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Me n' dollface and my Castor Beans in the garden, last week.

It's been a strange month or so, and the sheer weirdness of watching the hyper-capitalist dream grind itself apart while BushCo runs out the clock has left me feeling like doing more thinking about all the strange possibilities to come than blogging.
I've been battening down my mental hatches before the storm, so to speak.
It's also been an ugly season of politics, one that makes me want to shut off my computer and go for a walk. The kind that takes six months and to somewhere where there's a temperate climate beach. Hopefuly after McCain's effort to feed the dogs of hate crashes.
I don't have much hope for Obama being able to do much but manage inherited crisis after crisis, but that cranky old bastard McCain has proved he's about as evil as they come the last few days.

And his running mate is even more of a freak and liar and danger to us all.

Kori and I did our road trip, driving down to Erick and Missy and Gene and Kathleen's hometown of Athens.
We played pinball, worked on guitars, I got to play about a dozen nice Les Pauls of varying age and make, through filthy amps that made my bones rattle and my nipples hard.
Kori spent two days geeking out fixing a Twilight Zone and an Addams Family pinball machines. She loved it.
We left Athens on the day the remains of Hurricane Ike lashed Ohio, Indiana and big parts of the Midwest.
It sucked. Really, really sucked. I wrestled the truck through winds up to sixty miles per hour for nine hours before we stopped in Indianapolis for the night, and it took stopping at three different hotels before we found one with electricity.
The next day we rolled west to the Mississippi, taking what seemed like a thousand years to cross the ugly boring flat fields of Illinois.
We hit the big river and started cruising up the river road. It was pleasant enough driving, but we were amazed by the lack of local joints to find some food at. We found nothing worth stopping at until we hit Galena.
Galena is an old town, filled with well preserved buildings, amazingly well built.
But it's a TOURIST HELL. Really. It's about as fucking overpriced and ugly as I could imagine, and I do not lack imagination. We tried to find a joint for lunch, but all we found was snooty overpriced joints selling nine dollar hamburgers.
There is no hamburger worth nine dollars. For god's sake, it's machine chewed dead cow, not prime steak.
We walked up and down the main street, filled with overpriced knickknacks and six dollar Carmel apples, through a cloud of white people perfume thick enough to kill flying cockroaches. Why do so many middle aged white women feel the need to drench themselves in fake stink?
We both voted with our feet, slogged through the zombie upscale shoppers and hopped back into the truck and headed back along the river road.
About an hour later we saw the first road sign pointing to Madison and both decided we'd had enough driving and blew off the last night of our trip to head for home.
I'll post some photos later of the pinball repair. I didn't even bother taking any in Galena, the whole town is a doomed high end snob shell of it's self.
When the big inflation spiral starts after Bush slinks out of the back door of the White house, that place is going to be emptier than an overflowing porta-potty.
Sure looked good from the second story up, though.
We also descended into the bowels of the earth and took a trip to the big lake they call Gitchee Gumme, but more about that later.