a genuine Pool Hall, and we could play billiards for hours at a reasonable price. 

I love you for Capri pizza and the best stromboli in the East.

I loved the hours playing beach volleyball, playing in the arcade (digging for coins), playing with tourist girls.

I loved the summer job at Ye Olde Curiosity Shoppe and the terrible bagpipe player outside my window.
I love your fireworks.

Thank you Lake George. I love you.

-C

My dearest city of Glens Falls New York,
I love you.

I love you for being my home while I was little and growing and learning the ways of the world. You treated me, if not kindly, then at least fairly...or at least as fair as the rest of the world I've lived in.

I love you because I know you, and propinquity.

I love that people who don't know you call you Glen Falls. I don't love that, it drives me nuts.

I love that you encompass views of the Hudson River which travels south all the way to what might be the most important city in the world.

I love the South Street of the late 80's and early 90's with the Video store on the corner, the OTB in the middle and the library at the end. That street had the whole world inside of it.

I love the dirt road that connects Ogden and Division, turning independent streets into one community.

I love how you snuggle in between Lake George and Saratoga, two other places I love.  

I love that when I lived within your borders, I could ride a bicycle anywhere, and did.

I love that you showed me how unique a wonder you really are in all the cities of our Country, I am so grateful.

Thank you Glens Falls. I love you.

-C

Las Vegas is spanish for "The Vegas" which we all know is a Nervous system...but don't be nervous.

RULE 1: DON'T BE YOURSELF

• Everything in las vegas is fake, you should participate. 

• Choose a character - budget, wardrobe, thoughts

• Start with one new character per trip and work your way up to one per interaction

RULE 2: BE STRONG

• Walk, walk away, walk a lot

• Stay on foot

• Walk the strip loop

• Walk away when losing

• Walk away when winning

• Can you get to both Tacos El Gordo in one day?

Rule 3: SAY YES

• New experiences of all kinds

• No too dangerous, mean or bad things, yes to the rest

• talk to strangers, stranger the better

• Lie to strangers

• Eat new foods

• Drink new drinks

Rule 4: STAY UP

• This city changes shift every 8 hours

• Watch, listen and absorb

• sit still for long periods of time in the same place

• don't keep to your home schedule

• rest a lot, but at odd times

RULE 5: BE OPEN

to changing the way you think about....

• People

• Places

• Attitudes

• Opinions

• Ideas

Let's be realistic here, you aren't going to find another job that pays this well and leaves you alone so much.  You've got it better than anyone else you know in terms of total compensation for your hours invested. But why should it be so hard.  It's the same job more or less that it was 12 years ago, and 12 years ago you couldn't have been happier in your work.

Perhaps it's not the work's fault at all...maybe it is your lack of purpose.  Why are you here?

Is it your job's responsibility to give you purpose in your life?  Maybe for some people...but clearly you aren't or don't want to be only associated with work, right?

So, who are you then? 

Today the honest answer is "a bored middle aged middle income shlub with no goal to chase beyond surviving to retirement"

In dreams?

A fully free person empowered to chase any whim or hobby to its end. An avid reader and hiker and explorer, someone who could write their feelings without remorse or editing to appease the reader. You wake with the sun, fill a backpack and follow life wherever it is heading today.  You have an outlet for your ideas that compensates you fairly.

I'm not a bridge builder and I don't know how to gap this chasm. 

Why would you replace this job with one that wants more from you in return for less? What more could it give? Purpose...again.

Well, sorry bub - you aren't going to find purpose in a cubicle or on a laptop on your couch. 
Keep the easy road you are on, don't go hunting for the silvery road filled with treasure.

For now, find ways to lay on the beach and stay warm and read all the books.  Get your work done so nobody complains.

Take deep breaths, stretch, eat healthy, get outside, laugh laugh laugh (I know it is impossible).

I could be a celebrity influencer by creating UnBagging Videos about food from the grocery store.  Unbagging Video #1 Bugles...Why isn't the bag material recyclable, talk about the crinkly bag chip issue, who is General Mills a guy or a place or an Idea? What is a bioengineered product, is it inherently bad for you or evil, what's it got to do with Monsanto? The actual product sucks and has no QC - what is the factory like, who works there, how much money do they make, what are the benefits like, do they get free Bugles?

I think given enough time science will show and is showing already that there really are no individual organisms - that everything is some symbiosis in one way or another or some lichenization of multiple independent aspects. just like mycelium and trees and algae and bacteria formulate lichens. If we can accept that about ourselves, then it's not ever a discussion of I, rather a discussion of WE and that makes me think that when we die components just leave and there really isn't a lot left after, taking away at least 50%. That means I think our consciousness as beings is somehow tied up in our capacity to build these relationships with entities even when we don't know we're doing it...like in current humanity.

Some folks are opposed to charity in general because they believe that humanity in general if given the opportunity not to work or contribute will not work or contribute.  I suppose we just grow lazy and fat and do nothing in this theory.  I am also opposed to charity in many cases, but not for the same reason. Instead, because I think it hides the real injustices in the world and makes people feel like they are helping when really they're just helping to cover up the problem.

The reason Brittain, Great or not has a problem with overconsumption of alcohol amongst young men is due in my opinion entirely on the policy of calling drunk driving, drink driving.

Drink Driving sounds fucking cool as shit.

Drunk Drivers sound like assholes.

Drink Drivers sounds like the star of Mad Men.

Change the I to a U and the dranking will end.

September 2024 Notes Cleanup

• Learn to carve gravestones, find an old rock, shape it and carve into it the death of the hit television series Empty Nest and put it behind a nice little fence.

• Build a themepark ride based on being cared for in a hospital while it's being bombed with American missiles.

• Good Art shouldn't be whispered about - I'd like to reach out to a local museum like The CLARK about hosting a normal human-being volume discussion in a room about a painting between maybe someone who knows about art, or the artist and someone who doesn't really know anything and just wants to ask questions, like me.  We can call it something neat like "Shouldn't We Be Whispering"

• Why do we have Doll Houses and not Doll Trailers or Doll Trailer Parks?  I'd like to make a barbie scale dollhouse this is an accurate copy of my house on Pinello Rd and Levi's Trailer next door complete with him standing on the back steps, pissing into my yard while flipping me off and saying "Morning, Faggot"

• Cats can only get 9 lives because they can't read.

• Tshirts that are just words - Boner Factory, Misconductor, Train(ed) (Mis)Conductor, I'm a size 0, EXPENSIVE BRAND, Lady Hunk, Unremarkable, Incorrigible, Be Wildered, Cribbage Players Love Pegging, Don't Shoot Poor Folks, I'm Haunted.

• iWatch users look like particularly hungry zombies eating their own wrists.

• "He was a man of Letters...Like Y"

• Can't see the poorest for their pleas

• A midlife crisis is nothing more than reflecting upon your life, and the goals you had set for yourself in your youth or young adulthood and measuring them and recalibrating. In Project Management we call this being agile.

• New Book - OppoCities - that explores various cities around the world, in comparison to some other great city. Examples could be Salt Lake City, Utah and New Orleans, Louisiana or Boston, Massachusetts and Oklahoma City, Oklahoma.

• Goofy Hats will be back in style - Mark these words - We need a MODERN HABERDASHER.

• Sporting Good Clothing company - FIT FOR ACHING

• Modern Day raid on Historic Deerfield - We take over the school buildings and we hang cardboard flames from the windows. Participants should include members of the local schools and school boards.  While Deerfield Academy has a Koch Brothers funded planetarium, or local schools are canceling their music programs. We will dress up like a reverse tea party and wear 1700s clothes not dressed like Indians. When asked why we will say that if we dressed up like Indians, they wouldn't have let us in and they would've called the police...even today being an Indian is worth a call to the cops.  From the start of American History, it was the English with the money making the decisions and calling the shots and it's their descendants and other rich people still calling the shots today.

There is a singular gift in our Country that is worth more than all the rest combined. Better than gold.

Better than yachts. Better than Lil' Yachty poppin bub on a yacht with beats thumping.

The gift of failure.

It is so rare.

So fucking rare.

If I had a problem with premature ejaculation, I'd hang a photograph of failure next to my bed, because failure is so hard to come by.

Failure means that you have something to fall back on, or the maniacal power to just allow yourself to die in the street hungry and cold.

In silicon valley in the 90's they were all failing so fast, using up so many resources, wasting so much time...bless their hearts.

A baby is born and is in the bassinet and if the dad's job is to put bass in a net, he right better do it and do it well, or failure.

What is failure?

I come back to a story I heard a long time ago about a (forgive me because this will be all wrong as all things inside my brain become) a potter who wanted, no needed via obsession to replicate a certain glaze that hadn't been produced in hundreds of years. It had a certain crackle that acted as a Mesmer upon him. He was already a surviving, if not successful potter with a wife and children and food and chairs and a roof and a shop for him to work in.  He stopped taking new work, he stopped playing with the wife and kids, he stopped making pots. He only worked on his glaze and the crackle. They ran out of food. The roof leaked. The wife left with the kids so they didn't die. He kept on glazing. Before he died, he did it.  He found the exact correct proportions of water and mineral and the exact right temperatures and curing and cooking times, with only the correct fire fuels, and exposure to oxygen. He did it. He got his glaze. 

Did he succeed, or did he fail?

The wildly frustrating thing is the answer is entirely up to each individual and their I don't know what...the soul.  What is likely the Voltron of your physical body's microbiome working in concert in the vibrations that we humans need fuck tons of drugs to tap into. The billions upon quillions of tiny universes that live in our bellies and on our skin and connecting us to the soup we call air and land around us, they get to decide now don't they if we want crackle more than love or food or security.

I am forty-five years old and it has been a long time since I could fail. 

When I was little, we were not rich and the 1980's really valued money.

Money equals happiness...

Of course I've met people in my life that taught me something else, or at least more nuanced.

Money equals freedom, freedom leads to happiness...

But most of the richest folks work the longest hours and have the shittiest family lives, so that can't be it either.

Money equals capacity to Fail...

When you can not succeed, when you can fail, when it isn't blocked in your spirit and body and brain and fingers and ankles by a universe of fighting against failure, then you can be more free and that equates to more happy... if you are so inclined.

I made choices as a teenager that committed me to a life that I may not have otherwise chosen. Of course, somehow I could have been empowered to fail at this endeavor, but there isn't any appendage in my structure that supports it.

I am forty-five years old and maybe I can fail now.

I will have to remake the man I am. It won't be automatic. 

No matter how much I want it, I won't become an overnight failure.

I have had and I have had not, and I know enough to know I'll be equally me in either state.

My commitments are unfurling, like that wind-pillow we unroll on the beach, the one we call the blue-vajin.

It is more callous than muscle fighting failure, I need to dig deep. I've dug out callouses before and I've cut otherwise as well, and the land between new and old, fresh and dead is painful. I will require strength and resilience and verisimilitude

and I'll have to look up verisimilitude.

In all these years I have desired. I have desired to the point of exhaustion. 

Today my desires run like torrents of rain on adobe roofs racing for the faucet exits on all sides toward giving up.

We fight. Maybe I fight. I fight myself. I fight for the right to party...to live to excess, in excess listening to INXS. Listen like thieves was a christmas present from my mom. I was maybe 11 years old.  It might have been the last time I felt safe failing.

Oh, what a gift. 

I'll have a sausage with peppers and onions and brown mustard.

I thought you were a vegetarian.

I was.

Why not anymore?

Because the world is fucked and I've given up trying.

What makes you say the world is fucked?
There are no more good guys, there probably never were, but in my head there were.

But now, the good guys want to close the borders too, just with laws not walls. The good guys are cool with innocents being slaughtered, so long as we get paid on time. There are no more good guys. Fist bump KSM entrails splatter of Jhamal.

Things have been worse.

They will continue to get worse.

We are the bad guys. We are Pan-Em. 

There's nothing here left to fight for.

Except maybe some peace and quiet.

Fuck.

The queen is dead, long live the queen.

She warn't no queen, just a chicken.

But she was my friend, and Emily and Victor and Caleb's friend, and a friend to squirrels and cats and wild birds.

There is no purpose.

There is no reason.

There ain't no fucking way we get out alive.

We love each other and we love things and maybe they love us back and then they die or we die and its over.

Unless it's not, but either way...doesn't change.

She was alive. She was good and I'm sorry.

I'm sorry a lot.

I know she wasn't Palestine...she wasn't Uigher, she wasn't Jhamal...she was my friend.

Not anybody else's thoughts...that'd be creepy and immoral.

I mean I dream of being able to control my own thoughts.
Like to be able to decide not to have the lyrics scrolling through my head, pushing to be sung out loud, and always just a bit wrong.

Like to be able to select a task from my list and turn it into a smaller list and incrementally tick each one off until the entire thing was done.

I would like to think about one of my inventions deeply, instead of shallow and move on. hit and move. hit and move.

What if I could put all of my thoughts and energy into one project...what could I accomplish.

I think I want to make something physical, but then I think we have enough stuff in the world. 

