It's Gonna Get Cold In Here

Joel and Maggie, 2004 or 05

Our furnace was making strange odors. The kind that make you think somebody's set up a foundry in your basement, that odd, half burned smell.

The night before last I dreamed I was sleeping in a metal foundry, inhaling fumes and metal dust. A disturbing dream, filled with refugees and orphans and old sweethearts. I kept thinking, where are these strange dreams about toxic emissions and odors coming from?

Yesterday I decided things really smelled wrong when I turned up the heat. I called a nice guy from a HVAC joint to come check our furnace.
It's dead. He took off the front panel, spent five minites poking it, and said he wouldn't even turn it back on. I belive him, too. It's an old oil burner converted to a gas burner, and almost as old as I am.
So Monday we're having a new furnace put in. And it's going to cost us four grand. Ouch.

But it's better than dying of carbon monoxide poisioning. But damn, it's going to get cold in here. And I think I understand why I had dreams of unburnt carbon and of old sweethearts. It was toxic gasses!

Onion Flower in My Garden, July 2007

I miss my garden. I miss summer, everything all green and lush and fragrant. I miss long hours of sunlight making my garden leap into a lush jungle that scares the children and horses.

I miss a lot of things these days.

I guess I and many of my pals are deep in the winter of our discontent, as Shakespeare said.

Things are weird. The weather's been all over the place, we're being governed by thugs, the war merchants and neocons are trying to get us into a third or fourth war, depending on what crap they're ranting, our rights have been steadily eroded by the rethuglicans, and we live in bozo times where people who try and talk about issues seriously are called angry

or liberal scum, where the incompetent fall upward and get medals of honor or giant bonuses for wrecking companies or laying off thousands, and in a time where people measure the quality of their life by their car, ugly McMansion or the amount of money they can make.

All of that weighs pretty heavy on a lot of us these days.

Maybe that can change when we get rid of the evil power drunk clowns in the next year or two.

It makes me feel a little bit of hope to see the record turnouts in the primaries on the Democratic side.

I still think the democrats are almost as blind the shit in the wind we're going to have to face, but if they can sweep in a bunch of new people, there might be at least a hint of sanity creeping back in.

I think it's time to go watch some post apocalyptic movie so I can feel better about how bad things aren't. And one never knows what practical information you can get about killing viral infected zombies.

I think we have got a bunch of them in our local Walmart .

Heidi's Head Is Not This Big In Real Life

Heidi, July 2007

She's got a new kid. Named it Odin. Or maybe Caleb, her sweetie named it Odin. That's a big name live up to, since Odin was a one eyed father of the Norse Gods. But I liked this photo, so there it is.

Oh, and besides actually having a normal sized head, she's also not three feet tall like she looks here.

But I am addicted to wide angle lenses and getting in people's faces. They don't seem to mind. Or maybe they're scared of me.

Or perhaps my subtle and hypnotic personality seduces them.

I sorta doubt that, though.

Melrose, 1987

It was one of those incredibly hot summer days, the heavy wet air

clinging to everything like a blanket of steam.

There wasn't a wisp of breeze to be had, and it felt like that strange kind of weather that could swing from sauna to green skies and tornadoes at any moment.

The farmhouse was a crumbling old place on the edge of town, filled with old yellowed wallpaper and cracked plaster walls, the echos of all the people who lived there bouncing, filling you with a sense of place that once held something vital.

My pals were living there for the summer, doing restoration on some strange and crumbling cement scuplture folk art park, one of many renters to move in and out over the years.

The place was mostly empty, had that feeling that nobody lived there, that they were just camping out for a few days and moving on, leaving the place to the ghosts once again.

Or for the next bunch of rootless people to use it and move on.

Small towns in central Wisconsin are filled with old houses slowly crumbling away with no family there to care for it and no people moving in and gentrifying the neighborhood.

Eventually they just burn or fall in on themselves and somebody

puts up an ugly two story ranch, or the basement fills up with rotten wood, scrub trees and weeds.

