Go Read Kunstler, Now

Quote of the day:


"What I advocate is a broad recognition that reality is compelling us to change our behavior. Reality is trying to tell us that we can't run an economy based on nothing more than investment schemes without directing investment into activities that produce things of value. Reality is telling us to be very worried about living arrangements that can only function with copious imports of oil from people who are disgusted with us. Reality is telling us that we can't divert our food crops into making motor fuels without people becoming unable to afford either fuel or food. Reality is telling us to redirect our culture more toward things-we-do-with-other-people and less toward things-we-do-with-new-things. Reality is telling us to shift from avoidance behavior and denial to engaging with reality in order to lead lives that are consistent with reality."

50

Fifty years ago on the 21st of September, my twin sister and I were pushed into this world by our mother. My sister's long gone, making me wonder if I was the evil twin, but that's another story.
Fifty's a big number. One I'm feeling mixed feelings about.
The older I get, the more ambivalence I have about everything. Time slips by faster, and I think about what the hell to do with this strange gift of sentience and awareness. It's a luxury of sorts, having time to think and reflect and fuck off.
I don't have to make much money these days, being partnered up with a sweetie who mostly likes her job and is in no hurry to push me into something as mind numbing as cleaning houses like I used to do.
There's a line if Fight Club that I think about often. "on a long enough time line, the survival rate of everyone drops to zero". Knowing that fifty of my seventy five or so good years are behind me, it makes a lot of sense.
Like most people, I scurried around and obsessed over getting things done for a long time. Now I wonder if the time I spend goofing off at EVP coffee, the time I spend on my favorite online instrument builder's forum and those times I spend watching movies on the idiot box with dollface aren't the most important.
I'm sure as hell not gonna be choking out my last breath thinking I should have cleaned up my shop more often. I hope I don't.
It's been a rough year since my last birthday, and filled with change for me. It's made me sort of cranky and reflective. It had in it a bad ear infection that left me with one ear ringing most of the time, shoulder problems that mostly got fixed by physical therapy, and what I am pretty sure is the start of arthritis in my back and hands.
It was a year where what I thought was a lifetime friendship went horribly bad, starting with a fucked up recording project with the band I thought I was important to, and ending in a terribly depressing breaking up of a five year musical and personal friendship with an ugly series of toxic vibes via email.
I'm still trying to put that one behind me, being thrown under the bus by somebody who I thought was central to my tribe, who I trusted to be honest with me. Sometimes I think it's stupid to take community and friendship as I seem to.
Then I realize it's what makes me feel grounded, connected to something bigger that means something. Maybe I just need better bozo/bullshit filters.
But it's not all pain and stupid human tricks, this strange year. It was another fine year where Kori and I managed to still not get in a fight, (thirteen years or so now without one), where she showed me again how sweet life can be when you're lucky enough to have a partner like her.
It also had Tim and Bess and Robin and Pam and a ton of other folks in it to make it both sweet and solid, musically and spiritually. It brought me a new camera that has woken up my long sleeping desire to take up photography.
It's also been a year where I started to blossom musically, even if it was and is scary as hell to both record and sing my own stuff. I am incredibly lucky that I have my musical mob, both the rock band and the oddly acoustic trio.
It's been a year where my garden has been throbbingly happy, where I learned to make pickles and can salsa and to grow beets and dahlias.
It's a year where I got my first new used truck in 13 years. A gray 1992 Toyota Extra Cab that replaces the one I lost when my life bumped up against the reset button and split for the west coast back in 1993.
That one was new. This one's old. But I am starting to be a lot like that truck, two thirds used up but still sturdy and ready to roll, even if I'm not sure where I'm rolling to.
So I'm going to drive that new truck out to the movie theater on Friday, and catch a matinee of a really good bad post apocalyptic movie, (my favorite bad genre), get a nice Mexican dinner I don't have to cook, and then have a small party with my posse on Saturday.
That Does Not Suck, and I'm grateful to whatever god it is I don't believe in for all those good things I've gotten. And that I'm not working cleaning toilets, even if I was really good at it for a long time.

Going to see the Athens, Ohio mob

I hate Indiana. Most of Ohio too. Every time I drive across either one, I feel like I'm surrounded by idiots and enemies, morons and meatbags.
The freeway rest stops are ugly, nasty places filled with mostly morbidly obese slobs driving listing and smoking old Chrysler minivans, plasterd with yellow ribbons and Jesus bumper stickers, ugly waddling people in cheap imported Wal-Mart clothes, clutching huge bags of Cinnabon rolls or Big Mac value meals and giant sodas, or those horrible bovine milk gland juice grande frappalatechinnowhatever the fuck things they sell at fast coffee joints.
It's a long unbroken stretch of Retughlican ugly from the start of Gary, Indiana all the way over to the Pennsylvania border.
The only parts that don't suck are when you're asleep when somebody else is driving, or when you get to see a nuclear powerplant, and you realize that the winds blow east and it won't hit you when it melts down.
Nothin' but bible thumping morons, giving birth to more moronic NASCAR fans, some of whom think the biggest thing to reach for in life is a massive four wheel drive, a place playing horrible music in a Mega Church band on Sundays between the more than likely Gay Pastor's venting and ranting sermons and his PowerPoint presentation.
Every now and then one of those meatbags snaps, and starts randomly shooting people from overpasses, pushed just a little too far by his bible freak conservative inbred family.
Maybe it's the inbreeding, maybe it's because they drive out everybody who's got a brain, or is queer or odd or interesting. Or those people leave to keep their sanity.
Horrible places, both states. Aside from one good restaurant in South Bend, and Athens, Ohio, you could depopulate most of both states, move the stupids to someplace else and maybe have a chance at reclaiming them. Maybe.
We're going to Athens this weekend. Athens is a college town, a mini-Madison, a shot of Berkley in an otherwise idiot state. It's got all the things I love, a great punk/rock music bar called The Union, a great hot dog joint, a good Mexican restaurant, a good university atmosphere, and my pals who work at Stewart McDonald guitar supply and my demented pal Billy R, who makes the coolest carved sculpture guitars in the whole world.
http://www.fishguitar.com/index2.html
It's a ten hour drive through that wretched god fearing stretch. I only do it about once a year, but this weekend the party is at my pal Gene's new joint, a guitar repair shop in a small crumbling town about ten miles from Athens. He bought an old Odfellow's hall and renovated it. It's a great funky old space, the kind of place we never build anymore in this country full of garbage disposable pole building big box stores.
And to make it even more fun, we're renting a big car with a killer stereo and air. Whooweee!
But we still have to drive across Indiana and most of Ohio. Pray for us.