I want to be where happy people are, and allow my brain to float around as it will.
If I give it a pleasant environment and sufficient stimulation, I will be just as happy with my mixed uncontrolled thoughts as if I could be singular in my focus.

I take drugs to slow my brain, but it doesn't slow it down enough to deal with most of life...which is seriously slow motion most of the time.

The drugs I take are grown in my own yard, or a friend's...they are directly from nature and have been used probably as long as humans have existed.  I don't feel weird or wrong about using these modifiers any more than I do the cups upon cups of coffee that help me regulate to a conventional work schedule.

I realize that there are other drug options, medications that I could take, but they are made by man and man is fallible to a fault, and I don't want to risk my sanity for some better work productivity.

The real solution is to find a way to be free to choose every moment and to be in a place that supports that choice, with resources sufficient to achieve them.

What a tiny thing to ask for.

Wildly fun and incredibly inexpensive to produce, this show will be the biggest sensation of the 2029 summer.

The premise is simple - A Chair sits center stage.

An MC selects a member of the audience to sit in the chair.

The selected Performers for the day then pull a song (Lyrics and all) randomly from a huge stack of printed song lyrics.

The performer then needs to NOT SING the song, but dramatically re-enact the song without any music...using ONLY the lyrics.

The Best performances are chosen by the audience for a FINAL SONG Readoff with a Really Silly song.

More than anything I'm sad that we are who we are as a nation. I wish we fed the hungry and clothed and housed the cold and hardened. I wish we cared for our fellow man, no matter the genetic variation. There are some, to be sure, but the way is blocked at all angles by misdirection and trickery. I'm not angry at them who hate and fear, I simply feel remorse that they will never experience rapturous joy but also that they will go about stealing it from others, never knowing it existed to begin with. A real true love for humanity and a pure connection would break the spell, but alas, it seems too late.

1500 miles from New Orleans to WestMass.

2 days

Through all these cities and all these towns...

I'm glad he was not a very astute lyricist because if life was a highway

I'd be looking for the next offramp

• I used to get upset about Middle Eastern Terrorism, you know...around 9/11. I was so angry because before then a guy that looked like me could get a job as a bad guy in a movie, but nope - foreigners taking our jobs.

• I really do enjoy a good pina colada, but who the fuck likes getting caught in the rain? I would not be a good match for that personal ad.

• I've been working on my foreign languages.  My favorite SPANISH movie right now is "With Air" starring Nicolas Jaula.

• My favorite FRENCH band is GOOD JOVIE - that guy, John Good Jovie really can sing.

• Reporters have this saying "Sunlight is the best disinfectant", whoever came up with that saying never covered Tampa. That place is both Sunny and Gross.

• I dated a lot when I was a young person. I dated a person that looked just like an elderly Kevin Bacon, boy she could dance!

• I wrote a song one time, named it "Just OK Balls of Fire" - it was nothing to get worked up over.

• I try to start all of my conversations with new people with "IF YOU'RE A COP, YOU HAVE TO TELL ME"

• It makes me happy to think that Jesus, you know...Christ, was such a big fan of HIP HOP HOORAY that they have statues of him dancing to it.

• Toaster Strudel are just POP TARTS for really rich kids. They have to put their own icing on. Suckers.  Pop Tarts are just Best Value Toaster Pastries for medium rich kids. Lucky fucks.

• I spent a lot of time thinking about how much welding is going on in the star wars garages right before a big fight.  They should do more regular maintenance.

• There was a sign over the gas pumps at the Station this week letting me know that I could now buy MILK WITH A WORRY FREE CAP. Really takes a load off my shoulders, I hadn't even realized that was what was keeping me up at night.

• I love back rubs. Some people are weird about it though, It's a back, dude...calm down. It's nothing sexual. I'm just a dude rubbing another dudes shoulders, under the shirt, at a urinal.

• How much toilet paper do you think HAGRID went through?  Do you think Hogwarts plumbing had to be magical to support him? Where did the creepy dead girl go while he read the sports? 

• Have you ever noticed that 0ut of all the dangerous shit in a kitchen, the only thing with a built-in Lock are TONGS? Protected from accidental TONGING.

• I always dreamed that I'd win a GOLD at the OLYMPICS for eating PEANUTS. Dreams are weird.

• Probably just like most of you, so far I haven't made it through a JOB INTERVIEW without saying at least once, "Blow it out your ass".

• I love fresh fruit, but I refuse to eat Pears.  Yeah, I was out the day I learned that TWINS COME IN THEM.

• In the car the other day I had just about made up my mind that I was going to STOP BELIEVING, but a song came on the radio that changed everything. I wish I knew what it was called.

• Fig Newtons are a great Beach food because they taste like you've already dropped them in the sand, so when you do it won't matter.

• Here's a seasonal regional joke, I got caught PEEING in the shower...FUCKING ASPARAGUS SEASON.

• I think of my marriage like music...there is High Fidelity and Low Fidelity, no such thing as Infidelity. I don't cheat, just like LO-FI on occasion.

• Hey Guys, ever been at a Urinal and realize you got the bathroom math wrong and your number 1 is really a number 2?

• When I was young I treated Sexually transmitted diseases like Pokemon...I had to catch them all, with my balls.

• When I was 18 I worried I'd be too quick in bed with a woman, now I just worry that my wife will wake up.  I try to time the movement to match the snores.  When the snoring stops I'm like a cat tracking a songbird.

• Things are getting crazy in my town. Downtown this week a guy was just standing in an alley staring out at the people walking by while jerking off.  I was like "HEY - Watch what you're doing. You almost punched me in the eye."

• ...And when there was but one set of dinosaur footprints...that was when I carried you...in my mouth...to feed to my kids.

• I've always said it, and I believe it...Gay Men will get it in the END!

• My doctor is worried about me, he says I'm so out of shape that my tendons are now nine-dons. If they get to 8-dons I could die-dons.

• I love sleeping so much I wish I could stay awake to enjoy it.

• I dated someone who said I had problems, I said like what, they said Microcephaly. I dated a doctor to find out they were liars.

• You learn a lot reading the newspaper - I learned recently that I can draw a cowboy if I take it one step at a time. I wonder if I could draw a cat the same way? I also learned in that very same newspaper that my pop-pop had died.  Now that I think about it, that might be why mom mailed it to me.  I should have known she'd never support my art career.

• I wasn't smart enough to earn a fulbright scholarship so they gave me a half-bright one instead.

• I used to be afraid of taking off my shirt, not shyness, but fear of the split second where I can't see anything. I guess I worried about alternate universes and just basic distrust in object permanence. Most people nail that by age 2, I was 19 wondering what I'd do if it all changed. 

• I'm embarrassed that I've never been able to shoot up heroin, it's not that I'm against drugs or afraid of needles...it's just that I'm terrified of spoons.  I wish I knew what soup tasted like!

• Going to the beach is choosing to go sit on hot dirt. 

• I had a huge, misbehaved dog, it was a Bernard.  It was no Saint.

When you have baby carrots in your fridge

I wish you hadn't bought them

they are a lie

but since you have them in your fridge

Do you also have some salad dressing like Italian?

Preferably not something cream based but thats maybe just me

How about an old emptied, clean pickle jar of glass with metal lid?

If you put those lying bastard nuggets into the empty jar and then cover with salad juice,

Well then, friend you have a perfect side dish that gets better every day it stays in the cold

The carrots get softer and more and more flavors osmote

You are welcome

Invite me over for a snack and a beer

Last week, or earlier this...my brother almost died in a plane crash.

Well, maybe not - but it was close enough that he wrote out letters to his spouse and kids.

I wanted to explore what a letter like that would look like from me, but I fear that I can't be that genuine, and that...

in the darkest of it, who gives a fuck which words you choose, so long as you are honest. Simple words would probably be best.

I love you. I'm sorry for the times I hurt you. I wish I could have spent more time with you. I hope you know how deep into my being you are embedded and how thankful I am to have had time with you. It is my hope that the world be awake for you and you can hear birds and critters and think of puppies and feel joy somewhere inside the sadness, for as Yogi (not the bear) says "Expansion of happiness is the purpose of creation".  Don't fight it.

Maybe if I were more literary I could say something about how we aren't separate, just as aspens and ants are not really independent. I could say that we were more like Lichen, a symbiotic relationship that Voltron's something altogether better...but as you can read...I'm not more literary.

When you've been married as long as I have you learn what and what not to worry about. Take for example vacuuming - say you are vacuuming, because you should be doing that, and you hear a clink into the bag. As a newly married person you have to make a rapid decision. Do you mention the clink to your spouse, and when? Do you stop the machine immediately and yell, HONEY! Or do you pretend you didn't hear it? Either way you were probably in the wrong for not paing enough attention so there is some math sense in staying quiet...

But, what if later they say "Hey have you seen my heirloom diamond ring?" 

Now you're in real shit, doubly so if you emptied the bag.  Of course you could fess up right away and only hear about it a short while. But if you stop at every clink the job might never get done.

As a person married as long as I; I know the location is the critical factor - a clink in the kitchen? Dog food.

A clink in the bedroom...STOP THE LINE.

I grew up in a trailer.

Let me rephrase that...I spent most of my youth living out of a trailer (with addition), but have also spent some years under 18 in other trailers, tents, and walk-up apartments. I shared a room with my brother until he left for college. He was 4 years older than me, so until I was 14, I shared a bunk.
I got my girlfriend pregnant while I was still in High School, she was a community college freshman. We had one more baby that made it, he was born in 2000...I was 20 years old with two kids and a factory forklift job and a bicycle instead of a car.

The older of the children is now in another State, with a real career and a whole life ahead.

The younger just finished lawyer school, Tulane Law. He's 24 years old.

He didn't grow up in a trailer...he went from small house to larger house. 

I don't know what any of this means about wealth or the American dream, or race since this would have been so much harder but our pale skin.

I do know that one lesson I've learned in life is that you have to fucking hustle. 

Lost to time and sluice-box skull, the explanation given

Matters little 

Having read the pretension of the writer simply having to write

For us it is just the same - to catch is in part because you can

and if you can you should

insofar as we are talking of collecting dropsies from maples

and oaks and ashes and beeches

I'll break it down for you

While your connected bits float through the plant dying time in New England

Maintain an eye on the middle space

between the aliens we haven't met in the sky

and the ones we don't know yet under our toes

A stiff breeze like a stiff drink makes loose un-needed garments

raiments are they sometimes called

come raining, men, hallelujah

snatch it from the air as a brownie pulls a worm like spaghetti

from his space between unknown dangers above and below

I'm trying I promise

Its "good luck" to catch a leaf that has fallen or been pushed from a living standing tree

Gravity, you're under arrest

By the power vested in me by my opposable thumbs

Half at least of the magic is inside the thought that 

Were it not for you 

The trip would be over

A few grams will in moments so brief

Complete the only trip it will ever take

The rake is moving corpses

The leaf hangs on

Some varieties cherish their dead and hold them tight

Marcescence

They know the joy that comes with hanging on

Even after all hope is gone

Because hope isn't real and it doesn't change

Whether the leaves fall in the rain or wind

Or where the seedling lands

This slough-off holds a twinkle

and while you hold it you will too

Produce a wish, a want, a cure

Ask the soldier before allowing his trip home

To see what she can do

About your needs since 

after all

you are more powerful than the most powerful

forces of nature

and hope away hope all day

hope and pray to tree scrap

Were yours to be fulfilled

Blame could be ascribed

To the aspen and not the sky

I have memorized in near infinite detail all the Norman Rockwells of my New York/ New England life;

And I'm prepared now for a little Georgia O'Keefe in the desert.

So long as I'm with Duhrer and not Kincaid, I think that I'll be alright.

When you realize the weight of Einstein's (or supposedly so) quote - "Alles was wir machen ist falsch" - it changes things. 

I think Hunter S. Thompson maybe got it, I'll look into that.  His actions lead me to believe he'd seen this light.

What I take this statement to mean is that "nothing we do is real"

Maybe the zen buddhists with their backwards poems that don't seem to mean shit to me get it too. Should look there as well.

If none of it is real, then...well...none of it is real.
Where you aren't afraid of what happens in a dream because you realize it isn't real, it's a good feeling.

When you realize nothing at all is real, it's not so much fun.

There are so many stories and songs and movies and books trying to explain this to people, but 

hey, you can lead a horse to water

Try convincing other people of anything it's impossible

JB and KG really might understand me, if I get the purport of their lyrics - I'd like to someday ask them

What would NEO have done if he had a wife and two kids back in his apartment? What would be the right move?

I heard a story once of a potter who became impassioned by a certain crackling glaze from a long time ago

He devoted his life to it. His family went hungry. they had to leave him

He almost died of starvation

but he got his crackle.

Who the fuck cares about stupid shit like that?  All of us.  

All of our shit is Stupid Shit. It doesn't always feel that way.

But then we remember ol' Al E. and his big brain.

Knit me a sweater with 'Don't sweat - it's all fake'

I bet if I read some philosophy, I might find that I ascribe to a certain system.

That would be neat to find out, like a genealogy of belief revealed to me. I should read more.

The challenge I avoid, is, 

If you know it's all bullshit

but they don't 

do you go chase a crackle?

