Ode To An Old Ford Truck

Recent politics make an unwilling participant pine for the good old days. Many of mine fortunately comprised a smooth bench seat, flimsy lap-belts, and a sightly lass crowding me in a Ford truck. This Craigslist ad for a '65 F-100 transcends its genre by a far piece, so far it's told with a sigh, ages and ages hence, with fitting humor and honesty. Pics of a vehicle less traveled:

(Hat tip to Blunt Jackson)

FOR SALE: 1965 FORD F-100 PICKUP. RUNS.

The late Dick Helmold, of Helmold Ford in Raleigh, told me that in 1965 the Ford Motor Company began to use inferior steel in their truck bodies. Weakened the stock, he said. I'm pretty sure he was correct.

More rust than paint, dry-rotten tires, one missing and three mismatched hubcaps, a gas pedal that sticks and brakes that fail (DOT-3 is my co-pilot), no radio, interior lights, or heat, but with a three-on-the-tree gearshift and an amusing horn, this heart-breaking truck is difficult to give up, or even to give away. The driver's door opens only from the inside, so you must enter the vehicle through the passenger side door. Fortunately, the bench seat makes it a breeze to slide across. You may exit via the driver's door, but please don't slam the door shut, or the window will fall down the well and I'll have to take the door panel off to pull it back up and re-engage it with the window knob linkage thingy.

I have owned this dysfunctional vehicle around 18 years. I promise it starts; you'll just have to be patient. The application of jumper cables is a given, so you will need another vehicle for that, and a little cleaning solvent sprayed in the carburetor helps, as long as you don't overdo it, because then flames will shoot out of the engine compartment when it kicks over. If it finally does start, on the 14th attempt, the neighborhood children usually stop what they're doing, because they know that as I crawl up the street in first gear, I'll be laying heavy on the "ahh-OOOGG-ahh" horn and embarrassing their parents who should by now be inured to this spectacle.

This truck can only live in Carrboro. I can't remember the last time it went to Chapel Hill. It is so not Meadowmont. If it showed up in the Oaks and leaked fluid on the golf course, someone would call 911. If it tried to drive up and down the hills of Lake Forest, it would get sick and throw up.

When you see it on the street, though, this rattling deathtrap is a quite the head-turner, even as it tends to slip out of first gear with a loud bang, as if the non-committal transmission is in active rebellion against any rules of engagement, and must be coaxed gently back in as soon as the gears stop whining and grinding and throwing their little tantrum. This is most likely to happen at noon in heavy traffic, in the middle of a left turn at a traffic signal, downtown. I'm not proud of it, but I admit that I bear some personal responsibility for many of the multiple-light-cycle delays in Carrboro since 1991. When the bed of the truck is overflowing with three cubic yards of mulch or groaning under the weight of the rocks from a dismantled farmhouse chimney, I can swear that the leaf spring suspension is literally cracking in two beneath my bench seat as I motor slowly along the two-lane road while the other drivers line up behind me, waiting for their chance to pass. Some of them give me a happy thumbs-up gesture, or roll down their windows and shout "I love your truck". The others, I assume, are silently wondering what kind of jerk would over-compensate for his shortcomings by foisting this ersatz mockery of a truck upon the rest of the driving public. Honestly, though, am I really so different from the farmers who used to drive their tractors into town for a haircut at the Friendly Barber Shop? Well—yes, I am. I grew up in suburban New Jersey for starters, and have a couple of college degrees, so I don't exactly have my rural bona fides. Luckily, to date, nobody has actually yelled at me, "I hate your truck".

I first suspected something was strange about this truck twelve years ago, when it decided to sit in our yard on Maple Avenue for the entire month of December, dressed effeminately, draped in foliage and refusing to do any work whatsoever. This truck loved Christmas; it truly lived for the holiday. It would get all giddy around Thanksgiving, pulling old boxes of its grandmother's Christmas lights out of the attic. At first, I was embarrassed—what would the neighbors think, and all that stuff that tells you more about my own fears than anything else. I must have thought it was just a phase, but in retrospect, of course, I was in complete denial. And even if it was the truck's idea, I was definitely an enabler. My wife said, "Let it do what it wants to do. It's not hurting anyone." And in time, I realized that I still loved it, that being different was okay, and who was I to tell it not to follow the internal combustion engine at its heart?

But the truth was that over time, the truck had become increasingly unreliable. Like Lindsay Lohan, this baby is one hot mess.

