Return of Burning Elf

Burning Elf returned. It was low key and fun, and a good way to avoid thinking about the tumor growing in the living flesh of our democracy. There were nice people, good chili and the elf burnt nicely - and pretty much burnt out in the time it took to play the extended mix of "Move On Up" by Curtis Mayfield.

Peace.

Christmas was good too, though there seemed to be a lot of inert sitting around due to us all having colds.

Experiment. Is Any One Really Paying Attention?

       In an effort to see if any one has the slightest interest in their surroundings or community, or has a sense of humor left in an age of self absorption - I have temporarily changed the sign welcoming citizens to my neighborhood. My son and I cut the bushes back a couple times a year. When I was doing it last, I started to wonder if any one noticed. That lead to an idea; given our present national crisis, where some one shamelessly exploited the system for his own gain and no one seemed to notice, is that a thing that could only happen on a grand scale or would people pay attention on the small scale? So a silly sign held up by 3 staples- will anyone notice?

       This was done on Sept. 20th 2017- I want to see how long it takes for it to be removed or mentioned in the local blog or facebook page.

      This is only a test. I will update when something happens.

UPDATE: Oct 22, 2017 - Still up. No comments, no official notice.

UPDATE Nov. 11, 2017- Two months exactly- Some one noticed- as reported on the North Delridge Facebook page!!!

UPDATE Jan 24. 2018- Still up. No "Official" notice or removal. I am thinking of taking it down and changing it.

UPDATE June 4- Sign removed (by me doing vegetation maintenance) - To be renewed with new slogan soon.

Edibles. Why I Can't Enjoy Pot. WARNING: Includes Spoilers About My Brain!

      Okay. I admit it. I must accept a bitter mantle thrust upon me in High School: I am a lightweight. I can not maintain. I am paranoid and I can't deal with being stoned. So branded, I was relegated to being the last to get the bong hit and the first to go home, or be helped into the back yard to lie on his back in the suburban grass and hang on, waiting for the wrath of a vengeful god. I had at least one bad experience in High School with PCP  laced pot- the infamous Led Zeppelin concert of 1977 - which for lack of a better description was sort of like Hieronymus Bosch painting set in the quaint parking garage type structure of Seattle's beloved Kingdome. Whoa, that was strange.  It was uncomfortable. I am a sort of weird guy anyway- I sometimes wonder if my "normal" is what others see stoned- My imagination is filled with conspiracy and orthodox christian imagery (I once saw the face of Jesus in the acoustic ceiling popcorn of my family's rec room after smoking hash oil in the 70's- try just casually smoking a doobie after that...) Generally I am wrapped a little too tight. I am not socially easy to be with. Being high makes me yet more awkward in the extreme, so I wholly accept my High School brand. I guess I have no choice.
      Like many people I voted for the legalization of pot in Washington. Why not? My 90 year old parents voted for it too. Many people enjoy it, some need it and may get benefit from medical uses.  I get weird. My favorite human and love of my life, L can't smoke- she has asthma - and she has a certain amount of chronic pain and certainly has the universal liberal post 2016 depression to deal with - so we visited our local pot store.  We settled on edibles. - Weird little THC breath mint slips that frankly did nothing for me. I went back and got gummies- mandarin flavored one inch square treats that I was warned to eat only half to see if they worked for me. They are crappy as a candy, but mystic adventure to hell if you over indulge. Of course the half I ate did nothing,and  after 45 minutes, so I ate the rest and SHABAM! I was immediately transported back to the Kingdome 1977. Unpleasant but easier to handle as a decrepit old guy. I spent the evening- a work night before an out of town job, being outwardly weird around my wife and son. I was on deck of a tempest tossed, sinking mental frigate, drowning in my own ocean. Unlike having a drink which just makes me stupid, pot is a mind bending and bizarre world of intellectual self examination and macro focus introspection to me. It's like looking at things through a set of binoculars, or a microscope- very interesting but for fucks sake it's hard to walk around with the damn thing on your face. It's also hard to remember to breathe, anxiety being a running joke in my personality anyway. I watch friends smoke this shit like chimneys but I couldn't do that. I am a little sad that I can't join the social world of pot, that I can't make use of it's gifts, but it's not for me. I suppose my over active, sometimes dormant creative side comes out and interacts with my deformed anxiety prone psyche, and the combination, while not lethal is toxic enough to avoid.

My Amazing (and ultimately sad) Predictions for the Present Regime and the End of Our Normal Lives.