When you know there is no season and no sun

it is still fun to sit in it.

My amigito perrito and I were walking through the woods that I played in as a child yesterday...

brief interlude:

"Bulldoze the woods that I ran through. Carry the pictures of me and you.

I have no memory of who I once was and I don't remember your name "

-The Avett Brothers

We now return you to our previous broadcast:

As we came upon a scene dear to me as a fond reminder of my boyhood (see image #1) I also found to my initial dismay

a heap of trash

Maybe worse, because this stuff could be recycled - 

if it wasn't so rusty...

(see image #2)

We looked closer and I got to thinking...

when did they last have pull tabs on beer cans?

It must have been in my early childhood or earlier that they disappeared

So these cans are older that I am, still sitting here.

Maybe some leaves or dirt hid them from the many walkers along this trail

Perhaps they are left there as a reminder to take care of our planet

Most likely people dumped them out there in 1975 because there was no recycling program and no nickel

And they also most likely drank them out there in 1975 and I am set to thinking

I bet those parties were fun, out in the woods - overlooking the Mighty Hudson, years before I was born

I took my two samples to bring home and left the remainder

I'll walk there again next year or maybe sooner and they will be my friend that I will check in on and say hello 

to my trailer park ancestors rippin butts and crushing Gennys and Milwaukee's Best out in the woods

I have a lot of stories of these woods, but am still in the thrall of somebody else's party rubbish.

A bench - normal, above the bench a sculpture meant to block the sun. The sculpture is a naked man lying across monkey bars with his dick hanging down.
The Bourne and Sagamore bridges are being replaced - someone should follow the Sydney Australia model and add adventure walks to the financing model. A company could lease the maintenance walkways and get lots of insurance.

Alternate uses for Sugar Maple Sap - Cold plunge pools into maple water, hot tub filled with maple sap, slowly becoming syrup. Soda Stream Sap - like a lemonade stand, collected fresh daily (fuck that's a good one)

• dropped in on a half-pipe on a skateboard

• jumped out of a plane

• white-water rafting

• Snowboard Instructor

• ridden in a tiny airplane

• been to Ireland

• been to Canada

• Visited 2/3 of MeowWolfs in America

• was an extra on a film set

• Spent time in LA, NYC, Boston, Las Vegas, New Orleans, Santa Fe, Saratoga, Lake George, Culebra

• Ran a 10k

• Rode 125 miles on a bicycle in one day

• Rode 200 miles on a bicycle in two days (Across MA)

• Swam in the Atlantic, Pacific, and Caribbean

• Went Deep Sea fishing

• Been fired from a job

• Walked off a job

• Shot, cleaned, cooked and eaten Squirrel

• Grown my own mushrooms (shiitake)

• Smoked cannabis

• Eaten psychedelic mushrooms

• been punched in the face

• crashed a car accidentally

• Had surgery for broken bones (ankle, wrist)

• Got Tattoos

• Became a parent

• Got married, stayed married

• Kissed the blarney stone

• watched someone die

• witnessed a birth

• Sang in a band

• tried to learn an instrument (uke)

• started my own business (this)

• made my own alcohol (cider, rice wine)

• ride a unicycle

• can juggle

• seen/experienced ghosts

• stolen from stores, people, institutions

• made birthday cakes for people I love

• elected to political offices

• volunteered for non-profits

• hand-made hand tools (screwdrivers)

• forage for wild foods and health-aids

• helped run a Mayoral campaign

• had a sibling die

• had a parent die

• Sat next to a grand piano being played well

• Met Mr. T, David Hasselhoff, Blake Shelton

• Became friends with a disgraced State Senate President

• killed a cat

• had a dog put down 

• drove a golf cart

• Made my own sauerkraut and maple syrup

Self sufficiency only works when you believe in the idea of self.

That said, making maple syrup is fun and good exercise and relatively inexpensive and produces some of the greatest stuff on earth.

Just like most things in life, technology has made the collection and dehydrating of sap easier and cheaper than it ever was in the past, and thereby fucked the whole model.

Good things are supposed to come in small doses, after hard effort.  Making chocolate cheap only makes cheap chocolate and devalues the real.

I bet that is the way religious feeling works - saying "sorry" on your deathbed only devalues real piety and a lifetime of work.

With Maple Syrup, having suction hoses and 200 gallon collection buckets and commercial electric evaporators certainly results in a greater volume of syrup out the door with a minimum of labor, but what the fuck else are we meant to be doing out in the woods this time of year?

So we work less hard, get moldy, plasticky, ugly intubated forests catheterized like cancer patients wandering the halls of the forests that all used to be farms and are studded with rock walls and abandoned apple trees.

The syrup comes cheap(er) and tastes worse and people say - Pancake syrup is just as good and it's pennies on the dollar and who cares if it used to be beets or corn and never was a red leaf a hematoma on the woods slowly healing into explosions of color only to fall dead and become food for the next generation of trees.

We are using galvanized steel buckets, spiles, and lids.  We are using giant metal pots and scrap wood from the yard for heat, we are collecting daily by hand. It is hard work and cold and rewarding in a way that is hard to understand to someone that has never manufactured their own raw ingredients.

We start with stained old empties, young bucks, and denuded standing firewood and after a drill and a hang and a boil, we get dessert.

There was an episode of Perfect Strangers that I recall from probably 1989 where cousin Larry tried to turn a recipe from Balky into a product and everything falls apart when you try to make more than 1 batch at a time.

I try and I try and I try to remember this important life lesson.

Doing something easy devalues the end result, and devalues the person doing the easy work. Doing work yourself always tastes better than letting someone else do it for you, and when you are working for yourself you take a lot more care than working for an unseen face, for the stranger you'll never meet. See ALDO LEOPOLD for a better explanation.

Tomorrow I will go to Taunton, then to Mattapoisett and harvest shellfish. This will be pretty easy because someone planted those seeds in the bay and we are only doing the harvesting.  I will appreciate the freshness and the connection to the ocean as I eat them, but not as much as the guy who seeded the inlet or the person selecting the scallop from the wild sea that they will feed their family.

But I'll like it better for sure than any sushi I could buy at any price, I promise that.

We're right and well fucked, things have gone pear shaped as it were...to coin a Norman phrase.

I think it's time for the GIVE UP party, not to run for office, obviously...that wouldn't be giving up would it?

No, We need a GIVE UP party to throw parties. To throw soirees. To throw trash out the windows? Maybe not...

Just because we are fucked doesn't mean that we have to be assholes to one another, directly.

We are awful to other humans every day and we don't know it, buying cheap chicken from the market, shopping TEMU.

I'm not saying we should start burning our trash, but at the same time, we have to admit, things are past the point of getting better.

Things are terrible in almost every conceivable way - global pandemic, trumpism, israel, russia, AMOC, parade shootings, education, cost of living, volcanos...it doesn't stop.

It is silly to pretend like we aren't past the edge of the cliff.

Let's be grown ups and see it for what it is and decide how best to have a controlled shutdown, as opposed to a violent explosion.

Let's stop pretending like we can right the ship, so that we can start the orderly evacuation.

Not from earth.

Too late for that.

An orderly evacuation from current societal structures and norms. 
Better learn to fish and hunt mushrooms.

Better not care so much about Kardashians.

More people could be okay, or at least suffer less if we weren't so focused on the prentend chance we have that the planet doesn't puke us out.

Perry Farrell says in the song pets :

"My friend says we're like the dinosaurs

Only we are doing ourselves in

Much faster than they ever did

We'll make great pets "

I read an article last week that said that the AMOC - an Atlantic Ocean current is showing signs of collapse.  This could happen, according to the article, as soon as 2025...so we need to hurry to get this film made.

AMOC is a disaster film without any CGI explosions or earthquakes or anything like that.  

This should be a psychological thriller.

We are always looking for the huge Tornado, the Earthquake, the Tsunami - but what if Water Currents were what really takes us down?

If this current collapses, within weeks, temperatures in Europe would drop 30 degrees on average. Sea levels would rise substantially, and the flora and fauna will not have the ability to react quickly enough to survive the way they are.

*****UPDATE*****
This was the premise for the 2004 movie Day After Tomorrow, so I'm 20 years late to this one.

Although, my interpretation would be different.

Captain Cujo

Greenfield MA 

413.522.9686

Wemailcoconuts@gmail.com

Objective: To never have to work on someone else’s dream. To have all that I need to be able to chase my own dreams. To escape the capitalist system. To be a free human.

Education: 45 years of racing. Racing bills against pay checks. Racing to stay ahead. Racing to feed my family and keep warm.

Skills:

·        Reading

·        Relaxing

·        Drinking Beers

·        Smoking Weed

·        Playing outside

·        Hiking

·        Helping others find freedom

Experience: Admittedly, I’ve only tried work like this in a voluntary capacity, and only in short spurts.  I will say however; that when I was engaged in this work, I found it rewarding and always wished I could do more in this field.

Certifications: Trying hard to avoid certification (of insanity)

Hobbies:

·        See Skills

In the United States if you are rich you can keep a sick dog alive. If you are poor, you might be able to do the same if you agree to go into substantial debt.

It isn't a bad thing that some sick dogs get to live. I understand as well that not all sick dogs can or should be kept alive. I also understand that animal care is expensive, and caregivers need to make a living, and none appear to be the ultra-wealthy.

I am lucky and can pay to keep my sick dog alive.

25 years ago, I wasn't and couldn't and didn't.

I didn't deserve the hurt then any more or less than I do today.

The dog wasn't at fault.

Inevitable.

That is what my brain screams into my ears.

But its only inevitable inside this system.

The one where credit cards change hands before care is deployed.

It isn't the only model.

It's just the only model we have here.

Historians will say the rest are even more flawed, the other options.

Still it is worth documenting that in current America a person is made to decide financial ruin or a dead puppy.

There are neighbors, there are thousands in fact that want to help my puppy get better.

There are tools online to let people beg their community to help them survive.

I imagine a pretend place where animal doctors care for animals as best they can. They all have warm homes and plenty of healthy food, so they aren't worried about your Credit Score. The young and the old and the poor don't have to hurt more than the rest.

I think about our ancestors, and the stories about families with 12 kids, 8 kids, 15 kids - and inevitably (there's that word again) a few would die. I tried to imagine if it would hurt less, maybe since there were more of them they were somehow less precious individually. Its not true. It wasn't true. Losing someone hurts just as hard the first as the 40th time and I have to be angry.

So I'll be angry at money and how even inside a system that is flawed, maybe there's a way to make everyday life a bit easier...I know people want it.

I know I do.

1. The Deep Thought Club - This would be a group of people that get together at regular intervals to discuss topics in a salon style setting with a professional meeting moderator (me) to control and guide the discussion.  There should be comfortable seats, drinks and food available.  We'll publish the notes on a site, like this one, for those that missed the club date, or weren't invited.

2. Movie Premise - The Big Lebowski II - Little Lebowski Urban Achievers League. This would be a follow up to the Coen brothers movie, but this time set in current times. The hero and star of the film would be someone like me, surrounded by crazy young people - a modern version of the Bad News Bears, sort of...

3. Phalanstery - Exploring the role of communal living and society on the health and well-being of humans. We should look at other critters, besides humans like bees for example.  If we were to isolate a bee from a bee colony and if we didn't know anything about how bees live and interact...what would we be able to know about them?  Is their socialization a foundational part of what a bee is...how about an ant? Birds that murmur? What about us?

4. SIDEWALK KING - This is an invention that I've come up with to make better urban and suburban neighbors. It is a tool to ensure sidewalks stay clear and unobstructed for pedestrians to use.

 The Sidewalk King is essentially a Rectangular frame, adjustable width and height.  The SK attaches to a bicycle, a motor scooter, a riding lawnmower, a segway, and can even be used on foot.  The idea is simple, you start at the end of one street at the sidewalk.  You adjust the SK to the correct sidewalk width and set the height at the standard 6'.  You then start moving this rectangle forward along the sidewalk...the places where bushes, trees, plants, and other obstructions hit the SK, they are marked with an impermanent Chalk paint.   Property owners adjacent to chalked barriers would have a set number of days to resolve the situation or the town would come and clear the path, and bill the homeowner.  Overgrown hedges, poor vehicle parking and other barriers would be a thing of the past.  This would be very helpful especially for people with limited mobility.

Camp Karen is a female-led coming of age time travel comedy.

In the summer of 2023, an all-girl boy scout troop go on a weekend camping trip into the Adirondacks that will change all of their lives. 

Led by an out-doorsy, off-the-grid rural powerhouse Scoutmaster, and her stoner, 10-years-older Junior Scout Master, the troop consists of 6 girls, ranging in age from 11 through 17. Represented in this group are kids who are screen addicted, kids who are gamers, shy and outgoing, traditionally feminine and androgenous, strong and weak.

They've all grown up in our modern, connected world.

Deep in the forest they come across a tree more ancient looking than all the rest and the hippy dippy Jr Scoutmaster insists they all perform a ritual to thank the woodland spirits.  The whole troop take hands circling the tree and they all rest their heads upon the bark at the same time.

