stickpaste - prose poems that explode with meaning and beauty

return of the mack

2011-03-22T17:48:00.015-08:00

baby, now I got the flow
'cause I knew it from the start
baby, when you broke my heart
that I had to come again
and show you that I'm real

-Mark Morrison, "Return of the Mack"

On a fateful night in the fall of some otherwise forgotten high school year, I crashed my parent's red Ford Taurus wagon into a tree.

The temperature was just above freezing. Later I would learn from my Oceanography teacher, the great and wise Clay Good, about dew points and the science behind why the road had patches of ice despite the few degrees of temperature buffer that I thought I had.

Coming into a long, doglegged turn, I steered too far into the oncoming lane and in correcting the heading of that oblong, jellyfish-looking automobile that represented the nadir of American car manufacturing back into my own lane, the black rubber of the churning tires met black ice.

I had no seat belt on.

I was going about 75 or 80 miles an hour.

I was way out the road, a good few miles from any kind of civilization, on the border of where the tenuous city of Juneau becomes genuine Alaskan hinterlands.

In that instant, I felt the asshole-clenching sensation of imminent death and the shower of prickly adrenaline secretion washing into my veins.

The car spun an awkward half pirouette and slammed into a tree trunk that instantly halted the massive momentum of everything. The tree trunk caved in the passenger side at about the midpoint of the car. I had been listening to the classic club mega-hit "Return of the Mack" during the accident, but the music stopped with the impact.

I can't hear that song now without feeling like my life is reeling off before my eyes. In a way, that indelible link has made that song a sort of touchstone for me. Reading the lyrics now, it seems almost prophetic.

It hits a little too close to home, really.

I know that this all might seem like I'm being sarcastic, but I'm not. There is real meaning in that song for me even though it's a one-hit wonder piece of shit that time and good sense has left for dead in the purgatory of '90s dance compilations.

Sometimes, truth comes from the strangest of places. I can attest.

I was amazed even at the moment I walked out of that wreck that I had nary a scratch or ding or ill-effect from the impact. The car, impaled on the tree like a badly aligned corndog, did not fare as well. I tried to start it and drive off, but the Taurus wasn't budging, so I began the trek to DeHart's where there was a payphone a few miles yonder down the road.

Calling my parents and having my dad drive out in the old Ford LTD that served as the family's back-up ride was far more terrifying than my brush with eternity. My dad, Paul, was not a fun person to be around when he was pissed. Those occasions were rare, which made them all the more distinctive and etched in memory.

Maybe one other time, when my sister Patrice and I were kids, did I see him get so fumed. I can't even remember what that was about, probably my sister and I fighting for hours on end, but I just remember he got his belt and the blood veins along the ridges of his temples seethed and he gave me some good licks that time.

For months and what seemed like years after my car crash, our family had to drive that old LTD everywhere. It was a classic Helmar family piece of shit car.

My dad always said when you buy a used car, you're just buying someone else's problems, which is ironic and sort of funny in a bittersweet way looking back on it, because all we could ever afford were old beaters and my dad always insisted on buying American autos, which severely limited the pool of cars he could consider in a town that must be like 50% Subarus. The nicest car my parents ever owned growing up was a 1993 Ford Tempo that had all-wheel drive.

When my dad died, after I was out of high school, I would have the pleasure of driving that Tempo into the ground while my mom defected from the long-held family stance on auto buying and got a new Subaru Forrester.

The LTD ran like an aged pack mule and it was always burning oil.

I always see it in my memories enveloped by a cloud of caustic smoke. My mom would drive me to school in the mornings in the LTD and the heater wheezed on the frosted windows with all the gusto of a stage 4 emphysema patient, which caused a vicious cycle of condensation where the damp interior of the old Ford would never get all the way dry and the windows were always terminally foggy and we had to wipe them from the inside with jacket-sleeves just to see the streets and byways of God's green earth on the way to school or wherever the destination was.

I would ask my mom to drop me off a few blocks from school so I wouldn't have to bear the shame of being part of a family that drove shitbox cars, which was partly of my own doing, of course. Self-inflicted wounds always cut the deepest.

In summation, I am a very lucky person and the universe seems to have an idiosyncratic way of doling out my fate. There have been many incidents in my life like walking away from that car crash that defy logic or the immutable principles of the cosmos.

One time I was sitting on a couch with my friend Jake Good, son of the aforementioned Clay Good, Oceanography teacher extraordinaire. As an aside, Clay is also the main reason I got out of high school because he passed me in Oceanography with the old D-minus stamp of approval even though I didn't show up for the last half of the semester and everyone needed that class to graduate. I thanked Clay for his grace a few years back, and he said something to the effect of, "Don't mention it. Getting through high school here is based on the buddy system."

God bless that man.

So Jake and I were sitting on a couch in the upstairs of my parents house, watching TV and smoking dope and I had a basketball in my hands and I was sitting with my feet out on an ottoman. Without even the germ of a thought and while looking at Jake, I threw the ball hard up towards the heavens and it bounced off the ceiling and came down on my feet at the perfect angle to roll right back into my hands where it had left an instant earlier.

I know that this basketball incident seems like small potatoes, but I'm sure Jake still remembers after all these years because it was a moment of wondrous and sublime energy that just came through me at that particular moment and vector in space and time. I'm not saying that I have some sort of special power, because like I said, I didn't even think about it and I wasn't even really controlling my body at the time.

It just happened.

Things just happen to me sometimes.

sueño atrapar

2010-01-06T06:26:00.009-09:00

Puerto Lopez is a lost little village from a place in my dreams. It´s a small fishing town and I have no idea how I ended up here, but I did and it is exactly the kind of place where one doesn´t question the status quo. The two industries here are fishing and a smidge of tourism. A small fleet of dilapidated boats ventures out into the sea each morning, going only a few dozen meters and usually powered by the plunge of a pescadero´s, or fisherman´s, pole into the muddy ocean plain.

The hostal where I´m staying is called Monte Libano and it´s right on the beach. Frente la playa. A Swiss woman named Sabrina and a Ecuadorian gentleman named Jadin are the owners of the place, and they are amazing hosts. Last night, I went to the local mercado (market) with Jadin and bought fresh produce and camarónes (shrimp) and together we made salad and papas fritas (fries) con camarónes. Everything is daily fresh here and the market is a wonderful festival of theatrical haggling and vivid colors and smells.

Notice the dream catchers, or sueño atrapar. There is some sort of indelible link between this place and Juneau, maybe it´s the fishing thing, but when I saw the dream catchers a wave of feeling sort of like deja vu hit me. Like I was familiar with this place before I consciously was aware of its existence.

Puerto Lopez is an exercise of letting go of my American inhibitions. There is strange and familiar insect life burgeoning from the open sewers or dikes that ring the little pueblo. Cockroaches and crickets and ants and every other god awful creature you can imagine are crawling in the next thicket or crevice. The facilities are limited and I often ruminate on the state of the plumbing and electrical wiring and wonder if the people in this country are just willfully lazy or just too busy enjoying the sun and seafood and beach - or maybe both. This kind of thing, the amenities, only matter if you´ve come to depend on them. That is one way I´ve taken to thinking of it - window dressing.

In a sense, being in Ecuador is a way of beginning to let go of this frame of mind that I have, that everything needs to be perfect or life is unmanageable. I remember being a kid and losing a He-Man toy, one of a vast array of these characters I possessed, and because the collection had been marred, I lost all interest in all of the toys. I hate things in the state of incompleteness. I am an order-bringer in the middle of a stew of total chaos, and because the disorder is so overwhelming and immutable, I am more than happy to be able to let go.

In the mornings, before the sun begins to impose its oppressive heat, I like to go to the fútbol courts and play a little with the local kids. The court above is the only one that is purely a soccer pitch. The most popular deporte here in Puerto Lopez is volleyball, actually, or bali is its referred to locally.

The first time I played, I bought the kids some Gatorade, and from then on I was in. The skids, however, don´t really need to be greased here as the Ecuadorian people are entirely friendly. A guy who was interested in where I was from followed me around for a couple hours showing me local points of interest in the town. He bought me a portion of tiny huevos duros, (hard boiled eggs) possibly tortoise eggs but I´m not sure, from a vendor. The eggs are local delicacy that are more subtly flavored and delicate than the normal chicken egg. People are more than willing to take you into their homes and feed you and talk to you.

The mariposa (butterfly) above was found dead in an ashtray. Ecuador is unrivaled in its biodiversity. Every moment is an opportunity to see a new odd creature traveling along its unique life arc. There are humongous birds here, like a gull of some kind, that fly over the shallow coasts and they feed by hurling themselves headlong into the water in pursuit of the abundant sea life.

The pescado (fish) here is unbelievable. It is typically cooked on a grill, a la plancha, and is served in thin fillets that are crisp and golden outside and moist and tasty inside. Salads of tomates y pepinos (tomatoes and cucumbers) are common and rice and/or fries are included with most every meal. No fuss dining. I tell everyone I meet that they need to come to Alaska and try the fish, and also I tell everyone that they need to open a sushi restaurant because this is the perfect place; I mean, it´s all here. Rice and amazing fish and cangrejo (crab) and langosta (lobster) and camarónes and I would imagine they can get their hands on some seaweed and wasabi. When I mention the sushi thing, people are kind of aghast, though, and I think it´s because their attitude is that everything here is as it should be, and further, why mess with a good thing. This is, of course, a perfectly reasonable way to look at things, but the order-bringer in me almost can´t take it.

We have a saying in America that goes something like, "Sometimes you are the fly, sometimes you are the windshield." That is, to me, this country of incredible climactic and biological extremes in a nutshell. Things just are and the people don´t spend their lives agonizing over the details. In the States, we seem to have created a culture entirely driven towards distracting ourselves from the living of life. We obsess over popular culture and the various idols and icons that exist in that sphere. We create an ever-shifting modern mythology about these things and have deluded ourselves through power of beamed signal that celebrity or power or the ability to purchase a luxury car is all we need. I know I have that sort of longing, but it is totally illusory on the most basic, human level.

Brad Pitt is just a man and Jon and Kate are just a collective fever dream and American Idol is a hallucination on the level of mass hysteria at a Pink Floyd laser light show. These people here in Puerto Lopez just care about feeling the sun´s warmth and the salt-licked breath of the ocean. They care about having enough fish to eat and maybe a dry place to hang a hammock and they care about their families. They could give a care less about the next Real World / Road Rules challenge and reality television doesn't register because their reality is tangible and it´s warm and beautiful in Puerto Lopez and it feels like sand in your toes and sunburn on your neck.

how I learned to stop worrying law and start loving the law

2009-12-30T14:45:00.013-09:00

The first thing you´ll be glad to know is that I finally found out where all those Sacagawea dollars are going. They all have a fine and, in the local vernacular, tranquilo place to chill here in sunny Ecuador. In the coins, I see a small microcosm of the whole place, which is at once familiar and totally, irrevocably alien from what I know. For example, the local currency has become, by dint of a weak national bank, the dollar. Everything is paid in good old greenbacks, and illusory gold like the over-sized coins bearing the ironic likeness of an Indian princess, but everything is valued as it would be in a far-flung, third world place. Breakfast, aka Desayuno? $1.50 for eggs, toast, coffee, fresh-squeezed juice and fixings.

This tasty little plate has been one of the more expensive meals I´ve eaten. It´s a fusion Japanese-Ecuadorian dish that I savored in a strange restaurant in Cuenca that had sumptuous, red pleather couches in lieu of more conventional furniture. There is a fried egg on top, which seems to be a common flourish, the local version of a parsley sprig, and below is a steak sizzling in an onion-vegetable-oyster sauce bath which is also inhabited by the occasional papa frita, or french fry. Total with a bottle of agua? $6.

***

Before I arrived here in my first Banana Republic, I had thought often of checking out the courts. Cultivated by my job in the Public Defender Agency up in Alaska, I have an endless curiosity about how justice is meted out in other worlds. Part of the impetus was a planned Anthropology paper, part of the urge a natural curiosity to see a layer of Ecuador whose parallel I had a good feel for in the U.S. so as to create a context. The courts, the thought was, could be a lens to better see the internal workings of the country.

In Alaska, one can certainly see through watching the courts what some of the values of the community are. Our criminal justice system is strong in terms of the individual´s rights and in independent, un-beholden thought. Still there is much inequity, but because of our strong State consitution and the independent nature of the people, our courts, too have a pioneering spirit in terms of the rights of the common person.

In Ecuador, things have been similarly revealing. The system is a tangled mess of corruption, ever-changing landscapes of the law and, most of all, a thousand gatekeepers. There is no analog to our right to a jury trial, instead a person accused of a crime must hope to receive an "audience" with often corrupt judges.

Above is a furtively taken photo of a witness being deposed at one of these audiences. Note the man´s proximity to the gaggle of three judges - they can see the whites of his eyes and he is noticeably uncomfortable in the heat of three powerful men´s gazes. The witness´arms are crossed and his tone rises to almost shrill heights when he tries to sketch out his side of things under the withering questioning of the skilled prosecutor, who uses the language of Spanish like a claymore; careful and alliterative and confidant behind the machismo and rhythm of the grand language, or idioma is it is called in español.

The case centered on a bank robbery. The defendant was not, however, an alleged thief, but rather a guard who had left the scene of a nascent robbery. This was, apparently, common and that made a great deal of sense to me as security forces seem to be everywhere in this country - outside of every bank and fine retailer - and not everyone can be a hero when confronted with an actual arsenal of automatic weapons. Beyond the basics of the situation, I could not comprehend what was happening with my limited hold on the language. Still, it seemed obvious even without the words how strained the system is.

Here I am in the foyer of the constitutional courts, which had just been established in August of 2008 here in Ecuador to offer redress for human rights violations. I was shuffled off to an information officer who gave me a sanitized break down of what happened at the courts. I, through my travels, have talked to a number of young people from Ecuador who were completely skeptical of what sort of justice this new entity might offer. One of these people was a girl named Rafeala, who had completed three years of the five year law school program here which combines post-secondary education with the nuts and bolts of the world of law. She was so disillusioned, and I wanted to offer her some sort of encouragement that she should return to law school so she could be one of the principled few in her country that would gradually return the system from its state of atrophy. Then I thought of my own path, which has been bumpy and fraught to say the least, towards love of the law.

Every day contains some measure of struggle or seeing people at their lowest point. I am but a lowly law office assistant, but I like to think of myself as a point guard on a basketball team, a distributor who combs cases and prepares them with a bit of leg work before passing them off to the correct attorney. The office works better the quicker I can get cases out. I feel a sense of responsibility to our clients, trite as it sounds, because I have seen the power and influence of addiction and negative, hopeless thoughts, and to some degree I can understand why people find themselves in these impossible situations.

The key to maintaining a fluid law office, I have found, at least administratively, is to never sit on a task. Each day I heave the pile of paperwork forward with the force of all that guilt and anger transmuted by our clients. It has taken traveling thousands of miles away from it all for me to realize how personal it has all become. I feel a sense of sadness that I can´t be home soaking up paperwork and competing with the other side in our strange and wonderful adversarial legal system. Yesterday we went white water rafting on the Amazon, and my team, with two less rowers, bested the other team of rafters and it was partly because I slipped our guide an extra five bucks so he would push us to victory. Our team had an established cadence and by transmitted force of will, we plunged our plastic oars into the choppy, brown water with special purpose. Uno, dos. Uno, dos. Uno, dos. Uno, dos. Vamos, Chicos! The guide would scream his words with much delight at the Americanos pulling at the water so abrasively.

Before I left this unhinged world of mine for the placid, warm climes of muy bonito Ecuador, I opened a fortune cooking during one of the last, expanding moments in my apartment in which hasty, crazed preparations had been happening. The cookie had told of an unexpected treasure to come in the next week. All the while, I waited for the sign to come, and through the week of plane ride to plane ride to airport blocks of blank time and bus rides that seemed endless and cumulative, I waited for the treasure to materialize. Nothing came but a bill from UAS telling me they were going to start charging me out-of-state tuition next semester, even though I had been in-state the semester previously, because of some new change in its policy. This seemed to be the farthest thing from a treasure possible, but it made me think.