      Hubris is one of those concepts that 10th graders are taught and immediately forget. It doesn't fit easily into the mundane everyday lives we lead in America. We have so much stuff we have to manage, who can keep track of the huge weight of history and the clock that counts down our last few seconds when we have shows on Netflix to catch up on or if you haven't  been to Facebook in over an hour?  In the name of freedom, (mostly our freedom, that of suburban white Americans anyway)  we have rode rough shod over much of the world, and the bill is going to come due. We have congratulated ourselves endlessly over our free institutions and elections, never realizing that they were so fragile and dependent on good people with at least superficial altruistic motives to operate them.  We now have a president that is so deeply damaged as a person, so indulged and incompetent, so shameless and uncomprehending of his potential for inflicting pain on the world that he is threatening nuclear annihilation at the UN. Scary but can't happen, right? There is very recent precedent for things that "can't possibly happen" with this guy- "He was so awful" we said- "he's a joke" and will never be nominated by the Republicans. He was. He will never be elected, he can't be. He was. He will never be indicted or impeached, he will be... but he won't, and here is my sad prediction; the  angry toddler, bruised by low polls and targeted for his crimes by Mueller,  will goad North Korea into a conflict as soon as the special counsel gets close to implicating the him or his family in punishable or impeachable crimes.  He will sacrifice millions of lives without a second thought so as not to be embarrassed by removal from office. He will literally start WWIII so the Russian pee tape will not be released. It couldn't possibly happen, right? I have the same feeling about this as I did the election, that it couldn't possibly happen but it did. We will become the bad guys of history to protect the precious impossibly delicate ego of billionaire douchebag. This is where hubris comes in. It's not the hubris of the sorry buffoon in the white house - it's ours, all of us, America's.  We had it so good and we could have made this world so much better, all of it. We could have taken our lofty ideas and helped more but we got fat and lazy. We were too interested in our toys and our bellies. Did we really think that somehow we would escape the pain of the world? That we wouldn't be victims of history some day? When he launches the nukes at North Korea (he will want a good show- the ratings will be terrific) killing millions, both innocent and guilty, there- then will be retaliation on the US, maybe only one or two from NK but that could kill millions here, possibly even Seattle (which would be great for the orange man- we voted 8 to 1 for Clinton and Jeff Bezos who owns the Washington Post lives here) creating chaos and the ultimate distraction from the special counsel and his glorious Reichstag fire to ensure his presidency for life and the succession of his monarchy.  And that's if China and Russia do not jump in. Does Iran decide that with the US fully involved in Asia that it's time to start something in the mideast? Science fiction? Nope. It's the road we are on. All the online petitions and calling your congressmen and angry Facebook posts will not stop him. We have done it to ourselves, we created this TV Frankenstein, we fed him and now his reality TV installed brain is looking for the ultimate season finale. I have a bad feeling.

Weird Orange Sun

Maybe it's just forest fires choking the air with ash and making the sun burn a sepia orange that makes everything look weak and sickly. We have always had forest fires that do this, right?. And huge, dramatic hurricanes. And total eclipses....and the not-so-subtle feelings of dread and doom, but something feels like we are in uncharted wilderness, fed by the narcissist clown emperor that is failing his way into apocalypse. We are fucked. Or is this the sort of chemotherapy America needs to burn out the evil?  I want to think that but my jolly Jehovah's Witness seems pretty certain other forces are afoot.

New art.  This is my Last Supper. It's large and I have no place to hang it so it sits in our small fortress of solitude in the backyard.  I also did this on a cabinet that I built many years ago to hold the stupidity enhancer (TV)

A Genuine Bastard or Bad Book Keeping?

Behold- The man on the left is my great grandfather Herbert O. Perkins; man of mystery. I have no idea who the other gentleman might be.  This is the first photo of Herbert O. Perkins I have ever seen. He was by most accounts a neer do well out of Maine, who drug his wife and children around the USA looking for the prosperous riches that constantly eluded him. My grandmother, Nellie, was born in Fort Worth, Texas on one of the stops on his grand tour, but she was raised in Seattle.  Her father, seeking his fortune left the family there in order to strike off to the Alaska gold rush. Of course, he was never to be seen again. Or was he? I found record of his death many years later in 1929, in Oak Harbor, WA- not far from Seattle on Whidbey Island. Did he just abandon his wife and five children for the life of leisure in Oak Harbor? Or was he declared dead there by his widow, outside of Seattle, so as not to bring scandal? Was it even him?  Could he have lived in Oak Harbor, started a new family or just existed with his wife and kids so near and no one the wiser? Obviously, there were hard feelings in my grandmother's family about Mr. Perkins.