For the past two years, I've kept my increasingly unstable truck in a kind of halfway house, sort of a "Club Chevy Nova". I've left it parked on a lot I own along the hill on South Greensboro St, below the road grade. The only way out is a steep incline to the street. You know what they say: out of sight, out of mind. It wasn't invited to my stepdaughter's garden wedding at our house in May—it just sat and sulked, full of bent-up metal poles, a discarded lawn mower and cans of old paint. I won't even try to take it out without getting a spotter to halt traffic in both directions while I burn out the clutch climbing up the driveway. The last person to perform this duty was a wide-eyed impoverished sculptor (you know the Carrboreal archetype) who claimed to love the truck just as it is, and likely only agreed because he wanted to buy it from me, but I don't think I dislike this young artist enough to do inflict any more suffering upon him. Maybe if he wants to just plant it in his yard and nurture it...

So over the last 18 years, this truck has consistently passed, albeit with a D-minus, every test I have devised for him. And now, as much as any under-performing teenager with a mohawk, eyeliner, and a bull ring in his nose, he needs to leave home and find his place in the world. I have turned his plates in, I'm no longer paying his insurance, and he is technically no longer my dependent. I will either donate him to Durham Tech or to the local high school, where I hope he will at least take some shop classes, maybe get his GED, or learn a useful skill. He says he wants to design sport roadsters in Italy. If so, wonderful. For all I know, maybe he'll end up opening a tattoo and piercing body shop on Hillsborough Street in Raleigh and hanging out at Sadlack's, and I'll be okay with that. I'll still love him. But for now, I think he's spinning his wheels drinking coffee at the Open Eye, buying American Spirits at TJ's, and hooping at the Weave on Thursdays. He just needs a little push, is all.

California Screamin'

I'm heading towards Hollywood and Vine to close down an un-airconditioned office a few stories above the walk of fame for a client. I'm waiting out tough times underneath a palm tree, waiting for the stop light and economic shoots to turn green as a cunningly bleached blonde sits up high in an onyx Porsche Cayenne Turbo SUV. She crosses our path in front and dawdles to turn left while a little white dog nestles on her breast looking down at me and nervously at the cars, the kind of dog that's not good for much but luxuriating or tossing up in the air to punt over a fence.

The girl's wearing goggle-sized sunglasses and maybe she'll turn 20 years old while she waits for oncoming traffic to clear and my friend, an L.A. resident, who has been fielding my questions about the Governator's budget crisis follows up with, "They just announced they're cutting summer school and child care programs for migrant workers." "Oh, yeah," I sigh. "Now that makes a hell of a lot of sense. That's really cutting the fat out of a budget! Bold leadership. Political courage!"

To my right, a sun-baked caucasian man, fiftyish, drags down the sidewalk like a grimy, dessicated crustacean with about an hour to live, trailing a torn t-shirt devoid of color, dust in his hair sticking up in the air ike free beauty parlor product, greasy gray jeans hanging off him obscenely. No one at the bus stop sees him, he's magic, he's an invisible man. So I'm sitting there thinking, look pal, it's right here, the future is being spelled out in front of your face on a big mind-reading neon sign just like with Steve Martin in LA Story. Stop for a minute and read.

California's got it all. It's the #1 Death Factory and it's the #1 Dream Factory in the US and the world. Tops in arms production and entertainment. 8th biggest economy on the planet, huge wine producer, agribusiness, no slouch in the ganja department. Companies like Apple, Google, Disney, Miramax, and YoYodyne are all in California. It is the most fungible entity imaginable.

Yet it's bankrupt, its bonds are junk, it is now paying state worker in scrip and its population is shrinking for the first time since the conquistadores brought the plague. Now, I'm thinking at the stoplight, we must be suffering from a philosophical conundrum. A triumph or failure of Reaganomics, of scientology, of pull yourself up by your bootstraps, trickle down Wysocki, trickle down. If you can keep your income inequality when all around you are losing theirs then you will be a man my son.

America has never viewed its working classes through the sentimental fug of an Edwardian music hall, but when treated well one time they promptly payed back with the greatest explosion of prosperity and technology in known history. But that's a bygone era, constantly memorialized and milked for every last drop of hope in repeating a Greatest Generation. California, particularly its coastal southern cities, provides a juxtaposition of glittering got-it-made success and violent squalor, with pernicious polarizing influences and taxes that keep regressing. It's the Big vs. the Little Lebowskis, and it's actually hard to tell who's winning--half the time the plot's entertaining, half the time it's frightening, and half the time it's disastrous. Because it's California, the halves add up.

But uh-oh. Cali's attached. It's kind of attached to the US like a skull, in fact. Am I looking at the future of my entire country? Well, it was America's bellwether state of the 20th century, so yes, it would seem so. Reading Will California become America's first failed state?, a competently researched and interviewed article in the Guardian, triggered the above memory of a recent trip to L.A., and the upshot of it is that public services will be shut down to reduce the budget gap, that's not going to be enough, and people will think of something because Californians are innovative.