I wonder if that house is even there anymore.

I know almost all my tribe from those days have moved on from my life, leaving a love for doing art to become computer geeks, jesus freak school teachers or seamstresses or stockbrokers and project managers.

Very few of my artmob kept doing art. It's a shame too, because for a time, we had some seriously good scultptors, painters, potters and printers doing something magical.

My tribe tends to be musical these days, and I still have people around me doing fine things, but that group in Oshkosh in the mid 1980's was sure an amazing bunch.

Shot with a large format camera on my favorite old film, Tri X using the available light.

Touching Passion and Playing it Safe

We're here on this mudball planet for a short time, a good 50 or so years of relative health if we're lucky. Viewed in a long term perspective, it's less than nothing.

So I think it's important to live out on the edge, to truly live like there might not be a tomorrow. I think seeing a good friend bash her head in and die in a horse accident when I was 18 had a lot to do with making me be aware of how quickly everything I am can vanish.

Add into that my intense Norwegian/Swedish decent, a family genetic disposition to being a smart ass bundle of energy fueled by coffee and sugar and restless discontent, and one gets a reputation for being a wild woman, a pain in the ass, a live wire, a free spirit, all those terms people who play it safe like to use to describe someone alive enough to make things complex.

It's gotten me in trouble, ejected from friendships and bands and jobs over the years. It's also allowed me to light things up, step loose from the safe road and figure out how to make peace with what I am.

I think passion and conflict and intensity are pretty much required for a vital life filled with music, art or whatever you pursue.

So it makes me a little crazy when I get surrounded by people who play it safe, who need rules and arrangements and who avoid conflict because they're weasels, chickenshits or frail vessels.

I even understand that fear of the unpredictable, that need to lock things down, although it taxes my patience to accept it in my pals.

But when it bugs me most is when something happens and people I thought I was communicating with and spent a lot of time working with just clam up, avoid dealing with anything uncomfortable.

Who don't tell me what they're thinking, or speak up and clear up things before they become big issues.

There's a cliche that friends help you move, but real friends help you move bodies.

I can understand that. But I think real friends tell you what you need to hear, don't shy away from listening to input and giving it back, and agree to disagree.

They sure as hell don't just vote you out of the tribe and then pretend nothing happened, or act like they're your friend while working against you.

I prefer a clean fight to sneaking around, would rather clear things up before they become real problems.

I guess that today's rainy foggy freakish weather and the conversations I had yesterday with some old bandmates has made me think about these things.

One of them standing right in front of me yesterday still didn't have the courage to actually say out loud she'd voted to remove me.

I wonder if she and the others got what they want, a nice safe band with no tension, no conflicts. And more than likely no chemistry, moments of great stupidity or bliss or connection.

I've got new music now, making last year's ugly seem less damaging, and I'm pretty happy with where I am musically. But I still miss the fire of playing with my longtime pal Bob up there on stage at the High Noon, ripping things up and feeling the big alive.

I guess what a lot of what I'm feeling boils down to thinking you should shoot your own dog when the time comes to end things, metaphorically speaking. Not be a sneak, a weasel or play the victim just because you're timid or uncomfortable around intense and passionate people.

One week's Difference

Joyce and Emma, 1989

Taken one week apart.

They Walk Among us ,September 2008

You never know who you're going to run into at

the Willy St. Fair.

I love this town. They say Madison lives in it's own bubble.

I think that's pretty cool, bubbles rise to the top instead of staying sunken in the mud like the inbred little tourist town folks I grew up with in Northern Wisconsin.

The ones who stayed mostly became drunks, jesus freaks or both, if they didn't drive into trees and die.

Metal Man Scupture in da UP

It was early October. We were in between my peak experience with a chili dog and our visit to the Porkies, just about dusk.

The sign said free family park tour, so we dived off the highway into a freakshow of fun metal sculpture. These guys were part of a half mile or so tour of great weirdness.