I have been every moment contemplating this new outlook on my future ever since the University decided that I was suddenly $6000 more of a burden to it next semester. The thought chain has brought me to often think about why it is that I choose to remain in Juneau. I have been trying to put my finger on what it is about that strange place for as long as I could abstractly ponder why I had been born there and not in some metropolis which seemed always to be my natural place. There again, though, when I leave the small burg of Juneau, I feel an acute, displaced longing to return. To return to what? My family, certainly, but that is what the occasional holiday trek is for. It did, after a period, begin to come into focus for me during this viaje, or voyage. Juneau is comfortable and largely unchanging. Even if things did change, they were often referred to in a sort of anthropological past tense - A&P market was still Foodland to any rooted local. The Mapco building, although without a tenant at the time of my departure a week and a half ago, and through the years with many other incarnations having passed through - the Party Zone, Williams Express, a pizza place - remained so titled as a land mark. Western Auto was stilled called the Mark´n Pack by the elder members of the Tongass rain forest tribes of aboriginal Juneauites, even though no such sign had graced the business in years.

Things were, by and large, as the community wanted to remember and emphasize them. Tears were still shed over long dispatched restaurants like the Armadillo and City Cafe and Channel Bowl Cafe. My mom, herself a native daughter and child of a native daughter, would say that we stay there because we don´t want to miss any part of this long narrative that we have woven our own essential fabric into.

I think this is why I keep coming back. I don't want to miss out on the story and become disconnected with where I'm from. Juneau isn't perfect and the world isn't perfect. I don't think any place can be because of the human element, as I'm coming to realize more and more. People build places and maintain them and live in them and as such these places take on human characteristics. People are fallible, and I think confronting and accepting our frailties is as important as understanding the gifts of humanity like curiosity and love.

break down on the lonely blacktop of the info superhighway

2009-04-28T10:38:00.012-08:00

Paper versus digital information. It is the divide the world is hovering over. Recent events in our society have shifted the debate on that topic from something substantial to a a decision-making process that is fueled by emotional thinking.

I'm not saying its wrong to love curling up with a hardbound novel or newspaper, but its important to not lose sight of the differences between a world in which information is indexed in a superhighway of totally accessible data and a one in which the world's knowledge is contained in reams upon reams of paper - in paper stasis essentially.

To illustrate what I'm talking about, I'll tell a story about a guy I used to know when I was growing up. His name was John Dent, and he must've been in his late 30's or early 40's by the time my friends and I started hanging out with him. Luke, Jerry and myself were the main people that hung out with Dent, and we were maybe 16 or 17 at the time.

It is strange to think - there are people that shameless in the world - a guy 10 or 15 years older than I am right now who hangs out with high school kids because they know where to find him weed - and the only reason we would hang out with him is because he was way more than old enough to buy us booze and he had a batch pad to kick it at. In fact, the place he was living at the time is maybe only a block from where I type this. That shit sty was a strange little basement apartment in the shadow of the 12-story Mendenhall building downtown.

Anyway, Dent would tell us all sorts of stories about the nineteen eighties and what it was like in that magical era of blow and neon Hypercolor shirts and the Mustang 5.0. After maybe a year of hanging out with him, taking knife hit after knife hit with him off of his chintzy coil stove, and at least one memorable episode of Mr. Dent passing out standing up while doing so, he told us the salacious details of his background.

I don't know if its true or not, but Dent told us chitlins that he was a con man back in those halcyon days of dead disco bleeding into New Wave music and I always imagined Dent having one of those Don Johnson, Miami Vice-style blazers with the sleeves rolled and the pastel shirt and the scruff and the aviator sun glasses.

His tale was a tale of woe, though, as he ended up getting busted and right before he went down he signed over all his possessions to a lady friend who subsequently ditched out on him. But for a few sweet years coinciding with the rise of Joy Division and the Cure he had the world on a string.

His deal was that he would find a person who was born in one county in, say, Florida and died in a different county in another state. Well, because records were kept in giant piles of paper somewhere in a court clerk's office, the only people who had access to that info were a few, overworked court employees, and even then they had to navigate the vagaries of a dead tree information system to find the data that needed to be communicated to another clerk somewhere back in Florida facing the same set of issues with regard to finding the physical, paper file - binders and two-hole punches and three-hole punches and files that have been sent somewhere else - a warehouse where the paper is essentially waiting to be burned, or as they call it, "in archive". There were no search engines and the flow of information was such that as recently as 20 years ago if you died in a different county and state than where you were born in, the change would basically go unnoticed by the world.

So, what I'm getting at is that stemming the free flow of information leads to massive inefficiencies, which lead to criminals like John Dent stealing your identity by gradually replacing well-forged facsimiles of birth certificates and social security cards with the real things by taking two fakes to get a real drivers license, (With his picture and your name, no less...) then taking one fake and a driver's license to get a new birth certificate and then suddenly he has stepped into the legal skin of another entity.

What he would do from there is make a map of all the grocery stores and other large retailers who cashed payroll checks and he would hit each one for whatever it was, a thousand bucks, and then he would charge up bad credit cards, too, and in effect go at it balls out, bull-in-a-china shop style doing that across large metro areas. Its like being able to print money.

Also, by keeping information proprietary, you give undue responsibility to the court clerks of the world. These people are the gatekeepers to the fundamental data that governs our criminal and civil court systems and vital statistics.

In the end, we are talking about the failure of a business model. When the notion became popular that automobiles would start replacing horse and buggies, there was almost certainly a similar uproar. Same for any major innovation, although none are quite apt as analogs for the predicament of newspapers and paper media.

When the printing press and all of the advancements thereof were introduced, written knowledge began to be more widely disseminated, which had all sorts of other effects, and those effects were more profoundly felt than the ones we are currently experiencing. People went from being totally illiterate to at least having the ability to acquire books and the accompanying skills. Eventually, modern schools came into being and now, at least in this country, there is a basic level of understanding of the written language by essentially the entire population. We all have the tools, or should.

The effect of digitizing information is more subtle. We still haven't seen the full measure of what this will start to look like simply because the population at large doesn't have cheap broadband access and also the majority of the population was born and became accustomed to a world in which paper and the pushing of it were the focal points of business and media, which creates a situation where the world of paper and all of its complications must be maintained as long as people are, for lack of better word, still stuck there.

The first major gains in efficiency won't be seen for some time as a painful reorganization must be undertaken where new, "green" industries that are productive to the basic aims of mankind are created for the workers who used to populate the old, paper-based, petroleum-based industries. Basically, my belief is that we need to fund the shit out of education in this country, because ignorance is becoming painfully expensive.

The business model of a newspaper is a product of this old style of thinking. I don't know how much newspapers spend on the production and distribution of their newsprint edition, but I would imagine that paying the employees that operate and maintain the printing press, paying delivery drivers and paperboys and the costs for the raw paper and ink and the cost of the complex and expensive printing press itself and the cost of the computers that control the press and the people that work on those computers and the HR staff to hire and fire these people and accountants and paper pushers to pay everyone and get health and dental insurance and on and on in the end amounts to a huge part of their expenses. To pay for all of that shit, they need to sell a lot of papers. The distribution model of an online-only newspaper is much more streamlined. Sure, they need to pay people to maintain the servers and what-have-you, but they are already doing that anyway.

It boils down to what ads are being sold for. I heard this statistic the other day, and it makes sense: Advertisers pay roughly 10 times more to reach a customer in a dead tree newspaper than they do for the eyeballs of an internet reader. Why the disparity?

I get it. Its not easy to just divest yourself of expensive equipment. I mean, who are all of these newspapers going to sell their printing machinery to? And it sucks that the good union people working on those things will lose their jobs. I would say it sucks that the delivery people are losing their jobs, but those jobs are part time affairs at best, and the waste involved in having a system in place where you have to drive to each of your customer's door every day, spewing more exhaust into the already burdened skies and then at each door step dropping a little turd packet of dead trees, you know, trees, the organism that does the most to replenish the vigor of mother nature, on the old front lawn there. Further swaddling it in a orange plastic, death-to-seabirds! screaming bag is incomprehensible and I'm glad, glad, glad that we can leave that little tradition behind someday soon.

I mean, should we all still be riding in horse carts because we didn't want to push horse drivers and saddle and buggy makers out of business? In the end, the companies that survive will be the best and the ones who were the most nimble in navigating the daunting and complex arena of ideas that is the internet. Its not enough to put a newspaper online, because newspapers and the thinking behind engraving your words on an unchanging surface and letting those thoughts be buried by the bodies of a thousand other pages in the paper quicksand of the dead tree dystopia is outmoded. We need to pool our information and knowledge and accept and embrace a future of more seamless information dispersal, because as Ronald Reagan would say, a rising tide lifts all boats, which I believe was actually a literal analogy - as in we need to melt the ice caps with carbon-based fuels so all of the poor people without boats will drown.

Is this thing on? Hey-o!

moving on is... you never know...

2009-04-26T21:07:00.008-08:00

I used to be a suburban nomad in my early twenties, which, in the last few months, have sadly come to end. I am now in my late-twenties, I suppose, but just writing that seems like it can't possibly be true. Lo those many years that I should have been achieving higher education, puking in dorm shitters and generally advancing and retreating according to societal norms.

Fuck, its not really that sad of a thing. Perhaps we, as a society, just place too much value in being young. Seeing people warped by the strangeness of plastic surgery like a Terry Gilliam-acid dream gone terribly wrong can only confirm this. We know that your teeth can't be that white; your hair that robust and unfelled by gray; your anatomy that oblivious to the weak but constant force of gravity.

Thinking about the ways and means of middle America gives me a fucking migraine.

Alas, the time to move has come once more. I am departing an apartment building that is less than a block from my work for a place another block or so remote, which doesn't seem like that big of a transition, but it has been an incredibly grueling process of haggling with my current landlords and also looking for other suitable apartments in this domicile-starved town of shitty real estate options.

Long story short, my girlfriend and I got tired of a six-month long process of finding a one bedroom unit in the apartment building I live now. The dude who is the leasing manager right now is a douche bag supreme, and I can deal with a lot of onerous shit when it comes to a living situation, as exemplified by my sordid past of flop house-ing it, but one thing I will not tolerate is being under the control of someone who is a dumb fuck. You know, willfully ignorant, shit bags who lord over whatever security guard at the mall-type power they may have.

So a move is on the horizon, and consequently I've been thinking about moves past and some of the shit holes I've crawled into and out of. Among those memories is a gem I hadn't thought of in some time, basically what amounts to the worst moving experience I've had in my 26 short years.

I was maybe 21 at the time. Actually, I think I was 20. I had just moved to Portland from lovely old Juneau. I was living in a nice little, nondescript jobber right off of Interstate in the North part of town with two Juneau friends, Jared and Nick. My buddy Nick worked at a near-by Subway / Plaid Pantry until the place got held up a couple times and he had second thoughts about continuing on the road of the One True Outcome of food service path he was bearing down.

There was also a tiki bar (Portland's only!) called the Alibi right there along with a family diner place and a sandwich shop that made an unreal teriyaki-meat sub. It was a veritable buffet for someone used to the squalor of food options in Juneau, Alaska.

I remember moving out to the great Northwest from my home state and if I recall correctly the drive from Alaska to Portland took place in the 2nd of two Ford Tempos I was lucky enough to own. My friend Jared and I streaked comet-like across the dirt highways of Canada and through the State of Washington in what ended up being three days or so, which was amazing considering at one point in the great wild of Canada we thought the old Temp-ster might be down for the count. We let her cool down with a splash of sweet tasting hose water and a pint of transmission fluid and in two shakes we were back online.

I think I only lived in that house in Portland for maybe a month before we moved to new, larger digs. During the last bit of our term of residence there, Jared became embroiled in some sort of dispute with the power company, so we were without power outside of the few times we stole it from the neighbors via long chains of extension cords.

The weekend we were supposed to move, Nick went to visit his aunt in Washington, so it was just Jared and I, which was a raw fuckin' deal for me because I had only just showed up on the scene and already I was moving couches and cleaning floors. Whatever, if it had just been that easy it would have been just another notch of the old move-out belt.

The first thing that was majorly fucked was the bag of chicken in the freezer. During this whole whirlwind of a week, we had somehow neglected to remove a large bag of frozen chicken from the old ice box. Big fucking mistake. The slab of frozen breasts unthawed their salmonella special gravy all into the insides of the fridge during the power embroglio. I think the bag must've been placed over the drain in the freezer, because the soup of chicken juice sunk into the skin of that machine like no other shit I've seen before or since.

Over a few days of room temperature stewing, the solution became a fetid cesspool of beyond sewage ugliness. The rotten chicken stew was un-fucking-real, and we ran gallons of every kind of cleaning product through that son of a bitch and it never did get better. We would tip the fridge and each time the spew that came forth would be even more terrible smelling, a mixture of the industrial perfumes of cleansers and the pervading force of the lukewarm chicken slime.

I don't know how many hours I spent face first in a pile of that shit.

Secondly, in the act of cleaning the stove, I came upon a dead mouse that had lodged itself in the part of the contraption where the burner coil gets plugged in. It was obviously trying to burrow out of the oven to the safety of an adoring wife-mouse and a litter of newborn vermin when it got caught in the small cavity in between the prongs of the burner coil. The front of the mouse was stiff and in a state of beginning decay but otherwise fully life like, however the back half of the animal wasn't so lucky and had been incinerated to a charcoal cast. It was and is a pretty stark image of a painful death, a bit like discovering a mini- Pompei in the recesses of your kitchen.

The third thing that went pair-shaped was the weed plants. We were growing a few little fellows in said residence and there were a few large pots of dirt with stumps from the last crop left in the garage. I think Nick was supposed to move them before he left, and I can't remember now exactly how we managed to fuck that one up, but we left them there during the move and our landlord found them and realized what we were up to, which would have been fine if we weren't moving into another one of his pads. So he didn't take too kindly to us from that point on.

Shit, what gives?

Anyway, its strange how it all works out, no? I think of how things might be different if our gay landlord Max hadn't found those pots of dirt. The place we moved into was so perfect for what were doing and maybe we would have gone huge and maybe I'd be retired in some wonderful, alternate reality where a man can make his way in the world by a fistful of moxie and a trunk full of dank pot. And maybe in ten other realities I'd be reduced to a number on a striped suit, so there you go. You never know.

seeing Tom Selleck cruise by in a hoop'n ass bronco deuce

2009-04-18T21:01:00.005-08:00

In the course of fulfilling my 9-to-5, rat-fucking obligations, I maintain a database of criminal defendants. Consequently, when I find my mind wandering to work during the weekend or on any off hours, its usually about some name or association between names.

I'm sure I've written about names before, and I always think about starting a list of the best names I have ever run across. I'm fascinated by the strange patterns of recurring names and the consequences of being called one thing or another.

I remember none other than C. Scott Fry, my mentor and life coach and, at the time, my boss used to tell me about the "President's Club", which was a list that existed in his head of all the people who had ever come though the revolving door of working for C. Scott at the front desk of the Alaskan Hotel and sleaze shack. There was a Bush and an Adams and a McKinley and maybe he even had a couple of more esoteric ones. Harrison? I'm sure. Washington? Maybe. Taft might be stretching the limits of believability. I've certainly never met a Taft.

One of my favorite things is when we have a client who shares a name with a famous person. I think its fun to imagine someone having a complex about carrying a burdensome name like Scott Baio or something; like the character in Office Space named Michael Bolton.

"Why should I change? He's the one who sucks." Screams non-famous Michael Bolton in Office Space, and collectively the psyches of every Tom Selleck, Dick Cheney and Harry Connick that has felt the sting of Fate and Celebrity's cruel chance.

We used to have a guy named Gary Cooper at work, but sharing that name is not even that bad. First of all, no one really knows who Gary Cooper is anymore and they certainly don't have any weird associations with the name. Secondly, Gary Cooper was a bad ass as far as I know.