Viruses suck unconsenting donkey dicks

I have never gotten a virus or malware on my computer until this week. The other day I got hit by four trojan virues, and now I have wierd pop up pages almost every time I hit a new web page.
I'd like to find the fuckers who write this shit and rip their guts out slowly, a half inch at a time through their noses.
I know, in the global scheme of things there are many worse evils. But to decide to write malware and trojans for fun to fuck other people's time and creative efforts over is a trait that makes you an evil shithead.

Plenty?

SSince I wrote this, I found out that our CSA, Harmony Valley, is about half underwater, and about half the vegetables they were going to supply us acording to our contract, are possibly destroyed by this wierd weather. We can replace them with store bought vegetables, but it just ties into what I posted about being on a knife edge. I had planned on canning a bunch of their stuff for this winter.

It's been raining for days, over a foot fell in the last two. Rivers are reaching flood stage, four people died over in Minnesota, and there's rain in the forecast all week. The farmers must be freaking out, their fields saturated, their crops starting to mold and rot.

I went into the jungle that is my garden yesterday, and picked about 40 or 50 pounds of tomatoes, a milk crate size box of beets, and we harvested dozens of peppers, because I think I'd have a lot of moldy or rotten food going to waste.

Those tomatoes are in the freezer now, peeled and seeded and turning into blocks of icy red raw materials to be salsa in a few weeks. I've taken to canning things like salsa and applesauce, because they're soooooo much better than store bought. And I feel good knowing I have something of a stockpile.

We live on a knife's edge in this world. Most people have no stockpiles of food, few people do home canning or keep dried foods, and most don't think about their food supply other than what they need that week. I've had people who come over joke around about how we have a pantry full of dried beans and noodles, and lots of canned goods, like we're freaks for having a month or so of food around. But then they joke about coming over here when things get bad.

Most people never seem to think about the fact that we're about one bad harvest away from the start of starvation as a world and as a country.

They take for granted that the drive through and the big supermarket filled with low quality food is going to be there to give them corn syrup filled junk food and factory farm meat.

One look at what happened in New Orleans two years ago tells me there's sure a problem with a lack of long term thinking going on in our country.

Now people are talking about ethanol as though it's going to save us from the oil crisis, but all it's really going to do is drive up food prices, (and beer, because barley is being replaced with corn) something that's already started, and destroy the last six inches of top soil and drain the aquifers of the midwest so people can keep up the doomed motoring culture we're addicted to.

I am no great visionary, nor a prophet of doom. I like to write and read dark apocalyptic fiction, but I also love pizza and beer, cool summer nights, being able to buy heartburn drugs and get my teeth fixed by a real dentist.

All of those things are only going to keep going if we figure out how to make other arrangements than the business as usual method we're doing now. Between global climate change, dwindling global oil reserves and the problems of having over six billion people on a planet that could support less than a billion at the current rates of consumption, we're in for some overly interesting times.

Baby Belly in shadows

My coffeeshop pal J. has been modeling for me, and it's the first time in years I've taken nudes of anybody. She's a very good model, very comfortable with herself, even if there's few comfortable ways to move about the earth with a belly this big.

She's going to have that baby in the next few weeks. We're going to shoot more pictures once the wrinkled little diaper filler gets used to this bright and cruel world.

I've often thought it would be fun to be pregnant. For about five seconds of each month of pregnancy. But I like baby back ribs too much to ever make a baby. That Would Be Wrong, even if I am from the same state as Jeffery Dahmer and Ed Gein.

My pal Gail, An Amazing Drummer

I shot this the last night I played with her at the High Noon last winter.

I miss playing with Gail. I miss her amazing timing, her subtle but freakin’ awesome sense of dynamics, the way she and I locked together on some of the songs we used to play before I got shoved out of the band for being too alive.

Or being an asshole, depending on who you talk to. They are almost the same thing.
Her amazing drumming made me feel like I was connected to something really, really huge, and when it was time for a solo, it felt like she was the jet turbines pushing my guitar parts into something more than just a bunch of notes to fill a space. With her behind me, I felt like my wah pedal was connected to god’s own hotline, that my amp and strings and fingers could tear down skyscrapers.
I have no idea if that translated to anybody else, but it felt like there was enough joy and savage glee in those moments to push life out of the safe and bland ordinary mode most people fall into by default.
Touching passion is a scary thing. A lot of people run away from it.
I have a great drummer now, Robin’s his own madman/savant/genius, and the new electric band goes further out into interesting places than I felt the old one ever did, with people in it who want to get out on the edge.

But for that year or two when I got to play with Gail, there was a huge mojo for me.
I have no idea what things are like now in my old band. When the long knives came out, when I was fired after five years of being Bob’s right hand tool, I did my best to move on, putting all the guitars I played in that band away, stripping back to one distortion pedal and playing totally different guitars in standard tuning, things like cheesy Les Paul copies and humbucker guitars, doing lots of feedback and distortion work.
Steering myself into the other side of the musical ditch mostly worked, although the ugly feelings still linger in a few places in my head, more than I wanted to.