And on another unrelated note, if Obama becomes president, I hope he's a ruthless bastard when it comes to dealing with the swiftboating, bible slamming, kneecapping and devious slime known as hardcore rethuglicans.

They need to be treated with the same charity and kindness the give others.

Or killed, but I'm not quite ready to advocate for that. Give me another year or so of Bush and I might consider it.

Go read The Lost Albatross

http://thelostalbatross.blogspot.com/

Emily Mills is doing some very good writing, a lot of it on local issues here in Madison. I found her site as a link on Dane101.com, another good local colaborative blog.

Sleeping on the couch, 1989

I loved watching her sleep. It was one of the few times

she ever looked really at peace.

I somtimes wonder who's watching her sleep these days.
I hope she's happy with who ever that is.

Emma, 1990, Emma, 2007

The first time I met Emma, she was pretty boring. And she took a shit on my lap and then threw up on me.

She's changed a little bit since then. She also spent four or five summers sleeping on my front porch, learning to argue in a creative way, and becoming addicted to Buffy The Vampire Slayer.

She's the daughter of Joyce, whom I posted a photo of the other day,

and Bill, my long time pal/roommate/art mob member.

A Nude Photo and a Quote I like

A floating Sophia, 1986

Sophia was one of my models when I lived in Oshkosh. She was an artist, made jewelry and the last I heard, she was living in Florida somewhere. This was shot on my birthday in the crumbling back room of our band's practice space above a music store. I miss her, I hope she stumbles across this and gets in touch with me.

And now, a completely unrelated quote I like:

“The human race divides politically into those who want people to be controlled and those who have no such desire.” — Robert A. Heinlein

Tim framed in Pink

Tim on Robin's back porch, Summer 2007

Graffiti, Minneapolis, 1983

This was spray painted on the wall near my crappy apartment building

off Franklin Street in Minneapolis. It was a rough neighborhood, filled with a weird mix of immigrants, native Americans and low rent artist types like myself and my sweetie at the time.

It reads:

"You must have a flaming moral purpose, so that greed, oppression and exploitation shrivel before the fire within you"

Never has that quote made more sense to me than right now.

This country has moved into ugly, dangerous territory, a time when rich thugs own the news and piss on the idea of truth, when greed has become a virtue, and when ideas like the rule of law and the common good have been made into a joke by the thugs running the country for their own uses.

I think the coming economic and environmental shit storm is going to change the way we deal with authority, and I sure as hell hope we can get some of the things we used to be back.

I don't want things to fall apart, but damn, I'm sure getting nervous waiting for it to happen.

Joyce, 1986

Shot on a 4x5 view camera, natural light in the

Witzel Street studio.

She makes the best apple pie, ever. She grows huge gardens full of flowers, and she's passionate, intense, sometimes cranky and even though we don't talk that much because we moved far apart, my life would be a hell of a lot more boring without her and her kid Emma in it.

My Father, His Pet Bear, and His Fishing Posse

My father is the guy in the center, with the baseball hat.

I think this was around 1963.

My dad would be considered pretty intense these days, the way he spent his life hunting, fishing, working and laughing harder than anybody around him.

He could yell, argue and give dirty looks pretty well too.

He and his pals would go up into Canada, up to Lake Nippigon with some pals every year to haul home big loads of fish.

One day he and his buddy caught a bear, out there fishing for pike or whatever else would bite. They saw this little bear swimming around in the middle of now where alone, and decided to rescue it.

That's the story they told us, anyway. They smuggled it back across the border, sound asleep in a gunny sack behind the driver's seat of the family Station Wagon, and my dad kept it as a pet in a spare room we had in the basement for about six months.

It made us popular in school that year, We'd say to our schoolmates, Hey, wanna come see our pet bear?

My dad would take it out on walks in the yard on a chain, let it climb around on the scrub trees in our yard, feed it bakery and donuts leftover from the big commercial bakery up in Appleton.

I remember that bear biting at the chain, trying to bite my dad through thick gloves, and I don't doubt he did bite my old man, who would have just shrugged it off with a grin and a band aid.