The one that has crossed my path lately, and I know this seems insane, is Tom Selleck. Yes, there really are more of them out there. I feel like there needs to be a whole other website like Facebook for these people so all of the world's multitudes of Michael Jacksons and Jim Morrisons and Howard Sterns and Tom Cruises could commiserate in one nameless orgy of internet rantings.

He stopped by my office maybe a week ago. Tom is a smaller fellow and a bit older these days, too. He is fighting with tooth and nail against the pull of middle age. He has cultivated a look consisting of a pleather jacket that looks like Walmart's reimagining of the buckle and zipper infused number from Michael Jackson's "Bad" video layered over sleeve-less t-shirts that accentuate his scrawny, age sunken pipes. Still, he persists in trying to don this tough guy mantle. When he walked in to the office last week, he was sporting his old-school Oakley's and in a mock- Clint Eastwood growl asked if we were expecting him.

How could I have been expecting Magnum fucking P.I. to walk into my wage slave den? I mean, seriously.

I had to choke back the laughter. Tom is 5'6'' in hiking boots and is the sort of guy who would shove a dirty sock down the crotch of his acid washed jeans before going out on a weekend. He inspires a mixture of pity and derision. He keeps coming back into the criminal justice system on stuff like driving with a suspended license because I'm sure he has thousands of dollars and dozens of hoops to jump through to obtain a driver's license again.

A week ago, I saw the non-famous Tom Selleck (Although, how famous is the real Tom Selleck these days anyway? How far are we from seeing him in a real estate informercial a la Eric Estrada? Yikes.) driving his sweet '89 Bronco II around downtown, and I was almost sure he would get rung up again before he completed the short loop through town. After all, cops are posted all around the area and they can't help but know Tom Selleck and his low riding shitbox of a Bronco II.

What a strange junk vessel of a vehicle. Today as I was bringing in groceries to my apartment, I spotted the savage beast of a machine outside, parked on the street. The inside of the vehicle looks to be enveloped by the world's largest garbage bag, but a few household items and other random effects of a life fully lived peer out the slightly shaded windows of the rusted out Bronco Deuce. In the photo above, the base to a coffee maker can be seen. Tom Selleck is a man who likes his caffeine. I would envision his tastes to trend towards dark, bitter coffee and I'll bet he makes pots of joe that could take the stain off of a table.

Juneau Tom Selleck is a man who has the world by the balls, driver's license be damned. Now that I think of it, I think Tom Selleck might have got his license back because I think we got his case dismissed. We do that for all of our clients. I guess you could say we treat them all like celebrities. Hey-o! Rim shot!

I would like to note, for the record, the gas jug and the boom box that can be seen in the rear window in the photograph above. Three words: Mobile. Party. Station.

pizza psychic

2009-04-16T21:33:00.002-08:00

Being attuned to the secret world of pizza is a weighty thing. It is a burden I do not carry lightly.

My story of the genesis of this strange and awful power is like a post-modern version of the post-modernist tale of angst and responsibility and the corrupting influence of power splayed across the technicolor-crisp pages of Stan Lee's Spiderman.

Here's the rough outline, and then onto a tale of pizza wizardry the likes of which you've never heard:

I was maybe twelve years old and my life consisted of going to school and every day in sweatpants and rubber boots and working at a book store after class making $4 an hour mailing brick-loads of rare books and endlessly organizing and dust-jacketing them all to make it to Friday, the day when I got my meager wage paid out in cash. Each Friday, I would take that hard-earned wad of maybe twenty dollars and go hang out at a local comic book store. Life was pretty wild in the fast lane.

The real highlight of my evening, however, was the mini-deep dish pizzas right next door at Domino's. They were so good and so cheap that you just knew that it was too sweet to last. They were like the CBGB of mini-pizzas in that once people started to catch on, the ride was over. Alas.

I remember they were five dollars and you could get any toppings you wanted. This led to the inevitable mini-pies loaded down with a back hoe full of extra-extra cheese and bacon and sausage and insane amalgams of ingredient combinations of endless complexity.

So, like a scientist plucked from the void and placed into a lab full of instruments, my pizza-loving nerd brethren and I set forth upon the outer limits. It was a long, strange ride; in fact it seems less than real, to be honest. Foodland was open 24 hours a day back then, too - the supermarket across the parking lot from the comic store and Domino's. Now-a-days, it closes at 9 sharp and the place has fallen off in general, as well. Everything in Juneau is trending that way, to be honest. Even the glacier that surrounds this semi-frozen waste is receding.

Now, some dozen years later, the lessons I learned as a pizza psychic prodigy have taken root in the way a golfer internalizes his swing or a violin player has feel for strings.

Tonight, par examplé, I rang my local Domino's branch and spoke with el hombre José about getting a pizza heat-waved on up to me. Mind you, I am fully aware of the current Domino's marketing firestorm. Sure, some asshole in New Jersey or wherever is right now squeezing a hot load of jizz into the marinara at a Domino's somewhere in the world, but much like the manner in which STDs travel, my rationalization goes something like this: It couldn't happen to me! It couldn't be José and Consuela and the local pizza professionals, no! I thought we were friends! You said that you are the only driver who brings little packets of parm and hot peppers and you wouldn't do that for just fucking anyone...

Or would they?

Anyway, Domino's can chalk one up in the win column on my account during what has got to be tough times for the low rent pizza pushers over there at the big 'D'. Most people read a story about the employees of a restaurant hocking loogs in a food item, and they avoid it like in-laws or the plague. Me, I'm wired a little differently. I knew that all would be well - I sensed it.

After placing my order, however, there was a nagging sensation like there had been a lack of closure. I got back in bed and was just about to stretch out and relax when my phone rang. The pizza couldn't be done yet, could it?

"Howdy." I said.

"Hello sir. This is Jose from Domino's. I'm sorry but the computer lost your order, sir. Can I have your information again?" The caller on the line said.

"Ha! Jose! I had a feeling you might be calling back, my friend." I said. I sat perched in the cool air of an open window in my apartment, cradling the cell phone in my neck. From the distance, in a marsh glade in the gradually warming, Alaskan spring, I could hear a whistle pig sing his eerie bird song.

janitors and stimulus cash: Things that I think about while filling out tax paperwork for 400, please, Alex!

2009-04-09T10:14:00.009-08:00

Last night at around 7 o'clock, I had a couple of interesting and unexpected things occur to me as I was working on a tax return at my office in the dark - only spooky-lit by the flicker of a computer screen.

The first confluence was meeting the janitor who cleans the office building I work at every night.

The second confluence that occurred to me was that the toxic evil that is George W. Bush had finally done me a solid. Fucking irony, people.

So I was entrenched, balls deep in a sea of W-2 form font in my dark and deserted office space; and my office in particular is really an efficiency apartment in an old luxury apartment building that was long ago converted to office space as the topography of the commercial world and the people around the dwelling changed with time and circumstance.

In from the emergency-lit abyss of the hallway came the janitor who had a name tag on his janitor attire, which was something like the apron that one wears in the kitchen but more industrial and burlap-ish, and the name tag read "Julio".

I would attempt to describe the encounter with dialogue, but Julio can't be easily approximated. Suffice it to say that we talked for what might have been fifteen minutes. At least that long, alone in the relative dark with Julio with only the gleam of a monitor and the setting sun and the emergency track lighting bouncing and ricocheting into the efficiency apartment / office that we now shared.

Julio is a man of many opinions and with out prompting he started into a long riff about local politics, touching on Sarah Palin and the Federal stimulus money, the mayor here in town, the local education system and its lack of merit, lack of a sufficient minimum wage and so on in his amazing accent. Julio came to this cold place from Uruguay 26 years ago, I came to find through his soliloquy. He came from that small country in the tropics, a place he described as being somewhat of an idyll, but that may just be the fond remembrances of a 60 year-old man looking back on the splendor of youth.

I offered only sparse verbalization for my part. I think Julio asked where I was from and I told him here and that is how we started down the tangent of his tale of Uruguay and the slow pace of life there and the way it compares to the hectic sprawl of what happens here in the States. Other than that, I maybe was asked and offered my name and a series of affirmations and head-nods in response to Julio and his long string of consciousness. He is certainly the most gregarious janitor I have ever met and it seems like being a janitor would be a lonely profession to have and if one was socially inclined in such an avocation, it would lead to these breathless social outbursts like the one I am describing.

And Julio, as he went through his shtick about government and politics and life with the rhythm of a stand-up comic, would always return to the refrain, "But, I'm-a janitor. What do I know!", and the slight lisp and animated slur of Spanish-speaking annunciation made it so I was almost relying more on his expressive gesticulations and intonations and other, non-verbal communication more than the scrawl of words that he said.

The part that really sticks with me is that Julio, towards the end, remarked that I could stand to use a little weight; and yes, I could, but I wasn't sure at first why he would mention it given the tenor of everything else he said, but he subsequently started telling me a story about "Mitch", who after a minute I figured out was just Julio's Uruguayan translation for "Meachum", an attorney I work for; and in Julio's story, he was losing his vision and Mitch, who is a neighbor as well as a janitorial client, told him he needed to go to the doctor. Apparently Julio has diabetes and was going blind from the onset of the disease and the reason he was getting it was because he weighed 75 pound more at that point.

"You-a don't-a want to has to stick yourself. I stick myself, can't-a eat no wheat, no pasta." Julio said.

"Fuck that!" I said

"Yeah! That's-a right! Fuck that!" Said Julio.

It was a miraculous and deeply funny exchange. After he left, I thought about how interesting it is to meet the janitor because we share the same space but are likely to never meet because of our opposite hours. Ships passing in the night.

Secondly, I would like to take this opportunity to thank the W. for the stimulus check. I didn't get it last year, so its finally happening for me. $600 dollars in exchange for 8 years of fear mongering, greasing the corporate skids and generally shitting down the throats of tax-paying, working folk. Its like throwing a miniature life preserver to a turd before flushing the toilet. Thanks, friend-o.

But, in his finite wisdom, the sweet-tasting mercy of George W. has finally trickled through the circulatory system of the grand architecture that houses the grizzled mange that is the savage beast of Government and now, peaceful and hopeful for the future in the absence His Douchiness, I can suckle on the soft teet of stimulus money and sigh contentedly. Thanks, W.!

the pale warmth of winter - 2nd draft

2009-02-25T12:13:00.010-09:00

The morning sun climbed through a ring of clouds to its' perch above the hulking Mount Jumbo on whose banks rested the small island community of Douglas, Alaska; sister city to Juneau, which is the capital of the great barren wastes of America's Northern outpost. The winter had been mild and that had been the case for a few summers and winters in Southeast Alaska. Mostly the forecast called for rain and in colder times there was a teetering of warm snow and cold downpours that splashed across the calendar months.

A frost formed overnight on the fermenting wood of geometrical patterns of the piers and boat docks that surrounded the small city and borough and the beaming brilliance of the distilled morning sun started to awaken molecules in the frozen dew. Some alluded to the dark specter of global warming or more arcane conspiracy fantasies of peak oil and lesbian dentist cartels. Others would state that it was merely the warm trade winds from Japan; whatever the true nature of the anomaly, it had been a warm winter in the small hamlet.

The hour was almost nine a.m. and the sun had just begun its truncated display above the capital city. People still scurried along the slush-covered byways to work in the bustling downtown corridor that clung to the walls of mountains.

A long plateau of dock bordered the shores of the town. It was a substantial dock with thick planks of timber that slowly rotted in the pervading wetness of the temperate rain forest. Giant, city-sized cruise ships docked there in the short summer, but for nine months of the year the docks are lonesome and mostly have a second life as a bum's paradise. One such vagrant stirred from a fenced-in hole under one section of the thawing wooden expanse.

He was a large man and as he emerged from his sleeping bag and into the brisk morning, he stretched upwards to a monstrous height all the while unpacking the tendons of his massive limbs in a contorted, pained looking daze of an alcoholic coming to terms with last night's poison coagulating in the joints and soft tissue of his unwieldy frame.

From the direction of town, a second straggler wandered into the path of the emerging giant. The second person was a gremlin-looking little bum with a snarl of disfigured teeth who stood in stark contrast with the first bum.

Long ago, Juneau was a summer fishing village of the Tlingit Indian tribe, but the discovery of Gold by two hardscrabble miners aided by a local Indian chief in the 1880's set into motion the wholesale expansion of the town site for better or worse. I mention this because much of downtown stands on old mine tailings on the former site of wetlands and tide pools that were once trolled for fish stocks.

The little man with a face of rearranged features sidled up to the large, awakening hulk and began to speak.

"Hey. Hey. You got any change? I'm trying to find someone to help me out." The strange little leprechaun man said.

"Wow. Pal, I'm trying to get my bearings here." The giant said. "Are you, uh... allowed in the liquor store down there? Fuck, what time is it, pal?"

"Yeah, they let me go in there. Its just after eight. They just'a opened." Replied the troll.

"Yeah. Well, I believe I had a little issue with the clerk there last night. There isn't no other stores around this shit hole?" Asked the large man.

"Other stores? Well, there's one down the way near about 20 minutes, but they don't open yet." Said the troll man, words barreling out with slurps of errant spittle that sieved through the crooked teeth of his grill.

"Alright, little friend. I've got a ten dollar bill and that's it until I can drag my ass to the bank. I want you to go and fetch us a couple of cold ones. I like whatever has the most booze in it, ok, pal?" The hulking man asked and the gremlin-looking motherfucker quickly nodded and took the ten dollar bill and headed back into the mists to the store.

The city and borough of Juneau is a place used to change. From a mining village to a mining boom town metropolis and back to bust it went with various incarnations as a timber town, a fishing town and a finally a state capitol and seat of government, Juneau is a place of opportunity and small circles of associations. The sudden warmth, in short, was no shock.

Down in the heart of town on South Franklin street where all the bums hang out at night, the same street where all of the bars pour their drunken guts out on at the strike of one each weeknight, a small gathering of old people began to form and they sat in a circle of folding chairs in front on the Triangle Bar, a famed local watering hole where high and low, state legislatures and two-bit hustlers have met in the middle for cold suds for many a generation.

"Back in '81, I remember, or was it '79? I can't recollect. Anyway, back then it did get into the sixties one day in January. Water was a meltin' off the snowbanks and people were sunbathing and jumping into ice holes." An old man said.

"60 gad-darned degrees in January. Can you believe it? I wonder if it'll get close to that today. What a treat that would be." A second remarked.

And a similar conversation was taking place amongst many of the citizens of Juneau. Teachers in between classes at Juneau-Douglas High School convene in the break room over caustic-smelling pots of coffee to speak in wistful tones of taking the day off. State workers clad in their conspicuous uniforms of off-the-rack collared shirts and print dresses from Fred Meyer's or Costco skitter from office to office, subdividing into discussion groups around the armature of cubicles and watercoolers to describe their reactions to the gradually warming winter month. All the while, the big, heavenly body of burning radiation continued to climb.

Back by the docks, the small man with the important parcel of booze returned to the wreckage of the hulk's body. The big man's limbs were crossed in impossible angles as he lay crumpled on the dewy ground looking like an ancient ship wreck entombed in a mud bank.

"Here's your beer." Said the little fellow. He laid the brown paper parcel in the stirring monster's vicinity and then set off for his own hole underneath the docks. The sloppy mass of the giant man eventually righted itself enough to begin pouring the serum down his throat.

Downtown Juneau is the old part of town and beyond the few square miles of it that rest on the artificial reef of mine tailings, the town is perched upon steep hills which causes many of the summer visitors who flock to witness the big wild to remark that it is akin to a small San Francisco; albeit a much colder and rainier version. A San Francisco of the far North, if you will, squatting in the middle of the vast Tongass rain forest. The slopes of the hills are lined with houses, many dating to the mining era and those paved slopes give way to the gravel paths of Basin Road, a large recreation area that trundles through the wreckage of old mines and the accompanying support buildings, segueing into wilderness trails that fan out for miles.

Under the weak but constant pull of gravitons, the run-off of melting snow mounds steadily began to trickle into the gutters of town creating a mixture of hard-crusted snow and deposited silt and particulate dredged down amongst the ground-eroding liquid that lined the curbs of the walks of town creating the kind of environment where rubber boots are all but necessary to seek passage in the sloppy streets. Like members of some strange cult the townsfolk seemingly all had the same set of two-tone brown boots, slacks and jeans and leggings all tucked in.