When the ritual is done, the group goes back to camp to pack for home, but some things have changed.

It takes getting back home to realize that something is very different. There are no cellphones. There is no GPS. The video games are 8-bit the tvs are fuzzy and tiny and bubbly shaped.

As all movies of this style follows the same pattern, I'm not sure I'd mess with it much.

The girls grow and mature and learn to be better, fuller, more complete people and less reliant on constant feedback. They face adversities like school bullies, gender norms, and isolation.

In the end, they find their way back to the tree, perform the ritual, and head back to the old camp site - they are back in current times.  But are they happy about it?  

Newell is a multinational corporation that owns among other things, Sharpie brand, Rubbermaid brand and Yankee Candle brand.

Today our local paper announced that 350 jobs would be leaving the area as Newell consolidates businesses and seeks efficiencies in operations.

This story is so far from unique that it wouldn't be worth noting, except that I think I have a bit of a unique perspective on the subject; having worked 6 years at Yankee Candle, having helped design the facility they are closing, having been both loved and mistreated egregiously by the company, and by having an audacious plan to get just a tiny bit of retribution or remuneration.

Around the year 1997, I was 18 years old with a wife and baby son.  I was working at a local vegetarian food factory doing manual labor, packaging and light warehousing.  I saw an advertisement in the Greenfield Recorder for warehouse workers at Yankee Candle with a starting pay over $12/hr.  When I got that job I thought I was the luckiest person on earth.  This would be enough for rent and food and a car (1997) if I busted my butt. Prior to this my only daily transportation was a mountain bike.

I started out on Christian Lane in Whately loading boxes onto belts and into order-picking bays, and transitioned to driving a forklift shortly thereafter.

I learned to drive a forklift by visiting an offsite warehouse with another young employee where Mike Kittredge stored some of his car collection, right along with excess candle merchandise.  My first pallet move was over the hood of a black porche 911 turbo.

I met some of the most amazing people at Yankee, and am still very close friends with a guy who now lives in Sacramento, CA.

When I started working there, Mike K was still the owner - he hadn't sold to the first of many subsequent owners yet. 
Things were good in the Mike K years.  There was free Pizza for lunch every Wednesday. 

While the pizza came on Wednesdays, there were always leftovers on Thursday and often still on Friday.  This meant that my total lunch costs for the week usually worked out to about 80 cents, as Monday and Tuesday I would eat a pouch of ramen noodles with microwaved water, and pizza for the remainder.

Around 1999, Yankee began to build a new office headquarters and a new distribution center (both now closed or scheduled to close). The new DC would use the latest warehouse management software, so trainers were needed to teach the staff how to use these tools.

Managers and Supervisors in the company selected some of their most capable floor workers to become Trainers. I made that list.

After a successful transition, the company made my role permanent and I became a Warehouse Management Systems Specialist, which was a SALARY!

No longer hourly, I'd have security to raise a family, with a second baby on the way.

At the same time, things were changing for Yankee - Mike K sold the whole shebang to a Private Equity firm.

The salary, I found out was the lowest legal salary that could be offered without having to pay overtime and other hourly benefits. 
The minute I became a salaried employee, my relationship with the company changed. I was told to work all shifts, ensuring training was consistent throughout.  I was told to stay as late as necessary to get certain jobs done.

Our first INVENTORY after the switch to the new WMS system was a huge debacle and I was told "you do not go home until this is done". I was on site 20 hours one day and across 3 days was in the facility 50+ hours.  I was so sleep deprived that I found myself one morning in the women's bathroom wondering what the machines on the wall were for, and why they weren't there yesterday.

I saved up vacation time, sick time and whatever else I could so that I could be with my wife when my second son was born.  I had 3 weeks accrued.  The day he was born, 5 weeks premature, moved to Baystate Neonatal Intensive Care unit, I got a call from work.  There is a problem you need to come in.

I told them I have time, I have a sick baby, a distraught wife.  They said be here or you no longer have a job.

I worked 12 hour days at Yankee and from there went daily to Springfield to spend the night with the baby, stopping at the company gym to shower.

I was tasked once with finding out why our shipping costs were wrong with a certain carrier.  I worked with another leader, a very smart woman, and we figured out the issue was double-billing in the software we were using.  We alerted the company which in turn got a rebate check from that carrier for over $750,000. 

I was thanked with a $100 YCC gift card.

I owe a tremendous debt to this company. Yankee put me on an airplane for the first time in my life - I went to visit distribution centers in Salt Lake City Utah and call centers in North Carolina. They paid me well. They taught me a ton.  People were kind most of the time.

In or around 2002, the changes that private equity had put into place were making life at Yankee pretty bad.  Pizza was still free, but only 1x per month.  The pool tables were removed from the breakroom, and the summer picnics no longer had Vacation Prizes, Lobster and Steak on the grill. Those were the superficial niceties that disappeared, but the real trouble was when the company decided to institute productivity quotas.

If you've never worked in a factory or manufacturing facility, a quota is a set amount of work the average worker should be able to complete in a given workday.  This seems reasonable enough, but anyone who works for Amazon or C&S will tell you, management slowly turns the dial...higher and higher until the average worker fails and only the strongest, hardest working survive...until they also burn out and get replaced.  Remember, workers are not people under a quota system, they are tools that can be replaced when they fail.

A forklift operator that I'd worked with for many years at Yankee approached me at my cubicle one day, I, having a luxurious office job. He told me that while they were setting the quotas, it would be helpful if the workers knew the metrics being used, so that they knew where they had to perform best and where they were being judged less harshly.  

Inside that request was a moral quandary.  

Is my responsibility to the mega corp that paid me, or to my co-worker who simply wanted to make each work day a bit more survivable?

I chose to help him.  I told him the internal metrics that would be used.

Someone overheard us, again, it was cubicles not some clandestine meeting at Wolfies, and ratted us out.

I was pulled into HR, where I first lied, then knew I was caught.  I called a high school friend who ran the "packaged applications" (IT) department of Ringling Brothers Circus and he got me a job in DC. That was how I left Yankee.

I reached out to some friends still there years later and was told in no uncertain terms that there was in fact a DO NOT HIRE list and that I was on it.

I'm kind of proud of that fact now, but at the time being barred from employment with the biggest name in the county was a challenge.

OK, to wrap this all up -

Newell just announced they are closing this Distribution Center.  Last year they closed that new Corporate Office building.

In related news,
Mike Kittrege's son Mick has recently listed his father's house in Leverett on the market for $23,000,000.

It has a bowling alley, movie theater, lazy river, classic car garage, tennis courts...

Mike worked hard to earn those things.   He was smart.  He was kind.  He was savvy. Mike deserved this, all of it.

I don't know Mick, I've met him 3 or 4 times...shared lunch with him and a friend twice...argued with him about the stupid Dunkin' in Bernardston...he might be as great as his Dad, I don't know.

But he didn't start a business in his Mom's basement. He didn't bust his ass to become a Billionaire with a 270 foot yacht.  

He was just lucky enough to be born.

I think the best way to honor Mike Kittredge's true legacy would be to open that mansion as a public park and use some of his riches to pay to keep it clean, open and free.

Mike was a rockstar, figuratively and literally (the house has a full stage).

At the very least, I mean really the very least...Open a weekend invitation to former Yankee Candle Employees to visit the house or the yacht.  Let them drive one of the cars, drink one of the $500 wines.  Why not? 

Robert Redford was an actor so handsome that nobody gave him any respect. He used his fame to donate fuck tons of money to charity and made a bunch of OK food to achieve this also.  He made a move when he was a pretty old dude, and it is awesome.  It's called ALL IS LOST. But that's just the title of this section...the purpose is really to say that all is lost for realzies.

Its hard to see when you are inside of it, but the USA didn't survive COVID and TRUMP.
There was no Grand Finale, no penultimate scene, only the denouement.

We have no national television channel or radio station that most people listen to. 

We have no method of learning what is really happening around the world, maybe we never did, but the big 3 channels and their nightly news gave us a sense that we were all on the same page together as a country...or at least we were all working from the same workbook.  

I know that old way was flawed, we didn't get to learn anything that "they" didn't want us to learn, but now there is no way to disseminate important truths.

I think Elon killed Twitter on purpose.  I think he knew that communication breakdown was a first step to destabilizing our country, and this was an easy way to remove one of the big global discussion tools, by removing safeguards, increasing prices, saying stupid shit constantly, not policing hate speech...

The truth isn't supressed in America, it is simply drowned out by other truths, by lies, and by inanity that passes for news.

Our leaders have crossed every moral red-line we had as a nation.  We cavort with killers, we support the murder of tens of thousands of innocents. We finance death around the world, and manufacture the tools of the trade.

I don't know if we were ever more than this.  I really don't.

Here's what I see is going to happen -

The weather will get worse.  People will try harder to get to safer places.  USA is amongst the safest places, so lots of people will try to get here.  We Americans need the labor, we need the bodies, we need the influx of culture and art and entertainment, but we are also so greedy.  Lots of us will say NO you can't come in, we will make them stay in the horrible places they tried to leave. 

Whole groups of folks will be angry with us for hoarding resources, pretending that Everything is Fine.  Palestine's attack on Israel should be a sign that similar attacks are headed to our shores.

We can't be fat, lazy, immoral assholes without it eventually coming back to haunt us.

Maybe you aren't rich, but you live in a rich country.  People who are poor and live in a poor country might just suffer enough to decide to try to do something about it.

We aren't heroes of the world, we never were.  It was all a lie they taught us in school.

We don't deserve the toys we have. We don't deserve the largess.  We didn't earn any of this.

OPEN BORDERS will save us.

OPEN BORDERS will save the world.

FCTS is a really good school that I genuinely believe cares about the students, staff and faculty and they are demonstrably successful at educating young people under normal conditions.

In addition to my time with the Tech School and Greenfield city council and ZBA, I served on the board and was chairperson of MAVA (the first public virtual school in MA) for some years.  There are student communities that can succeed at virtual education, I've seen it.

But online education only works under ideal circumstances and only for a motivated few. It's not the same thing as teaching in a classroom...it's akin to asking a veterinarian to help people in an emergency.  Yes, they can help, sort of...a little bit...but they aren't doctors and can't just be swapped out permanently. Same with brick-and-mortar educators - yes, during catastrophes we can ask them to use online tools as best they can, but it's not fair to expect them to be able to fully educate kids with the same efficacy as we have come to expect.

My personal reasons for resigning:

I don't think enough people understand the long-term effects of this virus on our lives, society and culture. 

People want so badly to "get back" that they don't realize that back doesn't exist anymore. 

Serving on a board today feels like deck-chair-shuffling on the Titanic. 

155,000 people in America are dead from a global pandemic that the President thinks is caused by getting tested. 

The reporting says we'll hit 300,000 dead by the end of the year.

Talking about how to mark bus seats to get kids to class without breathing on each other is not a good use of our time.

The budget concerns I mention:

Back in March the FCTS board gave the Superintendent a substantial salary increase. The meeting packet didn't mention a vote, didn't include any financial justification, any budgetary impact statement and there was close to no discussion. To be fair, this may have been discussed and even voted on in the subcommittee, but not in front of the full board.

I felt and still feel that the Superintendent is a good person who was doing a really amazing job; but that doesn't negate the board's responsibility for fiduciary oversight. The board let me down and I came home from that meeting frustrated and angry.  It's been 5 months - I don't know what the financial impact of COVID will be on our schools, but I really wonder what the board would do today if the Superintendent had asked for this same raise now.

Combine my frustration with the laxity of the board and my general pessimism from COVID and I just can't be a helpful board member right now.

A Bampire is like a vampire, except a bampire will never bite you or cut the skin.

A bampire will use its goat-like skull to head-butt you into unconsciousness and will then slurp blood from the hematoma.

It will do this using a suction-cup like mouth that when not working looks just like any other mouth.

How would a vampire see a dentist? Do their fangs retract? Fuck those sparkly fucks.

Bampires are real and cool as shit.

Nobody knows about them because they always create short-term memory loss in their victims.
The most any recall is waking up with a splitting headache on the ground, some wonder why the bruise is on the front of their head, when they clearly fell on the back.

A little advil and nobody is worse for the wear, usually.  Sometimes a youngster will get a little overzealous and break a skull bone or miss and crush a nose.

Nobody ever dies from a Bampire Attack.

Vampire lore talks about various ways people become vampires, but with Bampires it's pretty simple - its genetic.

Bampires are unnaturally sexy and smart and talented, so they don't need to live forever to continue their shit, like stupid vampires who have to live forever because they can't get laid. They just have bampire babies.

Bampire babies, By the way, look a lot like other babies, since all babies love shoving shit into their mouths, and they are just the same.

The tiny bit of blood they need for nourishment (along with food and water like other normal folk) is almost impossible to notice on the dog, or Mom's breast or Nana's fingers. There is no pain involved, its actually quite pleasant.

IF you are ever so lucky as to wake up with a sore head, perhaps after a night at the bar, it is probably just a headache, but you could also be the victim (as much as you are victimized) by a bampire.

Lucky fucker.

BAMPIRE FAQS:

• What does a bampire look like?