Eventually my mom decided the bear should go or she would, since it was getting pretty big and was between her and the washing machine, and they gave it to a game farm in Northern Wisconsin.
All that bear did for the rest of it's life is screw other bears, eat candy and live a life of captive leisure. It got huge, fat and older than dirt as far as bears go, and sure seemed content.

I know a lot of guys that would love to just eat, screw and lay around all day, and I think they wouldn't mind the cage either if it had cable and a wide screen TV.

Sometimes people don't believe us when we tell them about the bear in the basement. This photo is from my dad's photo album, a crumbling book filled with only photos of his hunting and fishing exploits. He loved his family, but the only thing that he ever seemed to take photos of was things he killed.

I feel like I grew up in a John Irving novel when I think about how strange my home life was. That's a good thing.

Soo, Marcy's House, 1989

It was cold as hell outside. We shot a bunch of photos early in the morning in Marcy's guesthouse, then went out for breakfast.

I miss Soo, or Sue or whatever she calls herself these days. She was a great model and a good friend.

This Man Roasts All The Good Coffee I Drink

Mathew at my Solstice Party that I did not blog about.

He roasts almost all the coffee down at EVP, the place that I spend at least three h0urs a week in drinking coffee and yakking at my tribe. We've gotten quite the table full of strange people built up over the last four or five years, a real mix of all sorts of dykes, firefighters, poets, musicians, teeth gnashers and political activists and cranks and loons.

They also make the best damn espresso, anywhere. I know, I lived in Seattle for six years, and the only place that came close was Coffee Messiah or Cafe Vivachi on Capital Hill.

Mathew is also a musican, enjoyable freak and very sweet guy.

Merry Christmas, What's That Burning Smell?

The Charred Remains of my Coffee Maker1997-2007

RIP

So, you wake up at home on Christmas morning, just me and sweetie lounging around watching Charlie and The Chocolate factory, waiting for the coffee to be done. Your nose picks up the scent of burning plastic, and, being more awake than you thought you were, you stumble down the stairs at high speed, walk into the kitchen and look to see what's going on.

You look out into the sunroom and see two feet of black smoke above two feet of grey brown smoke, and see that the switch on the ancient coffee maker you've been trying to wear out before buying a new one has decided to short out and melt the whole damn thing, then light fire to the melted remains, the plastic tablecloth it's sitting on, and is about to light fire to the whole house, and you think three things.

one: HOLY FUCK!

two: WHERE'S THE FIRE EXTINGUISHER?

three: TAKE A DEEP BREATH AND BLAST THOSE FLAMES!

Then you spend the rest of the day airing the house out, cleaning the sunporch and thinking about just how much too close to disaster you were.

On the plus side, my firefighter pal did give me a new fire extinguisher this afternoon, and said I did ok.

And I thought this christmas was going to be drama free because I stayed home with sweetie and didn't do blood family stuff. Go figure.

And yes, I know I should have not waited so long to blog again, Tom. What can I say, I'm a bum.

My New Computer Fan Being Humped By A Punk Barbie Clone

My new motherboard and my favorite Barbie Get It On

11/30/07

My computer died last week. After ten years of using the same box and five or so of the same motherboard and chip, it just died. No sparks, no drama, it just refused to get out of bed and be something usefull, dambitt!
It's puritan work ethic died, or maybe the endless hours of my life I spent pissing it away reading blog posts and depressing things made it just stroke out.
So Kori and I have spent the last week froggin' around with building a new one, one with more hard drive space in a new box.
I'm going to sort of miss that big ugly tower box my old roomate gave me in Seattle, all painted up with gold sunbursts like a cheap Japanese electric guitar from the early sixties.
But I'm hoping the new one works as long, and it's sort of sexy in a black gleaming darth vader sort of way.