***

"The whole reason I'm here is to sue the Judge and take down the system here in Alaska. I'm from back East, you see, from St. Petersburg, Florida. I came to Alaska, to Petersburg, Alaska from St. Petersburg to go fishin'. I got drunk and they threw me outta the bar and said I tried to rape babies, so I'm stayin' until they make good." A new, younger member joined the circle of elderly gadflies in their cavalcade in front of the Triangle. His whole appearance belied a man who must've been through a rock-tumbler of a life. His nose was bent to one side, no doubt the result of a series of kerfuffles. His eyes, while bloodshot from the manifest dehydration of alcoholism, still had a certain gleam of conspiratorial mischief in them.

"Florida! Well I would venture to say that even in the Everglades of Florida its not as warm as it is here in sunny Juneau, son. Ha! Imagine that! What kind of fishing were you after, anyway?" Asked an old man in the fisherman's jacket.

"I dunno. Salmon, I guess. I used to fish for marlin and mackerel, maybe a little perch." Answered the middle-aged interloper.

"Sounds good! Say, whats your name, partner? You sure got an interesting story to tell, hoo boy!" Another old man asked.

"Vincent Falcone. Call me Vinnie, though. A pleasure to meet you." With that the scraggly Floridian took his leave of the council of elders. Down Front street he went, past the movie theater and the town's nod to true American commercialism, McDonald's, on his way to the cross street of Seward that led up the hill to the court house which rested at the crest of 4th street across the street from the state capitol building. It was now just after ten and through the mottled, translucent layers of gauzy cloud ceiling, the radiation of the sun continued baking the small hamlet of Juneau.

Vincent carried with him a rolling luggage bag which was full of court documents. The wheels of the luggage clicked furiously on the gradiated ruts in the pavement. Falcone was quite a sight to behold, a manic hulk of a man towering at over six foot with a great boiler of a pot belly which led like the gradual slope of a mountain to his barrel chest. He wore a plaid shirt from Wal Mart which was a size or two too large, an amazing feat for it must have been 3 times extra large; and ill-fitting Dockers style pants which sagged ingloriously off of the bottom half of Falcone, perhaps in an attempt to look somewhat official or lawyer-ly, but to poor effect.

Up the four or so blocks the large speck with the distinguished plaid shirt climbed, towards the shiny metal and glass of the Dimond courthouse in the sickly warmth of the day. It was a fever-warmth, the kind of strange, flailing heat that manifests itself around the head and neck area during a fitful sleep.

The blocks in the pavement became concentrically graded and smaller, larger to smaller fanning patterns of tiny bubbles of pavement. The rolling luggage with documents pertaining to Mr. Falcone's curtailed liberty rubbed with a staccato whopping at the horizontal ruts until the big lug bridged the ferry of wet slush separating 2nd and 3rd streets. With quick motions, the massive arms of Falcone lofted the large bag into the air to avoid the gushing streets and when set down once more, the staccato 'wock, wock, wock' was replaced by an almost constant humming of wheels running on stippled sidewalk.

Falcone walked to the delta of 4th and Seward streets and looked for a second at the fanciful monolith of the courthouse. People in suits and indigent clients in smarmy sweatpants and t-shirts with drug slogans or beer advertising shuttle in and out, smoking cigarettes and huddling up in the plaza for breathless talk over glittering, stainless steel cups of steaming caffeine. Every so often, a siren wails and a charge blasts a piece of the adjacent Telephone Hill out for a coming parking garage, shaking the ground marginally and causing the free-flowing conversation circle to briefly pause and look up; a forced reaction of human nature like how unavoidable flinching at H-bomb blasts.

Vincent Falcone peers at the strangers muddling through the physical manifestation of the system and ponders the insignificance of the human detritus before him. He decides to visit his court-appointed attorney's office before taking any actions today. A block or so away from the courthouse, in the middle floor of a three-story office building is the Office of Public Protection. Falcone walks the set of stairs leading up to the office and into a reception area strewn with color-coded files and the constant twittering of the office machines spitting out layered streams of documents.

"Vinnie! Where have you been my whole life!" A young man exclaims from behind a Pizza-the-Hut sized mound of paperwork. The phone rings with a low, electronic-sounding alert and the young fellow diverts the call with a quit, practiced motion.

"Hey Lee. Is Mr. Hedmund around?" Falcone asked.

"Naw. I think he's over in court, Vinnie. What are you up to today?" The office assistant Lee replied.

"I dunno. Still trying to sue the Judge. They don't have jurisdiction, see? Its all in the UCC. Do you realize that Lee? That the government controls us jurisdictionally with their codes and laws? They forced counsel on me here because they didn't want to let me speak because I argued in court that this was an unconstitutional proceeding and they know I'm right! I wanted to proceed in prop-ia persona because I didn't want to admit that they had jurisdiction over me and they didn't want to deal with me so they forced you guys on me." Vincent was practically foaming at the mouth, his words slopping out over his thick East coast accent at the young gentleman manning the desk, who up until Vinnie walked in had been scanning the internet for sports rumors or reading the Times or had been generally soaking into the office furniture and marinating in the prospective future of State worker-hood.

Outside of the office window at the back of Lee, a group of large Ravens milled about the gradually warming tar of the roof. A siren sounded and then a sound of bedrock being pulverized punctuated Vinnie's frenzied raving. The fax exhaled another set of documents with a whirring of worn down internal mechanisms and the vibrato of the dial-up sounds of protocol being passed along from another remote fax somewhere else in an undisclosed location in the city where another office assistant man or woman sat vigil over the cheeping undulations of their very own paperwork-maker.

"Wow. That sounds crazy, Vinnie. Did you want to write Mr. Hedmund a note about it? I've got a legal pad here, maybe this way he'll be able to read and digest what you have to say and then get back to you." Lee said and he handed Vincent a yellow legal pad which Falcone received in a disinterested gesture.

"I think I'll just try him later, maybe try and find him over at the court. Do you know what courtroom he's in?" Asked Vincent of the young man who was now becoming detached and absorbed once more by the digital display of the endlessly gaping maw of the vast series of tubes before him.

"Not sure. One of the ones on the 2nd floor, I think." Lee said and almost before the words reverberated in the eardrums of Falcone, he was headed out the door to the seat of justice, his luggage rolling after him.

"Hot enough for you, Vinnie?" Yelled Lee, Vincent already halfway down the hall. Falcone hesitated for a half step and thought of responding but instead a knowing smirk formed on his face, a mug cut of a hard slab of plaster with its strange, impossible angles and thick bursts of unkempt beard. He was a such a dead ringer for what one would imagine a conspiracy nut to look like to the point of being too obvious for even the broadest Hollywood casting director. "Nope." They would say. "He needs to look less like the fat, crazier brother of Ted Kaczynski." I guess all conspiracy theory guys must think that "They" are after them, but to Vincent Falcone, the narcissism was absolute and it washed over him like sloshing undertow waves sucking the top-most layer of sand from the beaches' bulkhead; a peeling back sort of craziness where it becomes gradually more and more laid bare for God and everyone to see.

***

The hour struck 11 on the town clock outside the Triangle bar. The clock was one of Juneau's distinguishing landmarks and it was a nice little number; dark blue clad like the electric blue of Alaska's flag, which is a almost solid colored flag with only the eight stars of gold stippling the dark ocean of tone.

Vincent Falcone stood in the square of town, leaning against the thick metal base of the clock. The streets were active with people milling in the 75 degree heat. The grouping of old folks still ringed the other side of the street in front of the ancient, gold rush-era bars of town. Vincent had thought about going to the court house to look some things up in the law library that they had there. Falcone, absent a job or anywhere to be, had taken up a strict regiment of harassing official employees of the court, his court-appointed attorney's office and anyone else who would even half-listen to his stream-of-consciousness rants.

Falcone pondered the groupings of people and the burgeoning heat, his eyes finally coming to rest of the harmonizing neon signs lining the large, bay windows of the Triangle. He was thirsty, and the mental image he had of the crispness of a cold glass of suds was, in this metaphor, a giant carrot and his dry and arid throat was a pack mule longing for the brusque snap of vegetable flesh against his gnashing molars.

The interior of the Triangle is a jumble of oddly-splayed walls. The building is actually laid out, more or less, in the shape of an irregular isosceles triangle. Video poker machines lined the brushed aluminum of the bar. Pictures of old timers ringed the walls. A middle-aged bartender with a pony tail was serving a group of old men is suspenders small flotillas of pretzel snacks and pitchers of near translucent, light-colored beer.

"Bartender!" Falcone exclaimed. "I'd like a beer."

The pony-tailed bartender looked casually at Vincent and stood in place for a moment before deciding to engage the monster of Falcone's near endless thirst.

"What can I get for you?" The bartender asked.

"Something cheap and cold. A small pitcher." Said Falcone.

"I've got Coors Light on special right now."

"Sounds good." Falcone took a seat at the bar crowded with the retirees and other day-drinking regulars. Behind him, at a dimly lit table, a pod of primeval fossils sat playing a game of Pinochle that may have been started before the Great War.

"Hey. Hi. Hi. Hot enough for you out there, partner? Ha. Ha. Ho!" Asked the man next to Vincent. Falcone's neighbor was a lonesome looking man-beast with a bushy splay of white beard hair enveloped in a layer of sweat clothing. He had the cut-off sweat pant-shorts, zip-up sweat shirt and a collared tee with more unruly sprouts of white bodily hair fissuring from the neck hole of his garments. He too, had a big old boiler of a gut, but more bulbous and less powerfully built that the old Ironsides of Falcone's paunch.

"Hot is right, friend. Name's Vincent, how do you do?" Falcone replied.

"G-G-Gary. Fuck! Name's Gary. Pleasure to meet you. Yeah. Yeah. Fuckin' unimaginable that it would get to this temperature. Ha! I should be out enjoying the weather, but ah.... but ah... I, uh... I felt like a cold one." Said Falcone's new buddy, Gary.

"No shit. Say, you happen to see any basketball scores today, friend-o?" Asked Vincent. There was a instant bond between the two misfits. Gary like Falcone because he didn't look at him strangely and dismiss him out of hand for his peculiar manner of stilted speech and ultra-relaxed manner of dress. Falcone liked Gary because he was just another fellow sitting at the bar with no pretense like those sons-of-bitches who work up on 4th street, always looking down their noses at him. Fucking court employees were the worst. They always gave him a ration of shit when he asked them to do anything, even though they charged outrageous amounts for copies and other services. They seemed to always be so much more absorbed with bullshitting about who is going out with who and what was happening on the weekend and when they were retiring; Falcone didn't like people in general who didn't live somewhat in the moment.

"Ho! I uh... I uh... You know I didn't. You, uh, watch, uh, hoops? Ha!" Said Gary.

"Oh yeah. I'm from St. Petersburg, Florida. Used to drive to a lot of Orlando Magic games, especially when Shaq was still on the team. Came up to Petersburg, Alaska from St. Petersburg, Florida to do some fishing and also because I liked the name, you know." Said Falcone.

"St. Petersburg! Ho! That's a... That's a... quite a ways away. I bet your, a... used to the, uh... the weather, though. Ha!" Gary said and in turn took down a giant slug of beer from his pint.

"Yeah, although something about the whole thing seems very odd." Falcone said and the bartender brought a small pitcher over and Falcone handed him a twenty. "Thank you, bar keep."

"Yeah! Yeah. Yeah. Somethings, uh... rotten in, uh... Denmark. Yeah. Yeah." Said Gary.

"Say, partner, what's your story? No work today?" Falcone asked Gary.

"Yeah. I'm retired. Ha! Uh... Yeah. Retired from the State of Alaska. Worked there for, uh... for, uh... 35 years." Said Gary.

"No shit? What did you do for the State, Gary?" Asked Falcone.

"Department of, uh... Transportation. Ha! Ha. I, uh... got, uh... forced out a few years back. Forced into, uh... early retirement. Yeah." Said Gary.

"Why'd they do that, Gary?" Falcone asked and Gary took another sip of the pint of microbrew that had been resting, sweating soft drops of trickling water beads before his big mitt of a hand obscured the perspiration.

"Ha. You know, I'm still, ah, not sure. My boss just asked me to accept a retirement package, and uh... I wasn't, you know... ahhh ready. So I uh, stayed, uh... stayed for five more years. Sat in my, uh, my office for five more years, you know, each day, uh... knowing that uh... they didn't, uh... want me to be there anymore. Ha! Ha! So I just fucked around on my, uh... computer, uh... all fucking day and I'll tell you something, uh... Vincent, right? It was torture. I would've rather, ahhh... done something there. But, ahhh... a couple of years ago I gave up the, uhh... the ghost." Gary said, sputtering in fits like an old jalopy.

"Wow. Yeah, sounds rough. Well, were here now sipping beers in a warm Alaskan winter, though, huh? We made it, Gary!" Vincent said, not bothering to pour the small pitcher into his glass, instead toasting Gary with the pitcher inside of the large cavity of his palm, almost looking to scale next to the meat hook that held it.

"Yeah! Yar! We did! Ha!" Said Gary and they sat together for a while more, watching the ceaseless scroll of SportsCenter and every so often one or the other would comment on a particular result or transaction. The town clock was about to strike noon when Falcone took his leave of the place, thirst now sated, to go tangle with the many-headed hydra of the courts.

***

The town clock sounded noon with a fanfare and then twelve long tones indicating the hour. Vincent Falcone began to mount the hill once more, this time with feeling and verve, headed on a crash course with the criminal justice system. The blast siren wailed and sounded like the anti-aircraft alarms do in old, silver screen war movie classics. The siren was shortly followed by the baritone rumble of an explosion created deep in a mountainside of bedrock.

The runoff now came in a near-deluge. The melting snow gave way to its' water brethren and the gutter's bellies were bulging with new fill. Up past 2nd street and then 3rd and finally 4th street he walked, past office buildings full of insurance agents and bank tellers and other members of the status quo. Vincent Falcone was a man at odds with his surroundings and that much was plain for anyone to see. The raging neurons inside of his crazed mind wanted nothing more than to throw a sledge hammer into the safe, confined ivory tower that the corporate pawns existed in. Had they ever known real suffering or breathed in the sweet-tasting air from the acme of what it means to be alive? Falcone thought not.

The Dimond courthouse is home to 7 floors of the very kind of office vermin that Falcone took issue with. The only ones he liked in the giant monolith were the security guards, two Filipino ladies who were eminently pleasant and understanding. He chatted with them each time through the metal detectors that stood sentry in the bottle necked entryway.

"Hi Phyllis! Hi Blanche!" Falcone said in a warm tone to the security guards.

"Hi Vincent. Nice and warm today, huh?" Said Phyllis, the welcoming vanguard of a tiny Asian lady with short-shorn hair and John Lennon glasses that juxtaposed beautifully with her discordant-looking security guard fatigues.

"Nice and warm. Too warm, almost!" Replied Falcone. They all laughed a short laugh together. Vincent had put his rolling luggage into a large x-ray machine that the other lady, Blanche, manned with gleeful disinterest. Blanche would often talk to regulars and look them in the face as their law office assistant, shoulder-style bags passed through because she did not need to confirm for the ten thousandth time that the file-runner from Baxter, Bridget and Muffington or whomevers firm had the same eighteen cents in change, same cell phone and set of keys he had during the morning run and the afternoon of the day before's run and so on and so forth for the last time.

Falcone collected his luggage and proceeded to the elevator to head down to the ground floor clerk of courts office, where the magic happens. Where the rubber meets the road so to speak. The clerk of the courts office is where the filing of pleadings happens; the payment of fines. Its where the paperwork gets sorted and stuffed into court boxes for other assistants to come and pick up and file in other distinct folders with substantially similar papers, normally indexed by case number or client name, all until those papers need to be copied and bound to other papers and sent somewhere else. The courts in Juneau are a giant jellyfish of undulating papers, and while the Federal courts and the rest of the modern Metropolis of America are moving into the brave new realm of the internet, the legal system of Juneau is mired in a pit of pulpy despair; and thus the metaphor of a floppy invertabre makes immanent sense if you are even passingly familiar with the attrition and insanity of paper; real, crisp to the touch, dead trees flying roughshod into a cruel world full of lazy workers, moisture, time, heat and most of all the fearsome teeth of the paper shredder.

