In Appalachia (1)

Word is out I have a trade, steady income, health insurance, no debt, clean record, regular hours, go to church, good with kids, know how to sweat, and don't drink, smoke, gamble, cook shine, or grow wacky weed. 

The women are talking: I'm the devil they don't know.

tabitha gnillort is my daughter

and the locals have no sense of humor where bears are concerned. It's like living with thousand pound dumpster-diving gangbangers on PCP, each armed with a few dozen switchblades.

Good luck on outrunning them. Try climbing a tree...

triffids and ice

are here

the mixture is whimsy

and that is much too large a venue in which to comment directly

After Allende's "suicide" (1)

"We move like gazelles or the way gazelles move in a tiger's dream."

--Roberto Bolaño, By Night in Chile

Santiago was frightening, one of the few cities where I felt threatened by what I saw on the streets. I wanted an escape route in case the wrong people took an interest in me. And Chile was a place where escape felt impossible.

Here's the thing about cleaning up oil spills under a military regime. Big money is involved and the people with guns always want a piece. I've been crudely threatened, for example, by the Minister of the Five Percent and his big brother, the Minister of the Ten Percent. 

In a banana republic, such as where this extortion played out, you nod your head and catch the next international flight. You may have to buy your way through the border; I suggest crisp hundreds. (And I suggest you not carry a lot of them and especially avoid wearing a money belt if you're flying from Bogota to Mexico City.) But given the base venality that defines a banana republic, you can be gone before the goons arrive to favor you with mandatory hospitality, i.e., jail.

The trick is to get over the border fast into somewhere hospitable. For example I do not suggest fleeing Algeria for Sudan. Escaping Algeria for Morocco, however, is perhaps less convenient but also (probably) less fatal.

And forget about fleeing Algeria using dollars and a flight schedule. Back in the day it was French francs and dinar for an overland driver and expedited consideration at the border. (After my connections developed I could take a fast boat to Marseilles under cover of darkness, assuming certain risks.)

The point is to plan these moves, to lay out your resources for at least a skeletal escape, before you set foot in a place where you'll need them. And everybody I knew in Chile was trying to get out.

Continued... 

The new medication

is kicking my ass. (And juggling the old medication adds to the ass kicking.)

"They" are right: I remember my dreams now. And my dreams are not nearly as violent as they were. I no longer put two hundred bullets through a handgun without changing magazines three feet from my target and he's still functioning, although he's no longer trying to kill me.

I shared that dream with the minders at the VA and they freaked but that's another story.

Now I know that I'm dreaming and the dreams are active, some anxiety-making. (Getting shot at with big stuff for x days in a row apparently has a price.)

Still, I can't complain. The VA are not going to fix me any further (yet another story) but I'm street legal, more or less physically functional, and the pills are free.

So I can't really complain. And compared with some of the patients I see at the Martinsburg hospital, I have no room to. Things are cool.

But good God am I groggy this morning.

"Of what is lost, irretrievably lost,

‎...all I wish to recover is the daily availability of my writing, lines capable of grasping me and lifting me up when I'm at the end of my strength."

Even before reading these lines, with which Bolaño closed his first novel Antwerp, I have known that my life is missing the daily dance with the blank page, no matter the pain that might come with that dance.

Kelly Joe seals the deal

It took me five hours straight to get there, 298 miles door to door. We'd been going back and forth for six or eight months on the phone, email upon email, stopped by her house a few times "just sort of passing through," 298 miles door to door.

So this time I walked in, handed her my copy of Shine Eyed Mister Zen, she settled back and halfway through House Carpenter said I've got a spare toothbrush if you didn't bring yours.

Dock Boggs Country Blues is track number six on the disc. Maybe we made it that far.

Reading Bolaño's Antwerp

Nonlinear narrative. Shattered, glued, shattered again and printed.

And brief. The 2010 New Directions hardback is seventy-eight pages plus Bolaño's introduction. Fits in a cargo pocket with a pack of Gitanes, your moleskine knockoff, and a small box of vin ordinaire. We're good for a morning in the park.

Fifty-six chapters, paragraphs, scenes, reflections, whatever they are. Attention span optional.

But it's Bolaño. I'll have to read it a half dozen times to get his point.

Can I walk this fast...

Annual endurance test on November 6th for our wildland team at the high school at 8:00 am: 3 miles, 45 pounds, 45 minutes. Do it or lose your Red Card.

No Red Card means sit out the fire season; you're off the team. So I'm burning my lungs and legs tonight. This fast.

2 mg prazosin HCl cap qhs

They say my dreams will no longer be nightmares.