Stench

some days you find the stench
in your mental existential trench
some days are like shoveling dirt
heavy wet dirt until your arms hurt
fall days can be sweet

the cool air makes

pie and coffee

a treat
but these gray skies
make me want

to accept defeat
my body aches
from my arms down to my feet
and it seems like
the cloud filled days
are stuck on repeat
this too shall pass
becomes your mantra

Thanksgiving

I sometimes think the human brain is like a giant thrashing machine. We dump loads of stuff into it, be it Jenifer Lopez videos or limericks or old phone numbers and odd little bits of semi-worthless knowledge, and sometime later it shakes out into something that might actually make some sense. Might be turned into art or some form of expression our screwed up human pool of knowledge might find some beauty or use for.
Sometimes I think I've trained myself to think in terms of guitar licks, flavors of coffee and beer, and smells like sawdust and garden dirt and peeled onions and garlic.
It's Thanksgiving day, one of the most hipocritical days we celebrate. I have ten people downstairs waiting for three or four more to show up so we can stuff our faces. I'm happy as a clam in clean mud.
Back to my tribe now. Happy dead turkey and opressive invader society day, everybody.

William Gibson quote on his writing

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics

You made your name as a science-fiction writer, but in your last two novels you've moved squarely into the present. Have you lost interest in the future?

It has to do with the nature of the present. If one had gone to talk to a publisher in 1977 with a scenario for a science-fiction novel that was in effect the scenario for the year 2007, nobody would buy anything like it. It's too complex, with too many huge sci-fi tropes: global warming; the lethal, sexually transmitted immune-system disease; the United States, attacked by crazy terrorists, invading the wrong country. Any one of these would have been more than adequate for a science-fiction novel. But if you suggested doing them all and presenting that as an imaginary future, they'd not only show you the door, they'd probably call security.

Big Happy Funouse, Sigourney Weavers MP3, Brewing beer

You know, it's bad enough to live in the time of Bush the Younger and his bunch of soul sucking thugs, but day two of this crappy Seattle style weather when it should be crisp and cool and blue skies really is not a happy thing.

Time to warm up the house and brew beer, I think. A trappist ale and a fine Brown Ale, Irish style.

There's something very damn satisfying about brewing. To tap a keg of your own brew on a cool fall night, kick back and crank up the tube amp and telecasterish thing really takes the edge off.

Speakin' of telecaster disaster, here's a link to an MP3 of my loud band doing a little number for your listening pleasure called Crazy Little Pixie. A recording of practice that is far from suck, I'm told.

Click on the link at the top.

http://www.snowdancer.stormshadow.com/mp3s/mp3index.htm

I stole the photo from one of my favorite blogs, BigHappyFunhouse, run by a dude who buys and finds old photos and posts them. I love old found photos. He also advertises free pie, although I haven't been able to download it.

http://www.bighappyfunhouse.com/

Nice To See Your Back

Soo's Back, 1985
We had a long photographic realtionship. She was a slender young art student who was part of my art mob back in Oshkosh in the mid to late 80's.
For a long time she'd come over to the studio and we'd shoot some nudes, or we'd go off and shoot somewhere on location.

She, like a lot of people liked to drop into the photo studio I worked at, check out the new artwork we did in our off hours when we weren't photographing garbage trucks or Tampon boxes or cop shoe catalogs.

After a while she became a big part of my photographic artwork. She loved to model nude, and she was good at it.
This was one of my first times shooting with a 4x5 view camera. I really had a love/hate relationship with the big camera. It was slow, clunky and awkward, but it taught me to slow the hell down and focus on the images I wanted to make instead of just blasting away with a Nikon with a motor drive and picking the best image.

I also loved the amazing quality of the big negatives.

Ironic that here on the web they're chopped down to tiny and low res images. But when you start with that sort of quality, it still keeps a lot of mojo.

