Quote of the Day

"People often have this idea that money is what is preventing them from doing their dreams. That's very rarely the case. It usually has to do with fear: fear of failure, fear of what people will think. You can go awful far without many resources on the low financial road. In fact, you actually learn more that way. If you have a choice, take the cheap route, always. "

Kevin Kelly

http://www.kk.org/kk/

Kevin Kelly's been one of my favorite writers for a while, he was at Wired for a long time, and was involved with The Whole Earth Catalog/Review mob, too.

A great futurist and alternative thinker. We need a lot more of them.

Today I hid in my shop, finally getting back to building and fixing guitars after a long break brought on by a flood of water, a huge garden and a more than a little fucked up world news overload funk.

It feels good to make sawdust again.

Hot Truck, Long Drive

A few things I thought about or reflected upon today, while driving:

My sweetie rocks, big time, even when she's overheated and nearly silent.

Inflatable queen size air mattresess lose air when you have two large mammals sleeping on them. And they suck even before they lose air.

Josh Munter builds kick ass guitars.

The older I get, driving for 6 hours with no air in the car sucks.

Thrift stores in Northern Wisconsin not called Goodwill are a much better deal than they are in Madsion.

Goodwill sucks no matter where you go, and the evil corparate mentality behind their mission makes the whole thing seem freakishly ruthless.

McDonald's iced coffee is not good, but can keep you awake.

There are about one third as many misquitos in northern Wisconsin than there are down here.

My tomato plants are starting to produce, big time.

Eating roasted fresh baby potatoes and a garden salad made from basil, tomatoes and garlic and olive oil, along with fresh picked sweet corn and Kori's homeade bread with Bess while watching the Futurama movie "Bender's Big Score" is a very fine way to spend a night after too much driving.

And, my little 1992 Toyota Truck got 30 MPG today.

Life is good, today, anyway.

More Making BBQ sauce

Mom's still going strong at 81, still cooking for a lot of folks.

She spent 50 years being a cook, thirty at a huge summer camp, a number of years in a few fancy pants hotels and ran a few restaurants with my short attention span father.

She knows how to knock out three meals a day for hundreds of folks making ingredients from scratch, and has a heart bigger than Northern Ontario.

I've been canning and putting up conserves and jam, this was my first BBQ sauce.

Few things taste as good as fruit and jam and pickles you make yourself. Being in a town with a Farmer's Market like ours is not a small thing.

But I still hate with a passion more bright than a thousand supernovas those damn eight wheeled strollers that self entitled yuppie scum use to push their spoiled brats around the market on the square.

Making BBQ Sauce With My Mother

Last week I went north, to the cute, quaint, lovely little shithole town I was stuck in when I went to what really was "high" school.

I spent most of my last three years bored, miserable and stoned in that tiny little school, one of thirty two who started senior year and 26 who actually cared enough to graduate.

Now, 33 years later, nearly everybody I went to school with has either fled, become dead from logging and drunk driving mayhem, or a catholic.

I thank god every day I'm no longer a believer in that whole suckitude that organized church life brings. I do however, enjoy the thrift stores run by mean, bored, petty little women who would hate my guts if they knew about my shocking lifestyle and disgusting habits.

I am still a dirty hippie, although they mess with you less when your fifty than they did when you were 15.

I hated a lot about Three Lakes then, still don't care for it now.

It's full of thugs and rednecks and retired swine who hate anybody not

white, straight and a dullard.

It's a great place to move to if you want to die old, and bitching about things.

I prefer Madison. People up north say Madison is a bubble outside reality.

I think at least bubbles rise up to the top of things instead of staying inbred, obtuse and bellicose. Not that most of the people living in my mom's town would even know what those last two words mean.

But I digress. My main reason for going up was to see mom, who lives across the street from the school I went to, a block from where her mother spent the last decade of her life.

Mom's a damn fine cook. She and I made a gallon of BBQ sauce, which we canned. Here's some photos of the process.

I made mine with lots more hot pepper, added jalapenos and a few more cloves and vinegar, but it's the same basic recipe, catsup, sugar, vinegar, spices, peppers and liquid smoke.

It turned out damn fine.