Meditating on Bolaño (1)

Roberto Bolaño forces me to confront what I will do if the Republican party recaptures significant political power over the next few election cycles. I suspect they will use their subpoena power to visit upon Obama's administration the same kind of death by a thousand cuts to which they subjected Clinton's. 

And after they derail Obama we'll get eight years of a Bush-like stooge, perhaps Palin, with a Cheney-like fascist again controlling the strings. 

I doubt I can spend my declining years under another Pinochet regime. My self-disgust for having remained a US citizen during Cheney's reign of terror was mitigated only by the hope that we could come to our senses, put the miscreants in dock (here, the Hague, Madrid, wherever), and roll back their crimes.

But should the Republicans regain significant power, I fear we are in for another reign of the black shirts, who will have no trouble enlisting brown shirts as enforcers. A significant portion of the citizenry will passively watch, perhaps take an active part. We'll slide further into the 19th Century, perhaps worse.

Continued...

Words a parent does not want to hear.

"I'm a vampire slayer."

I would rather she tell me she's pregnant.

Online social networks

...at least the ones I'm on. Mostly feels like who's cool at school, which I still don't play well.

Danny DeVito talking about art

‎"...something to hold onto in an ephemeral letting go kind of way..."

Guest of Cindy Sherman Clips With Danny DeVito
by Paul Hasegawa-Overacker

Toyota technicals

Saw my first of these in the 1970s and salivated. Problem is, I use trucks to haul long, heavy stuff; mainly logs. Were I in the hired guns business, however, a few of these would be ideal.

What little TV I watch (1)

"You were supposed to be here an hour ago."
"Be nice to me... I just spent two hours with our ex wife"
"Yeah? She mention my name?"
"Not for years."

NCIS, "Short Fuse"
air date 10/5/10 via cbs.com

Not a big fan of mashups but...

Relationships (1) -- The night has teeth.

I am a lone wolf, an alpha with no pack; the most dangerous kind, they say. 

I no longer hunt but at times I'm the hunted, a pleasurable way to play the game.

Playing catch with a live grenade.

I'm feeling a little sanguine here, where futzing with blogger's basic design is concerned. I have docs that describe blogger's css in numbing detail, which in theory should allow me to revise their basic template to my liking.

I foresee a complete catastrophe.

Things we share

I'm not sure which came first, my X End the alter ego or their X End on YouTube.

She (1)

Cada día se la traga mi corazón.

Stuff to write about

My brain chugs a lot while I read or drive or hear snippets over the EMS scanner. My brain carves essays in air while it's inconvenient to carve on the page. Topics for future posts:

• Guys with guns -- Civilians & conceal-carry permits.
• On the run from yourself -- Chemical dependency, recovery programs, and the face in the mirror.
  
• Emigre paranoia (1) -- I always spend time in their little rooms-without-windows whether coming or going, yet they never fail to grant me a work permit.
• Emigre paranoia (2) -- Why my Spanish isn't worth shit.
• Emigre paranoia (3) -- What I learned at Franco's tomb.
• Emigre paranoia (4) -- Choose your maternal city wisely. San Sebastián is pais basque, Santander is not.
• Emigre paranoia (5) -- Citizenship options... How much guilt do they feel? (The "law of historical memory.")
• Emigre paranoia (6) -- Expat isolation.
  
• Child-parent revenge fantasies -- "That patient really needs a DNR."
• Mandatory corpse abuse - "We're doing CPR why, again?"
  
• Your personal jesus ain't mine -- Street medicine as ministry minus coercion.
• Barcelona, my other Rio.
• Kitchen tips (1) -- running life on one each plate, spoon, fork, sharp knife, cookie sheet, and deep tupperware thing.
• Kitchen tips (2) -- using a claw-hammer-and-brick can opener without repainting the walls.
  

Heart like a wheel

Linda Ronstadt singing "When Will I be Loved" and "Willin'". X1 got this album if I remember right.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mI9FMwzgY-k

"So I cleared the bar with his head..."

I post in other places, forums that feel increasingly unsatisfying. A return to Blogger demands a change in focus, less self indulgence, and more disciplined writing.

It also suggests less time on those forums, the ones that now feel like black holes, which means more time to write and even more time to study.

This blog is probably the tenth that I've started in ten or so years. For the first few I used ftp and a text editor. Before that it was list servers, not really blogs.

I don't worry about traffic or comments. I worry about whether I can get the words out on paper. I get bored when my writing fails. At that point, so far as I'm concerned, the blog is brain dead; I pull the plug, erase it.

We shall see where this goes.