Metaphorically, to take California's lead, the United States has a case of brain cancer, and it's not ready to start dealing with it in any serious way. Delusion is the order of the day. The recession is over, I'm sure you've heard. Tide's still up, sky's still blue and the myth of the California Dream is going to die hard, like a butthole surfer screaming "whooaaa, duuuude," as he bashes up repeatedly against the stony crags of Monterey.

To end on a glass half full, as required, California dreamers hang it out innately, they don't know any different, which means America's problems tend to crop up first and most prevalently in that state. Presumably, so will solutions.

Dippy Dead Celebrity Week Is Over!

Michael Jackson, Farrah Fawcett, Billy Mays all died last week, sending this blog into a tailspin of mourning as the media trampled over small children to hog Serious News Time. For example, an entire Keith Olbermann show was devoted to Michael Jackson coverage, with no mention of "mentally ill pedophile."

We create our celebrities, we twist and transmogrify the beautiful into the grotesque, which is to say, their faults are ours, and ask not for whom the bell tolls. May these tortured souls rest in peace regardless, and Farrah's Speedo nipples achieve deserving immortality.

Without further ado, I hereby usher in the Al Franken Era. Minnesota's governor just announced he would rubber-stamp Franken as Senator. For conservatives, this is going to be great! Every time Al opens his mouth to drone nasally on about metric shoe sizes or some other liberal doggerel, they will writhe and awwk like vampires speared to beach-chairs in Bermuda. Just do us all favor: bite the bullet, take the pain. Close your eyes, and think of Sarah Palin!

Update: Jon of the aptly named 'He Is Not Dead Yet' corrects my celebrity body count mistakes:

Marc: You forgot about Ed McMahon. Also, we all know that celebrities dies in threes: Ed McMahon, Farrah Fawcett, and Michael Jackson. Billy Mays threw in an extra, fourth dead celebrity AT NO ADDITIONAL COST!

Neko Case In The Crystal Ballroom

Seats for Neko Case's show at the Paramount in Seattle were already selling for $250 back in April. They were only $25 per in Portland so a kindly internet goddess, aka Lord Wife, swooped in to scoop up two for my birthday, booking us onto an Amtrak and into the Hotel DeLuxe. It's just a few blocks away from the Crystal Ballroom where she played two nights, an old hall with a fully functional "floating floor" once popular for swing dancing.

I was turned onto Neko Case by a friend's facebook aside in late February, never hearing anything of her before. The more she sinks in now, the clearer she stands as a poet who happened to develop into a singer. Poetry in turn brings back Mr. Marcinec, my high school AP English teacher, who once asked the class to debate whether verse can be assessed on technical merits alone, or if the artist's life must be taken into account. The answer, to me, was as sharp as a late hit. If you walk home past dark woods on bitter-cold nights near Robert Frost's haunts, as I did, musing on death whilst rejecting it is an option is easy to spot. You have to move, or you have to freeze.

Knowing that Coleridge woke up from his opium dreaming of Xanadu and Kubla Khan increases your odds at guessing what suppressed wish a stately Pleasure Dome signifies, and J. Alfred Prufrock's spiritual exhaustion starts to resonate when you plot it against T.S. Eliot's European travels as Edwardian life unraveled prior to World War One. Neko Case went to school in Tacoma, leaving home at 15 to live in a classmate's unfinished cellar while the nearby Green River Killer was ripping through more than 70 young women, half of them under-aged runaways. She's still scared to walk alone at night, and absent that context, you might awkwardly misinterpret one of her most popular songs, Deep Red Bells. She wrote it not as an ode to g-spots, but to victims:

where does this mean world cast its cold eye?
who's left to suffer long about you?
does your soul cast about like an old paper bag
past empty lots and early graves?
those like you who lost their way
murdered on the interstate
while the red bells rang like thunder
deep red bells, deep as I've been done

Putting Case's name in the same breath as Coleridge and Eliot is intentional. She belongs. At 18, she started playing drums for a succession of punk bands. A god-given ability to sing was noticed and invited to do covers, and from there she went on to share in the artistic processes of a number of bands. She credits collaboration with musicians such as The New Pornographers, The Corn Sisters, The Sadies, Cub, Maow, and Kelly Hogan for teaching her the craft. She began to write her own material, releasing her first solo album (The Virginian) in 1997.