The Garden, July 21st 2008

The big flood in May didn't do any long term damage to the garden, that's for sure. It's gone berserk, with the hot days and warm nights bringing in tons of peppers, tomatoes and chard and summer squash.

It's so fertile that there are tomato and squash growing out of the side of my black plastic compost barrel.

Now if the damn skeeters weren't so thick, I'd be out there pulling weeds.

The Japanese beetles are back, though, munching on the hops and beans again. Damn alien invaders are now here for good.

We've been canning and putting up fruits and veggies like crazy.

Last week I picked a gallon and a half of tart cherries off a pal's trees, and we made fruit conserve, a pectin free fruit spread with walnuts, cranberries, cherries and pineapple, and another two batches of rhubarb conserve, using apricots, more pineapple and rhubarb and golden raisins.

We also hot packed eight or so pounds of green beans with jalapenos, and made two kinds of mulberry jam with blackberries, and a few other kinds of mixed fruit jam.

I like canning food and having locally grown sources for the ingredients, few things taste as good in the dead of winter than homemade jam with homemade bread, and Kori's turned into an amazing bread maker.

Last night we had our freak tribe real family Sunday dinner, and we ate beans and zucchini, garlic and onions from the garden, and made flaming cherries jubilee served over frozen yogurt with the cherries from Pam's trees.

Life is good, even with the speeding train of peak oil induced economic mayhem coming at us.

Daddy Complex make em' stupid

So, I'm reading the news, watching the blogs, and I'm noticing that almost all the reporters and barking heads are being just as stupid as they were when Bush was running, maybe more so about how wonderful that cranky retread of Bush the Younger McCain is.

It makes my head hurt. He says things that make no sense, and every time somebody gets in a question he can't handle, the media leap to defend him.

Just like they did when Bush ran. Maybe even more.

There must be something about the mainstream media that just loves a daddy figure, even if the rest of the country is ready for a real adult to run the country.

McCain did serve his country in the war. He did get shot down, tortured, locked in a hole and saw what must be the thing most like hell on earth you can live through.

But it also is the sort of thing that makes you barking mad, and fucks you up for life, from his damaged shoulder to his giant anger.

When a four star retired General like Wesley Clark can't point out that getting your ass shot out of the sky and then being stuck in a hole doesn't make you qualified to sit at the desk with the big red nuke button, and gets swiftboated for it, you know things are getting stupid.

I think I'd like somebody in that office who's not still fighting the wars of the last century, and somebody who can at least not look like a grinning skeleton being run by a puppeteer, somebody who will notice that things are going to shit in a whole different way in this new century.

And I also think Obama's going to be another Bill Clinton, looking out for just a few more people than the rethuglicans.

So, take your pick, the handsome black guy who won't keep fucking you in the same old way, and offers a reach around, or the angry old white man who should be in a retirement home and in therapy for big lying and anger management issues who's going to keep up the BushCo method of lube free reaming.

I think I'm gonna go barf.

On second thought, I did that after the pig roast Sunday when I got food poisoning. Never mind.

And here's another monkey photo, because I like them. Time to go pick beans and chard.

Thought of the evening:

Thought of the day: Watching your neighbors pull a whole pig out of a hot hole in the ground sure reminds you of how much a pig looks like a fat human.
And, the manly young men did not cook it enough in the pit. I am popular tonight, because we have a giant gas grill, and they're using it next door to finish the pig. And because we keep playing rude music like warped minstrels in an tacky italian restaraunt, walking from clot to clot of humans playing rude songs. The crowd really loves songs like "liquor and whores" from the Trailer Park Boys show. I'm amazed at what bad taste my new bandmate Micheal can pull out for drunks.


Liquor and whores
Liquor and whores
Cigarettes and dope
and mustard and bologna
andLiquor and whores
I went down Drinkin' '
at the Legion
I met a girl she was nice
She was pretty and pleasing
She said "Hey boyWe should do some marrying"
I said sure but before we do
There's something you should know
I like Liquor and whores
Liquor and whores
Cigarettes and dope and mustard and bologna
andLiquor and whores...