I felt oddly empty and sad for months.
It was a strange winter. Starting up the acoustic project with Bess and Tim helped a lot, although I still can’t get used to having to sing and play my own songs. It’s not the role I’m used to, and to have people expect me to bring in my songs and have them actually want to play them hasn’t happened since I started playing with Bob in Tin Ceiling.
The new bands feel more vital, and like I’m no longer chained to one guy’s rather bland, one size fits all rhythm approach, or being stuck in a band where people can’t seem to step up and let things rip, or worse yet, pretend to be playing while hiding behind other members.
I felt like things were going to shit the last few months I was in Bob’s band. If a number of people in the band avoiding conflict had actually talked a few things out, I might have been able to leave on good terms.
Instead, the usual human thing happened. I got ejected from Bob Manor and the Getaway Drivers without ever having a chance to talk things over, got blamed in a series of increasingly strange emails for everything that was wrong with the band, and fired without even getting to talk it over with the band.
At that point, all the tracks I put down for the new CD were done, we did one last High Noon gig that felt like something was badly broken, and I got fired by email the next week.
Fired by email. By a guy I spent a very long time playing music with, who was one of my tribe, and somebody I felt was one of my best friends.
It sort of put the whammy on me. It’s not what I expected, nor what I would have ever thought would happen. It felt like a divorce, both liberating and terribly damaging at the same time.
But for all the ugly weirdness that came with being booted by people who could not actually face me, I am grateful for the time I got to spend playing with Gail.
She’s a fine human, a great drummer and she was honest, direct and didn’t ever bullshit me. That's something to treasure in this world full of self declared saints and sneaky shitheads.

Cabbage!

My garden is making me very afraid.

They seek the light, but dwell in the dark of space

I love babies, but sometimes I fear them, for they are often not really babies, but aliens hiding among us, seeking to steal our vital bodily juices and to confuse us by imitating real human babies.

I think this one's a real human, though. I hope, but I thought he was cute, so the odds are he's not really human. I have bad luck that way.

Roller Derby Girl with Bruise

I
At the roller derby practice there are often times when all those adult mammals on wheels rolling madly around collide. Sasafrass was kind enough to show us her most recent use of her body as a canvas. I think the tattoo goes well with the lovely purple blue and yellow and red.

Crouched on the Couch, 1993

She was barely 18. She walked up to me at a group art show I had a few nudes in and asked me if I was ellie. I said yes. She asked me if she could model nude for me.

I love this planet.

This was shot on a warm summer afternoon in my living room. There was a big storm rolling in, and the light had that strange color it gets before the thunder and lighting kicks in. A greenish tint was in the air, and I barely had enough light to catch the photo.

I have no idea where she is now, last I heard anything, she was living in Minneapolis, had a platnium blonde crewcut and was happily tangled up with some cute boy.

Gone To Canada

This weekend Kat and Leah are off, to a new life in Kat's home country. I'll miss them. Leah's finally going to be legally married to her sweetie, but she's also leaving her home country.

Lots to think about, these two have. Bon Voyage, my pretties. I'll be up to see you sooner or later, if only to escape BushCo and the new order.

Pine Hill, Stump with Legs

It was a hell of a place, a heavily wooded hill between two lakes, a few miles from anywhere. We used to go camp there when I was a teenager, canoeing across the lake we lived on with marshmallows and vodka and sandwiches stolen from the summer camp kitchen.
It was filled with huge pine trees, big open spaces to sit and look out across the water as the sun set. I kept going back there for a long time, either riding horses or hiking. About 100 yards from where the stump in the photo was my horse once tripped and I broke both wrists and my back, spending the summer with two casts on my arms and one hell of a sore spine from the compression fractures. It bugs me more today than it did in the decade after the accident. Part of the price you pay for having a wild and often too interesting life.
We were out hiking the day I took this, sometime around 1978. I had only been shooting for a year or so, and it was one of those hot summer days where the air smelled of pine needles and swamp water, where the sun baked the horseflies and dragon flies into a happy frenzy of energy. I hated those horse and deer flies. They had a bite that felt like a napalm covered bee sting.

Nice Teeth!

Another coffee shop beauty! I think it's the coffee down at EVP, it tends to make the world look very odd to me.

Nude with Coffee, Sunday morning, around 1988

That apartment was huge and ancient, above a glass store, nine rooms for 250 bucks a month. Cheap even for 1988 money. I shared it with a series of people, one a lunatic furniture salesman and fanatic bike rider who screwed as many girls as he could, then an artist pal who did dark and wild paintings and drank heavily.

He got a bad Jesus virus, decided I was damned to hell and moved out, and on the way told two mutual friends they could move in over the weekend while I was gone.

The apartment was next to a door factory where machines hummed 24/7 and sawdust collectors exploded and the fire department would scream up every few days to put them out.

Across the street from a biker bar where drunks would stumble out to scream and puke on the street, or roar around on big loud Harleys and choppers.

The real kind of biker, not the pampered dentists and clean smelling yuppies who came later.

The two new roomies turned out to be new age roommates from Hell. They preached love and bought weird crystals and drank strange overpriced elixirs made from seabed minerals. And they fought like demons late at night, screaming and throwing each other around.

I finally had to move out, ready to kill both of them as they slept just so I could sleep a whole night. I found out later they had some new age guru who had "found a dark spirit in the old apartment".

They did some strange ass ritual/ceremony with a six hundred pound amethyst crystal to exorcise it. I think they were exorcising me. Somewhere, in between roommate madness I shot this.

I had a spare room, with great morning light overlooking the busy street below. I shot this one rare quiet Sunday morning sometime in 1988 or so.

She was my first nude model that I photographed, and we were a couple for a very long time. And she still looks great 20 some years later.

My Back Yard

It's taken twenty or so Toyota truckloads of mulch, burned out one rototiller, about a half a truckload of landscape timbers and seven years.

It also grows about two inches an hour after a rain.

Twentyeight tomato plants, six or seven Castorbean plants, too many morning glories, beets, cosmos, marigolds, cukes, and god only knows what else.

I'm happy with it. This is also my commute to work on the way home, all sixty or seventy feet of it. That is far from suck.

Torso, Early 80's

One from the vault, shot in the old photo studio I used to work in. Shot with a big, boxy and very nice Hassleblad on real film and printed in a real stinky darkroom.

I do not miss working in the darkroom. Not one little bit. I think 15 years or so of soaking one's hands in sodium sulfite and glacial acetic acid was long enough.