The hulking figure of Vincent Falcone walked towards the front counter of the clerk of courts office where a queue had formed. The line was a few people deep, a strange amalgam of young-ish law office assistants with their court bags and middle class apparel and the defendants or other malcontents looking for bail money refunds or dirt on a ex-lady friend. The guy in front of Falcone smelled like he was steeped in thick smog of Marlboro smoke and he had the timeless dark-plaid flannel over hooded sweatshirt look going. Falcone's rolling luggage clicked as it crossed each grout line in the rectangle-pattern flooring.

After a few minutes of listening to amateur hour, Falcone finally found himself at the front of the line. The clerk who was the main desk assistant, and thus really just a firewall to one Vincent Falcone, had a look of total anxiety wash over her upon looking up from her freshly acquired stack of paperwork, to the point of eliciting a visible wince like an abused small animal contorting its facial muscles in constant terror for the next wap of the newspaper that may be forthcoming.

"Oooh. Hi Vincent. We still don't have your CD request finished..." The clerk began immediately in attempt to placate the already growing anger of Falcone.

"You don't have it? Glenda, I told you I need that CD so I can get it transcribed for the motion I'm workin' on! How much longer I gotta wait?" Said Falcone.

"I'll ask somebody. I'm sorry! We're just really busy and two people just quit on us and we're looking like crazy for new people to replace them!" Glenda said, her voice quavered and broke and she sounded child-like and lost even though her hair was grey to the point of being bereft of color. She was stuttering and hurried as she walked into the cubicle grid behind the front counter to whisper with another, more senior, court employee who would acknowledge the counter scum only if they became unruly or had a question that was beyond the capacities of poor Glenda. Check both boxes for Falcone.

Glenda returned with another lady, this one even shorter and more disgruntled looking and with huge glasses that dominated her mousy face in the style of the 1980's. She even rocked the patterned vest over the turtle neck look from that era and appeared to Vincent like an extra from an early Seinfeld episode.

"Mr. Falcone." Said the tiny clerk with giant eyeglasses. "We can call you when the request is done. It may take a few days yet. Do you have a phone number we can reach you at?"

The clerk spoke as if speaking to a hearing-impaired person or a small child in blocks of syllables and with careful annunciation.

"Listen, lady... I filed that request five business days ago and on the form it says 'within five business days'. What gives? Like I told this lady here, I need the CD so I can write a motion! I'm acting as my own attorney! Do you understand that?" Falcone said and the clerk looked in near shock from the lambasting.

"Sir! Leave a phone number and we will notify you! Otherwise it will be done when our staff has the opportunity to do so!" Said the senior clerk. In lieu of a response, Falcone merely dismissively waved his hand and began to shuffle his belongings towards the elevator. The sun was almost blinding as he stepped out of the elevator and back into the main lobby. The skin of the Dimond courthouse is all glass and the light pours through uninterrupted and when the sun is actually shining, a rare occurrence in rainy Juneau, the effect is awe striking.

As Falcone emerged from the court building and its facade of angles, the sun was a giant halogen array on the alley of 4th street between the court house and the state capitol. To his left as he faced the capitol building and its' four immense granite pillars, the snow-dusted trees of Mount Jumbo were soaking up the sunshine, looming over the enchanted isle of Douglas. From the general direction of behind the grandiose capitol, a stone slab of an earlier time of immense oil-wealth, a low rumbling sounded; a sound reached the ears of one Vincent Falcone as it spread in the manner of a exhaled breath all over the fjords and valleys of the stream of sea-borne islands, traveling near about 340 meters a second and careening off every surface both hard and soft. It was like the noise an enormous, Polyphemus-sized femur bone would make as it was ruptured by a savage, monstrous wrenching.

Falcone quickly ran a half block towards the Office of Public Protection so he could see past the capitol building. From his new vantage, able to see the shifting slopes of mount Juneau, he could see the snow sloughing off the side of the leviathan rock. Even from his remote vantage, it was obvious that giant bales of the long-frozen snow were collecting in massive avalanche chutes. The behemoth of mass barreled down the main chute of the mountain, collecting rocks and tenuous tree-outcroppings and other debris as it chugged along and for maybe 30 seconds the rumbling was audible to Falcone and the others standing dumbstruck on 4th street, boots repelling the ever-swifter streams of run-off.

"What the fuck?" Falcone uttered. His mind was racing. What to do? Where to go? Should he abandon the effort for the day and head for dry ground? Where could he find out about the damage the avalanche had caused? Where could he go and be safe?

Falcone pondered and his momentum carried him away from the court house. The tributaries of tiny rapids continued to wash down the steep hills that downtown was perched on and with the increasing mass of new melting water, the stream began sorting with it larger and larger particulate. Who would know what was going on? A computer! Quickly assessing the options, Vincent Falcone realized that the most adept person he knew concerning computers was the son of a bitch law office wise ass at his court-appointed attorney's office.

Over the one intervening street of waterlogged debris Falcone trudged, up the flight of stairs to the Office of Public Protection's reception area. The office building in which the O.P.P. resides is another finely hewn slab of stone with the ornamental trademarks of art deco design. The reception of the office faced toward the water, looking away from the towering peaks of Juneau proper. Lee, the office assistant wise ass, was listening to music and absorbed in the dull glow of his computer screen. The office was rather under-lit by the typical standards of state worker office lighting. Only one array of halogens was active, a panel which hovered over what appeared to be a rarely used, ancillary desk. A smattering of interesting looking plant life formed a canopy resting on the various filing cabinets and other office furniture.

"Hello Mr. Falcone. To what to we owe the distinct pleasure of your company? Mr. Hedmund is still not at his desk." Lee said without looking up.

"Hey pal, I need a favor." Said Falcone.

"Oh yeah? I think I've heard this one before. What can we do for you, sir?" Replied Lee.

"Did you hear about the avalanche?" Asked Falcone. Lee broke his computer-borne trance and looked up at Falcone.

"Avalanche? Where? Here?" Said Lee, voice rising with his level of interest.

"Yeah! Just outside a few seconds ago!" Said Falcone.

"Are you sure it wasn't the blasting? You know they're blowing up the hillside right around here, right?" Said Lee.

"I know, I know. I saw it with my own two eyes, Lee. I wanted you to look it up on that computer there." Said Falcone and Lee set to tapping buttons furiously on the keyboard of his machine.

"Holy shit. Breaking news on the Anchorage Daily News' website. 'Large avalanche buries part of Behrends Avenue'. Nothing on the Empire's website. Not that we should expect any breaking news on that floating turd of a site. But holy shit, Vinnie, you saw this thing, huh?" Asked Lee.

"Yeah! I saw part of it. I think it came down the other side of the mountain from what I was seeing, but I saw some snow coming down for sure." Replied Falcone.

"Fuck. Man, I knew there was something way too good to be true about this whole sunshine in winter thing. Man, oh man." Lee said, looking suddenly distraught, a marked change from his previous, glassed-over countenance.

"Yeah it is. This is Florida weather. I should know, that's where I come from, see. Well, shit, you know my whole fuckin' story cause I told it to you so many times. But this is what happens, see, when a man like me is wronged, pal. Bad shit. Now look on that fuckin' machine where's safe to go." Demanded Falcone.

"Yeah. On it." Lee clicked his mouse and ran his agile fingers over the small, black blocks of the keyboard.

"Shit. So I just found a video outlining the biggest avalanche hazard areas. There is a small area of total protection, it looks like, right by Starr hill there on 6th street. Mount Marina we used to call it as kids; its a little knoll that sits right at the base of an avalanche chute, so as long as you stay behind it, there should be cover." Said Lee.

"Yeah? You know how to get there? You should come wit' me. These slides aren't gonna stop anytime soon, kid. Not so long as it stays this warm out there." Said Vincent.

Lee looked directly into the eyes of Vincent and momentarily weighed his options. There really was no downside to going, outside of some scenario where Falcone went all "Alive" on him and chopped up his rather nutrient rich, corn-fed, state worker carcass in some survivalist nightmare gone wild.

"Sure. Let me just get my coat, Vinnie." Said Lee and with that, they set out for Starr hill, a short jaunt up the way and a few blocks farther away from the capitol. Falcone and the state worker made an odd-looking pair; like a couple of guys who were in route to a drug deal, what with the strange juxtaposition of classes. Falcone would be playing the part of dirt bag drug liaison, along to facilitate the deal because he knows the guy with the dope and Lee, resplendent in his state worker scrubs, would be assuming the role of high-functioning money man. Or maybe they looked more like a social worker and his client, walking to a meeting with another set of professionals to work the case plan. Regardless, they briskly walked the few blocks, both huffing from their excess girth. Lee's sneakers were woefully inadequate for the task of fording the surging street rivers.

Up past Rainbow Foods, the health food store that sprawls in the old bones of a church; where the Birkenstock-loving, tie-dyed burnouts mingle and pick through baskets of organic comestibles. Up to 5th street as it crosses Franklin street, the corner that is home to Tom's Pots. Up past Capitol school playground, which has a good sledding hill and a basketball court to boot. And, finally, down 6th street across Gold and Harris, the later named for the pioneering miner who discovered gold here in the Gastineau Channel area.

Like so many other things in life, the naming of Juneau is a product of the arbitrary forces of the cosmos as large. To illustrate, Juneau was originally named Harrisburg after the miner and co-discoverer of town, Richard Harris. The other miner who stumbled across gold-laden ore was Joe Juneau and after bumbling in and out of town once, they were blessed with the auspicious aide of Chief Kowee, a local man of measure. Somehow, not unlike the two characters in this story attempting to hike to the shelter of mount Marina, through the harsh conditions of an Alaskan winter, the two men made it to a place called Snow Slide Gulch where they struck pay dirt.

The two men reached the base of Starr Hill, an steep chute of a few blocks of true blue Juneau neighborhood that led to a small glade in the woods where 6th street stops and the trail to the top of Mount Roberts begins. So, it was only serendipity and the quirks of men that Juneau came to don the mantle of it's name. The miners voted it so and you can read as much in the almanac entries that describe the factual events of this place, but the subtext, the true story is that Joe Juneau bribed the miner-folk with an afternoon of free booze, and like so many other dirty deeds of our unsavory race, the skids were greased so to speak.

"Shit. Whew. We're here, Vinnie. There's a clearing up a few houses here that we can go to." Said the desk slave, Lee.

"Aww hell." Falcone gasped, half bent over, his giant potbelly pointed towards the ground. Before he could continue his train of thought to determine the next move, another thundering began to reverberate and this time a great whooshing of wind accompanied ita few tense moments later; a violent shoving of great masses of displaced air came down the hollow reed of 6th street and descended on the two men gasping and inert at the base of the steep embankment. The air shook windows and had a similar quality to a stampede of cloven-hoofed beasts moving across a great plot of prairie.

"What the fuck was that?" Falcone yelled like a crazed man yells to an uncaring sky god. Vincent and Lee had been knocked into the onrushing sop of the streets by the massive gusts.

"Good christ. I just checked the latest news scroll on my phone and I guess there was another huge slide over in Douglas and now..." Lee said, furiously pecking at the touchscreen of his phone.

"Shit. The water levels are rising. Fuck Vinnie! Everything is built on man-made earth down there. Fuck." Lee continued.

"Yeah. This is what happens, Lee. This is what happens if you ignore something for long enough and let it fester like a bad cut that you don't care for. I fuckin' should've just cut my losses and left back'ta Florida where its warm and I don't get run out of town. You know they said I raped babies there in Petersburg? Honest to God." Falcone said.

"Yeah. You had mentioned that." Said Lee.

The two beings hiked half way up the hill and through the front yard of an a quintessentially Juneau home. Up the steep and winding short set of stairs and through the meticulously tarped vegetable garden, they walked on a path made from interlocking stone steps past the house and up a forest path to a dark, cool clearing under the thick shade of evergreen boughs. The men's thoughts strayed for flickers into the future: What will become of me and what will become of dear old Juneau and it's small flock of citizens who identify so deeply with the steep slopes and salt-smelling wetlands of this far-flung sprig of rain forest that has sat so precariously for so long up until now on the edge of oblivion? Where will we all be when we are finally able to exhale and open our eyes in the new, strange, divorced-from-this-place-and-time cities we will find ourselves in?

"You say there's good fishing in Florida, huh?" Lee turned to Falcone, still breathless and hands on knees, gathering perspective.

"Best. Trust me, better than this. I would've left a long time ago if I didn't have an axe to grind with the fuckin' judge here." Said Falcone.

"And I hear that houses are cheap down there right now. What with the forclosures and everything." Added Lee.

"Yeah. Its got that going for it, too." Said Falcone.

pondering deeply the unseen significance of J&J Deli

2009-02-10T08:51:00.004-09:00

The winter weather and the return of the heaving snow descending from the sky is a departure from recent anemic winters of cold rain and bleary darkness. It accrues and it accrues like paperwork or coat hangers or the softly falling particles of skin and interstellar sands that make dust. A sheet of wintry film has fallen on our small village in the inside passage and in the distance, each tree is distinct and defined along the mountain slopes.

It used to come in piles and the wet snow pack would rest on the road ways disrupting travel. I would feel the sensation of giddy isolation, the same sort of feeling that being confined to a tree house or pillow fort provides, a sense of finding one's unique place.

Speaking of unique places in the cosmos, I went as I often do to a place lost in time and space for a simple yet delicious, classic American lunch. J&J Deli, I speak your name sweetly. Located in an odd nexus of Juneau that remains mostly unchanged from my years spent in the lower flats of the Harborview school area, J&J's is a time capsule of a convenience store.

Inside are spare but well appointed shelves and a sandwich counter straight from the era of Andy Griffith and tv theme songs you can whistle and Pop's malt shop. The sandwiches are like pretty little maids all in a row, with imposing yet whimsical local place names like the Mount Juneau (My favorite.) or the Thunder Mountain, Mount Roberts, Mount Jumbo; all names I can stand solidly behind and declare loudly into the hypothetical night, "Yes! I want a sandwich called a Mount Jumbo so laden with Roast Beef, Cotto Salami and Tillamook cheese that I could barf from pure happiness!"

And they make it so. I always get mine with the works and pickles, and unfailingly the person making it (Of which there are only maybe three people who have worked at J&J's that I can discern in the last 20 years.) says "Number 1 with works and a pickle coming right up!" And the prices are pretty much static, so its always disorienting to spend less than 10 bucks on a lunch there. (By the way, it seems like not too long ago that you could get breakfast or lunch at a place with a twenty in your pocket and end up with a ten and change. When did that gravy train careen into the turd-laden punch bowl?)

And the folks who make the sandwiches are the very same ones who years ago sold me candy as an elementary school student at the adjacent Harborview. The high school is just a little further down the road, and I would often stop in then, too, remarking very little at how the surroundings had not changed because not enough time had passed through me then, I guess.

When high school became a drag, all of the waking up early stuff, I went to Alternative school which was even closer to J&J's, over by the Harri plumbing and heating building, which is the exact color of chocolate milk and to this day makes me long for the strange sweetness of that thick and satisfying beverage concoction. School started at noon at Alternative school, and you got extra credit for going on Fridays. It was really an idyllic year that I spent there amongst the knocked-up teenage moms and other odd balls and malcontents.

A signed poster of local-boy-made-good Carlos Boozer hangs in the back, inscribed something to the effect of, "Thanks for all the great food!" It and the general trends in convenience store food packaging are the only things that clearly deliniate the passage of time. Carlos is in his Duke jersey from college in the poster, and I can remember when we were in high school together wondering how his nascent NBA prospects would turn out and in a whisp of inhaled air, half a breath it seems like, Booz is like a 7th year-pro.

