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......

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.