Photoshop is far less stinky and more fun.

My Homeboy Lucas shows his True Form

They barf, shit and cry among us, and I for one welcome my pal Christine's new rapidly growing minature Alien Overlord and Activities Director.

All hail Lukasss, Ambasador from the planet Haa'raxaloo Prime!

P.S.- His name pronunced Lu-cas, although given his ability to barf up curds from his mom's milk, maybe it should be Mucus. I'm sure all the little bastards on the playgrounds of his future will call him that.
Kids are really not nice people. I know, I live next to an elementary school playgound, and they swear more than the cast of Deadwood.

True pregnant beauty

Sometimes, the pregnant female form is about

the most wonderful thing in the world to look at.

Screwed up blog code

I have been away from the blog because Blogger has a "autosave" feature that pissed me off so much I walked away. It would save everything I wrote with a new entry, and I wound up with about three dozen posts for every sentence I wrote.

I hope it's fixed now.

And now, the sexual organs of flowers. Passion flowers from my deck.

I got a new camera. It fucking rocks. A digital SLR that has a really, really wide angle lens. Thanks Kori!

Prom Queen

SShe was the talk of the prom in that fine frock.

Kaboom, Tar Baby-Man with Malcontentia!

He pounds the skins

sounds sweeter than sin

he tickles and taps

knows where to rap!

The lovely dark eyed Pam

Does one become a sort of rockstar because they look like they should be, or because they rock out? Dark mysteries like this escape my puny primate brain.

T-Man, with crow

A photo from last night's band shooting. Scary, but damn handsome.

My New Loud Band

In all it's middle aged glory. Pam, Robin, Tim and that rude malcontented fake redhead.

This band's fun.

They don't give me dirty looks when I sing, ask me to play my songs instead of just telling me they're too dark, or ignoring them,.

They don't seem to see me as a tool to further their music and egos.

It feels really good, and like we're all in it for the sheer joy of playing music.

And we get to play loud!

We have two gigs coming up on June 2, too. More on that later.

Eliminate the middle man

Theology: the learning and developing of methods and practice in how to make people feel like shit about themselves, to make them scared of imaginary beings, also a method of middle man money extraction and a means to power and wealth filled with manipulative and needless speculation.
This madness is also tightly woven into religion, modern physics and political identity, and is both a curse and a source of endless wars, hatred and emotional abuse.

Spirituality: the day to day realization that there are things bigger than one's self, and that the huge and beautiful mystery known as life and sentience is bigger than our tiny primate brains could hold.
Being solidly connected to spiritual thinking in a world full of fundamentalist thinkers is a rare gift, and sensitive people who can rub more than a few neurons together are often driven mad by people practicing the often barbaric and ruthless methods of theology. Which have been all of them from where I see things.

My New Homeboy

My new pal Lucas. He's not much of a conversationalist, but sure has a loud voice. Mostly he just sleeps and farts a lot. Almost every time he stretches.

News Flash! The Pope sets pagan babies free! ( act now and we'll toss in a free bottle of holy water!)

Today the pope said he was getting rid of limbo, and all those pagan babies I worried about in third grade must be filing into heaven one at a time.
I wonder if heaven's got a DMV take a number setup, or if they just open up a whole new subdevelopment? There's gotta be a long line, going back to the neaderthal age of babies waiting to get in.
Then there's all those good hearted adult pagans that were supposed to be waiting too.
I wonder what the waiting room looked like, if it had horrible uncomfortable chairs, bad bathrooms, horrible coffee that tasted like cat piss filtered through broken and burnt walnut husks, with buletin boards on the walls covered in notices for things like the limboholics anonomyous group, and if the room had flickering flourescents and a strange pine disinfectant smell?
I knew the whole Catholic church and reliegon were horseshit by the time I was ten. And it was those poor pagan babies waiting in limbo forever that woke me up. I suppose I should be thankfull and not bite the hand that both blessed me and woke me up.

Cash money from the market gig

Right before we left on our road trip, my pal Bess and I played at the wintertime Farmer's Market. They liked us! We got fifty bucks tossed into the violin case, a great free organic breakfast, played two long sets for an oddly attentive crowd, and even had four people ask us if we had a cd and what our band name was. I told em' Led Zepplin.

It was good to play out again, I've been missing it since I got booted from the last band I was in.

Playing as an acoustic duo with Bess rocks. It's simple, organic and flowing, and really relaxing

to escape the weirdness that comes from playing with ego and insecurity driven singer songwriters. I sure love playing the loose instrumental music, and the crowd sure seemed to pay more attention than I expected.

The woman who runs the entertainment at the winter market wants us back again next fall when the big noisy, stroller and tourist choked market closes down again for the season.

What I Saw On My Trip To Cleveland

Sneaker, Atlantic Ocean, Wet Foot.

Kitty Hawk Sunrise, Again. April 2006

Snow in April

small flakes are drifing down

april is here but with a frown
tommorow when we leave this town
the goddamn snowlfakes
will follow us around
this weather sucks
but it won't last

things got green really fast

this ugly winter will

be in the past.

Toadkiller Dog drawing

Too much coffee brings out the artist in me. Or at least something like an artist.

I liked the name Toadkiller Dog in Glen Cook's Black Company novels, so I drew one. One that looks nothing like the one in the book.

http://riotclitshave.livejournal.com/ another good image site

I have no idea who took this photo, but I sure feel like it could be me on a bad day.

riot rite right clit clip clickshave slave save : http://riotclitshave.livejournal.com/ is another kick ass photo site I hit every few days.http://riotclitshave.livejournal.com/

Stuck In Customs photoblog

Go check out Trey Ratcliff's blog of photos. Here's one sample image.
www.stuckincustoms.com

Two Steps (more lyrics)

Two steps behind

She might just look back
to see where she's been
if just remind her to say
never again

One foot in front
two steps behind
headin’ on out
lookin’ for signs

Freedom comes hard
fear comes first
leaving is easy
all it takes is the thirst
better times and newer things
different songs and fewer strings

and She might just look back
to see where she's been
if just to remind her to say
never again

the road is the road
it's not good or bad
but it being back on it
makes her feel good
It hurts her to leave
hurts worse to stay
her feet are on it either way

She might just look back
to see where she's been
if just remind her to say
never again

One foot in front
two steps behind
headin’ on outlookin’ for signs

At the coffee shop (self portrait)

I love wide angle lenses. They fit my view of the world, a huge place

filled with angels and assholes and flowers and freaks.