I have a distinct memory of J&J's as a 1st grader. My teacher was Ms. Harris, who I still see from time-to-time here in town. She was a lovely lady to have as a teacher, very caring. She was the only teacher who I can remember who had me in her house, which is sort of interesting and I don't remember that context very well, just the amazing wooden toys that she had. Just a fragment of memory there. But J&J's back then was really something for me.

My entire class went, like twenty or more kids, and we were all allotted a couple of dollars to go hog wild with. Two dollars seemed like a sea of cash to me then, the number of small chocolates of peanut butter cups it could buy enormous. I remember getting an Astropop and a smattering of other tidbits. Just a brief, specific memory of a place and time and J&J's has real magic in it because there are so many little memories inside of it. Its a place of arrested development in the best possible way, a place for miniature-sized, convenience versions of things. Things that you don't have to commit to. Things that seem attainable to a young adult-age person. You're not buying a 20 pack of them at Costco, you don't have to squint and tabulate the price-per-ounce.

And a place like J&J's is also majestic because it allows you, as a kid, to think that maybe when you grow up that your lifestyle will center around these effortless, disposable conveniences. Every day can be a day of dining on the deli's fruits and the no-hassle ease of microwave cookery.

I would say the memories are like sands in the hourglass that is J&J Deli, but that's what an asshat would say and its not true, really. The memories are more like snow. They materialize with regularity all over the world and their presence is ephemeral; but more to the point there are only a few places in the world where they stick and accumulate.

Glaciers are the physical manifestation of accumulated snow, and for each glacier there is a constant balancing of snow accruing and resolving back to water. I feel like memory has the same, gradual sifting movement.

stickpaste radio this Friday the 23rd!

2009-01-21T19:37:00.006-09:00

Its happening. This Friday at 6pm, tune in on KXLL 100.7 FM!

http://ktoo.org/kxll/

Click link to listen on the web via KXLL's tube.

The show this week is about taking the ride to Breeze-In, a local obsession here in Juneau, and all of the amazing idiosyncrasies that take place during that little journey. Special thanks to Andy Kline for producing the son of a bitch, to Lukewarm and Mike Price for the clutch voice work and finally I'd like to thank the good folks at the Breeze-In family of late night shopping marts. Tip of the cap on the baked goods, fine sirs!

Also, myself and possibly Lukewarm will be DJ'ing an Obama ball here in town this week. Here's the scoop from my mom, who is involved in putting the thing on:

Juneau's Obama Inaugural Ball will be held this coming Saturday, January 24th at the Juneau Arts & Culture Center (the old National Guard Armory) at the corner of Egan Drive and Whittier Avenue. Tickets are $20 and are available at both locations of Hearthside Books and at the Juneau Arts & Culture Center. The event begins at 7 p.m. with a cocktail hour and piano music by TJ Duffy; dance music begins at 8 p.m. with Fleet Street. DJs Lukewarm and Lee Baby will play music during Fleet Street breaks and after Fleet Street is done, around 11 p.m. Hors d'oeuvres will be served and a no host bar (pay for your own drinks) is available for people over 21 years of age (people under the age of 21 can attend the event and are encouraged to attend). Dress is formal, but the organizers say be creative! "Formal" in Juneau is in the eye of the beholder.

red dawn to the future

2009-01-20T13:26:00.005-09:00

The sky as it appeared at about 8:30 in the a.m. on the first morning of a new era.

For red is the colour that my baby wore,
And what is more, it's true,
Yes it is.

-The Beatles

Red is the color of victory and a small portion of the morning sky was alight with the longest wavelengths of discernible light.

juneau's version of a warm winter weekend

2009-01-19T22:22:00.002-09:00

"This is kind of like your 'Running of the Bulls', no?"

Andy, station director guy of KXLL and local radio celebrity, asked me over the blaring mountain of sound spewing from the stadium-sized speakers next to the boxing ring.

"In this analogy, I'm Hemingway, I'm guessing..."

I responded.

"I mean, just get a look at this scene."

Said Andy, and it couldn't be helped, the urge to feast the eyes on the parade of strangeness. The vibration of his rich baritone barely registered across the tremulous flesh of my ear drum in that vast room full of foreign yet ineffably familiar faces. I mean, fuck, we were still in Juneau, so why did it feel like being in the Cantina bar in Mos motherfucking Eisley during some fever dream that runs concurrent to a Star Wars marathon?

"I guess the thing with Hemingway and the bulls was that the bulls weren't so complicit."

I said to Andy and he laughed and said something to the effect of no shit and I sat and thought for a moment about the sadness of these odd displays of humanness before me there at Marlintini's bar.

Shit was bananas. Dudes in Seattle Supersonics garb, (One styling Valley-denizen even had a Boston Celtics Ray Allen jersey. Way to keep up with the times, guy!) ladies in Fred Meyer's absolute finest; it was a scene that could only take place in the dark heart of the Valley; the million-miles far away feeling Valley with its' quaint diners and automotive supply stores. How I miss your sweet comfort. The comfort one feels being under the peering, unblinking eye that is the Breeze-In franchise of all night convenience stores. Bless your vigilance.

It was Friday night. Or maybe Saturday. I can't quite keep track during the days and hours of such a long and succulent weekend of eminently mild winter weather here above the 58th parallel. It was over fifty degrees in the breadbasket of January here in Southeast Alaska to the point of feeling like a three day spree of a false spring that spreads out over a few days of expanding brightness. On one of the weekend nights, Friday I'm sure, Naomi and Jessie and I traveled to Roughhouse boxing to claim our free ringside seats. Jessie has a morning show, and since she gave the boxing promoter and venue owner some burn, she got us free tickets. Really, the opportunity was too ripe. Can you believe that I've lived in Juneau for most of my life and have never been to a Roughhouse boxing event? Unfathomable.

First of all, the swarm of people was impressive. The boxing promoter, Juneau's Don King, was a salesman of the highest sleaziness and I couldn't have been happier about it. Every other word out of the guy's kisser was in reference to Budweiser products or the Domino's Pizza for sale at the back bar, of which I sampled two pieces. It was either that or freelancing at some dicey late night spot in the Valley, which might as well be a spin of the food-borne illness wheel of destiny. No thanks. I was saving it up for the next night, it turned out. That is another strange, inexplicable story for later in this here post, but back to the action at Roughhouse Boxing.

To summarize, the night was special. Half of the people fighting were easy to root for because I had seen them recently go through the criminal justice system in my capacity as a now-veteran watcher of the Juneau court scene. Funny how that shakes out. At the outset, loud, booty shaking music of the modern, pitch-controlled ilk was shaking my brain like you should never, never shake a baby and it was a little grating. The transition between rounds, once the fights began, was jarring with no gain at all to the levels of the music being piped in.

Before the first action, a rather rotund native fellow who I recognize from the downtown milieu as a semi-frequent bar fly found his way onto the stage and belted out an amazing, Aaron Neville-like performance of the anthem. He owned that stage and I bet some pretty lady took the old dirt dog home that night 'cause he sang the shit out of that song. It reminded me of Barney from the Simpsons, but you know, Juneau's version.

The first action of the night pitted Don Johnson, not the Don Johnson of Miami Vice fame, but rather Juneau's Don Johnson, who was rather less impressive I must admit than the real. Our Don is maybe 45. He is not a man of great physical gifts, being about 160 pounds and standing at no more than 5 foot 9 in shoes and socks. Juneau's Don Johnson was also fresh from his first-ballot induction into the district court Name Hall of Fame that I secretly compile in my mind during my day job of funny names that appear on the rosters of criminal defendants.

Don was pummeled by a younger and stronger fighter in near-sickening fashion. You could easily perceive the lag time in Don's reaction to the quicker man of many less years. A stream of other sordid sorts of affairs unstrung across the night and I left for an hour besides, so the memory is disjointed and I think being inside the booming madhouse of Marlintini's for those two or so hours rung my bell well enough to where I could go another hundred lifetimes without sitting next to a giant wall of speakers. There was a certain charm to the incredible lewdness of it all, a spectacle for sure. Girls were lifting their shirts for cheap strings of beads like some later night infomercial, but the locally produced Juneau version, of course. The promoter had the kind of voice, too, that is perfectly evocative of delightful sleaze. Its the kind of voice the sounds like it has been marinated in a tub of scotch / soda and 2 packs of Winstons each day for the last twenty odd solar cycles. The kind of voice that projects the sound of a small amount of spittle escaping as he entreaties the ring girl to shake it or take another lap because he wants to see it one more time.

The warmth, oh the awful warmth of a spring day in the middle of what had been a dreary god damned winter. It drove me to stark madness the other night. Saturday, I believe it would have been. I dragged my patient and lovely girlfriend to the Valley Restaurant for no other reason than my yearning for breakfast food at an ungodly hour. For the entirety of this junket of time in Juneau, I haven't even given it so much as a passing fancy, the Valley Restaurant that is. But there we were, starved for omelets and dishwater coffee in Juneau on a Saturday night with no good place to turn.

It felt like I must've been in the desert of life for so long before rediscovering this little oasis. I mean, look at the booth upholstery! Fucking ducks, man. Geese. Whatever. Its pastoral and conveys a sweeping sense of movement.

It did feel like coming home again, in a sense. While we sat sipping on our drinks, the television played something that appeared to be an Asian version of American Idol. A group of young men and women in formal attire left from a booth in the back of the joint, the skirts all made of gossamer material and the jackets all bold, contrasting tones.

Now, much later, I sit with the tiny laptop, pictured here next to a quarter, shown for scale, and a lighter bought by one Jerry Florentine for my cousin Lukewarm, a history buff. The lighter is a relic from Vietnam, the war and the country where Mr. Florentine just arrived stateside from. On the front is an Asian man riding some crazy bike contraption with a basket on the front and on the back is inscribed: "He who steals this lighter eats shit"

And finally, ladies and germs, a tiny sword from half way across the world and its' elephant ivory scabbard. Leave it to Jerry Florentine to send gifts worthy of Indiana Jones. He's Juneau's version, for sure.

view from an office window

2009-01-13T22:51:00.009-09:00

The view from my office is calming in the way the water looks as it advances and retreats amongst the wetlands and the scenery hushes when the fog rolls in and around the shoulder-like mountains of the Alaskan sea coast. I've thought about that sitting at my desk, which faces away from the window and this aspect of the mottled utopia before me.

I work in an old building in the heart of downtown on 4th street, next to the seat of dwindling power, the state capitol, and also adjacent to the Dimond court house. Originally, my office building was intended to be fancy apartments, so each of our offices has its own bathroom and walk-in closets and the like. It is an place of rapid accrual of papers and flotsam, and over time things get buried in the quickly changing sands; through and through the skeleton remains materially the same.

When I was growing up, my mom had an office in the same building, the old Assembly building. It was on the top floor, the third. My office is on the second. One day, I wandered up to the third floor, a suite of offices dedicated to the Enterprise Tech wing of the Department of Law if I'm not mistaken, to see if it would reawaken some lost childhood memories. No such luck. The hallways were spare and the only visible things inside of the myriad rooms were rows and rows of servers and a cavalcade of accompanying cables.

My mother had a small business that she ran out of that office called the Legislative Reporting Service that produced a periodical in newsprint chronicling the ebb and flow of local state politics. It is unimaginable to think of such a thing existing today, what with newspapers so in decline, although it makes a world of sense to support that sort of thing in today's news-starved world. I feel like a business model exists out there somewhere, but companies that are trying to transition from the printing press to modern media in what amounts to a decade are falling into irrelevance by their bumbling staff cuts and the watering down of overall quality.

The local paper, the Juneau Empire, has been buffeted lately by staff cuts and cuts in sections and so on. The thing is a fucking mess. Its like they just got the message a week ago that most readers wont be getting their world or national news from their local community daily. If someone is really interested in world affairs, they should be on BBC's website or on any one of a number of sites that aggregate news. If you are reading an AP wire story in the Empire, you might as well hit yourself in the head with a tack hammer because you are a retard getting week old news in arbitrarily and severely edited chunks that are beholden to things that have nothing to do with the content like the size of adjacent ads and the size of the section the article is in. Get the net, to pilfer another classic 90's movie quote. It seems so obvious, but only within the last few weeks has the Empire seen fit to do away with some of the excess news inches devoted to this retread.

As you can see in the photo above, the weather can best be described as grim in Juneau, Alaska as of this moment. The grays in the sky have the warmth of funerary drapes. What is startling is the actual temperature. Its a sneaky 39 degrees Fahrenheit and all of the accumulated snow is melting in streams that manifest themselves in burgeoning rivers running on the shoulders and around the sometimes circuitous path of least resistance. I walk across the waterlogged byway called 4th street a few times each day and I wonder if most of the melted runoff that torrents down the hill will reach the Gastineau channel, which segues into the salty ocean.

Every so often, the avalanche alarm squeals loudly through the mountain valley that hulks over Juneau and the surrounding boroughs. It sounds like an air raid siren does in the movies and its bleating is usually followed by the sonic resonance of a large caliber weapon's report.

After work, I walk home in the friscillating dusk light which gains near-about five minutes of shimmer each accruing day. Tonight in the dying brilliance the mounds of snow berms will look to be a strange sort of rotting. The sudden warmth sucks the snowy life like bone marrow from the interior of the berms and all that remains is an armature of the staunchest sprigs of icy snow.

time line into '09

2009-01-07T09:18:00.017-09:00

It was easy to be disaffected and rebellious growing up in a climate of strangeness like we all did. For God sakes, look at the man. If that shit-eating grin doesn't speak of used car sales, I'm just not sure what would.

Welcome to the last and waning days of G.W., an abomination that spanned my prime, high school and after years. In American pop culture of yore, it might have been a time of great introspection; taking girls to the prom and behind the bleachers; driving a jalopy and going to Pop's for ice cream and french fried potatoes; maybe have a couple furtive chugs of crisp and bitter forbidden beer.

Instead it played out in a much more somber and less idyllic fashion. The years roughly spanning 2000-2008 were ones of confusion and each advancing year eroded a little more glimmer from the pan. Boy bands, Britney Spears and reality television didn't define or impact me personally, but to come of age amongst such bullshit times was a let down, I will not attempt to soft-sell it.

It would be like growing up in the 80's without being in on the joke.

As a person who aspires to intellectual subtlety, not the best of times. It is a struggle like thrashing movements attempting to leave the slurp of a sinkhole. The television and its inane offerings are a constant millstone and it seems like it has finally found some serious traction within the rotting minds of my generation. This isn't about the man or Vietnam or fighting the good fight. Its not that idealistic. At this point, I'm just worried about everyone around me turning into roving zombies bent on television's bloodless power.

So it is with an open and eager heart that I welcome the thaw of 2009. With just under two weeks left under the voodoo of the current administration, I thought we'd take a look back at a brief, personal history of the Bush presidency in the form of a time line!

Click time line thumbnails to view full-sized panels. Easier to read!

My memory for 2008? That's easy. Obama all the way. Here's to a new year, god damn it.

text from the next 'zine

2008-12-31T00:52:00.008-09:00

I have been basking lately in the post-modern glow of consumer culture, and I have to say that it feels pretty right. The itch to stroll the well-lit aisles of a mega-mart looking for new drapery or throw pillows is a powerful impulsion, no doubt. Why, in the last few weeks, I've added a tea pot, a bathroom organizing rack, a dish rack, a knife set, a cutting board, a tiny and a not-so-tiny trash can, a string of miniature Chinese lanterns, a stand-up lamp and other sundry items to my home's attire.

Notes and thoughts from a willfully disorganized past:

I once lived in a trailer home with my cousin Lukewarm that had an Arctic entry entirely full of pizza box detritus. It was a short engagement, a piggy-backing of the last few months of a flaky older friend's lease. It was not unlike the recording career of the Sex Pistols. Short lived, too chaotic to hold up in a vacuum (Or, I suppose, without a vacuum...) and indelible in terms of long term influence.