Beer Drinkers and Breweries are Lame

I like to brew my own beer, and keep it on tap in recycled soda kegs. I never have to wash bottles or bottle the beer.
But when I run out of homebrew, I like to go to Woodman's or the liquor store down the block and get the old style cases of returnable bottles. I like the idea that bottles get used over and over along with the beer cases.
But now it's getting harder and harder to find, and this trip the only beer I found was Point.
I like Point, it's not bad for a store bought lager. And I really hate the idea of using something once and tossing it. Reduce and reuse are a hell of a lot smarter than recycling.
I imagine mass market distrubution makes all of this much harder and messier, even though in the long run it's much smarter.
And I suspect a lot of consumers are too short sighted or just too lame to deal with returnables. Most people can't even remember to stick a bundle of used grocery bags in the trunk or backseat, and then have to get new bag every trip to the store.
That's fucked up. I'm not sure bitching about it matters though. I think the coming shit storm of environmental and financial problems is going to make a lot of this moot.
But at least I know how to make my own hard cider and beer when I'm totally broke...

Dreadlocked Mona Lisa

Today I photographed a dozen roller derby women. I am a sucker for taking photographs of big eyed, tattoed and dread headed roller derby queens.

So I shot these very serious looking photos in between doing some very funny ones for the team.

Love that tattoo.

Motor Primitives at The High Noon

A bunch of dirty hippie peaceniks threw a benefit today at the

High Noon. The kind of people my retuglican brother thinks have "nancy pelosi liberal values".

I call them my tribe.

I think my brother's pretty stupid sometimes. Something about living in the Fox Valley makes a lot of people spiritual thugs and cranky fucks.

I think it's better to have a bleeding heart than none at all. But I'm a dirty hippie and a queer too, so what I say doesn't matter much.

John Lennon said that living is easy with eyes closed, although the clenched assholes of a lot of those same people must get sore from being scared all the time.

But anyway, my pals Pam, Robin, Jeff and Ed rocked out to raise money for the Madison Peace Coaliton, and I went down, drank fine IPA and shot these photos.

They rock, these four. I may be biased, Pam and Robin are in a band with me too.

Kori, 1996

How could you not fall in love with that face and smile?

I did a long time ago.

Shot with a 4x5 view camera using polaroid film.

Too Many Left Feet

Doll legs at Axman Surplus, Oct 2007

Some days I feel like I was made from a box of parts like this

limbs all left feet

a sewed up pile of strange human meat

stitched together like Frankenstein's monster

parts from mom

parts from my dad

all mashed up into somebody who's

less than both

more than they could have been

walked in strange places that didn't exist

in their world

I envy the simplicity of their lives

I wouldn't trade being who I am for anything

but damn, bein' my kind of queer

in this strange world sure comes with a strange

price tag.

Some days I wish I could just pay the fine and go home

find normal

then I remember it's just a setting on an iron

and thank the goddess I don't believe in

I am not simple

Pears

I I went to Woodman's today. I saw these pears, thought about how I used

to shoot photos of fruit and nude women and all sorts of stuff on

slow days at my old job at the photo studio.

So I bought these and took some photos. Tomorrow I'm going to eat my models.

It's strange to think that 20 years ago when I bought pears to eat, I never would have

wondered where they were grown, how much toxic crap had been dumped

on them to make them huge and nearly tasteless,

and if they had e-coli all over them.

Now something as simple as buying fruit is both political and possibly toxic.

I think I'm going to plant my own fruit tree in the back yard next year.

Mom's Kitchen at Camp

Mom and my Great Aunt Kell in the Kitchen at Camp

sometime around 1986

Shot with a 4x5 view camera

I grew up at a summer camp, my parents were caretakers. I worked ten summers at camp, running the riding stable, helping out in the kitchen, doing odd jobs and falling off horses and breaking bones.

Mom stayed there for decades, cooking great meals from scratch for the kids who came up, kids from broken homes or real orphans who wound up at the Catholic orphanage who owned the land.

I learned how to cook for small armies of people by watching and helping mom. I find it hard to this day to cook for less than about ten people.

