Viruses and A Motorhome

Last week my computer once again got a virus. I shut it off and walked away to work on the motorhome Kori bought two weeks ago.

The motorhome has been gutted since then, but this damn computer still has issues, although we have so damn many virus scanners and killers on it they aren't doing much but pissing me off.

People who write computer viruses for fun should be lobotomized and given jobs fishing used condoms out of sewage treatment pools.

There's no reason to write them and turn them loose other than sheer malicous intent.

Now the motorhome, there's no reason to have one of them, either, but I do love a good dirty project, and if the quadrillions of dollars worth of credit default swaps go Cherynobl on the world economy, I'll at least have somewhere to sleep when I park it in one of my pal's back yards.

In honor of this motorized bedroom, I offer one of my favorite oddball artists doing his song "If Jesus Drove A Motorhome" by the deeply freaky yet shy and polite Jim White, who moves through strange air.

Quote of the Day: Wendell Berry on Failure of Imagination

We are involved now in a profound failure of imagination. Most of us cannot imagine the wheat beyond the bread, or the farmer beyond the wheat, or the farm beyond the farmer, or the history beyond the farm. Most people cannot imagine the forest and the forest economy that produced their houses and furniture and paper, or the landscapes, the streams and the weather that fill their pitchers and bathtubs and swimmingpools with water. Most people appear to assume that when they have paid their money for these things they have entirely met their obligations.

An excerpt from “In the Presence of Fear” by Wendell Berry

Hot Springs and Crumbling RVs

Soaking at Indian Springs No. 1
After three days of driving and this brutal Wisconsin Winter, this was the sign pointing to bliss.

Martye's little adobe house.

Soaking in the mineral water baths in TorC rocks my cranky middle aged many times broken boned body. In a good way.

We soaked every day we were there but for the last, and Indian Springs was my favorite. It's a run down old hotel with the springs on the same property, housed in a bare bones metal roofed shack.

The pools are concrete, with pebble lined bottoms.

Because it's a natural flowing hot spring, there's no chlorine smell in the water, and it averages somewhere between 101 and 104 degrees Fahrenheit.

It is very salty water. The first few days I felt like a seal or a whale coming up for air, because whenever I took a deep breath, I'd rise up like a balloon, then fall back into the water when I exhaled.

I thought it was from one too many bean burritos this winter, carrying around an extra 30 pounds of my own human lard.

But a few days later we soaked at another hot spring across the street and the owner told me it was the salt content.

One more week in those hot springs and I'd have had dreadlocks.

Some days we'd walk down the hill to soak, others we drove, because walking home after a hot soak is like trying to move around with warm rubber appendages.

T or C is a strange town, filled with closed buildings, old crumbling hotels and beat up RV parks.

Every other yard seems to have an RV in it, too, most of them in terrible shape.

New Mexico, day three

The sign in Martye's yard
Truth or Consequences, from the south side at night, looking towards the hot springs district.

The second and third days of the trip out were pretty flat, filled with tumbleweeds that kept rolling into the car and vast stretches of scruffy looking over grazed land.
We rolled through Dodge City, Elkart, and a bunch of towns that mostly consisted of big grain silos surrounded by run down houses and a few gas stations and beat up grocery stores. The two lane highways we drove on were mostly empty.
We stayed the night in in a cheap hotel near Dodge City,
In the morning we walked across the dark parking lot , the sun just starting to show in the east, the biggest full moon I've seen in years going down and went into a little breakfast joint and had an unexceptional breakfast.
You could tell that the Mexican influence was there in the food, but watered down like the coffee.
And nobody uses real half and half out west, it's all non dairy creamer.
The joint was filled with late middle aged guys in cowboy hats with pot bellies, the parking lot filled with big beat up trucks.
On the long drive west did pass a few huge wind farms, but the cold hard wind and a need to get somewhere left us rolling along, so we didn't stop for pictures.
We hit the interstate near Las Vegas, New Mexico and set the cruise control on 75 and pushed on to Truth Or Consequences, not stopping at Santa Fe, Los Alamos or Socoro.
Seeing the beauty salon sign that told us we were in front of Martye's house sure felt good. We unloaded and headed down to the hot springs district, and bought a soak at Indian Springs Waterhole No.1.
One thing I did find funny was how small the Rio Grande was. It's not much of a river at that point of it's run.