Job title becomes new name

I think I'm going to change my blog name to Malcontentia, the dark and evil artist formerly known as ellie.
It's all part of a nefarious scheme to destroy the self confidence of the world's manly men with guitars.
I think I'll make a loose black and red leather coustume and get a utility belt with ropes and wire cutters and a super soaker full of bitter bile to shoot out at the people who irritate me.
Then again, I might just go play my guitar in the sun, and rejoice that I'm not stuck in an office full of management types. It sounds like less work than being a superheroine, and it's much more fun, soaking up sun and making vitamin D.

Warm, at last

Wet rain
mud and slush and crusty dirt
the fields have bed head
grass matts up like a hipster's straw blonde head
cigarette buts and crocus green
winter leaves the scene
whoa, strange feeling, I'm warm!
spring does not suck.

Unreasonable Man

I like this quote, but I'd change it to human instead of man. But old George was not a man who lived in times where women were considered equal.
Then again, in most of the world these days, they're still not considered equal. Never mind.


"The reasonable man adapts himself to the conditions that surround him... The unreasonable man adapts surrounding conditions to himself... All progress depends on the unreasonable man."

George Bernard Shaw

Junkyard lover lyrics

she got a big mean pitbull
tear you apart
she got tattoo says mother
over her heart
sleeps in the junkyard
down by the swamp
throw you down on her bed
for a short little romp
yeah she's a junkyard lover
gonna tear you apart
gasoline and roses
squalor and sin
chugging down bottles of tonic and gin

she keeps a loaded shotgun
under her seat
got a pair of legs look like
rock solid meat
she swears like a sailor
drinks like a fish
shoots rock salt and buckshot
and she can't seem to miss

yeah she's your junkyard lover
gonna tear you apart
gasoline and roses
squalor and sin
chugging down bottles of tonic and gin

He wouldn't stay down (even more dark lyrics)

she hit him but he wouldn't stay down
she wasn't taking any more
from that drunken ass clown
she hit him but he wouldn't stay down
it looked like an accident when they carried him out
he was flopping around like a half dead trout
all she said when they asked her was
"he's drunk and he fell"
she hit him but he wouldn't stay down
she wasn't taking any more
from that drunken ass clown
she hit him but he wouldn't stay down
seventeen stiches they put in his head
the blood they drained out
was a dark ugly red
and some people said he'd be better off dead
she hit him but he wouldn't stay down
she wasn't taking any more
from that drunken ass clown
she hit him but he wouldn't stay down
now he walks around town with a stupid grin
big old scar from his ear to his chin
he drools and he laughs sees things that aren't there
the new village idiot in the town square
she hit him but he wouldn't stay down
she wasn't taking any more
from that drunken ass clown
she hit him but he wouldn't stay down

Where the blacktop started (more lyrics)

She drove on out
to where the blacktop started
thinkin' it was long past time
that they parted
down the road
where the highway called
better off alone than broken hearted
She drove all night
drove so long and drove so far
only stopped to gas up the car
eyes got tired and her back got tight
she drove on into a new dawn's light
every mile behind her felt so right
been so long
since she'd felt this light
drivin' all day
and into the night
things were bad
then things got worse
every word spoken
became a curse
had to give up the fight
to win the war
every mile behind her felt so right
been so long
since she'd felt this light
drivin' all day
and into the night

Pig Chow (lyrics)

She dragged his body down the stairs
one last shove
pushed him right in
to the hog pen
watched as the hogs
dug right in
she took a rake in the morning
pulled his clothing back out
burned it in the yard
then she got the hell out
took the truck and the shotgun
his money and dog
put the pedal to the floor
drove until dark
never looked in the rearview
he had a mean black heart
seems like killing
isn't always a sin
sometimes it feels so good
you want to do it again
yeah it feels so good
you want to do it again

I've been working for a few months on a project of songs one of my pals calls Swamp Noir, this is one that popped out the other day.
Hopefully the three or four of us can get this stuff into cd form before we're dead. Or before we get too wrapped up in the joy of warm weather bike rides.

Snow Keeps Melting lyrics

the snow keeps melting
the rain keeps falling
that river is rising
and we don't have a boat
I'm thinkin' maybe god
will throw me a rope
cause the road is blocked
it's a shred of hope

the wind is howling
and the sky's coal black
I waited too long for
my baby to come back
the power's off
the food's all gone
when that water comes in
gotta hold on strong

three feet of water
comin' through the door
it's just gettin' started
gonna be a lot more
it's cold as hell
and black as a grave
mother nature's in the mood
to misbehave

the snow keeps melting
the rain keeps falling
that river is rising
and we don't have a boat
I'm thinkin' maybe god
will throw me a rope
cause the road is blocked
it's a shred of hope

Louder

You stopped listening
I talked louder
things got ugly
everything became harder
The wheels came off
things went bad
losing each other
both of us mad
the saddest thing of all
is it didn't have to happen
when the end came

you didn't even call
just loaded up my inbox
with nasty vitriol
so you asked me to go
I said ok
sick and tired of fighting
you got what you wanted
I went away
coulda shoulda woulda
it's what we didn't say
it's all so different
when you first asked me
to come out and play
coulda shoulda woulda
before it all went away
might have made a difference
to say what we didn't say
but it sure did end

an a pointless ugly way

Lifestyle or New Job Title?

malcontent
Function:
noun
Date:
1581
: a discontented person: a: one who bears a grudge from a sense of grievance or thwarted ambition b: one who is in active opposition to an established order or government : Rebel

I have been branded
a cranky malcontent
a troublemaker
and a grinch
someone who just refuses
to give in an inch
It's really quite simple
I hear them say
just shut the hell up
and do it my way!
But life is too short
and ugly and unfair
so I'd rather just give them
a steely eyed glare
Tom Petty told me
he wouldn't back down
he'd sure as hell stand his ground
and I agree his advice is sound
and tell all the assholes
when they come around
be carefull of those
with whom you mess around
cause it's your ass
that I will pound.