  • They look mostly like normal humans, you have to pay close attention to even notice the subtle differences:

    • High hairline, Adult male bampires are almost exclusively bald or display male pattern baldness 

    • Often a bumpy or bent nose, from learning how to properly feed

    • robust lips, conventionally attractive on female bampires; off-putting on males

• Do Bampires act different from other humans?

  • they like slurping bruise blood as food

  • low emotional intelligence

  • fascination with facts, but inability to grasp larger concepts or ideas

• Are Bampires human?

  • Or are they dancer?

• Does WeMailCoconuts know of any Bampires that we could meet?

  • No Comment

I got two turntables and a microphone.

Love's what I got, don't start a riot...

Got to got to got to know are you gonna go my way?

I got my hands on some psylocibin and some home grown weed and a good beer from Maine.

Went to a place lovingly called the SAC

With my eyes closed I could see screen saver kaleidoscopes and forever changing patterns

Momentarily there was a vivid cartoon character, I wish I could always imagine so brightly.

Baudelaire talked about how unappetizing intoxicants are in nature, and how it's likely a natural barrier

to overconsumption

I tend to agree.

But I also can't wait to go back to rainbow fractal world.

A frozen screen 

as if a page in a book

A narrator with FOCUS to pull - that chair

This photo frame- zoom to the picture inside, to the shirt on the girl in the pic, to the button 

All while the Narrator drives the description

The Curtain - A story from each

a remembrance

The factory, the store, the day installed

slow zoom back out and start in again on the next item

A Kaleidoscopic effect

Starts half way through a description of the veneer factory from the wood from the coffee table in the room

Last 10 seconds are the scene unfrozen

Followed by tragedy.

The end.

Last night, I was in the basement rolling a jables when I hear a plastic dragging on cement sound.

I looked to my right and there was a mouse with a portion of its body trapped inside a plastic spiked snap-trap.

It was not dead. It didn't seem all that upset either.

The mouse didn't move when it saw me looking at it.

It did not move when I took three steps to the left to grab the iron pipe laying by my toolbox.

The iron pipe - I don't know why I have it, what purpose it was meant to play...

maybe an old science project about a forge and melting aluminum.

When it saw me again, this time with the pipe, it screamed.

It did.

It screamed three times until I thunked it much harder than required.

I dented the grey puzzlemat floor piece it was on, to the right of the furnace, flame showing from below

With a shop rag and some cleaner, I cleaned up the scene.

In the horror movie that mice live in, I was the big bad.

I was Jason I was Freddy I was the guy with the needles in his face.

It didn't feel good or right, just necessary.

My dad died two weeks ago.

WeMailCoconuts is as I have alway said, an aspirational site. We weren't sure to what we were aspiring, but we weren't perspiring, so we waited. 

It is believed that the answer has been found, at least a partial answer; by way of Prophesy.

I was lucky enough to know a genuinely good man who became a guide, friend, benefactor, and sounding-board.  

One day at lunch he said to me, after I remarked on his financial success, that I myself would be a Millionaire in my 40's.

We laughed at his little joke, and then I happily walked away And hit my head on the wall of the jail where the two of us live today (TMBG)

Our lives have been dominated by salary. We decide how to fill the majority of all of our adult daylight based on where the check comes from. My path has gotten easier over the years, but it is still someone else's work that I complete, not my lifes work.

I have turned it over and again in my mind, how do I do it? How do I become a millionaire with such a diminished start?

I am as the brits say Haff Way Fru and I didn't see the light, but We think now we might -

WeMailCoconuts is an aspirational site. Someday I would like to live close to coconuts and mail them to folks less fortunate than I. 

To do that well I need that prophesy to come true.

You know where this is going by now, I would think...

SHARK TANK

I will sell a 100% Share of ownership of Cujocon Industries, WeMailCoconuts, and all other subsidiaries for $1M.

All of the ideas, all of the writing, all of the stickers - use them, print them, stick them!

For FUCKS SAKE this is the way.

I have never sold anything much beyond a few t-shirts and sunblock across from the Mini Ha Ha but

I could sell this.

Because it is Me, and I can sell me.  I love me.

Thank You Skip and Thank You Barbara Corcoran, Bald Angry guy, and Damon Dash.

I was born late in the 70's and raised on TV throughout the 80's and mid 90's.

We adored wealth.

I personally dreamed of being rich one day.

I felt smart and driven and motivated and that would be enough to make me rich in America.

The problem is now, 2023 and looking at mega-wealthy people - I don't want to be them.

I don't want to be like them.

I don't like them.

I don't even like the people who promise to GIVE IT ALL AWAY...do it today.

Why, because you have collected this wealth, do you think you know best how to use it?

Collecting and using are two different things entirely.

I suppose the only way to get mega-rich is to be a douche, and it helps to be born into a douche family.

That would explain Elon, Zuck, Gates, Trump and the others.

As a child, watching Richie Rich and Lifestyles and their ilk - I didn't think that each jet ski could have been a school bus.

But it can...maybe not 1:1 schoolbus to jetski, I don't know the exchange rate.

Each Mega-Yacht could be a ferry connecting Culebra to Fajardo and it could be run for 1,000 years for free.

It isn't about if the economy is a zero-sum game or not...it is simply those with the resources have chosen personal enjoyment over communal good.

If I had a boatload of money, I think what would make me happiest would be to give it away in many small but meaningful amounts.

One Christmas I asked for Dollar Coins so that I could hand them out easier to people on the street asking.  It wasn't a large amount - maybe $20, but I recall giving each away and how much more joy I got from it than a bottle of wine.  A dollar didn't change anybody's life, or even day except my own, but that's the whole point.

If I had a lot of money I would give it away because that I think would be the most fun use of the money.

That, and a really high thing with water underneath that I could jump off of safely.

TUNE OUT TO TUNE IN

While I haven't finished the book yet, The Book of Disquiet led me to come to believe a unique idea...that all sentient beings are connected to one COSMIC RADIO STATION that isn't radio at all. In fact, it's so different from anything we know that Humans can't as a rule connect to it.  Instead we have shitty language.  What if Language was a bad version of this cosmic voice that we had to come up with because we couldn't connect?  What if we used to connect but lost the connection because of language?  

If there were a universal way to communicate (animal and language aside) would we as humans have any way to tap into it?

Psychedelics?

Meditation?

One lazy summer day the trailer park gang, of which I was one, decided to – no, were compelled to by unseen faces, unheard voices, to happen to check if the back of that tractor trailer was maybe unlocked. By chance it was unlocked and the decision was made to wait for night and hope the trailer was still there, on the sandy pull off just off Corinth Rd onto Van Dusen. There was a house across the street, but we knew it was a girl and her family and they wouldn’t get involved. They weren’t the kind of people to get involved…in fact, nobody in the neighborhood got involved, unless there was a way to gain. That night a select few of our best men, Levi and Paul, got the nerve and made the attempt. The back of the trailer was still unlocked.  The latch is a heavy rusty steel contraption designed to confuse morons for a precious few minutes, but the guys lived around trucks long enough that to two 12 year old boys, it was less of a challenge than a dog giving you his paw for a treat. The rust presented more of an auditory challenge squeeking into the darkness. I think it was the sound of the door more than anything else that shook them enough to grab the first two boxes they could reach and to run for hell.  The boxes were not small, but they were too light…something maybe was wrong.  Nothing of value could weigh this little inside this volume of corrugated. From the trailer to the pole-lines, to Pinello Rd and back through my own back yard onto Ogden Rd and from there one of any number of trails and tracks took them to their final resting home in the woods just past Division Rd. Paul lived directly across the street.  Once safe in the woods a mile from the TT, the guys finally tore into the cardboard and found Julia Roberts gigantic fucking mouth smiling at them over and over again from the 20 copies of Pretty Woman contained in Box 1. Box 2 was Macaulay Culkin slapping his cute little cheeks on the bubble plastic box after box after box of Home Alone.  Every kid in that neighborhood owned at least two copies of each of those movies, the rest were buried.  They might, probably not but maybe, still be there. Julia and Macaulay stuck side by side like unhappy married couples buried in Rhode Island style, Side by Each. Nobody was ever caught. The other VHS tapes started arriving at the West Mountain Pizza Deli for rent the next week.  I don’t recall ever seeing Pretty Woman or Home Alone available in the area rentals.

So far this is just a Book Title, but maybe the best one ever written.

Now this is a book, in a similar vein to Charlotte's Web - where the main character is a Spider...in this case a Recluse spider.
This spider went to community college at night and studied psychology where she learned all about Carl Jung.

"The most terrifying thing is to accept oneself completely."

Perhaps this spider has arachnophobia and the Carl Jung quote in this case is meant literally.

Could it be a Children's book introducing kids to spiders, psychology, and throw in some really great word-play?

The Jungian Recluse = The Young and the Restless (Title)

Deysavower Lies= Days of Our Lives (Main Character)

Bolton, The Beautiful = Bold and the Beautiful (Love Interest)

Jenny Rellhoss Pittal = General Hospital (Big Bad)

Lightlife

"18 and life you got it...18 and life you know..."

Got a job working in a vegetarian factory

Couple bucks better than minimum

They were local then, Corporate giant eventually bought them up

At the Temp Agency they said dress nice on your first day – make a good impression

I wore dress pants and a button up collared shirt

I walked into a room where the first woman I saw had a kitchen sponge rubberbanded to her forehead

She had a hairnet and ragged street clothes

She was spraying iodine and water out of a hose over a room-sized conveyor belt oven pumping out tempeh cakes

They had a good laugh at my expense

At first we lived too far to walk or bike to work - very pregnant 19 Emily would drop me off for 6am and be back to pick me up whenever overtime got out. We were at her parent’s house –20 minute drive each way.

Eventually we saved enough and moved into an apartment 4 miles away and I bought a bicycle

In my three years there I made two friends that I will love until I die

I haven’t seen or heard from one in decades and the other is lost to time

We also made tofu pups and fakin’ bacon and things they called MAP – Meat Analog Products

We would skateboard in the parking lot on lunch breaks

Jeremy showed me where two buildings were combined and that there was a narrow 18” alley you could sneak between and a small hideout to escape work

Pete rode a giant grey food bin down a 2-story belt shirtless while pretending to scrub a dub on his last day

The owners were purported to be hippies who smoked weed in the office, but I never did see the office, owners, or weed.

I took every hour of overtime offered

I took every shift differential proposed

I also used the scrap-bin to feed us – gallon buckets of Institutional Vegetarian Chili perpetually in my freezer

Seitan pouches never sealed correctly because of the marinade – lots of rice and seitan dinners

Climbed the racks in the freezer to send down cases – so much easier and more dangerous and fun than having someone use the forklift and have to move pallets and pallets of the wrong stuff

Easier to just monkey up and one-handed fling down 5 or 10 cases

There was a very kind small woman who was a Food Scientist on staff – didn’t believe it was a real job

My boss was a woman in her 50’s who had an adult son who also worked there

He is deaf

She told me the story one day of taking him as a toddler, maybe 2, to a Parade

All of the noise made the other kids cover their ears or cry but he just smiled on

She cried in his place

He had hearing aids and talked oddly, but very understandably and was strong and sweet

I did not wonder why she stayed or he for they had each other

I did wonder why I was staying

One day an intercom call – for me

I picked up to a dead line

Reception tried again

A dead line

Instead of a voice, I get a message

Your wife is in the hospital

There is no more message

I walk out the front door to drive to the hospital (3 miles)

I remember that I don’t own a car

I don’t think to go back inside and ask for a ride

Instead I started to run

I am bad with directions

I am chubby and do not run

At about mile 5 I make it to the front of the hospital

They say “No record” could she be in ER, they have separate admissions

I have to leave the building to run to the other side of the same building and enter there

“No record”

Any reason she might be on the 3rd floor – maternity?
Sure, I guess, but she’s still 5 weeks early – an elevator door opens on a hall and across is her ready to push with all her might

I learned that to love a job and to survive aren’t the same thing after that

I looked and found another labor that paid $12.63/hour – a wage we might survive on so I left

For me, the Adventure is the reward - so even if we don't get to keep the Millions, we'll get to keep the story.

If you can get access to ER Snowe's papers at BU, we should be specifically looking for information on these subjects:

• Book Title : Fantastic Folklore and Fact - New England Tales of Land and Sea

• Copyright : 1968

• Publisher : Dodd, Mead & Company New York

• Story : Is It Lost Forever?

• Years of Interest (in notes) : 1793, 1851, 1852,1866,1876, 1957, 1960, November 1967

• Names of Interest (in notes) : Henry Haggman, Joseph R. Shields, Mrs. Henry Whitcomb

• Places of Interest (in notes) : Isle au Haut, Penobscot Bay, Rockland Maine, Newport, Boston, West Street Boston, Worcester, Springfield, Lee, Spindle Hill, Mattaquatic Hill, Vaughn Hill, Highway 117, Route 85, Bolton MA

He has in the published books some drawings that are said to be from Henry Haggman's personal notes - if he had all of these notes, we could continue the search that way.