Objects in the mirror

Sometimes I wonder what it would be like to be one of my pals for a day. To see the world with their eyes, see how I and all my strange pals move through it with a different sensibility, to see how they might see me, to understand what they like about being my friend.

Then I start to think of all the ways I think I am, compared to all the ways people think I am, and I think about running screaming away from the whole idea.

Alexander Pushkin once said, "better the illusions that exalt us than ten thousand truths". I think I understand that.

Maybe part of it's just growing into being a round faced invisible middle aged woman, but the older I get, the freakier it seems to think about how others see us moving through the world.

I know I'm fuckin' charming, well built, dramatic and darkly enigmatic as well as being a hardcore genius. But I doubt the rest of the world sees me that way. So I am glad I can't see myself through the eyes of other people.

Telepathy would be a terrible gift, hearing things you don't need to know, like how often people would think of scratching their butthole, how much they think about sex they'll never have, and how stupid and boring the thoughts most of the human race think.

And on another note:

Happy "fuck you King George, we're outta your empire, and you can go piss up a rope along with your Parliament, and then hang yourself with it" weekend. Odd to think we have our own King George now, who locks up people without due process in his own Tower of London in Cuba, a place we embargo because it's not a democracy.

I have been thinking of the irony of using a base in Cuba to keep people locked up without recourse since we did it.

But I digress. I'm going next door now, so I am egressing too, to the party our neighbors are having, where a whole pig was roasted, to drink beer and play some music and masticate dead porcine mammals.

Quote of the Day: HG Wells

Every time I see an adult on a bicycle, I no longer despair for the future of the human race,"

H. G. Wells.

I got six of them, three off the curb. I may ride slow and not too far, but there's a beauty in crusing along on a giant beach cruiser converted to an oversized stingray on a cool summer night.

Makes you feel like you're not an old cranky fart ranting about things for a while.

More Washington Island Photos

The beach at the end of the campground did not suck.

I watched the scariest looking sunset ever there. The sun was bigger than I've ever seen it as it set, and more than once I thought about how it looked like it could go into a red giant phase.

Then I thought, if things did end, I'd be in about the best place one could ask for.

This poor crab was somebody's dinner. There were lots of signs of crab carnage, those gulls were hungry, and there were a lot of them.

Monkey lookin' rock.

We detoured off the road on the way back through the hell that is Door County tourist land to a little place called Rowley Bay, hoping to find the bakery they threatend was there.

They lied! But on the way I saw this little cemetary, and this statue. No name or markings to say who was laid to rest there, just a fine chunk of angel on top of the grave. Pretty classy.

We had a pretty good weekend, but I felt sort of odd, like somebody slipped me a low dose of thorazine. A savage torpor, a relentless slothfull feeling grabbed me a lot of the time.

But we got a lot of sun, I got to ride bikes around the Island, and the company was pretty damn cool. Ellyn has some seriously cool folks there to hang with, I can see why she loves two weeks of not much to do.

It drove me a little nuts, though. I'm already a slacker, deeply in touch with my inner Big Lebowski.

It also felt pretty wierd to stay at a resort. I worked at one, my parent's gig at the summer camp for 20 plus years made me more used to being the staff at a joint like the one we stayed at. I felt like I should have been running trail rides on horses or working in the kitchen or painting the cottages.

We at Hint of Dementia will be returning to our unreasonable rants about humanity next. Sorry for the intrusion of good taste and the lack of swear words, it must fucking suck to read such a nice post.

My Weekend on Washington Island, The Slacker zone

Rajani, Elias, Ellyn and Kori, on the tiny front porch of the cabin that Ellyn was kind enough to share with us.

I embrace my sloth demon, and read half the weekend, all bad fantasy and science fiction. Damn, I'm starting to look my age. These things happen.

Kori and Ellyn, aka elly for two weeks, on the bench in front of the bay.

I walked around the beach picking up rocks, looking at where the dents and shapes would make faces, then took a few sharpie markers and drew these guys. I did this for about three hours, then put them back on the beach. I wonder if anybody will notice them down there in the rocks before they wash off. Not that it matters, it was a fun way to fill a few hours in the sun.

This rock reminded me of "the scream"