Viral Microfiction, Chapter One:

Anybody who's been reading this blog knows I've been writing microfictions about a big die off of the human race from an incredbly lethal virus. Oddly enough, I never wrote an intro story.
So today I did, and here it is.
I've started recording some of the virus stories to put out a podcast or cd, having pals read it. I hope to get it done before long.
Anyway, here's the first chapter. Some of the information is from the Bird Flu Wiki, some of it is right out of the science news I read.


The virus seemed to come out of nowhere, and at the same time it popped up everywhere. One week there were only the usual casually dismissed reports of wild birds and animals dying, the next week the morgues of every city and town had started to fill up.

Jet airliners and the interstate highway system allowed it to spread like a wildfire, throwing the sparks that ignited into a wave of death unlike anything modern civilization had seen before.

Every school, daycare and hospital became a center for infection.

In North America, the for profit health system had driven cost cutting in every sector of health care, and there were no isolation wards or extra beds to be had for the number of patients already in the system.

The virus spread on the wind, spread hand to hand, in offal and waste, and even got into the water systems of every town through the wastewater treatment plants . Nobody had time to even figure out where it came from.Some people blamed leftover

Cold War science from the former Soviet Union, others blamed US government researchers.

It may have come from a French lab project that had the goal of using DNA samples to remake ancient viruses. All anybody really knew was that it had a mortality rate of over 94 percent, and just like the 1918 flu, could kill healthy people who became infected within 24 hours.

It was hardest on healthy adults in their 40’s, and nothing seemed to slow it down. Quarantine proved useless, mostly because the just in time delivery systems used in most of the world meant that there were no stockpiles of food, medicine or fuel of any size left in North America.

The truckers who kept the country’s supply chain of food, and medical and fuel supplies also unknowingly supplied the virus along their routes.Some folks saw it coming, but almost nobody had a clue how bad things were going to get. Many of the people who did live died in the fires, the famine, or gave up and died from suicide or trivial medical problems.

Problems that modern science had made non fatal became killers in the space of weeks once the house of cards that civilization was had fallen down.

The huge numbers of dead just added to the misery and level of disease. It was the start of the Chinese year of the Golden Pig, what was supposed to be a time of turmoil, chaos and opportunity, when every child born was fated to be gifted with fortune and wealth.Mostly they just got dead. The few who lived had some seriously weird times ahead….

Her fists, In Black and White, 1988 or so

She was my main model for a long time. She liked being photographed as much as I liked having her as a willing partner in my photographic work. I took this a long time ago, I think around 1988, although I never kept track of dates or techinical issues.

She and I drifted apart as pals, I moved to the west coast and got strange, she moved to the Carolinas and married a guy with a jewlery store, had lots of babies and converted to being a Jew. She stopped modeling nude for me right around then. I don't think her husband liked the idea.

But I am glad I have boxes of photos to remind me of her, and I sure was lucky to have her ask to model for me.

Not as Big

I can see the dark side
of the way things are
how did it get so bad
when we've come so far
I guess it comes down
to who we are
I thought we were bigger
than either one of us

and the doors slam shut
and the meanings got lost
and most of what I wanted
slowly got tossed
thrown over the side
to sink to the bottom
the few that are left
I'm not sure I want them

I wish I was a monkey
swinging from a branch
just grab the next one
take another chance
it sure feels like I'm sick
of doing this dance
I been trying to tell you
but you can't seem to listen
I became unimportant
when you got a mission
I got shut out
or shouted down
ignored or dismissed
like some fucking clown

you expected

your ass to be kissed
sooner or later
you'll look around

and I will be gone

nowhere near

to be found

Scare the Dog MP3

Here's a rough mix of something I'm working on. It will stay rough, because texture and rough edges feel good. At least sometimes when you're sick of smooth edges and exacting performances in other venues.

http://www.snowdancer.stormshadow.com/mp3s/scarethedog.mp3

The Sally Gardens

http://www.snowdancer.stormshadow.com/mp3s/sallygardens.mp3

I am a lead guitar and electric mandocello player. I don't play rythym guitar much at all in my band, but I've been playing music with my nimble fingered buddy Bess, who knows her way around a violin fingerboard pretty damn well.
I get to play simple farmer chord rythym tunes with her, and I'm finding I like the semi-mindless repeating of chord patterns, it's a nice change from having to listen for places to play lead all the time in the Getaway Drivers.
Here's a little uptempo take on an old folk song. I love Bess's double stop fiddle playing.
She rocks.
The original has lyrics writtten by W.B. Yeats, a guy who would have been a kick ass rapper were he alive today, who also wrote The Second Coming, one of my favorite poems.
But we are doing the song as an instrumental. Click on the link above if you want to hear an MP3 of it.

William Butler Yeats (1865-1939)
THE SECOND COMING
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all convictions, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand;
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

The Phone Booth, 1989 or 1990

West Virginia, sometime around 1990. New Years Eve, I think.

We were traveling from DC back to the wholesome and bland center of Wisconsin. The roads were a sheet of ice and rain.

Her Aunt had given her a fur coat, and she was midly mortified. Back in those days she was leaning into a hippie chick granola style, trying to be a vegetarian but not liking vegetables.

She was young, had a four hundred volt smile and I was madly in love. And a decade older, and rather obtuse about what the future held.

We pulled over at the phone booth, amazed that here, in a field miles and miles from nowhere, this relic of the 1960's still stood, and still worked. I took a few photos and we cruised on through the grey icy day, headed home.

She's gone from my life now, with twins and a long time girlfriend and a doctorate on the way. Now I make the granola, and I'm old enough to be somebody's hippie grandmother. Life's funny that way.