My New Favorite song: Colin Hay Beautiful World

My my my it’s a beautiful world
I like swimming in the sea
I like to go out beyond the white breakers
Where a man can still be free (or a woman if you are one)
I like swimming in the sea.

My my my it’s a beautiful world
I like drinking Irish tea
With a little bit of lapsang souchong
I like making my own tea.

My my my it’s a beautiful world
I like driving in my car
Roll the top down sometimes I travel quite far
Drive to the ocean stare up at the stars
I like driving in my car

All around is anger automatic guns
It’s death in large numbers no respect for women or our little ones
I tried talking to Jesus but He just put me on hold
Said He’d been swamped by calls this week
And He couldn’t shake His cold

And still this emptiness persists
Perhaps this is as good as it gets
When you’ve given up the drink and those nasty cigarettes
Now I leave the party early at least with no regrets
I watch the sun as it comes up I watch it as it sets
Yeah this is as good as it gets.

My my my it’s a beautiful world
I like sleeping with Marie
She is one sexy girl full of mystery
She says she doesn’t love me but she likes my company
For now that’s good enough for me

Big Sky, Flat Land, the first day of the trip

We got a slow start, rolling out mid day after making three days worth of sandwiches, roasted pork on good Italian bread with cheese and horseradish sauce and lots of lettuce. About the only way I can stay awake on long drives is to spend them gnawing on something every once and a while, dragging along a cooler full of food.

We drove the first day on mostly two lane roads from home across Iowa, through Dubuque, around Des Moines, stopping at a ratty little Super 8 motel between nowwhere I wanted to be and nowhere anybody seemed to care about.

All day long the land got flatter as we rolled west, the vast flat broken only by the big grain storage silos that poked up out of the landscape, looking like lonely skyscrapers or steamboats coming over the curve of the ocean.

Interstate highways sure homogenize and suck the joy and diversity out of the drive west. It's all chain restaurants and big box stores punctuated by miles of corn stubble and trailer homes and beat up farms.

And WalMarts. Way to many Walmarts and too many rotted and empty downtowns where you do get off the interstates.

We stumbled into the hotel, burned down some herb and I spent the rest of the evening either snoring or cleaning our .45 and watching TV preachers or The Weather Channel. The next morning we hit the road early, knowing the long boring drive across Kansas would take most of the day.

Back From the Desert

Two weeks in New Mexico gone. We're back, but fried. Photos and sick observations to come soon.....

Blur Guitar, Shot by Kori

Kori takes almost our band photos. She also comes to almost all our gigs, built my amp, wired most of my guitars, bakes killer bread, writes some powerful computer code, invents and writes whole worlds with her writing, and is beyond a shadow of a doubt the best pal/sweetheart/co-pilot/cellmate/sentient creature I ever fell in love with.

She's my rock star heroine.

And in case you didn't know, if you click on a photo on my blog, it opens a link to a bigger version.

Mr. M.F. the Seventh

Everybody thinks the MF in our band name is short for a crude expression involving having sex with your mother.

It's really because Mikey is the 7th Fairchild boy to carry that name.

While I am glad they're consistent, it shows a serious lack of imagination to keep using the same damn name over and over and over and over and over and over and over again.

And then they named their little girl Luna instead of Michelle.

Go figure.

Here is his bad MF7-ness self going all rock star hero from Saturday's gig.

I like playing with him. He never phones it in, or takes prisoners when he's playing music.

No Wonder they're going broke

NEW YORK – General Motors Corp. will offer buyouts to all of its hourly employees, a spokesman confirmed Tuesday, as the troubled automaker continues to slash costs.
GM spokesman Tony Sapienza said the buyouts will mainly target GM's 22,000 retirement-eligible hourly employees, though any union employee can take the offer.
News of the buyouts first broke on Monday. A union official told The Associated Press then that GM would offer $20,000 in cash and a $25,000 car voucher for workers who retire early and those who simply leave the company.

The official spoke on condition of anonymity because workers were not yet notified of the packages.
Sapienza confirmed that the offer will consist of a car voucher and a one-time cash payment, though declined to offer more details, saying that employees will be informed of the specifics of the offer on Friday. However, he said the latest offer would be less generous than previous buyouts.