Aunt Kell's been dead for years, and the Catholic Church sold the camps to pay off child sex abuse lawsuits, so this funky old and beautiful kitchen and the two thousand acres or so of land that were mostly wild are now bulldozed over for rich bastard's playgrounds in George BushCo's Amerika, but for thirty plus years, it was an amazing place to find real food.

I really fuckin' hate corporate greed pigs, republicans and religions, they wind up screwing everybody over in their sick need for money, power and control.

Another Good Sandwich

A delicious dead cow sandwich at Kate and Gracie's

in Alma, Wisconsin, October 2007

It had a very nice sauce made from marinated

Figs, Prunes, Apricots, Olives, Red Wine & spices.

I love to cook, we make most of our food from scratch to avoid all the crappy corn syrup and weird additives they put in mass market food.

So when we go out, it's usually for good beer on tap and fries. The best overall burger and fries I've had in a while I had at Mickey's over on the end of Wily St. Their sexy fries kick ass.

But when it comes to good deep fried taters and sauce, I still love the Harmony on Atwood. We go there most nights after band practice, knock down a pitcher or two of Lake Louis or Sphrecher beer, and have the hot pub chips with blue cheese dressing.

Just beware, that Lake Louis beer will fuck your shit up after the second pitcher. Tastes sooo good, and hangovers installed free!

The House on the Rock

Last month when Kori was on vacation, we finally went to The House on the Rock.

It's a freakshow of under lit crap, two and a half miles of walking through a musty house filled with hideous 60's shag carpeting and sensibilities.

I'd been there when I was in High School, we'd skipped school and driven 4 hours to see Yes in concert, then spent the day stoned our of our gourds walking around, but it's grown a lot since 1974 or so.

Whole new buildings devoted to obsessively displaying oddly arranged crap have sprung up since then.

Every room in the house felt like some overweight hipsters had had strange and bland orgies in it, like a mob of paunchy swingers had shed their sansabelt polyester slacks and ugly vinyl leather looking jackets to get down and dirty on some bored housewife.

Once you're through the house they send you on one or two more tours, depending on how strong your ability to absorb dark and chaotic collections of crap is.

Oddly enough, Kori and I and our pal Lisa all have high tolerances for weird.

It was like walking through a museum put together by a mentally diseased hermit who hated light and forgot all the labels.

Pretty cool, in other words, for freaks like us.

The low point for us was the never ending dollhouse that covered the last part of the tour, a low ceiling walk through smelly carpet and two billion really ugly dolls.

The high part was the Carousel pictured above, and the room full of angels hanging from the ceiling.

Hundreds of mannequins with wings all done up in cheesy white robes, and that carousel had hundreds of lurid or freakish carved animals on it.

You can't ride it, but it sure does knock your senses into hammered shit.

Neil Gaiman is one of my favorite authors, and he wrote one of my favorite books, American Gods. Most of the book takes place in Wisconsin, and he wrote a terrific scene about how the carousel room was a door between worlds.

It sure felt like it he was right standing there in that strange room.

I don't ever need to go back there again. Maybe in another thirty five years if I still walk the earth.

Free Floating Sense of Dread

Kori and Martye walking near Lake Nebagamon, Oct 2007
Today is the second day of the switch to Daylight savings time. That's a fucked up idea, that we could save daylight by pushing clocks around. All it seems to do is push people's moods around.

It's sure pushing mine, and I am not alone, judging by the mood of my tribe.

I'm not sure it's all because today is grey, short and because somebody decided to take an hour away from all of us with a decree. There's more to it than just an hour.

Maybe it's fall, short days making me feel like hunkering down, the cold air changing my mood.

But I have had a low level free floating sense of dread in the back of my mind for a while now, a sense of impending and world wrenching change that fills me with nervous anticipation.