I think it may be the collector in my personality burbling through the moat of accumulated bong resin, which brings me to a larger point which has nothing or at least very little to do with bong hits: Humans are by their nature an organized lot. We are organizers. Now, there are many exceptions to the rule. Some of our race flout the conventions of orderliness for perceived chaos, but I would ask you to consider that even in the wastelands of human laziness, a bare desire for composition and recognizable patterns exists. Those who strike discord with the theme of order, living messy lives in defiance of a deeply born need for uniformity, are perhaps driven to madness by the overwhelming nature of attempting to find some semblance of harmony in the spasmodic universe.

Notes and thoughts from a willfully disorganized past:

In high school, I slept on a couch in a converted living room in my parent's house with either a.) The t.v. on NBC, on which I would nightly watch Conan twice, once at the normal broadcast time of like midnight and then again on the follow through at around two or whenever it was. I would always try and mute it for Leno and Third Rock or whatever bullshit sitcom was a buffer between them at the time. Eventually, the situations of the intervening comedy began to amuse no matter how craptastic the cast, in fact often in spite of the actors. Take a bong hit every time French Stewart looks like he shit his pants! Ho! Or b.) I would listen to Art Bell on the radio. If you don't know about Art Bell, suffice it to say his show centered on the paranormal and was always lively but was always most notable for Mr. Bell's incredibly soothing timbre. Consequently, I was always late and eventually enrolled in alternative high school, which started at noon, which happens to be more in line with the schedule of a late night media consumer / couch sleeper.

It could even be argued that the over-riding purpose of humankind may no be to procreate or cure disease, but instead might be something of much greater magnitude: We may be the manifestation of the universe's need for harmony. We may be the order-bringers, or at least a fledgling version of what's to become the organizing intelligence of the physical universe.

Which brings me back to home furnishings. For basically the entirety of my stay here in sunny Juneau, I have been going with the bare-bones approach to apartment furnishing, but a combination of getting a free car, a girlfriend and the cushion of a decent-waged job have finally lifted me into the exhilarating heights of the middle class. The tinge of obsessive / compulsive disorder in my nature is being indulged, for sure; which naturally leads a person to thinking about the factors that influence OCD.

Notes and thoughts from a willfully disorganized past:

In high school, I owned a Ford Tempo. It was gray. I bought it from my great aunt Kay for $1500. It had something like 60,000 miles on it, which was nothing. My dad thought that the mechanic she took the car to probably didn't do anything to it but charged the unassuming elderly lady an arm and a leg for what amounted to polishing a turd. As a result, the transmission started to slip a few months after I bought it. The fluid must have been drained while the car was driven at some point. I rallied the shit out of that car, none-the-less. I remember jumping it off of the giant, surfing-wave sized berm out Thane onto the wet sands during low tide in the wetlands. I installed a sub woofer at one point and a cd player. There was always a mountain of trash in it.

Curiosity. The need to improve. The probing desire to uncover and de-mystify the unknown. Basically, the things that have become well developed and indulged in the fantasy that is our Star Trek progeny. You know, "To seek out new life and new civilizations. To boldy go where no one has gone before." All that splitting the infinitive jive. To me, these thoughts are the driving forces behind this idea of humans as a sort of interstellar cowboy, rounding up the stray cattle of the cosmos.

Notes and thoughts from a willfully disorganized past:

I lived in a residential hotel in San Francisco for awhile. It was right by the Civic Center, a total shit hole just off of Market Street. I had previously lived in residential hotels in Juneau and thought I knew something about what squalor looked like. The alleys outside of the old hotel were covered with a variegated variety of spent bottle caps and unwrapped condoms and unsheathed hypodermic needles. Inside of my room was one plug-in total, no mirror and basically a hamster's nest of free weekly papers. My neighbors were a black lady who liked to violently yell at me and a Cuban dude who would hang out by the stair steps. Me and el cubano would smoke tightly raveled cigar-skins full of fragrant California marijuana and talk of winter league baseball stars of the Dominican Republic and the latest rumors of who would defect to the Major Leagues from his small island in the stream of the Atlantic ocean.

What does it all mean if its true? The implications are unclear. But if I had to put a finger on what the fuck the purpose of it all is, I feel like human beings as order-bringers is much more plausible than, say, humans as facilitators for the second coming of a god-figure or humans as a random accident of the heavens.

So its got that going for it, which is nice...

stoner holiday: ham-venture!

2008-12-26T20:00:00.011-09:00

A couple of days ago, my mom phoned asking about a ham.

"Can you get a ham for dinner?"

She asked.

"A ham? Like you want me to make a ham?"

I responded. She went on to confirm that she did want me to craft a Christmas dinner ham. Having never been tasked with such a responsibility, I wavered internally before deciding to go boldly like Shatner before me and if I was going to really do this thing, I was going to document it on my camera phone and I was going to give the sumbitch the old college try.

"I'll make you a ham alright. The best damn ham you've ever had."

I said and I meant it.

Although I know nothing about making a ham per se, I do know that starting with good ingredients and having a plan in mind are key. After spending roughly three minutes surfing google for ham recipes, I decided on a little number with pineapples and mustard in a glaze. Yar!

For an ~ 10 pounder, spiral cut

2 c. brown sugar
6-8 tbsp. lemon juice (fresh squeezed)
4 tbsp. mustard powder
2 tbsp. cornstarch
3 cans of pineapple rings
salt to taste
1 blueberry muffin (for chef)

Also included in the final mix, but not represented in the photo was a healthy dose of sriracha sauce and I used maybe a dozen total cloves after scoring the surface of the ham pre-baking.

Toss in a tiny oven into the mix and wonders are ceaseless. The ham went in for an hour and a half at 325 and once that ball got rolling I shifted my focus to the creation of the glaze.

Notice how my miniature oven is functionally maybe only 4 times the size of that there typer-machine? What it lacks in size, it makes up for in spades with its tenacity and good cheer. Kind of like the Regis Philbin of ovens, and perhaps in terms of real years similar in age!

The typewriter pictured here is a magical typewriter which was bequeathed upon me during a fortuitous Jeep ride what seems like eons ago now, but not so long really...

A Smith/ Corona Electra 120.

With the ham squared away in its cozy pocket of hot, I turned to the glaze. I knew that with the pineapple rings, I was looking at a long, simmering onslaught to arrive at a finished product. For almost the first half hour of bake time, I simply reduced the pineapple and its juice, bringing it to a boil. I tossed in a cup of brown sugar at that point and a tablespoon or two of lemon juice to begin the caramelizing process and to brighten the flavor.

This ain't some hobo operation, shit...

After close to an hour, the glaze began to get to a manageable point in terms of volume and consistency. It took a lot of stirring, the most effective being an egg-beating motion, to break down the large chunks of fruit. I think this entire process made the final product much tastier. The sweetness and subtleties of the flavor of candied pineapples allowed a lot of leeway to spice the shit out of the sauce. I put in maybe more like 5 tablespoons of mustard and a big squirt of sriracha towards the end of the sauce-making process.

Things have been happening fast here in lunch lady land, aka downtown Herftown during the white-duff-covered winter wonderland that is the balance of December as the daylight accelerates once more towards fuller days and summer warmth. I got a tiny laptop for Baby Jesus dying this year. I hope its going to facilitate me writing more. I'm penning this entry on the tiny beast, so it looks like the intent will bear fruit. If not, whoopdy-shit. Its rad! And tiny!

The snow came in time for the big day and it is now the consistency of slick mashed-potatoes as the temperature warms and creates a goulash of cake-mixture thick slush in the shapes of tire-tread hollows and windswept dunes of Lilliputian proportions.

Note the ceramic lovebirds that flank the tabletop pictured above. I bought them at Joanne's for three dollars and ninety-seven cents a piece. Its a sickness, I'm aware.

I haven't eaten Chinese food since the last time it shanked me in a Calcutta bazaar. Even so, I keep coming across these little strips of sentient thought in my apartment and they always seem to cut right to the heart of things.

Use your abilities at this time to
stay focused on your goal.
You will succeed.

In my mind's eye, this spoke to the creation of the ham, and so it was. A timely augur of things to pass. If you look closely at the above image, you will notice the myriad of pens that bed the fortune paper. I always have a pen in my ear at work, and in my regimented life as a state drone, I often will come home at lunch or after work and I will throw the pen in my ear in the same spot on this table which over time creates a visible manifestation of entropy.

I glazed the side of pork by drizzling the pineapple sauce into the exposed craters of sizzling pig flesh. After getting a good lacquer-coat on the old girl, I layered the marinated pineapple chunks atop the ham and dropped it back in the Regis for another half a turn.

The tupperware above is the reserved sauce. Shar!

Like a holiday miracle, the ham came out bronzed and spicy as a motherfucker. It was a deep and abiding spice, too; the kind that sidles its way over next to the candied sweetness of a brown sugar and pineapple glaze.

I saved a few rings of pineapple for presentation and I think they set the meat's color off well. The sriracha sauce was really the feather in the cap of my ham-making experience. Really, what can't be made better with a shot of hot chili sauce?

The money shot! Oh, food porn!

This is how the plate presented on the table. I don't want to toot my own horn, but this little feller was the belle of the ball for sure.

Tune in next week when we de-turd a bucket of shrimp and make bbq kabobs!

Scott the mailman may be a celestial being of great import and other notions haphazardly arrived at

2008-12-17T14:57:00.008-09:00

My mailman's name is Scott. I've known him for quite some time. He's an affable fellow, good at what he does; capable. Scott the mailman wears glasses, often askance on his face as he hurriedly and efficiently posts letters in the correct box or maneuvers into a tricky doorway with a burgeoning pile of parcels.

I never really pondered the being that is Scott much before recently. He is a mailman, a good one at that, and those kind of people are background people. How often is it that we think of these everyday people we see outside of the scope of our relationship? I mean, I guess I just assumed that once Scott was done delivering the mail at my apartment building, he just went on down the line; never breaking for vacation or sickness or to see a movie and eat a well-prepared meal with his loved ones. Its jarring to see those folks outside of their rote capacity.

I first encountered Scott, or I first remember encountering Scott when I was a kid working and hanging out in my dad's photo shop. Scott would deliver the mail. Same route, I'm sure; in fact, the old site of the photo store is only two blocks from my current apartment. He was always amazingly professional and courteous, and as far as I can remember that was about the only thing that anyone ever remarked about Scott.

A few weeks ago I was in an elevator with Scott. We were headed up from the lobby floor and he was first to enter, and thus closest to the buttons indicating floor preference.

"Hi Scott."

"Hi Leo. Floor 8, right?"

"That's right. Man, its amazing that you can remember what floor I'm on."

"Yeah. Its just how I see things after doing the mail for so long. I used to have a much better mind for names, but now its just addresses."

"Funny."

The elevator stopped on floor 4.

"Well, see you around, Scott."

"See ya."

The elevator continued to floor ocho with only myself aboard. I got off and entered my apartment, and I can remember thinking about how wondrous Scott's mind is. I wanted to manipulate it like a database to see the beautiful webs of information packeted up inside that amazing brain.

Its like baristas who see people as floating drink orders. Tall latte. Decaf mocha. Grande shot-in-the-dark. Or bartenders who see lofting rocks glasses of whiskey and pints of ale. But Scott's strangeness is a little more endearing and interesting to me. He sees people's addresses, which contain a wealth of information about who someone is. More so, anyway, than what kind of Joe someone swills.

Scott is a watcher. An impassive, neutral force in the universe. There was a comic book series that I read when I was a kid called "The Secret Wars" that was told from the prospective of a narrator who was a "Watcher", a species whose entire raison d'etre was to observe and collect information about the cosmos. Scott to me embodies this archetype of people who are only involved with the outside world vicariously, yet are not disconnected from the realities of it. Much the opposite. Scott knows more about the comings and goings, literally, than anyone. That dichotomy, to me, is riveting.

How did Scott get to where he is today? What sort of life path did he flow into this very moment on? What were the factors that shaped his decision to become a postal worker? When I think deeply of Scott, I think of someone who seemingly could have succeeded in any number of fields of endeavour. I feel like someone with his mental armature must be pretty uncommon and not to say that being a mail man isn't a fine occupation, but there must have been a number of ways it could have gone better for Scott. Then I think that maybe he has ulterior motives. Maybe he really is a Watcher. Somethings rotten in Denmark, all right. I mean, what could be a better front for an occupation than a mail man for a Watcher?

Think about it...

a study of convenience: an evaluation of every outpost in the city and borough

2008-12-12T10:02:00.042-09:00

Don't ask me why, exactly. Maybe in the depth of winter there isn't a whole lot else going on. Maybe we needed to get out of the man cave, whatever, me and Lukewarm spent our Saturday going to every single convenience store in the city and borough of Juneau. It was an adventure, that's for sure. We logged a lot of miles on the Exploder. Had some beverages. Took some pit stops. Paused for the cause, if you will. We also returned Lukewarm's defective X-Box at Wal-mapart. All in all, a bustling day of beatific wanderings.

Let me take you to the beginning...

Stop One: Tesoro Downtown

We decided right away that we needed to come away from each store with a memento; something that would tie the experience together. What else is so common to the convenient shopping experience than the lighter, I submit to you? Everyone needs a lighter!

Besides, it was either that or a Snickers bar or a Coke or something and god knows I didn't want to feel obligated to gut that much high fruc-surp.

Tesoro downtown is great. Dan, the dude with the lowered orange truck, was working and it was a little dose of deja vu. That guy has been working at downtown Tesoro since I was in high school like eight years ago. Its insane. He's a lifer.

The food and bev selection is somewhat limited, but they have some key team members in place. Chicken and Swiss. Monterrey Jack Burrito. Breakfast sandwiches. Check, check and check.

3 Twinkies out of a possible 5

Stop Two: The Liquor Barrel

Tucked into the lovely subdivision of Lemon Creek is the Liquor Barrel, a convenience store that I have totally slept on. Lukewarm sung its praises highly and he should know: After all, he's a liquor distributor by trade and spends his live-long days delivering hooch to all of these places. The perfect guide to the intricacies of the convenience store subculture.

Maybe its the friendly staff or the way the place is laid out. I found the place inviting. Centrally located next to Lemon Creek Correctional Center, the Juneau Police Station and the Costco / Home Depot mega complex, its sure to please the busy prison guard, the harried beat cop or the doddering Costco sample monkey trying to fit in a smoke before his shift.

3.5 out of 5, almost entirely on the good word of Lukewarm.

Stop Three: Breeze-In Lemon Creek

Pay dirt. These guys have hands down the best drink selection. They even have hi-ball, my favorite energy bev, and for $2.29 to boot, a reasonable deal for sure. The place is bewildering and not just for Juneau; this complex even puts Dari Marts and AM/PMs down south to shame. Its a power house.

I ordered the Italian sandwich, a beast on a cibatta loaf. Lukewarm had the pulled pork sandwich. The hot food is muy bueno. I can't say enough good things about it. Breeze-In on Human Growth Hormone, and lest we forget, Burrito Bar!

5 out of 5. Holy shart!

Stop Four: DeHart's

After a brief touch up in the Walmart parking lot and the exchanging of the X-Box, we traversed to the far point of our quest. Lukewarm, being the canny guide that he is, suggested we burst forth to the remote outpost of DeHart's to begin the slow and arduous trek back to town.

Not a whole lot to say about DeHart's, a fine gas-and-go option, but the surrounding area is splendid. Let me just say that if you are not aware of the existence of Chan's Thai Kitchen and you're living through a brutal Juneau winter with me, make yourself so. Yar! Green Curry!

1.5 out of 5. Poop.

Stop Five: Duck Creek Market

Good old Duck Shit Market. In the heart of the Stephen Rich neighborhood 'hood. This guy gets robbed more than any other, so we dock it a twinkie right there for the heightened security measures. Candy bars behind glass? Shit.

I'm not trying to hate. There have been many occasions when the Creek has been there to do me right with the odd bottle of hatorade or what-have-you. I just expect more. If these bastards had a hot food deli, something... I don't know. Throw me a bone. I guess the appeal of liquor within walking distance is too much for trailer folk to overcome. I mean, this place could be a kissing booth-setup with bottles of moonshine in its current vector smack-dab in the middle of the ghet and it would make rent.

.5 out of 5. Maybe .6... somewhere in there. My name is... Ralph!