But I still miss that high voltage smile, and her friendship, even though we've both moved on. Like most things, it looks better in the rearview mirror. I saw her last summer for the first time in ten years. It made me realize how lucky I am to have the sweetie I do now.

How I spent the day after my fall vacation

The world starts to wrench sideways, like a boat being torn off rotten rope moorings. The steady hiss of the nitrous oxide and oxygen mix blend with the sounds of Joe Walsh singing "life's been good to me so far", an ironic tune to have running through your head when the novacaine needle slips right into a nerve, making you seem to hover instantly about 8 inches off the chair with a shock that would no doubt be like the one you send into a dead frog in science class. The man in the white coat stops for a moment, waiting for you to thud back down into the chair like a hog that's been hit with a sledge hammer, then reaches over and drills off most of a tooth you've been carrying around since Eisenhauer was president, all the time mumbling things you can barely hear over the stereo roaring and the odd disconnect from the gas. An hour and a half slide by in that chair, seeming like a slow motion accident, the sucking noises mixing with the grinding, the odd smell of glues and burnt enamel, the gritty spatter of old fillings bouncing off your teeth, finding their way over to the side of your face that doesn't feel like a frozen chicken breast, making you squirm. On the ride home, you realize that this constant removal of tooth material and money from your dwindling stash of cash can't keep up, mostly because you're running out of teeth to suck down money and offer these days of discomfort. And you pray that today's new temp crown stays on till the middle of January, when the new insurance kicks in, and that the tooth you're dropping a thousand bucks on won't decide it needs to finance the root canal dentist's new plasma TV. At least it's gray and raining. I hate walking out of the dentist office numb, drained and filled at the same time. I think I'll be a slacker the rest of the day.

Roadside Attraction, 1940 something

My mother, riding a dinosaur.

She's my rockstar mom. Great cook, world traveler, giver of unconditional love and adopted by hundreds of people with lesser quality mothers. I think this shot was from around 1947

What I drew at the Coffeeshop after four shots of espresso

Roadside Attractions, 1980

Somewhere in New Mexico or Arizona, 1980.

The car died three days later. We traded it for forty bucks and a ride to the Greyhound Bus Depot. In fucking Gallup. Never did like that VW Squareback.

My Father

Born in 1908, from a different world and a different society. Too young to be in World War 1, too old to be in World War two, he spent his life hunting, fishing, painting, logging, and trying to get more done when he was working than anybody else.
He quit his full time job as a caretaker at a huge summer camp to go back to being a logger when he was 70.
He shot 18 black bear in his life with a bow and arrow. He was fifty years old when I was born.
I dumped his ashes into the lake, like he asked, in 1983. He said he wanted to be fed to the big muskies that he spent so much time catching, so we fed him to the fish, sort of.
Sometimes I miss him, but not often.
I loved him, but didn't really find myself until he was gone. That happens when your father is a human dynamo.
But I can say that in the last few years he was alive, we worked out all our shit, and parted as close to being friends as two people so different and far apart as we were could be.

I like this quote

Life is tragic simply because the earth turns and the sun inexorably rises and sets, and one day, for each of us, the sun will go down for the last, last time. Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives, will imprison ourselves in totems, taboos, crosses, blood sacrifices, steeples, mosques, races, armies, flags, nations, in order to deny the fact of death, which is the only fact we have.James Baldwin, "Down At The Cross: Letter from a Region of My Mind," in The Fire Next Time (1963)

He Liked Right Wing Radio, Too...

He was a reasonable guy, a family man who had two lovely daughters and a whip smart son who would someday be an artist just like his great grandfather, he thought.
He had it all, or at least almost all he wanted, and that was something most people never could say. A lovely wife who had a lusty nature and happily made a home out of the house in the country, a fairly steady job designing industrial parts for a slowly contracting Auto industry, with full benefits and a cranky boss.
True, work kept him on edge with a cut throat approach, but every day he came home to a family that loved him, and a life that he never thought would end.
He wasn't really a political thinker, but he took great comfort in identifying with strong leaders, and his political affiliation was mostly something he viewed like he did a sporting team. You picked a side, learned enough talking points to pee in the rice krispies of anybody who disagreed with you, and firmly believed that anybody on the "other side" was either a pussy, wimp, or hated their country. "Do onto others as you would wish them do onto you" simply didn't apply to politics, he thought. Sometimes you had to do first, when it came to those dangerous islamofacists.
When the planes hit the Twin Towers, he lurched even further to the hard side of politics. He took comfort knowing there was a strong leader in the white house, and the radio talk show folks who seemed to have a clue how dangerous the world was. He supported the war, and agreed with the chorus of voices that bad men had to be killed. Aside from some high gas prices, the war to him was ideological, abstract and distant.
He never saw the bombs dropped on the wrong houses, helped carry the dead out of the rubble, never saw the blood and life drain out of people shot at checkpoints because they didn't understand English. He never saw the wounded or the dead, all kept out of sight and mind. It never even occurred to him that his three beautiful children were connected. Those brown people lived in a different world.
But they didn't live in a different world, and when the Iran war was started by the idiot cowboy president needing to boost his election chances to keep control of congress to avoid impeachment and criminal trials, all hell broke loose.
What was supposed to be a "surgical strike" turned into a full blown war. When the Iranians moved against the US troops in Iraq, already burned out from years of war and stress, things fell apart so fast it seemed surreal.
Six months later, when the suitcase nuke went off in Detroit, he lost his wife and son, both on the edge of the blast coming home from downtown.
The bomb was set off and delivered by an angry patriot. A guy who lost his family to a bomb that had gone astray, and wiped out his son, his son's new bride, his wife and his brothers. A guy who wanted his country to be free, a true believer in god, and a man of morals who loved his country and wanted justice. An Iraqi man who thought he had everything, and then had it taken away by those selfish white people.