There's now over six billion humans on this world, and more every day. Cranking along sucking the big dick of global capitalism, being shut out or sucked in and feeling things are slowly going to hell.
In our country alone we're in two or three wars, depending on how you look at it, the third being the war being waged against common sense, hope and love being waged by the rethuglicans and BushCo. Corporations.
There's some serious shit coming down at us both economically and ecologically, too.
We're all going to have to learn to join forces, build alternative tribes and learn to live locally and grow more of our own food. I really think we're in for a great depression of our own that's going to make the last one seem like a bumper car ride compared to the roller coaster that is ahead of us as a species.

But I can tell you that I am damn lucky to have my darlin', my tribe, and a sense of place among people who are paying attention and leading through their own actions. In the end, that's what will matter.

Breasts in Red and Black

Tiny Alien Humans Babies Everywhere

Everybody's having babies

but Kori and I

it's ok with me

I don't want a little guy

even one as cute

as Lucas or Huxsley

or Winston or Odin

who are far from Ugly

The barf and spit

fart and shit

lay there and gurgle

for the fun of it

lovely to look at

but not to hold

and anyway I think

I'm just too damn old

Seriously, sometimes I wonder why any of my pals let me point a camera at one of their kids, because for some reason they almost always come out looking like aliens.

Me and My clone, Mini E

My roomate Kate came as me to the Halloween Party last weekend.

Well, as half me, since she's about half my weight and half my age.

It's rather odd to look out from the stage and see your MiniMe walking around.

Bitch looks a lot cuter than me too!

Tattoo, with Shadows and Sunshine, August 2007

Heastock Barbies

Hot glued to the headstock, the shrunken heads wanted to scream, but had no lungs.

All night they bounced up and down, terrified by the loud music and rude people.

Alien Babies Will Find You No Matter Where You Hide

You cannot hide from Alien Baby.

Not in your closet

not under your bed

he will find you

he never stops looking

he may pee on you

he may barf on you

but he'll find you

and if you're not mom

and lunch, he's gonna be pissed

and fill your head

with shrieks and howls

from his baby jowls

no, you cannot hide

Rockin' out at Wonder's Pub for Halloween

We played at Wonder's Pub Saturday, the yearly Halloween Party.

VO-5, The Motor Primitives and our band, The Sigourny Weavers.

I had fun. I glued barbie heads all over my guitar, and flashing LED lights and glow sticks.

My ears are still ringing. Shit, then again, they always ring. Old age sucketh mightily, even if I still can rock out rude.

My Peak Experience With a Chili Dog

I love chili dogs and fries and Mountain Dew. While driving through Marquette, Michigan, a crumbling old town slowly being eaten around the edges by garbage fast food joints run by giant corparate greed pigs, we spied The Coney Station.

All gleaming stainless steel and retro bar stool filled, it managed to have a new look with a very old vibe. As we pulled in, they put the open sign up and we had this fine 11 am breakfast, and before devouring this fine lookin' pile of truly American food, I took a few photos.

They really do the classic chili dog and fries about as good as it could ever be. There's a purity to this that is almost never seen in fast food these days.

My new pal big H and his lunch counter

Driving along the water's edge

She slammed down her blood pressure meds with the last of a huge mug of mud thick coffee and headed down the stairs to the new used truck. It sat there in the driveway waiting patiently, looking ready to roll as far and as long as the money and the gasoline supplies lasted.
It was going to be a long trip, up the far east side of Lake Michigan, through the ugly ruins of Gary, Indiana, the reek of refineries and past crumbling ruins up to Grand Rapids, then along the broken roads of eastern Michigan to the south shore of Lake Superior, along the edge of the world's greatest freshwater body, then down through Duluth to the headwaters of the mighty Mississippi, along the river road until they reached the far corner of Wisconsin, then back to home, garden and the tribe.
Who knew what would happen along the way? They'd packed a bag of various Valiums, painkillers and a bottle of cheap tequila, the big army 45. and a hundred rounds of hollow points, one electric guitar and amp, and a laptop computer filled with strange writings and obscure music that only freaks and mental patients would listen to. They decided to leave the AK-47 home this trip. The .45 made a more rewarding noise. And where were the damn earplugs, she thought?
It was going to be an interesting ten days or so......