I'm also trying to find an excuse to drive that way - maybe a visit to Auntie Carrie and team (once everyone is healthy).

On Wed, Oct 12, 2022 at 8:35 PM Caleb Joseph wrote:

I’ve been looking into the legality of buried treasure and poking into the historical resources I’ve got at my disposal and while treasure law is horribly underdeveloped, I have in fact found that the BU archives do have a collection donated by one Edward Rowe Snow dated 1902-1982. It’s archive Accession #1352 for the record. I’ll be looking into it some more and reaching out to the archive to find out what I’d need to do to be allowed access to the materials of the collection, or if it’s at all possible to get someone to look through the contents and let me know whether it’s all research notes or just personal papers.

Regarding treasure law, so far as I’ve been able to figure out Massachusetts has no treasure statute and follows the traditional rule of find in that, if you find it, it’s yours. There is a federal statute stating that treasure or abandoned property on federal property is federal property, but as the highway in question is state-owned it’s not federal land so that’s a non-issue. This doesn’t mean you can just go digging under a highway mind you, if you found anything before getting caught you’d be seen as a wrongful actor and the courts would probably bend over backwards to take the gold from you. Technically a wrongful actor does still have a lawful claim to property obtained wrongfully (stealing from a thief is still stealing for example), but it’s not worth the fight considering the subject at hand.

From: Chris Joseph
Sent: Sunday, October 2, 2022 2:50 PM
Subject: Re: Treasure Hunt

There's an antique store called lighthouse antiques in Worcester that two years ago claimed to have original copies manuscripts of the book fantastic folklore and fact they were donated by the daughter as a fundraiser for her charity organization.

I've reached out to them in hopes that they might have something useful or can put us in touch with the daughter.

On Sun, Oct 2, 2022 at 10:58 AM Chris Joseph wrote:

As suspected neither the email or the phone number for the existing living relative dolly bicknell snow are in working order.

Caleb let me know how the treasure laws go.

because the state took the property over in 1963, I can't find any property cards on it from before that time, so I can't find the boundaries online. the Bolton historical society probably has maps there with clear markings and maybe even a way to guess where the barn would have been located. 

I've looked a little into metal detectors and what it would take to find this cash and it looks like the piece of equipment we need is like $30,000 new maybe we can rent it for the day or maybe I'm just getting ahead of myself.

A relatively free next step would be to make a trip out there and just look at the property to see if there's any hope of seeing anything there. We can easily park at the cemetery.

I don't know if the highway department has a library or history department that would keep track of property that they had to move to build 495.

I did read that for the well to have been there when the guy put the money in it in the 1850s it would've been a hand dug well so that limits its size to approximately 30 feet it also makes it a bigger footprint to look for.

If the world was filled in as part of the project it would've been filled in with Bentonite cement and if that's the case I think I'll hope it's lost, As we'd have to dig up thousands of pounds of rock and then break it apart.

On Fri, Sep 30, 2022 at 3:40 PM Caleb Joseph wrote:

So I didn’t check my email in a few days and all of a sudden you’re elbow deep into one hell of a treasure hunt. I’m a bit busy but I’ll see what I can do.

Firstly, I’m going to double check Massachusetts treasure laws (yes treasure is a legal classification), normally it’d be an honest finder gets it but things get screwy once you need to get a shovel involved.
Secondly, I’ll see if I still have access to the BU archive lists. If so, and the fella who wrote that book was a BU alumn, there’s a chance he donated his old notes and reference materials to the archive.
Thirdly, unless you do so first I’ll check to see if Bolton has its own library or some kinda historical society. If such exists they could be hanging onto old maps of the area we could reference.

As you’re Mr. Zoning Board I’ll ask outright, do you know of any town or state repository that would keep track of property which needed to be demolished in order to construct the on ramp in question? If the well wound up underneath they would’ve needed to fill it in or it’d be one hell of a integrity risk.

Also do you know the name of the property in question? Such could be used to check property records and possibly find a blueprint or some such.

Love ya pops


On Sep 30, 2022, at 2:03 PM, Chris Joseph wrote:

Ok, so to recap -
There might be $20M in gold coins in a well near or underneath the 117 onramp to I495N in the town of Bolton MA.
The story of how it got there comes from a book by Edward Rowe Snow, written in 1968.
While the gold itself may be a fabrication, I've been able to verify many of the facts in the story.

The nearest location we can pinpoint so far is the property where the house was removed - and we don't have the boundaries for that yet.
Here is a too-big range to be looking for gold: 245,000 sq ft.

If we can find the old property card, then we can narrow it down.  I'll look there next.
I'm also looking into the life history of the author of the book - Snow https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Rowe_Snow.  

CALEB - He went to BU!

He has a living daughter in  Marshfield, MA 02050
Her email address.
Her phone number looks to be...
I don't want to call and bother a 71 year old lady though.

I sent her an email but that address looks shit.
-C

On Thu, Sep 29, 2022 at 2:53 PM Chris Joseph wrote:
From Milford to Bolton, I495 passes just west of Route 85 <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massachusetts_Route_85>.

$50k in 1852 today would be worth between $10M and $20M or more.

I think I've found the name of the house where the well was located:
https://www.townofbolton.com/discover-bolton/pages/late-modern-period-1945-present
The biggest change in transportation routes, however, came in 1964, with the building of Interstate Route 495 north-south through the town just east of the center. Its construction involved the destruction of a few historic houses and the moving of others (cf. the early-eighteenth-century Kimmens/Whitcomb House, now at 48 Hudson Road (#153).
---This is referenced in the book - The editor of the History of Bolton says the farm house was originally built in 1793 and was moved to the spot where the guy who hid the treasure found it.

I can't seem to find anything about this house or its original location, but after a search on the name I found that there is an author with the same name who wrote a book on the history of bolton MA, and it is available online entirely here:
https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=uc1.$b542209&view=1up&seq=7

Here is a reference to the Kimmens House:

Here is the image of the current house at 48 Hudson Rd - Does it match the description?

It appears to be a Bed and Breakfast now - https://westpondinn.business.site/#summary<https://westpondinn.business.site/#summary>

The author says "Where the house stood was now the junction of a highway"
so maybe our map can be limited to:


I called the bed and breakfast and asked them if the house that was moved for the highway was their house...she said yes.
I asked if she knew the exact location it was moved from and she said "at the ON RAMP on 117 heading N for I495".
Here is our hunting grounds:
https://www.google.com/maps/dir//Bolton,+Massachusetts/@42.430738,-71.590641,176m/data=!3m1!1e3!4m9!4m8!1m0!1m5!1m1!1s0x89e3f29b1c548bf7:0xb16b4e9c336e8834!2m2!1d-71.6078449!2d42.4334258!3e0

How do you find buried gold without digging?
Ground penetrating radar?

We are about to become millionaires.

On Thu, Sep 29, 2022 at 1:27 PM Chris Joseph wrote:
I read "Fantastic Folklore and Fact" book on the plane by Edward Rowe Snow.  It was written in 1963.
The story of interest is called "Is it Lost Forever?" about $50,000 in 1852 gold pieces still buried in a well in BOLTON MA.

I started to google and found this interesting thread -
https://www.treasurenet.com/threads/bolton-ma-farm-cache.15508/

I'll start to pull together the facts from the book.

What do we do next?

We need a MAP from 1960, when the farmhouse where this is buried was torn down for 495 to get built.

Let's hunt some treasures!!!

I was talking to my friend Reggie yesterday. I was talking about how we always hear about cities becoming gentrified and how bad a thing it is.

I wonder where the offending gentrifiers came from, did they leave anything nice behind for the prolz who were forced out?

Are there farms upstate consisting solely of people who were priced out of Brooklyn?

Does Argyle NY have city dwellers now tending cattle, milking, haying?

Maybe gentrification isn't so much a bad thing as it is a sort of socio-natural force of nature - a house swap on city scale.

Hay anyone ever done a study on "Where are they now?" for the displaced?

Maybe when gentrification occurs, the previously poor move and are no longer poor?  

That would explain why you never hear their stories.

________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Social Mathematics: *Or The LAW OF PROPINQUITY

In my life I've probably met 100,000 people. One of those is my best friend.

If I met 1,000,000 people, would I have a different best friend?  Would I have 10 best friends?

What if I only met 10,000 people and my best friend wasn't one of them?

I think we must be programmed to believe that we just happen to be surrounded by all the people worth knowing and that everyone else sucks.

Maybe that is why it's no big deal to hear about tsunamis and earthquakes and war and famine.

Can you imagine how your reaction to war would be different if your Uncle Kevin were on the front line?

I can't imagine a better spouse and team-mate than my wife, but I only dated about 20-25 girls between the ages of 12 and 18.

That is to say...while I was between those ages, proportionate with the girls ages respectively.

What if I dated 100? Are there 3 other equally amazing people out there? Hard to believe.

When did I stop meeting new friends?

I must have made new friends at some point...or maybe they are like rust or limescale and friends build up over time.

Maybe we stop making friends when we realize we don't like most of the friends we already have.

Why do I want more of these?  I have plenty.

Then things happen, life changes and friends move or die, or you move or die.

Then you have less friends and maybe you think

 "I need new friends, but how do you make friends when you don't even know how you ended up with the ones you already have?"

I wonder who has the most friends?

If the accretion theory made any sense, then old people would have the most friends, but old people usually suck and are scary and don't have lots of friends.

You know who has lots of friends?  Little kids, like the littler the better.  

They'll be friends with anybody, with everybody.

They like kids that look the same, kids that look weird, they like older kids and adults.

Shit, little kids even like old people.

I guess it's probably true that the happiest people on the planet are little kids.

As they get older something happens and they stop being friends.

Sure, you can blame parents or society, but its more than that.

Kids have distinct personalities, and they eventually clash, and they stop being kids and start becoming regular shitty humans, like us.

Do people who travel make more friends because they are exposed to more people?

I don't think that's true because most of the people I know who travel a ton are douches.

Something about experiencing other cultures makes them somehow wicked fucking smug and annoying.

I'm going to Ireland in October.

Propinquity - Wikipedia 

_________________________________________________________________________________________________

You know we had a saying back in the park...

"You can take the kid out of the trailer, but you can't take the lead exposure out of them except with expensive chelation therapy"

Sounds like science found out this week that space wiggles like jello.

They say its from big things smacking into other big things.

The ENERGY splashes away from two black holes and ripples and spreads.

The universe is big.

Lots of things here.

Lots to bang against and into.

In the ocean there is this idea that waves can slap one another in such a way that the wave just gets bigger.

These can then hit other huge rogue waves and multiply the affect again.

The science is new to this week but I think we should be watching out for rogue gravitational waves.

Burbling across the vast nothingness, the terrible secret of space.

______________________________________

We're all in the same jello

If big things cause big jiggles

then all things jiggle at least a little

Is this what all the hippy talk about vibrations was about?

Is this Vibrate Higher from Outkast?

Is this the eastern connection to all things?

Is it possible that mushrooms or lsd help you to find that vibration that you can connect to?

When you meet someone and fall in love - do your vibrations sync, or syncopate or just sound nice together?
Can some people hear these vibrations and call it an Aura?

Is it not a Door to Perception and rather Headphones?

Time to put the ear goggles on, No?

The Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, in Transcendental Meditation, says that the expansion of happiness is the purpose of creation.

I don't think I can say if that's true or not but it sure sounds nice and feels warm to think about.  If I turn my own thoughts, cares, and concerns into questions of how each is helping me to expand happiness in and into the world, the solutions or paths forward always feel more clear.

The statement that expanding happiness should be my purpose feels true, partly because it aligns me with the purpose of ALL CREATION, but also because it gives me a purpose beyond survival and reproduction (both of which things I've aced already).

 Finding a route forward with a life devotion to happiness expansion might be fraught with misdirection and dead ends.  Knowing that a word, deed or action intended to expand happiness can be misunderstood, mistaken or misaligned. It can inadvertently hurt, have unintended consequences. 

Consequentially, it will not be a simple path and immediate expansion of happiness may be prolonged or delayed or devoid of occurrence.  I feel strongly that with an intent and goal and guide of adding more joy, it just can't have a worse out come than having no purpose or one centered upon myself or wealth building or security.

I think all of that is fucked.

Even if creation has No Purpose, or some purpose other than the expansion of happiness; I think for now I'll try to let it direct my steps at least when I'm not on auto.

Death can take a while. Some say death rides on a pale horse, but if so - it must be a very slow horse. When a horse dies, does it fall over in a field?

When my dog dies, finally, it will be here at home. I know this because he doesn’t go anywhere else anymore, maybe a short walk around the block.

I love on him and I thank him openly and verbally for sharing his life with us. We have been very lucky to have had so much time with him.

But he stinks now. He struggles up the steps. He doesn’t always make it outside before returning his breakfast. He often skips breakfast.

Some folks, folks I don’t care much about, will say that we should give him all the modern medicine a veterinarian can provide - the pills, the creams, the chemo.

Others say its long past time to have called him Old Yeller.