Huh, must be nice to have somebody give you more than a few month's health insurance and a few week's pay when they hand you your walking papers. That's all I got last time I worked somewhere for ten years.

And I can see why the big auto companies are going broke by being generous, although I suspect that the folks taking the buyout will be in the street soon enough after the government takes it's share. It's all taxable income, and more than likely taxed higher than usual paychecks.

Sometimes it really helps to have a Union behind you. I suspect those days are numbered, because of the way people love to hate unions for past abuses.

Cars are part of the reason we're a fucked up bunch of creeps in this country.

They're useful tools, but too often they are giant rolling cocoons that isolate us from the rest of the world and feed our paranoia when it comes to mingling with other people.

Mass transit done right has a real grounding and equality inducing element to it.

Cars just breed more sprawl, more aggressive behavior and a huge sense of entitlement that extracts far more cost and damage than most people realize.

Add up the costs of suburban development, the lack of walkable neighborhoods, the cost of road building and all the runoff problems and green house gasses and particulate matter that wind up in every body's lungs and the whole picture shifts.

But most people's creepy sense of entitlement about their cars makes them turn a deaf ear. They're too busy bitching about the taxes they're paying for those bums to ride the crappy bus service most places have.

Luna, Future Drama Queen

Luna.
I suspect she will not lack for a sense of dramatic projection when she becomes an adult. She's already a show off for cameras.

From Last Night's Show

We had a rockin' good time
Michael sang in rhyme
Jonathon pounded the skins
at just the right time
and C. Scott Fry was
spinning his bass with a grin on his face
and I was bashing out notes
all over the place
the joint was rockin' and the beer was flowing
and for once it actually stopped fucking snowing

They liked us again. Gave us an extra fifty bucks and booked us for March 21st. And I got to watch Ellyn and her horribly cool monkey brained sister dance with Dimitry. A fine night.

Bruce Sterling: 2009 Will Be a Year of Panic

2009 Will Be a Year of Panic

http://www.seedmagazine.com/news/2009/01/2009_will_be_a_year_of_panic.php
From the fevered mind of Bruce Sterling and his alter-ego, Bruno Argento, a consideration of things ahead.

"As 2009 opens, our financial institutions are deep in massive, irrational panic. That's bad, but it gets worse: Many other respected institutions have rational underpinnings at least as frail as derivatives or bundled real-estate loans. Like finance, these institutions are social constructions. They are games of confidence, underpinned by people's solemn willingness to believe, to conform, to contribute. So why not panic over them, too?
Let's consider seven other massive reservoirs of potential popular dread. Any one of these could erupt, shattering the fragile social compact we maintain with one another in order to believe things contrary to fact.
1. The climate. People still behave as if it's okay. Every scientist in the world who isn't the late Michael Crichton knows that it's not. The climate is in terrible shape; something's gone wrong with the sky. The bone-chilling implications haven't soaked into the populace, even though Al Gore put together a PowerPoint about it that won him a Nobel. Al was soft-peddling the problem.
It's become an item of fundamentalist faith to maintain that the climate crisis is a weird leftist hoax. Yet, since the rain falls on the just and the unjust alike, an honest fear of the consequences will prove hard to repress. Since the fear has been methodically obscured, its emergence from the mists of superstition will be all the more powerful. Unlike mere shibboleths of finance, this is a situation that's objectively terrifying and likely to remain so indefinitely."

The rest of this is pretty good, too, and sums up a lot of what I've been thinking about from reading economic blogs like Calculated Risk, The Big Picture and Ian Walsh's work over at Firedoglake blog.
I'm starting to think about buckling up for the ride, but with a four point harness like a stunt flier.
I also feel sorry for anybody who bought into the idea that they'd have any investments to retire on.
Looks like the grasshopper might come out about even with the turtle by the time this shakes out. And we'll be buying a lot less crap we didn't need in the first place.
http://firedoglake.com/

The Big Picture:

http://www.ritholtz.com/blog/

http://www.calculatedriskblog.com/

Quote of the Day: Steven Weinberg on Good and Evil

With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion. - Steven Weinberg

If there's a bigger bunch of thieves out there in the world than the godbags, I can't figure out who. Since the first shaman conned a tribe into buying into the angry gods idea and suckered power and money out of folks all the way up through the Catholic Church's Papal power madness of the dark ages through Rick Warren's slimy book sales and church tithes, it's been about money and power.