Her pieces combine stark observation with gorgeous melodies and fervent passions. Anger stirs unmistakably below all the surfaces, and there's a wild, even creepy quality to her, like wind blowing dust over abandoned roadside attractions. Flash-floods of overstuffed vans and army bases, grabby brakes and shabby blokes, emotional voids and hangovers, waitress gigs and crippling angsts come gushing through like gray water in laundromats. While her songs aren't always equally intense or personal they're sent from the same address, and she writes only as a woman who has been helpless before men can. It must've been very tough for a control freak of such high order. Her body of solo work is nothing less than a resolution to turn and face the humiliations of love, and, with music as her protector, to learn. With Middle Cyclone, she sets out to explore, finally having taken her struggle by the smooth handle.

The album seems to rein in vocal strength in favor of sharper lyrical focus. Every note and part of each composition is arranged to let you apprehend the words, delivered atop exceptionally precise instrumentals which often meander from traditional verse/chorus structure to weave in micro-songs. Heard live, the band performed a studio-perfect version of every piece, so tightly that "Neko Case" might best be thought of as a collective. Middle Cyclone was accordingly recorded in her barn in Vermont with over a dozen musical guests, including Garth Hudson (formerly of The Band), M Ward and a nest of robins in the rafters.

The Crystal Ballroom was Sold Out and a waiting line had already formed outside the closed box office two hours before the show. We spotted it in perfect time, so I snagged the best standing-room spots in the house--we occupied the "Magic Corner" 20 feet away from the artistic breakthrough of the year's main mike. Even without industry backing (Case's US label is ANTI-), Middle Cyclone debuted at #3 on Billboard, occupies the #2 spot on US Rock and is easily the most successful indie release of 2009. After a long hike, she arrived at a secret narrow embarkation point where critical acclaim meets critical mass.

Case had long been pigeonholed as a banshee, a speed-baller for belting out other people's songs. While there's no overlooking her dominating voice, labeling her as a torch singer is downright obstructive, and fails to describe how she can sail across genres and vocal planes. Let me put it this way: she could sing like Patsy Cline, Tanya Tucker or Rosemary Clooney, but they could not have easily returned the favor. As a pure singer, she's capable of nerdy introspection, tobacco-row mourning, indie-pop smoothies, eco-folk, jagged punk, charcoal chanteuse, retro orchestra and I would bet Wagnerian opera. She can conjure an interstate truck stop at 4AM, high school sweethearts home for goosebumps, fuzzy heroin magic carpets, square dancers bouncing off '68 Cadillacs with big chrome bumpers, and spiky CBGB mosh pits. Her voice attracted big-label attentions, but its proprietor had other plans:

"I'm not out to become Faith Hill, I never want to play an arena, and I never want to be on the MTV Video Music Awards, much less make a video with me in it. I would like to reach a larger audience and see the state of music change in favor of musicians and music fans in my lifetime. I care very much about that."

Case claimed there would be no love songs on Middle Cyclone, that all the lyrics could be taken literally, that Nature would be the focus. Which may be technically true, but it's akin to Stephen King stating, "I'm through with horror. My next books will all be travel guides." Ruthless restraint and a naturalist's aperture are devices which set the album apart, brilliantly so, because her genies can't be bottled or chained. You feel them straining and threatening to break loose at a remove, and you can hear when they beat the screens down. The first song is about a libidinous tornado unable to find its lover, or make him understand, carving his name across three counties. "People Got A Lotta Nerve" is about a caged elephant and an aquarium killer whale taking revenge, but like Coleridge's subconscious, Case sidles up and becomes a defiant predator giving fair warning. Then, as with Frost's deep dark woods at night, it's a mite difficult to rule out indelicate possibilities when she tosses her throat back and wails, "I'm a man-man-man, man-man-man eater!"

At a concert you pick up things the albums and tubes can't convey. You realize Neko's an introvert, not very comfortable in the spotlight, self-conscious of her relatively flat butt. Her skin and hair have the translucence and texture of perogies in orange vodka sauce, and she honestly loves animals. She's really just there to cut diamonds, and to compensate she's hired a statuesque, lung-expanding brunette backup singer arc-welded like a water tower to her left who banters in the pauses like an extroverted emcee, announcing her love for good burgers, that she's 46, and "my beauty secret is low wattage."

Before singing "The Pharaohs" Case remarks, "This song is about my second boyfriend," and when she pours out the bourbons of "my body burned, my legs ached/but you never came to bed/you just left me there awake/you kept me wanting wanting wanting/like the wanting in the movies and the hymns," veins thick as her middle fingers stand out on her neck. She discloses that "Red Tide" is about 3 million assholes who moved apropos to Seattle during grunge's gestation and suddenly noticed they hate the rain. The mollusks, they have won. You notice she reads voraciously and make a mental note: if you ever run into her, don't ask her about what she's done. Ask what she thinks of The Confessions of St. Augustine.