Things you might not need to know

I have a dead twin sister.
I have a degree in upholstery.
I think lima beans taste like spitwads dipped in old candle wax
I like eating thick cold chili sandwiches made on caraway rye bread with raw onions for breakfast
I have been an advertising photographer, a house cleaner, a barn painter, a pulp cutter with a Husquavarna chainsaw, and worked for a while destroying software.
I've cleaned up the messes from dead people more than once, and can tell you that a rug doctor's clear top shows blood too clearly, every pass you make over the pools of it.
I have a fear of black shoes induced by nuns
From the age of about four until about 12 we lived in the back of a bar and went to catholic school
from the age of 12 to about 19, we lived in the back of a convent
My dad smuggled a bear back from Canada, and kept it as a pet in our basment until my mother told him either she or that bear had to go.
I brew my own beer, build my own musical instruments, sew some of my own clothes, cook almost everything we eat from scratch, build my own furniture, but don't upholster it, build guitar amplifiers with my sweetie, and when needed, glue my own woodworking cuts back together with superglue.
I wear size 12 narrow women's shoes, but since I never wear shoes I can't run to or from somebody in, I buy men's. Girl shoes suck, mostly.
I have been sick with an ear infection for almost a month, and have been neglectin' this blog something terrible.
Ok 'nuff said.

If I Were a Super Heroine....

I wanna be her action figure. I want to spend a night with green skin, huge anti gravity tits and giant hair, get all She-Hulk on her buttocks in a slippery fun way.
Maybe take her for a ride in my invisible plane! Have her shoot bullets at me so I can bounce them off my bracelets, then lasso her up and show her how my take on Wonder Woman would make her wonder how she lived without me!
I think I'd skip the big pussycat thing though, I'm not sure I'd look good in that black spandex outfit, hissing and snarling, claws poking her skin and the Catwoman mask making my skull sweat.
I'd spend a night with her in dark smooth skin, blazing white hair and flowing cape, but I'd be afraid that being a mutant who can call up thunder and lighting might get out of control, and the storm I'd call up if I were storm would fry us to a crisp!
I wouldn't wanna be Supergirl though. Too much virtue, too white bread, even if I could fly her to Seattle for coffee and then north to the Arctic circle to make love on a polar bear skin. A live one, of course, hypnotic into sleep with my hypnovision, so it wouldn't tear her up.
I could see being Batgirl, if it weren't for the fact that I get dizzy honging upside down, and find caves to be smelly and dark. But having a utility belt with fun Bat-tools on it would be fun.
Maybe it's a good thing she likes me the way I am. It would suck to be a Menstruating She-Hulk, I bet her periods are a real heavy duty thing. And you know, sooner or later a SheHulk hot flash would burn down the house, and if you were Catwoman, you'd get allergic to yourself, and if you were Batgirl, you'd allays have a faint air of bat guano following you around.
I think I'll be my own mutant. She likes it that way.

Summer sucks

The air becomes thick sludge
with every breath and every step
you feel more and more
like an overheated wreck
the thermostat's busted
the radiator is blown
It's the hottest summer
you've ever known
and it's been thirty years
since you were full grown
the sun beats down
the garden wilts
so you crank the air
with a touch of guilt
the blacktop shimmers
with a heat mirage
the shingles are melting
on the garage
the only thing happy
Is the farmer's sweet corn
it's fat and plump
we've had plenty of storms
It's juicy and huge
a sort of food porn
you hide in the bedroom
with the air cranked high
hoping the powerlines
don't up and fry
a blackout or brownout
surely would suck
and the air conditioner
is broke in your truck
So it's bookstores and bars
and coffee shops
anywhere cool
is where one stops
you pray for a cold front
and maybe world peace
but mostly for this heatwave to cease

Mabel rolls free at last.

The big green Mercury sat waiting, waitng and waiting to go somewhere down there in the driveway.
Not to the damn grocery store. Not to band practice, not to the big box hardware store, but somewhere, anywhere it could stretch it's legs.
It was made for the roadtrip. Like a cheetah is born to run and kill, like a mosquito is drawn to feast and spawn, like a republican craves a mommy and daddy who will eliminate possiblility and make all things right, Mabel the Sable craved a big highway and a long unbroken run down the road, chewing up miles and spitting out fumes.
If she could purr, she'd would never stop at a flat 70 mph on the highway. She needed it, needed that wind flowing over her roof ticlking her rear end, needed to spool out on the turnpike, letting the scenery slide by her windows, her quiet interior making a green velvet coccoon for her driver.
She'd been a rental car when she started her road adventures, been nearly wrecked by it too. Her grandmotherly previous owner hardly knew what the pedal on the right was for, but her current owner sure did.
She fidgeted all night long, waiting for five am, when ellie would stumble down the stairs, ready to spill coffee on her upholstery, then settle into a serious rythym of tires clacking on road joints, stopping only till she hit the southwest corner of Pennsylvania for a week.
Of course Mabel allways forot about those regular java and bladder stops. When she did remember the routine, she'd get all cranky for a while and not let the airconditioner work,
showing that bitch behind the wheel that she wasn't completely in charge.
Ellie didn't mind. She like her green machine enough to know no relationship worth shit is frictionless. She'd learned that from her bandmate, who shall go nameless in this missive.
See ya next week, my freakish readers.

e.e.

Holiday Un-fun

He hated fireworks. Every mortar, every firecracker, every loud flash and boom, the drifting smell of gunpowder on the wind all made him feel like throwing up or hiding under the bed.
Even his german shepard didn't get as scared.
As a kid, he loved fireworks, shooting, guns and all the wild energy that came with being a kid and being LOUD. Loud guitars, loud cars, the screaming of football games or the throbbing feel of a big Harley with a blown muffler rumbling along.
Now, every bam!, every flash and bang brought back memories of those days on the big highway, crusing along listening to the big diesel roaring, feeling naked, waiting for those horrible crunching noises, the peppery smell of blood, and the numb feeling his ears had for weeks after the roadside bomb went off, along with his left earlobe, half his right foot and his little finger on his left hand.
It sucked, having his favorite holiday destroyed, along with his self confidence, sense of saftey and large parts of his soul.