I find the Abrahamic godbags the worst of all, from Islam to Mormonism, they're all about keeping women under control and getting the menfolk to be scared enough to kill for their mean manly gods.

And Steven Weinberg's right about good people doing evil things in the name of god, brainwashed into doing things by propaganda and the need to feel righteous.

Even Spidey's been hijacked by the godbags to push fairy tales, it seems.

MF7 Gig this weekend

A young girl is given a pile of manure for her birthday

by her cruel parents.

She's over joyed, and starts digging in it.

When asked why, she says, if there's this much shit,

there's got to be a pony here somewhere.

Here's the pony making my month better, on the last day of it, we're playing a gig this Saturday night at The Alchemy bar.

And it's free, and starts and nine pm, and goes all night.

You'll have time to catch the motor primitives at Mickey's and still see us, as we stumble through our third set, if that was already in the works.

The gig's free, and starts around ten pm. Usually a little before.

What was wrong with Cafe Zoma

Aside from the backyard on the bike trail, Cafe Zoma sucked. Not serious suck, like a chest wound from a hollow point .45 slug or having to go to one of the snotty coffee shops down on the square where the barristas are all bored shallow young creeps, but it sucked.

Here's my take on why:

The layout was terrible. You walk in the front door, and you're shoved right into a cattle chute. The coffee bar and the kitchen space behind it cut the store in half, with tall walls making an open space into a cluttered broken up mess. There was no center to it, no feeling like it was more than a walk through joint.

The coffee was average at best. Not nearly as good as what can be had at EVP on East Washington, and not even as good as the coffee at Mickey's brunch on weekends.

The folks running the coffee bar were too isolated from the rest of the joint. A good shop has barristas that not only like their job, but who also make a coffee shop feel like it's an inviting and welcome place.

I never had a bad interaction with someone working there, but never one where I felt like anybody really cared much about it either. I can get as good a coffee at McDonald's these days and it didn't feel much different, vibe wise.

The furniture sucked. A mish mash of uncomfortable tables, with no sense to how they were arranged, the really never gave the impression that you could find a regular spot.

Part of the reason a lot of people go to coffee shops alone is to sit and listen to other people while pretending to surf the web or read. EVP is perfect for that, and so is the Mermaid.

I know this because people often jump into conversations I've having in either place, and there's a funny dance where folks often orbit around our table full of loudmouth folks before they decide to jump into our circle of hypercaffinated world problem chewers. I never felt like there was any of that vibe in Zoma.

But they did have a good bathroom. And really clean. And it was an ok place to have a live music show, I played a few there. I'll miss stopping there off the bike trail on a hot day and getting something iced. But it had little pull for me besides that.

Lots of local coffee hounds are lamenting the fact that it's closing and trying to figure out how to save it. But until some serious rethinking of the space and attention are given to the overall scheme of things, I don't see how it can survive. Not in a town filled with good coffee houses.

You want the best coffee on the east side, with good barrisats and some seriously thought out space designed to be both cozy and filled with a sense of community, go to EVP. And Rae, Greg or Peter and the rest of the crew will make you a few shots that are perfect, and you'll feel like they actually care.

Cold Air, Cold Beer

Bell's Hopslam beer is without a shred, a micron, a jot, dash or smidgeon of doubt my new favorite mind altering chemical.

Thick, slightly sweet, packed with high alpha acid hops like Cascades that work like a valium, and what must be a barley wine level of ethanol, it's both dangerous and sublime. Worthy of the five dollar a glass price tag.

And I have to say that my new favorite bar is Dexters Pub on North and Johnson.

Good pub chips, fairly good pizza and walking distance from home, and it's not crowded or loud like The Harmony, and the bartenders are less grumpy.

I hate when Allison yells at people and acts like a hard ass about folks who aren't drunk.

I still think Mickey's has the best burger in a bar in this town, though. And brunch on the weekends.