After whistlings and stompings on the trampoline floor the backup singer came back up first for the encore and you caught her say "Oh, what the hell." They played for another forty-five minutes, so you knew they were done for good and pressed back through the bodies of screaming cognoscenti. You walked up to the DeLuxe and asked your wife how best to classify sui generis. She pauses and says, "Country gothic," and you think of how Boadicea might have fared if she'd properly armored herself for the Romans and their arenas. You think of her song about waking up to disorienting hotel fans spinning overhead, heads webbed with indiscretions watching maids who have nowhere else to be in Portland on a Sunday morning:

Prison girls are not impressed
They’re the ones that have to clean this mess
They’ve traded more for cigarettes
Than I’ve managed to express

Why Brett Favre Will Never Retire

It's easy to make fun of Brett Favre, a National Football League quarterback so famous even Lord Wife knows who he is. She was once moved to remark, "Why do those announcers just keep repeating the words 'Brett Far-vuh, Brett Far-vuh' like some kind of &*$#ed-up bird call...did he get back from prison or something?"

Admittedly, this post is just to get me rolling over a steep blog-slump borne of unspeakably gorgeous, teasingly tenuous Seattle springtime sun that could get shut down going into the summer like Mariners' batters facing Mariano Rivera in the 8th inning of the 2001 ALCS. The trade-offs of radiation plus children, travel, and time have resulted in a pathetic recent pace of one post per week. It's more parental gulag than semi-retirement, with swim lessons, bikes, strollers, eating fries in Tangletown under Hornitos sunbrellas, Adirondack chairs on stone patios and being condemned to perpetual chauffeur and bodyguard duties (my true callings) in relentlessly nice weather.

Thankfully, Favre is thinking of coming out of his 3rd, 4th, 5th or 6th (depends who you ask) retirement to play another season in the NFL. Why would he do this? Many point to his competitiveness, his love for the game, how he holds the known records for consecutive quarterback starts and for vomiting on sidelines and in games. Some have said he might want the record for interceptions thrown (310), but I just looked it up--he already owned that by 2007. Others suspect life on the road suits him and the little sum'pins he might have on the side, but he's made enough money to buy his own team. The Green Bay Packers offered him 20 million dollars to retire and he turned it down. I, having known all along he would never retire while he was physically able to roll his shotgun arm back to the huddle on degenerative hips, know why he won't.

His father was his high school football coach, dying on a Sunday in 2003. Favre played the following Monday Night game against the Oakland Raiders, throwing four touchdowns in the first half enroute to a 41-7 victory. Brett Favre still plays for his dad, and to deny death.

Beware Of Doug--The Far Side

Was driving along, saw a "Beware of Dog" sign, and my inner insurgents idly thought of getting out and sabotaging it to read as above. Came home, searched, found. Thank you, Gary Larson.

"Give Me A Waterboard, Dick Cheney, And One Hour, And I'll Have Him Confess To The Sharon Tate Murders"

Jesse Ventura added this treasure to my trove of revenge fantasies during a Larry King interview, further stoked this week by the entire Cheney family, which collectively told us we should be down on our knees thanking them for keeping us safe from the Bad People.

Other punishment favorites include holding a "Birdshot Party," sending him out as a postal carrier in the slums of Damascus, a regimen of beatings with a baseball bat, and simple execution. Of course these are negative, violent things, and I'm an optimistic and constructive chap. So here's what should really be done:

1) force-feed him a diet of nothing but marijuana brownies, cheeseburgers and milkshakes
2) make him listen to music by black artists, with emphasis on rappers, for 6 months non-stop
3) if he's still alive after 6 months, start an intensive program of feminist consciousness-raising training

In short, he should be sent to a re-education camp which uses advanced psychological therapies designed to literally kill him with kindness. Should he somehow survive it, he'd at least come out a better, perhaps even more bearable person.

I could easily perform this service to the world in a finished basement, pre-equipped for these and similar purposes, and hereby offer my dungeon and time gratis. As for step #3, Lord Wife went to NYU so she can devise the curriculum. Hmm...I think the music would start off with a Martha and the Vandellas video like the one above, a truly frightening version of "Nowhere to Run, Nowhere to Hide."