This was found digging through the piles of photographs and albums of my families, that my mother, 94 and the last of her generation, has been freighted with. Most of the people in the pictures I do not know, nor do I think anyone will fault me for discarding but it is a burden- the beloved keepsake memories of the long dead. I have today thrown away much of the out of focus, poorly exposed and composed photos of various"important" events of the 1960s, '70's, 80's and newer.  Generally the years I can account for: other people be damned. Now that they are gone I do not feel bad. Maybe I am more like my great grandfather Herbert O. Perkins than I like to admit.

Guitarsville: A Split Second of Exhilaration Followed by Fumbling Chaos

No musical skill was included in my inventory at birth. My mother graduated from the University of Washington with a Music degree and was an amazing pianist. She did however spend her childhood chained to a piano; a fact that leaves her conflicted about her achievements, yet she was very good in her day. Music escapes me. I have no aptitude. It is a surprise, even to me, that I have taken up the guitar. Tom takes lessons and is actually pretty good. As a degraded old person I am too embarrassed to take lessons, so I try and teach myself through repetition of bad habits and sheer luck. I liken my experience to an illiterate hunter-gatherer finding a wizard's staff and trying to make it work without an instruction book. What the hunter-gatherer did not have however was Youtube, which is ripe with guitar videos. I can find the random blues riff and , if I practice enough, it can sound close enough to actual music to give the briefest shiver of joy and imagine what the attraction the talented might have to performing.

Guitars, I find are also like my car obsession- I like old and flashy looking useless objects that I only barely know how to fix. They are a Chevy elCamino that make pleasing noise. They are fun to tinker with and customize in a manner that probably makes me look ridiculous. (See aforementioned elCamino).  These two are Archie and Jughead.  Archie is a Les Paul ( I refer to it as a "Much Less Paul") knock off kit guitar made from some strange Asian wood. I bought it from eBay and put it together like a soap box derby racer from cub scouts. It was fun and I learned the basics. It has a pretty decent action and sounds "okay".  Putting it together was not much different than working on my first car- a 1968 VW Karmann Ghia. Generally everything about Archie is pretty cheap but he tries to please. I have put him away for a while.




The black hollow body is Jughead. It is another eBay project though this was a restoration and not a box of parts. I bought it from New Jersey and it was listed as a playable guitar and it arrived trashed: electronics wrecked, wires stripped, neck potentially cracked, scratched, filled with dust bunnies and wanting to be euthanized. It looked like it had been looted from a Super Storm Sandy closet. It was never a great guitar- it is a "Winderoo" which was a Chinese company in the 90's. They are still made as a "K-tone".  I took it apart put in new electronics and used more extreme Epiphone pickups. It was a nasty, harlot red, and I painted it Mad Max stealth flat black. I had it professionally set up and a new bridge put in. The guitar tech shook his head like a surgeon that couldn't save the patient. "Enjoy it for whatever time you have left" he said. I really like it's twangy, grimy, bluesy sound. Even though I have almost no idea what I am doing - I am enjoying myself.   If I close my eyes, bending a note in the pentatonic scale, I can imagine I am BB King for a split second, and then I re-materialize as a fifty something white dude in his family room annoying his cats.

Book Report- My once a decade re-reading of Sirens of Titan by Kurt Vonnegut.

In the swirling shit storm that our post Trump world has become, I found it necessary to consult a book I have loved since my late teens. "Sirens of Titan" by Kurt Vonnegut Jr.  in many ways could be my favorite book of all time. It's not perfect, or particularly deep or important but it does combine many things that I love-It is an irreverent depiction of post war American morals- It is an existential satirical road trip through 1950's pulp sic-fi and mostly in the end it is a moving book about love, friendship and the purpose of being a sentient life form. When I was young I wanted to be a writer. I don't have the required skills or patience to do it properly. In recent years I have painted Sci-Fi pulp covers in homage to Kurt Vonnegut's alter ego, science fiction hack Kilgore Trout. My own novel "The Chronic Yard Sale" has the fingerprints of Kilgore Trout all over it. Sirens of Titan was the source of all that. It was a revelation when I first read it, like discovering a new dimension to your personality, which for a cynical, frankly depressed 1970's era teenager was welcome. I have re-read this probably four times, at critical points in my life- as a college student, as a young man unsure of my direction, as a new father and now as a decrepit and hollowed out bitter shell of a man,- Re-reading it during our present downward spiral to apocalypse was bitter sweet. It actually holds up well in it's pulp ethos, though it seems fairly naive now, the real world incongruence and garishness eclipsing it's much sweeter oddball vision. The theme of being used by history seemed actually preferable to the present chaos we find ourselves in.