Last night's ragged and bliss filled practice with Mikey and Fry, today's long walk in the cold winter air, followed by a fine pair of beers with Kori has taken the edge off this strange and sorta ugly week.

That cold front blew a little clarity in, too. Upon further reflection, cutting the baby in half doesn't seem so hard. Metaphorically speaking, that is. Not that I know what to do with two halves of a baby, I tend not to eat my own kind, and there's all that unpleasant paperwork if somebody finds out...

This winter sucks. And I'm starting to think about what I want on a purely selfish personal level, because I am one truck repair from getting in my truck and leaving it all behind until my credit card maxes out. Maybe take a long a pile of guitars to use as firewood along the way.

I want somebody to make me supper for a change. Somebody besides me or Kori to cook.

I want somebody to say, "damn, that was a fine time playing those songs tonight" or "hey, let's finish up that cd and play a few gigs"

I want the folks who say they're going to help me with a project help me with a project after they've used up my time and energy on theirs. I want them to clean up after themselves when they use my shop.

I want people to tell me what they're thinking. Not to evade it, or not even give me an answer when I'm doing something with them that I feel passionate about. If I ask you if you want to do a group project, fucking tell me. Don't just say "I show up, don't I? Lame, pal. Showing up is how you get through High School.

I want my pals who ask my fucking opinion on something to actually listen to it and stop using me as a sounding board for their own insecurity, or to stop asking me if they're not interested. I am not interested in telling you what to text people, or if your ass looks funny in those pants. You're not going to pay attention to what I say anyway. I really don't care as long as you're happy, and nothing I say will make a difference.

I want a few of my pals to stop their internal monologs long enough to hear my point of view. To not retreat into emotional breakdown because my worldview doesn't support theirs. To start considering thinking with more than their emotions.

I want people I used to be in a band with to stop whining to me about the band I'm not in anymore, and talking about what new projects they're going to do with other people. It's already been made very clear that I'm not worthy to play with you anymore, so why fucking dump on me about your next plan?

I want my tribe to start giving me back a few things, so it feels like a tribe again instead of me being the person who makes lunch and a handy mother confessor and fix it person.

I'm not holding my breath.

Same As It Ever Was

In any country where talent and virtue produce no advancement, money will be the national god. Its inhabitants will either have to possess money or make others believe that they do.

Wealth will be the highest virtue, poverty the greatest vice. Those who have money will display it in every imaginable way. If their ostentation does not exceed their fortune, all will be well.

But if their ostentation does exceed their fortune they will ruin themselves.

In such a country, the greatest fortunes will vanish in the twinkling of an eye. Those who don't have money will ruin themselves with vain efforts to conceal their poverty.

That is one kind of affluence: the outward sign of wealth for a small number, the mask of poverty for the majority, and a source of corruption for all.

Denis Diderot, Observations on the Drawing Up of Laws (written in 1774 for Catherine the Great), quoted from The Columbia Dictionary of Quotations

Pacing the Cage

Pacing the Cage

Bruce Cockburn, 1997

Sunset is an angel weeping

Holding out a bloody sword

No matter how I squint

I cannot make out what it's pointing toward

Sometimes you feel like you live too long

Days drip slowly on the page

You catch yourself
Pacing the cage

I've proven who I am so many times

The magnetic strip's worn thin

And each time I was someone else

And every one was taken in

Powers chatter in high places

Stir up eddies in the dust of rage

Set me to pacing the cage

I never knew what you all wanted

So I gave you everything

All that I could pillage

All the spells that I could sing

It's as if the thing were written

In the constitution of the age

Sooner or later you'll wind up

Pacing the cage

Sometimes the best map will not guide you

You can't see what's round the bend

Sometimes the road leads through dark places

Sometimes the darkness is your friend

Today these eyes scan bleached-out land

For the coming of the outbound stage

Pacing the cage

Pacing the cage

Some days I miss cleaning toilets in Seattle back in 1993.

Tonight I do, anyway.

Nobody knew me, everything was new again, and I had nowhere to go but up from the bottom I hit before I moved, and I didn't have to be den mother to a bunch of folks who took but didn't give when I needed it.

It's a new day, new president and there's supposed to be hope in the air.

I'm not feeling it. Maybe that's what tomorrow is for.