Neko Case, "Hold On, Hold On" Music & Lyrics

A little mental vacation on a sunny cumulonimbus-free afternoon in the Pacific Northwest. Tickets to Neko Case's June shows at the Paramount in Seattle start at two hundred and twenty dollars and you can't even find her music on a jukebox in a bar. Her album Middle Cyclone is taking her over the top music industry be damned. She writes it, she belts it, great musicians back it and a vocal accompanist adds a 12th-part Jimmy Martin high lonesome harmony to all the right places. Amongst her musical influences are Hank Williams, Tom Waits, Loretta Lynn, Neil Young, Nick Lowe, Charles Bukowski and Ralph Stanley. Lord Wife got tickets in Portland for my splendid birthday, at the Crystal Ballroom. The lyrics:

The most tender place in my heart is for strangers
I know it's unkind but my own blood is much too dangerous
Hangin' round the ceiling half the time
Hangin' round the ceiling half the time

Compared to some, I've been around
But I really did try so hard
That echo chorus lied to me with its
"Hold on, hold on, hold on, hold on"

In the end I was the mean girl
Or somebody's in-between girl
Now it's the devil I love
And that's as funny as real love

I leave the party at 3AM
Alone, thank god!
With a valium from the bride--
It's the devil I love
It's the devil I love...
And that's as funny as real love
And it's as real as True Love

That echo chorus lied to me with its
"Hold on, hold on, hold on, hold on!"

That echo chorus lied to me with its
"Hold on, hold on, hold on, hold on!"

Financial Vortex & Possible Happy Effects

There's arguing amongst the money people over what to call what we're in. Some of them go with "Depression," noting that deflationary pressure, sharp and sustained job losses, and lack of money supply warrant the use of that word. Others cite that few prices have dropped, on the contrary most are still increasing, and we're going through a Recession perhaps akin to Japan in the 90s. Still others recall Stagflation, a coin termed in the 1970s when inflation raged and stimulus had little desired effect.

Stagflation would seem a better avenue to understanding what we're experiencing, and it resulted from structural similarities. From 1973 onward, America's economy reeled, net wages dropped, wealth was transferred offshore and overall quality of life diminished. Vietnam War expenses caused Nixon to nix the Gold Standard in 1971, eroding confidence in the currency. Domestic energy production had peaked, so OPEC struck with disruptive embargoes. The Fed printed money for stimulus, but it didn't get to consumers and inflation took off. Trade deficits widened and businesses failed as political policies and corporate strategies were exposed for having been out to lunch.

Meditating on these slow-motion explosions, however, Stagflation doesn't begin to capture the magnitude of events for which the languages of economics or finance themselves are inadequate. Those disciplines too are in the midst of altering precepts and analytical frameworks, struggling to keep up with commoners in the wake of an unprecedented World Property Bubble. The experts haven't seen this beast before either.

So, what is it? We have a hyper-inflationary spiral and a demand-destruction (thus deflationary) spiral going on at the same time. When you've got two strong opposing spirals, you've got a tornado. Or a Vortex. General Motors, the twentieth century's greatest company, is getting sucked up into it, the cold air keeps hitting the warm air and when it comes time to rebuild, we'll have to call the East Asia Insurance Company. This when we're in massive debt, are printing tons of hundred-dollar bills to drop out of helicopters, and are stuck in unwinnable "dumb wars" whose cost is already comparable to WWII. Call me a neophyte, but I'm not seeing a handy storm shelter to climb into.

Maybe the dollar will get sucked through that Vortex along with GM and get spit out as a minority slice in a basket of international currencies, one which prominently includes China. For many of us going forward, this will be good news. It will mean we can't finance wars or more complex weapon systems by selling bonds and then paying them off with funny money, and we'll have to figure out how to peg the dollar's value to something other than the world's oil reserves. Our economy, imaginations and energies might be forced back to living within its means, to making helpful things, real things of actual value. Would that be so terrible?

Texas Governor Threatens To Secede From Union

This just happens to be what I wished for when I blew out that last birthday candle. Thank you Birthday Fairy!!

This move by Governor Rick Perry dovetails beautifully with the Dungeons and Day Jobs State's ad campaign: Texas...It's Like A Whole Other Country.

Umm, exactly. Houston we have a problem. Maybe America really is a failed experiment when your Constitutionally protected right to be a murderous hypernational boob-tard hits critical mass and people are walking in to places and opening up with automatic weapons fire already, a depressingly common event in the past 30 days, is it really so bad if we let them go? And if it does really happen, do not say it can't, it would be like having Uganda or Mexico right next door, except they would give those bastards in the UN a what-fur by not showing up to their "wimpy commie-fests."

Evil Day Bob Job, a blogger who happens to be the #1 hit if you entered "f*%@ texas" into a Google search, proposes the next tourist ad:

So, when you're looking for scorpions, poisonous snakes, scorching heat and human rights abuses, don't go all the way to Mexico! You can get all that and more right here in Texas! "It's Like A Whole Other Country That Was Founded By Your Abusive Brother-In-Law Next Door."