All I know is that it sure feels like I’m waiting for a friend to die…

I nicked the underside of my nose shaving this morning

It was painful. It was the only thing in the world for a fraction of a second

The gymnasium in my high school had a banner that read

PAIN IS TEMPORARY

PRIDE IS FOREVER

as if these things were both (1) true and (2) mutually exclusive

as if a prideful person never feels pain

or a pained person has no room for pride

Seems to me that the people most hurt are those whose pride has been hurt

perhaps, just perhaps the banner should read

PAIN IS PRIDE

PRIDE IS PAIN

take pride in your pain

take pains to be prideful

I’m trapped

I’m in love and I’m trapped in a town

with the person I love and a town I don’t care about

I want to be in love with a town and trapped with a person I don’t care about

I want to not be trapped at all

I want I want I want I want I
Fucking desire

I want to be free from this

I don’t want to be free from you

I don’t want to be without you

but I can’t be here anymore

the tv buzz is making me crazy

the anthem has already played

the programming won’t start again for me

I want you and I want away

I want away with you, but not away with you

We set a plan

we put it in motion

we righted and righted the ship

as it listed

we hit our target, but we weren’t clear enough

how could we be

how could we aim for sand when we didn’t know there’d be rocks

How could we have known the potential

I set my sights as high as I could see

but a trailer park isn’t large and seeing beyond it is hard

Fuck, We hit our goals, but we set too low

What do I do with the next 30 years?

I sure as shit can’t keep doing this.

In 40+ years on earth you hear things

that are said over and over and over

and the only time you hear people say this stuff

is when they say other people are saying it.

You say tomato…

We all say tomato. We just do.

There’s no such thing as a free lunch.

Horseshit.

C’mon over. I’ll make you a sando for nothin’.

Live below your means.

Must have been written by someone with means.

or someone mean.

In 40+ years on this planet

I’ve had means sufficient to match my needs

about half the time.

The other half is debt to someone

The free half is not free, since the owing half

will continue to owe until they are paid.

Now that I am an adult, I get to dig myself out.

Every shovel into the hole feels less heavy though

somehow the same weight feels less

when replacing the pit

instead of building it.

I’ve owed others

which is another way of saying

I’ve been owned by others

And I still am

Until I can clear the tab

of a life frugally lived

It should only take me

until I die.

Do you know Lewis?

Of Lewis and Kronos?

Only now its just Lewis - or Lewis and whatever the new dog’s name is. You’d know if you knew him. He’s a sort of strange guy. The kind of guys I like for friends. He rides a big mountain bike around in a bright neon vest with a neon helmet and with a big beautiful husky on a leash running not jogging alongside. Well, that was Kronos and I suppose he’s died because now Lewis is back around but now he has an orangey-lab looking dog - maybe a golden.

I don’t know, anyway I asked if you knew him because hes a neat guy - the most rememberable feature is his inquisitiveness. He will ask you a question and you can just tell that he absolutely needs to hear and understand your answer. And its not like hes asking a deep question always, or maybe, ever. I’d stopped to let Otto and Kronos meet a few times and we had exchanged the usuals - “This is Otto - he’s friendly” “oh, Hey Kronos” “Ok, C’mon Otto” “ hey Kronos, right?” “I’m Chris by the way” “Right on Lewis, nice to meet you”.

I tend to do this ritual about 3 times on repeat before I’ll remember a human’s name. I usually have the dog’s name the first time around. With Lewis, after a while, on a Monday he’d be asking me about pellet stoves and how my wife Emily was doing and when are we going to the dog park again and how Kronos was having a hard time making friends there because he was being discriminated against. In this he meant explicitly that Kronos was being discriminated against because of his natural huskiness and temperment, and not at all himself being discriminated against, despite having a few clear disabilities and for being dark in a white heavy community - to Thursday when I say “Hey Lewis, Hey Kronos” to his reply “I don’t remember you. What is your name?” Lewis is a young man, he is not elderly. But always, every time, every question - his interest in your answer was paramount.

He would stare at you while you answered. About a year and a half ago, Lewis and I had rebuilt a small conversational relationship when we crossed paths with our dogs. This particular day he was telling me that Kronos was gettting worse and the medications were making him lethargic and he wouldn’t run next to the bike anymore ad I didn’t know what to say. I couldn’t tell if he needed or was even looking for money for surgery for Kronos, I do recall him tellilng me an expensive surgery was an option. He was saying how expensive “it” all was getting and how he didn’t know what to do. Then he was gone.

I had come to know where in town he lived, because it was in my neighborhood - end of my street really…the house slowly degraded, it became clear that Lewis had been evicted - saw the moving trucks, clean and flip crew, new siding…

Yesterday I was driving past Lewis’ old house and there, like a ghost in time, was Lewis - out front decked in neon stopped in front with this new Not Kronos.

I’m of two minds. Part of me was overjoyed to see the resiliency of the human spirit. A broken man loses his friend and companion. Loses his home. Loses memories on or off medications and yet despite it all here he is!
Like Springtime, but with new flowers! A new puppy!

But then, at what cost? How could it be worth the pain? He’s Sisyphus building memories and relationships and homes and they are sandcastles one and all at low tide.

Why do I care at all, I ask myself. I meet lots of people…but that’s exactly why. Lewis is a neat guy to know. He makes me think about myself.

“Rake-ya-vik” Try to say it I say...

Only having learned it myself a moment ago.

“Try to say Rake-ya-vik” I say to her; she, that is a sleep short of three.

She, that led us here to this open sore of a country, this shredded space, where the air wants so badly to get away that it rends flesh on the way out, freezer burn skin.

It can’t have been so very ago we swam with rainbows. We lazed away twelve score sunny runs away from this deep sargasso sea. Where the english word for sun was insufficient and we give in and call it sol for we were wrong to call it what we did.

It could be called sun here. A weak friend,a soiled pet...it barely stays up there round here.

Slinks low, as though the party was days ago and there is no more need for these well wishes.

But we are here now. In this land of greasy grey fish (demasiado gris). Here in this brambled mylar scrap of soirees recalled only with maximal help - a breeze of ice pushed down from the roof of the universe.

We’d conceded she would strike the path and set the route when she spake us thusly -

“I am of you, and I am my own, and I am all. You do not, you can not, you will not understand.”

In this order explicit, in this way, we accepted our unanticipated journey. She said those words in that order with ice-from-the-coldest-day clarity to us both upon her first birthday, upon opening her full-sized eyes directly into our own. She filled us, us that did not know we were empty, us that were complete prior but were now a superset of multitudes, she filled us with this quest that would replace all that was else. Two years ago tomorrow.

None of the rest of that year matters. Forget it happened. All was “normal”. She did not speak again in this way. Aside from loving coos and little pieces of fragments as her physical engines could absorb and retort, she conveyed nothing more.

One year ago tomorrow...again the same words, upon first opening of roundness light...

“I am of you, and I am my own, and I am all. You do not, you can not, you will not understand.”

Now adding...

“On this day one year from today bring me to the Iceland. There I will share with you the purpose.” One year ago tomorrow. Another year of averages. And now.

Here we are. On an escarpment on a shore I do not know. The three of us a day away a world away a sea away away away...

“I do not know what tomorrow will bring, but I never did before, either.” I say with breath that returns for redistribution within my own lungs, “and I guess it doesn’t much matter”.

Gene Wilder was fucking wild

He screamed in the face of a little boy

He wasn’t mad at Charlie, just disappointed to the point of despair

It is Waiting for Superman

The factory was too heavy for him to lift

It was a dream he had that succeeded

He got his wish

We never talk about what happens when you get everything you want…

You live happily ever after.

That is what Willy tells Charlie as he foists the weight of an entire biodome/manufacturing facility upon him.

When did it all become too much for Willy?

When did he say…I can’t do it anymore.

I need someone else to lift the yoke.

It isn’t clear, but what is clear

He couldn’t take it, just couldn’t take it another minute.

What if Charlie didn’t redeem himself with a good deed?

What if Charlie let us all down?

Mr Wonka turned purple. A vein across the upmost corner of an eye.

Because he wasted a contest? Because he lost a day?

He fucking snapped, not because kids suck. He knew that.

He lost his shit because of the thought he’d have to go to work again tomorrow.

I have that same vein, the turbid flow thumping when I think I have to go to work again and again forever.

Willy needed Charlie more than Charlie needed Willy. Willy knew that.

The anguish of “I said Good Day” was the true story of what happens when we really get everything we’ve ever wanted. 

easily the best part of a good cooking show and when I say a good cooking show I mean most likely a Brittish cooking show because what makes the show so good is that the people are so nice and kind and helpful to one-another, like oh, yeah here is all my butter, I was going to use it in my butter sauce, but forget it fam, you can have it - the best part is when the announcer tells them that they have half the allotted time remaining They always say the same thing in the same way

YOU’RE HAFF WAY FRU

When I struggle with a work week when I struggle with middle age when I struggle through any slog I think of the kind brittish bakers hearing “bakers, you’re haff way fru” and it gives me the gumption to go on with my chorin’.

Whatever it is that you are stuck on…don’t worry because if you aren’t now you will be soon haff way fru

I was born in America. I grew up a proud American. As I came to understand that we are a nation with a violent and sometimes cruel history, I learned to love America, warts and all...

But then...

Yesterday...

I had to drive to a pharmacy in a storm and wait in a line in hopes of getting some leftover vaccine that might keep us alive a bit longer. I'm remembering the stories of people waiting in line to buy bread. I used to wonder...how could they let this happen?

I was third in line.  The woman first in line had arrived 15 minutes earlier than me.  She got the vaccine yesterday, I did not.  15 minutes. I thought to myself...what if I was a millionaire? I could walk up to this woman and offer her $10,000 cash for her spot and she would have taken it.  Extrapolate just a tiny bit and you see...how was it that I could be in line instead of at work? How was it that I even knew to go check for leftovers, except that I have access to high-speed internet and a good running truck? 

In the greatest country on earth, how is it that to get medical care I have to use the skills I learned to buy concert tickets online through TicketMaster? 

This is NOT a COVID19 problem.

This is an America problem.

I was born here and raised here and I know that there is evil and I know that there is good but this American In-Between is getting to be too much.

Sinew

Stop an animal breath

Roughly segment it

Count the bounty

Sort first Sku

Assign value

The sinew

Cordage

A binder

Built for this

Singular purpose

Adhesion vs lesion

Collectively together

Sans embodiment yet

Completes its mortal role

Fulfillment a beneficent goal

A lace to keep my soul whole

(And my soles without holes)

Half a century ago, a pop star said that in the future everyone will be famous for 15 minutes…

and I think he got it half right.

I believe that the future of famous is different that our current social understanding of the term. Fame to me is shorthand for having a lot of people know you in either a positive or neutral light. If they didn’t like you, you’d be infamous.

Everything is NICHE now.

Here is my take:

In the future, everyone will be famous to 15 people.

Duration isn’t the limit, social networks are.

Umber Ella’s Brown Umbrella

it sure was the cutest fella

kept her dry kept her clean

all the dross a little stream

down the seams a dozen even

secured inside this tiny heaven

Umber Ella cozy warm

Protected from the smallest storm

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

Elephant Gerald

had the voice of a king

but his hearing wasn’t quite keen

thought his name was

Ella Fitzgerald

who had the voice of a queen

but her time was expired

therefore she retired

be nice to think to a place

where queens and elepants can sing

if not in harmony, then at least harmoniously

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

One Does Not Simply Pass the Third Grade

My friend Paul failed kindergarten

Kindergarten is german and means that kids are plants

In spanish I can say son, are.

But not sonar

son is hijo

but sounds like E-HO

maybe we misheard and santa isn’t laughing

he’s just calling to his latino niños

Hijo Hijo Hijo

I raked out the tree belt and the flower beds

New growth hidden underneath

I feel the need to be raked out

To find new growth waiting underneath

The rake is unforgiving

Too firm a draw

Spring over too soon for a little purple nothing

Might have been something

Given time and a softer rake

Something to consider on a spring afternoon in New England

When is day

when is night

wan is looking for a fight

Juan just wants to sleep at night

won is losing conflagrations

One is filtering profligation

Hun can you get me determination

Huns overrun - emancipation

window, overton

shift

shift

shrift, so short

the cheapest port

a dream to land

to port import support report

freedom for the working class

Folks,

Who are we fooling? America has collapsed and we pretend anything otherwise. We’ve been rotten inside for a long time…maybe forever, but the combination of outright corruption of an entire political party and this virus have removed my blinders. I woke up a little because of BLM. I woke a little with Occupy WallStreet, and again with Me Too. Bid I didn’t see how far we’ve fallen until I read a newspaper from 1916 and it is so obvious how close to reality the movie Idiocracy really is. We are smart in some specializations maybe but overall we are far less educated than our forefathers.

A family comedy

The idea is Emily is a child prodigy pianist, but nobody ever sees her play the piano.

Penultimate scene: There is a high stakes tryout of a prestigious Piano college. All of the applicants have to play the same piece of music they’ve all just received. The music piece they have to play is complicated and tons of kids fail miserably. Emily may or may not be able to play this piece perfectly…we don’t know because we’ve never seen her play!