I can't wait to not go, and I'm scared to google-image the same phrase.

Note: Be afraid, be afraid, do not image-search that phrase unless Safe Search is set to "China."

Mousterian Age Industry & HandyMan Tool

Speculative pre-historic Question of the Month: how did they clip their nails?

Last month in the spirit of not having any right whatsoever to do so, I figured out (to my satisfaction, at least) why Neanderthals went extinct. I promised to attach a pic of a prized jasper tool which hangs above my fireplace "soon."

Apart from being a distinctive, compact and versatile tool which can be used as a cutter, scraper, and borer depending on which side is applied, and from having a shape perfect for receiving a thumb, what compelled me about this artifact was that it was made of beautiful, unweathered jasper. Jasper was coveted in the ancient world for jewelry and tools, and whoever made this unique could and did make more.

You are looking at a sharp flake of great prestige, which also was a basis of stone-age trade although this three-in-one was, one suspects, kept off the market as a personal effect. It was flaked by what looks like a semi-Levallois technique but isn't anything like the turtle-shaped circles of the Acheulian Era 100,000 years ago, nor is it nearly as thin or as specialized as the Chatelperronian flint flakes which started to appear 32,000 years ago. However old, it is a masterpiece, even sui generis and will still cut flesh.

It is from Fontmaure one of Europe's most famous Neanderthal sites near a modern-day farm and this hue of jasper tools has only been found there. The Neanderthals at Fontmaure lived above-ground, village-dwellers, and most tools from there are smaller than my HandyMan, as if the jasper was rationed to milk as many tools out of each precious core as efficiently as possible. Other objects found there are made of sandstone, flint and light gray quartz.

The light gray quartz artifacts originated from a site one hundred kilometers away, clear evidence of trade. I don't know how many above-ground Neanderthal sites exist, but there surely aren't many, and remains of both humans and animals have been excavated in Fontmaure's strata. Interestingly, limestone balls were found of a sort still used by natives in South America as a throwing weapon to tangle around legs, as well as triangular mine-pyramids perhaps used for decoration or ritual.

The HandyMan hangs directly over where I keep my Leatherman toolset. They are companions beneath a pastel blue piece of the Berlin Wall. Maybe someday I'll acquire this Fontmaure left-handed jasper handaxe. I hope they didn't use that one for fingernails.

Maple Syrup Slurpings

Lord Running Boy hosted a sleep-over one recent Friday with his cousin, whose tribal nickname is Beatee. They requested pancakes for the next morning. This was Beatee's plate.

Books Don't Burn Easily

books don't burn easily you'll know that if you've ever tried a pile
they're anti-flammable so you've got to put them down and pour
on gasoline and that's good because we have so many in our house
it will never burn neither but my body does and it will burn to cinders
after i'm gone if they come for my wife they will need to negotiate
narrow pathways and breach bocages because she'll have the whole
place barricaded and her protectors will be loyal phalanxes of books

People Got A Lotta Nerve, Music & Lyrics By Neko Case

Fair warning. If you click on that vid there will be returning. It'll take you back to your daddy's Ford to wild scallions growing up alongside gutted roads to the flat bench with your almost sixteen year old girl smushed up just as close as she can sit beside without you driving with her in your lap. There's a rifle in the gun rack enough gas to get there and back so you're driving off to find Paris in the dark.

She was right there with you too on the stainless steel cover of the cooling fan you sat on when you were nine watching people in the pavilion dancing and drinking their heads off to the Country Playboys singing promenade all the way swing your corner lady and promenade the hall. This girl is right where you're from doesn't even think about fighting fair she does not compromise and she told the whole music industry to go fuck itself and it did. So if you choose not to click on the vid I understand but here's what she had to say:

So the saying says an elephant never forgets. Standing in the concrete cave, sway inside and sing! They walked over the ocean and their dreams they dreamed awake until the lights grew dim. Until the cop cars came. Everybody tells me this is crazy yes I know but I'm a man man man man man man man eater! But still you're surprised prised prised, when I eat ya.

You know...they call them killer whales but you seemed suprised when it pinned you down to the bottom of the tank where you can't turn around it took half your leg and both your lungs and I craved, I ate hearts of sharks. I know you know it and I'm a man man man man man man man eater but still you're surprised prised prised when I eat ya. It will end again in moon-lit song, it will end again in moon-lit song.

As an added bonus, Neko Case has been banned for life from the Grand Ole Opry for taking off her top during a performance. Let's go see her when she comes our way.

Morning In Beverly, Twilight In Thebes

Ill fares the land, to hastening ills a-prey
Where wealth accumulates and men decay.

Oliver Goldsmith

Oliver Goldsmith wrote "She Stoops to Conquer," some lines of which have come to mind. The snap above is of Greystone Mansion in Beverly Hills. This morning's Cheery Thought was inspired by a drive through FameLand with a gonzo-economist guide. I love L.A. The highway signs talk to you here. While stalking Julia Roberts who doesn't really even turn either of us on we couldn't help but notice how surprisingly few nice places there are to live amongst these mansions.

Bush Gets First Job Offer...From A Hardware Store

He's still wearing a Presidential Seal jacket even on a visit to a hardware store? Sheesh. Just imagine if he took them up on the job. He couldn't even locate the "weapons of mass construction."

Had an interesting and nearly blog-free week. Downside was having several computer malfunction issues, diving into the complex task of choosing Lord Running Boy's school, and being me. Upside was personal breakthrough. More later.

Hell-Hound On My Trail

The cryptozoological terror sighted above torments my existence. If I were to flee to the Swiss Alps and hide out in the conference halls of Davos, it would track me down across continents and seas to emphatically corner me, her whole body trembling like some frenetic freak as she drills her dark expectant eyes into me and telepathically blasts out the message, "Give the dog your food. Give the dog your food!" She also has this routine of "are you ready to go out, are we going out? Are you ready yet because I'd really really like to go out out out and pee on everything and maybe I'll see a squirrel and then I'll climb up a fence or a tree and lick it to death."

Her name is Ripley, she is (allegedly) a Jack Russell terrier, geriatric yet undaunted. For any of you who own one of these accursed fox-hounds you know that one of their many annoying mutant traits is they simply must burrow under the covers with you, any covers, and sometimes you'll wake up to this thing, this awful horrible stink-mouthed thing licking your feet. She also has literally run off walls, caroming off the four corners of a room. This was not my choice, my wife inflicted this animal upon me and somehow it became my job, my job, to feed and entertain it. To top it off, more money has gone into her dental work in the past 4 years than has gone into mine in 20. God help us all.

The Sacred: Vasuveda, Who Dwells & Shines, Said "Everything Comes Back"

You can change the fate of humanity with a laptop, but some things you never want to change. I strive to save the best of what we were. Most of all, I want to save people's voices, and if you ever hear the not yet perfect results of synthetic speech processing, odds are I was involved in their creation.

The picture above is beautiful. I want to be there, too. Hindu devotees from Bihar state performed rituals this Monday in Allahabad, India, the annual month-long Hindu religious festival of Magh-Mela. It was such a festival that Hesse's character Siddhartha attended and decided to give up his luxurious life as a prince, to go after something far greater. People still bathe at Sangam, at the plexus where the Ganges, Yamuna and Saraswati meet, to wash away their sins. If we could only but likewise wash ours down the River.

My wife puts her mouth against our two month old son's belly, blows to make the sound of a whoopee cushion, and he laughs with the purest joy. I remember that feeling, I don't want it to ever leave the earth, or that is to say, erased without trace, without beholder. I remember that we can hold pieces of ochre in one hand, buildings in the other, that I will do anything to halt a long decline of everything I've ever loved into the ground, and I remember the end of that book, Siddhartha:

It was the self, the purpose and essence of which I sought to learn. It was the self, I wanted to free myself from, which I sought to overcome. But I was not able to overcome it, could only deceive it, could only flee from it, only hide from it. Truly, no thing in this world has kept my thoughts thus busy, as this my very own self, this mystery of me being alive, of me being one and being separated and isolated from all others, of me being Siddhartha. And there is no thing in this world I know less about than about me, about Siddhartha.

The Profane: "I'd Rather Be On A Deserted Island With A Gorilla"

The quote in the title was actor Mickey Rourke's response to the question, "Is it true you're going out with Courtney Love?" The rumor had been devoutly constructed by the Infinite Estate because of the way he looked at the expert courtesan whilst behind her on stage at the Bread and Circus awards ceremony. I have looked at Courtney Love similarly, before I even know who she was, and my thoughts were far from lustful. They were more along the lines of, "This psychotic bitch is fully capable of killing someone and enjoying it." A lot of Kurt Cobain fans are convinced she did.

Mr. Rourke has the same sentiments and expressed them in a way that made me laugh non-stop, but then I've been laughing a lot lately. Video of Mickey and female companion being ambushed by webarazzi is here.

Very Strange Thought Of Day

People with Alzheimer's are going to use Twitter.