At the last moment, when they call her name to the stage…Emily sits at the piano…takes a breath…turns to the judges and says “Should I play the error?” They act all dumb, like…what do you mean? and Emily is like “I know this piece - it is from some weird obscure pianist from history, and you’ve transcribed it incorrectly and that’s why all these kids have been failing. I’m asking…do you want me to play the error?”

Everybody starts cheering and clapping because she’s figured out the puzzle, they call her the big winner and the show ends.

We never learn if she can actually play the piano.

This is nice

If this isn’t nice, well then

I don’t know what it is

This is so nice I will take a picture

A picture of this to remind me

that this was nice.

Because, in the future I think

I might forget that this is nice

or that I might really

really need something nice

because of some future bad.

Can we have the nice without the bad?

Is that the definition of beauty?

Because this day is beautiful.

I was at work on 9/11 in MA... We watched it on CNN online. An alpha-male co-worker cried and went home. Today That same guy Is upset he can't eat his wings at the bar and thinks the other guy won. 

Looks like technology has saved us yet again…We don’t have to do anything differently, we don’t have to adjust our lives, we don’t have to think about our actions and our impact.

Yay, I guess.

I’m over the moon happy that a vaccine might result in fewer people dying of COVID19...

But I’m genuinely concerned that we didn’t take this opportunity to learn and change and progress as a society. We’ve learned to fear eachother. We’ve learned to hate each other. We’ve learned that we don’t know much about each other.

We didn’t learn that we mistreat our most critical members of society.
We didn’t learn

We didn’t learn

An arcade cabinet is not the same it was 30 years ago

Once dirty and dark and like New York City before broken windows policies

I was wandering through, and out the back of an old one last night.

emergency exit door opened onto a brick pathway.  The bricks were not umber, but were the color of a grapefruit in New England in April. Yellowy and jaundiced – little babies with low bilirubin counts.

walking this path toward a village of sorts.  They were fungal blossoms burst forth from rain and clean dirt, but sure enough some bodies lived inside and I was welcome there.

This buzzing.

Stop this buzzing.

Rolling, I glaciate my way to the silver box with the glowing hands and single rouge plunger.

When I drink at night to excess.  When I drink the way writers drink. When I drink the way Mom secretly drank - in the bathroom and hid the bottles under the sink for clean up day. When I drink this way I can’t figure out that red button. Is up On or is down On? Is it like a light switch where if it were up when I turned it on, then down is the new On and I might need to click it twice to activate it.  It is all too much like math class for me.

I’ll go shower. It is not cold feet touching wood floors winter or wake in a sweat ruin the lighter sheets with pools of stain summer. As such the water cleanses but doesn’t try hard to soothe. Coffee will be made. The ritual will be followed. Clothes that have small ink stains. Clothes that have small holes. Socks, the right one usually, the right one usually has a dime of material missing just a few centimeters behind the middle toe toward the heel.

I might spend the day thinking about that hole.
I might spend the day thinking about the mushroom people.

I might spend the day and the night and the next day and the next night – I might spend them all.  Might just as well spend them. I don’t have a retirement account of time that I can bank.

But time also isn’t linear and like my dreams, I can be pulled from revelry or confusion or distress by a buzzing call from elsewhere. Erewhon may haps.

On the widest roads, at speeds unimaginable, bodies fling through space are all thinking of their coffee and their dreams and their sock holes and not much of it seems too important.

Why not fill the day writing words.

Sometimes writing the words helps.

Fills gaps.

As text fits the page, they each – each word – each each is saying

These words do not matter, but what does?

Finding out is as good a way as any to fill out the time slip.

I imagine I’ll keep writing and showering and coffeeing until it gets figured out.

Black mothers (and my sister)

have to teach special lessons to their sons

unwritten rules that are just now

starting to be put to pen

this little secret is out

but there are others

and I wonder

if every group unique

have their own best practices

how to survive

the one I think of most

my dear sweet momma taught me

the bottom of the cart

is where you put the groceries

you can least afford

hardest to see and easiest to forget

be polite

know which items to put back

if you are caught

don’t hold up the line

Feels like some words are only ever used in one context.

Impending Doom, how I wish it were impending Delight

I’d settle for impending dee-lite because groove is in my heart

What if I’m fancy free, but my feet are bound?

I have both a pocket full of Cavendish but I am concurrently overjoyed at your presence?

The workweek was rough

disfruta la fin de semana

Something they didn’t teach in school, during wartime, people still need to work.

When Dresden had four thousand tons falling from the clouds,

Lil’ Ennio was still in the back of the sandwich shop putting cured meats onto bread.

We think of these times and the weight of weights collapsing the ceiling of heaven

We imagine being crushed with amalgam of steel, gas, revenge.

Ennio was only imagining of a time when he could get his hands on some proscutto.

Let us say that

when you were poor and dirty and hungry and cold

let us say that you made some wishes

held some dreams

but the poverty, filth, gnawing emptiness

created boundaries that even dreams couldn’t cross

Now, comforted and warm, all your dreams

Let us say that all of your dreams have come true

But they were never your dreams to begin with

They were sickly and weak dreams that were so mild and meek

They bring no comfort upon their fulfillment

The white girl turning cartwheels in front of Scout Finch was my sister. 

When you get in your car, do you have to hope it will start, or do you trust that it will start?

When you breathe your prayers up, do you hope you are heard, or do you trust she does hear them all?

A reliable car is a good indicator in most of rural and suburban America of a reliable life. A reliable life makes faith easier. Reliability makes everything easier.

Is easier better?

Who is more pious, the rich or the poor?

There were signs at my birth.

I was husky, at three-fourths of a stone.

They track any baby over 9 lbs since this started. When I was born, they didn’t know how to look for this particular gene abnormality.  It had not been diagnosed yet. There were hints.  There were clues, but, like any global paradigm shift (which this became in short time) …we just didn’t now.  We didn’t see it coming. I realize, old news now.

Most big babies are just big babies, fully 999 out of 1,000 will be “regular”.

To have a big baby back then didn’t create the same level of fear it does today.  I’ve read old articles, back to my grandparent’s days, and, unless it was just unreported, people didn’t get abortions because of the size of the child.  You have to understand…I need you to understand…that throughout history all the way up to the earliest parts of the 21st century people were simply not afraid of giants.

It didn’t take long for me to be outed – it was obvious.

I was only 10 years old when I exceeded my first HRL (height restriction line).  Fourth Grade. End of the year, we had a field trip to the Middle School to see what being in a new school would be like.  I was eager to eat lunch in the Cafetorium – it was a fun and silly word I loved but didn’t understand.  It wasn’t until many years later that I realized the school was too old and small to have separate cafeteria and auditorium (and too small for my kind).  They promised lunch would be hotdogs. I boarded the flat-front school bus with the green vinyl seats. The upholstery, if it could be called that, was without pattern, except that it was embossed with a sort of venous structure, I think meant to look like leather culled from a Capricorn’s lower half.

I was in the seventh row on the driver’s side, alone. My forehead was resting on the strip of aluminum holding glass window to steel frame. And in a child’s way, I thought I was hiding by waist-bending and pulling my shoulder blades in. I could say I was looking out the window, but I was really just trying to be less.

Sometimes, I think, “if they’d let me take that trip...if they let me go to the school and eat the hot dogs and see the cafetorium would we be at war today?” Could there have been a way out? 

Maybe even at ten, I would have understood…that being so much more than the people around me, physically and emotionally, was an untenable situation. Who can say if all of this could have been avoided? A civil war averted. A global war left unstarted.

But that isn’t what happened. That moment, being forcibly removed, ejected was unarguably the start of the end of our time of relative peace. The shot heard round the world. I was the catalyst, but I was only a little boy, albeit of immense stature and stentorian voice. The factions used this moment as clarion call to arms. Both sides knowing this was a fight that was worth dying for.

-Opening page from the Autobiography of Cujo Jones, Giant Rights Advocate.

Nobody warned me he’d be dead soon. What good would it have done?

When I am dying, will there be a warning?

When he died I wanted to be a famous architect.  Wanted to be assured that I’d be remembered.  What better reminder than an old house young people live in. But I live in an old house and I don’t know or care who architected it.  I don’t care who swung the hammer either.  When I die all the coffee will have been poured for nothing.  The breakfasts, all of them from when an airplane landed sauces into my lips and on my lips and on my chin and on my shirt.  From COOOOOkie-Crisp and whole milk from an orange tinged Cool Whip knockoff bowl (3 bowls to a box) will have been Consumed by the dead.  All the rolled steel cans of store brand Spaghetti-O’s that turned the Cool Whip bowls orange will have been rolled by hard leather hands, knuckles like knee caps, for nobody.  My dad has these knuckles. He will be dead soon too. Is he tallying now? Deciding if it was worth the slivers shimmering just below the dermis. I remember we once went to the Hoover Dam. On the highwater side, giant silver fish hovered just below the surface, waiting for feedings from tourists. I thought of the silver slivers in his hands quietly becoming part of him.  Whole hands get replaced by mitts, a catcher’s glove. Did he ever play baseball? Did he ever dream he could have a name that lived on? Did he? Does he? Should he care?

Should I.

Nobody warned me he’d be dead soon.

But he’s dead now and I guess that’s all that matters.

May 16 1750

There is rioting in Paris

In the streets

The police are out of uniform

They are taking the little ones

Off the Street

A wealthy aristocrat needs blood

He is not well

One girl 6 years old

She was alone on the Rue

On this Rueful day

Oh how she wished

That someone had a token

That represented her

That someone gave value

Just to come back for her perhaps

To be a Foundling

With a tiny diadem

A flat thimble even

In all the world

There are many 6 year old girls

Fewer are the Founders

Who rescue

And trade trinkets

And baubles

For their safe keeping

Outside, just outside

If S-F- had a breezeway or a vestibule

This quaking aspen would be in it

Far enough away still To forget that

the voices all around

Are so old here

While (A)rtistic less (a)rtistic

Fact almost an Artist Capitol

Still the winter weight blanket

Of experiences and of days

And of cups of ylang ylang tea

On the hottest days and coolest evenings

Squat on you in the stores

And Coffee shops (not cafés)

And on the sidewalks everywhere

Gravity for the gravity of the grave

Science promises and swears to us

With elevation we

Should feel heavier

Except

Except

As we rise

We are leavened

Above the age

Above the experience

And into the blood of Christ

There inside the holy

Is where I found my reward

Aspens are unique

In dendrology and beyond

A copse

Of silver spectres

Jingling their sleighs

Begging for change

In tambourines

They rattle rattle

In unison

Yes from one wind

But also from one root

(L)ike us but not (l)ike us

They are one being

Not similar not twins

Paternal or fraternal

They are one

We do not have time

To see and hear

To feel and taste and touch

All that is above the loam

Perhaps we should be forgiven

For thinking they are, like us

Each unique

The quaking Aspen

The quavering Aspen

The fallen rotted Aspen

All one

All one Aspen

Conjoined and consigned

Below

Bellow

Blow

A tree in a forest

On a hill

In the wind

Gets it all wrong

A tree is a forest

A hill is a tree

A wind is nothing

If not for the tree

That is a forest on a hill

In S-F-

I Invent

But the control is not mine

The idea manifests itself into reality

Only a conduit am I

I invent the way I sleep

Lovingly against my will

Some words Some devices Some ideas

Horrible

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The Covid Wars started around November 2019 as far as I can tell…

China first…they are saying.

They kept the attack quiet from the world pretty well. I don’t personally remember hearing about it until maybe February, and it appears now that there was fighting occurring on American soil as early as January. As an average citizen I don’t even really understand who this enemy is, or what they want. I know only that as of last count, they have executed 85,000 of our U.S. citizens and more are being killed daily. It seems they want to kill those with the most memories and experience…the elderly are the most common targets of these covid assassins.

It looks like South Korea took early warnings about an invasion upon their shores seriously and prepared their citizenry for the coming war. They had good plans for what to do in this very situation and acted accordingly. They have only been minimally affected with under 300 casualties as of mid-May. The U.S. on the other hand has pretended that we are/were prepared, but the truth is obvious with the recent count of 85,000 dead.

Lance Armstrong got caught cheating at bicycle racing. He was universally reviled and shunned.

Lance also raised $750 Million Dollars for cancer research.  He wouldn't have been able to raise $7,500 if he didn't win.

There are a few people for whom I feel bad - the folks who called out his cheating before he was caught and got ripped to shreds...I feel for them.

Then again, shut the fuck up...he's raising money for cancer.  Who cares that he broke bicycle racing rules to do it.

While I'm on the subject of unpopular opinions - I think it is sometimes OK to rob graves and to dig up highway onramps.

• Did you hear the story about the lady who got caught pooping in her boss' chair?

  • She was relieved of her doodies

• I went to Fashion school to learn all about wedding clothes.

  • It was to  know a veil

• My friends say that they think I have ADHD...

  • But it must be at least 85 or even 90 HD.

• I know a guy who used to have a really bad issue with premature ejaculation.

  • His solution was to keep an 1897 Uncirculated Silver Dollar under his pillow.

    • Those things are hard to come by.