Stop Six: Hockey Sticks at the heart of the beast- Valley Tesoro

Bing! One lighter please and thank you sir. Lukewarm and I were in and out of this guy in a hurry. I feel at odds with my surroundings in the valley and nowhere more so than at the disenchanting Valley Tesoro. The only good thing about it is the pay-vacuums outside. There is nothing of substance in terms of foodstuffs and the beverage selection is limited to run-of-the-mill Pepsi products which might as well be RC cola or TAB to me. Undrinkable unless free.

Tacking on one twinker for the convenient vacuums, (This is about convenience stores, right?) we arrive at a figure of:

1.5 out of 5. I couldn't rate DeHart's or this place any different. Its like trading deli food for the coin-op vacuums straight up, and that seems reasonable. It wouldn't be if the deli food was any good.

Stop Seven: Donut Heaven in Valley Breeze-In

The one and only 24 hour land of opportunity for fresh donuts and sandwiches in the landlocked province of Juneau. That really says it all. Until the LC Breeze decides to go 24 hours as well, the de facto best convenience store in town. Before, it wasn't close, but in terms of the actual store, the new Lemon Creek one is just the shit. Its better, its just not twenty four hours. Sure, there are some other differences like the videos at the Valley one, but the LC liquor store is bigger, too. Either way, being open all night is a deal breaker.

Shiver me timbers! Lighters are god's gift to degenerates. First, he gave us matches, and it was good. Matches are easy to use, cheap and have charming, quaint qualities like many of the things irrationally do that were material to movies from the Golden Age of Hollywood.

That's why we go with the lighter. Invariably, when I use matches I end up with a pile of burnt-through husks just sitting there with no good place to put them. And they smell like little whiffs of devil smoke.

The Valley Breeze still has all the best employees, as well. We ran into this guy:

...Running the register on the liquor side. His name is Sundowner, I think. If he's the guy I'm thinking of, and I'm pretty sure he is, he used to be Steve McNeeve's neighbor in the Northwood apartments. He'd always come over to toke one and be animated like, say, Busta Rhymes.

5 out of 5. Default holder of the heavyweight belt.

Stop Eight: Douglas Depot

Can you see what the register says in this picture? God, I hope so. Here, I need to blow it up for you.

Merch is rad. Five dollars and forty-eight cents worth of Merch. Mmmm.

Douglas Depot was a little bit of a let down. The gas is more expensive there in Doug, also known to the residents as Happytown. The selection in the cupboards was pretty spare to say the least. The floppy-haired kid slash son-of-a-bitch that sold us the lighter, a crack torch mind you, was sufficiently disaffected and douchy.

At least the nerfherder gave us the lighter for the price of a normal Bic, which they were out of. Lighters cost a ton at convenience stores. They ranged from about a dollar to mostly in the buck fiddy to two dollar range. Harsh.

1 out of 5. Mostly for the crack torch, too. That kid chapped my ass.

Stop Nine: Sublime to stand on the coastline at a Dougtown Breeze-In

Val was holding it down at the Douglas Breeze, the stop-over for many a Doug-er and rightly so; its a pocket-sized Breeze-In, the sandwiches and donuts are still there but not as fresh or abundant.

The night was brisk, but Lukewarm and I made great time in the Red Baron Exploder; crusing the slippery avenues with aplomb at reasonable speeds. The night was cloudless as well. Mostly, in the winter, the fog rolls in and it rains and barfs snow, but it stays relatively warm. As it hovers around freezing at sea level, the ski-hills are flush with fresh powder and all is well and in balance. Now, the weather becomes cold at the coincidence of no rain and the blue sky in the fleeting day was welcoming but at three o'clock with the sun down, the cold snaps.

3.5 out of 5.

Stop Ten: J&J Deli, sandwich stop to the semi-stars

This one is near and dear to Lukewarm and myself. Alas, it was closed on Saturdays, as it is on Sundays and every day after like 5pm. One of the reasons I like it so much is it's scarcity, I think. Its like McDonald's breakfast in that regard. Since its only available between like nine and ten thirty on Tuesdays and Thursdays or whatever, you always want to get in if you fit in.

The people crafting the sandwiches, named for local landmarks like the Mt. Juneau and Mt. Robert's, are the same people that sold me candy when I was a kid going to grade school across the street down there at Harborview Elementary School.

5 out of 5 for the sandwiches and the continuity. Anything that makes me question whether I'm in a dream from when I was ten years old is inherently worthy of regard, in my humble opinion.

Stop Eleven: Thibodeau's

The cupcakes are a plus. The central location next to the K3 radio and television studios also garners highly-processed pastry regards. Tibbies also has something resembling a deli and its also next to the Driftwood Lodge, which should be a badge of honor for any establishment.

Also, being next to the Sandpiper doesn't hurt, either. Holy shit, has that place come along. Not that it wasn't amazing to begin with, but fuck if I can believe how good it was last week when I went. I got this Smokey Tomato soup that was the balls. It was garnished with candied bacon and had a couple squares of foccachia with garlic butter on the side. I just order off the specials board. Its always good.

I would also draw your attention to my keys on the counter. Why is it that I have to spill out everything in my pockets to dig out a buck fifty? I feel ashamed to be a man.

3 out of 5.

Stop Twelve: Liquor Cache-d

Lukewarm and I were in the zone at this point. With only Percy's to go, we were home free. The counter jockeys are always the best here in the heart of the party zone in downtown. On the clock at the time was the super sassy gay guy with porn stache.

While more expensive, the location is the total appeal of this place. Its right up in the ass of downtown and all the drunks seem to like it, and if they like it, so do I.

4 out of 5 40 ozs.

Stop Thirteen: The unholy 13th apostle, Percy's

Percy's has a lof of history. A long time ago, it used to be a place to drink dishwater coffee, like a diner or something. These days, its a hole-in-the wall liquor store that has an excellent selection of tobacco products. No longer being a smoker, I rarely go. They also have good booze, I'm told.

The owner was kindly enough to ham it up for us, so they get a default 5 twinkies. Well done!

Speaking of well done, our bounty of lighters!

It was a Saturday well spent. We were in and out of the freezing cold, mixing it up, dining out and otherwise living it up in a consumer paradise. Was it convenient? Oh yeah. You betcha.

the depth of obsession explored in a tonal, previously unconsidered, couch-covered waste of the inner mind

2008-12-03T13:29:00.015-09:00

"...and this one, you can tell its good by the banding. You get one of those pieces of old jade that have the brown patina on 'em and the cords of white banding throughout it, and you can sell it for big bucks."

An older gentleman offered to the room. He looked as if he must be a professional rock hound of sorts. He wore sweat pants and a loose-fitting shirt that exposed tracts of graying chest hair and a necklace made of animal teeth. He was missing a front tooth and had native-American style tattoos ringing his forearms.

"I walk the beaches up there on the coast where the wind comes through..."

The old man spoke half in words and half through exaggerated gesture, his arms undulating to show the strong coastal winds.

"...I walk and Indian kids walk with me and I pay them a dollar for anything they pick up. They've got the green jade which everybody has up there in Sitka; but they also have dark jade. A real black kind of smokey lookin' jade and even some white jade, which can change into a rainbow of color if there are any embedded minerals and you give the rock a good heatin'."

I sat on a couch opposite the stream of consciousness and followed the movements of the elder's arms and narrative almost in a trance, the way bees must receive communication through a series of movements or the way interpretive dancers seek to disseminate information to an audience. Words transmuted into physical gesture.

"That's amazing. I didn't know they had jade here in Alaska."

I said.

"Oh sure. In fact, everyone has been using this Canadian jade lately, on account of the fact that they have great jade over there. I tell folks that I use Alaskan jade and they love it; they buy everything I have because that's what they all want: Alaskan stones."

"Huh."

I said and the room fell into a comfortable quiet. An old MGM cartoon played on the large screen television. The room waxed and waned with tone and brightness; the flickering images the tv cast coloring faces and furniture as the only source of light in the room. A girl sitting on a third couch, silent until now, handed me a pipe filled with burning marijuana.

"Here. Want to smoke?"

"Sure. Thanks. These cartoons are great, by the way. They are so strange and subversive compared to newer cartoons, it seems like."

"Yeah. They're directed by Tex Avery. He was a genius."

The picture was about bullfighting. One of the characters was a droopy cartoon animal matador who looked pitiable and sad while the other was strong, vibrant and flamboyant. They took turns confounding the bull with a series of comical tactics all the while vying for the love of a magazine cover girl. A draft of smoke moved across the upper level of the trailer living-room-slash-kitchen we were grouped in. The door opened letting in a gust of frigid winter air and a new entity came into the couch grouping and sat down somewhere in the spasmodically illuminated dark.

"Man, I've been thinking about something from work all day."

I said to no one in particular; about to travel out to the the jutting end of a tangent.

"This guy I work with, an older guy who's been working at my office forever, told me about this psychiatrist that used to practice here in town. This guy, Bob, who I work with, knew and worked with this doctor in a professional capacity for years. Socialized with him, had the same group of peers in a small town where all the professional-type folks know each other."

"That's Juneau for you."

Said the carver.

"Anyway, so Bob is telling me about this doctor who had a lot of contracts with hospitals and various other organizations and was basically the go to doctor for evaluations for a long time. This doctor worked with hundreds of people in the community and was by all accounts a good physician. The only thing that people would say about him is that he was obsessive, like OCD-level obsessive about things; he would move from one pursuit to the next. I guess he was all into UFOs and other conspiracy stuff. This was a few years back."

"Did you ever listen to Art Bell? The conspiracy radio guy?"

The old carver man asked me. The girl on the couch began to pull herself away from the saturated hues of the tv and into our ambit of conversation.

"Oh yeah. I grew up listening to him. Went to bed every weeknight in high school listening to his golden timbre. But anyway, this doctor, Dr. Chuck everyone called him, started to go off the deep end a little bit I guess because eventually Bob and everyone else in town found out that this Dr. Chuck was a board member of a national white supremacist organization. For Bob, an African-American guy, it must have been especially odd. I mean, they were friends. He thought he knew him, you know."

"Man..."

Said the stoned girl on the couch.

"I spent a lot of time during my day today reading about this Dr. Chuck guy. The whole thing is like something out of a novel. Its truly bizarre. This is a guy who was friends with Judges and powerful people, a guy who looked out for the underdog, someone who on the surface seemed to be not just a normal and good person but especially compassionate and competent... Yet, a conflict existed within him, a paradox; something that was fed by a very base part of the human psyche. To me, the most compelling part isn't even the fact that this guy was a bigot or had radical ideas about controversial things. To me, the story that makes me want to peel back the layers is all about this guys' obsession."

"Yeah. Like what is it that appeals to him about that particular thing... White supremacy or whatever."
Said the suddenly lucid girl.

"Exactly. I feel like I have a little bit of this guy's malady myself. I mean, I am borderline obsessive about things and I immerse myself into them and then grow tired and move on just like Dr. Chuck, but instead of UFO-logy or joining the national wing of a hate group, I pour over French New Wave movies for a couple of months or get into P.G. Wodehouse books. The line between me and Dr. Chuck is only a matter of shade, you know."

"Its strange what sort of ideas appeal to people. Me, I just leave the thinking to others and spend my time cutting rocks."

Said the carver man.

"Probably for the better. Anyway, the thing that made me ponder of all this is something Bob, the guy I work with, said. He said that this doctor recommended that he take this new supplement because Bob was having heart troubles at the time. Bob went and asked his personal physician about it and his doctor told him that it couldn't hurt and that there had actually been some positive-looking research that had come out lately about the stuff. Bob said that he still takes the supplement every day, this is years after the fact now, and as he is downing that pill with his morning beverage he thinks of Dr. Chuck. He just keeps coming back to staring that strange paradox in the face each day, and what else could you conclude but that the world is a strange and wondrous place."

Nobody said anything for a period of time. The room revolved around the contemplation of this thought that had just channeled through me. The droopy matador found the inner strength and resolve to conquer the bull where the one filled with all of the braggadocio and vigor had failed. The cartoon ended with the unlikely hero improbably sitting in an embrace with the splendid beauty. The television went to commercial. Sounds of the deep obbligato of a diesel engine whirring drifted past on the potholed road outside. A fresh emission of smoke stirred from a weathered-sounding set of lungs. Life went on.

bag! bag! it big, its heavy, its bag!

2008-11-30T15:39:00.010-09:00

As promised, a glimpse of Alpert, the not-quite-real cat perched atop Lukewarm's television.

Whenever I have shown someone Alpert for the first time, their reaction is always one of started bemusement. It's not really plausible that something so strange and at once lifelike and totally ersatz should be able to exist. It feels like poor Alpert should be pulled apart by the polarity that exists within him.

And then there's this little guy. This is my mother's cat, Chunks, as seen over Thanksgiving. Notice his cat toy that he is slumped over. Everything in my mom's living room has been clawed to shit by this over stuffed mongrel, so she finally bought him a scratching post and all he does is wedge his girth into it.

Chunks has the wanderlusting, aether-like quality of free radicals or the buoyant elements of oxygen itself: He isn't one to be hemmed in by science or furniture or any other sort or earthly force.

The vaporizer, or as I have taken to calling it "the couch maker". The pile of brown duff to the side of the space age popcorn maker-looking thing and in front of the touchstone in any man-kitchen, the Foreman grill, is the spent dope. It still looks good enough to where I would have paid 60 bucks for a bag full of it back in high school in lieu of the typical fare of pencil shavings and oregano, or the insidiously real looking chewed-up yellow book pages.

Holy bag! Strap on the bag and fire up the hot air and make like Ron Popeil. Set it and forget it! Or more accurately, set it and forget about being productive!

Lukewarm demonstrates the destructive nature of the bag. Beware the fearsome bag!

It has found pieces of lesser men in its' stool. The bag, that is.

I always think that a brimming bag full of vapor goodness looks kind of like a bale of cotton candy. Tasty.

script for a radio show

2008-11-28T14:27:00.008-09:00

(The courtyard of the Northwood apartments is twilit by a peak-of-summer sky featuring a sickle-shaped moon portion. In the adjacent parking lot, a collection of broken down cars and car parts and assorted tools is strewn along the gravely expanse. A doorway opens, the doorway of apartment number 5. The intense artificial light pours out of the apartment and onto the subtly lit grouping of stoops and stairwells that ring the atrium and makes more plain the nuances of unruly grass clumps and rain-bled hopscotch chalkings. Two figures emerge.)

NICK

What do you think, should we hit up Mapco, or do it up and go to the Breeze?

ELLIOTT

It always comes to this. I mean, they both have their charms. Mapco, easy, quick and full of delightful trailer trash. Breeze-in is farther away, yet has the finest and most thorough allotment of comestibles available in this sad, barren little town.

NICK

Man, I wonder if the Mumu lady will be there.

ELLIOTT

I swear, she lives in between her house and that convenience store. Its like she forgoes the mental anguish of an actual grocery store for the in and out anonymity of Mapco.

NICK

Its like she is resigned to paying double and having one tenth the selection so she can wear her mumu in peace.

ELLIOTT

I dunno, I like Mappy land, but Breeze-in has those wonderfully sacrilicious fresh donuts. And the insanely amazing sandwiches.

NICK

Ohh sugar... Lets go to the Breeze, man. I just worked up a halfy for an egg salad san.

ELLIOTT

Word. Onward Temp Dog!

(The two young men enter the enclosure of a late-eighties vintage Ford Tempo. The paint it almost an electric blue but darker and deeper like the color of desolate midnight and the Tempo seemed perhaps cloaked by its dark, resonant tone. The engine turns over on the first try and is quickly followed by the flood of highbeams.)

NICK

Have you packed yet?

ELLIOTT

Fuck no. I can't do that kind of shit until the very last minute. Its like I need a gun to my head to get it together. I could never understand those douche bags who coordinate their packing like its a religion.

NICK

God. Ziploc bags and pre-ironing their shit. I just go with the old Hoonah suitcase myself and throw everything into a garbage bag.

ELLIOTT

Nice. That's a good idea. Why overthink it? What kind of chips are you going with? Cool Ranch or Nacho Cheesier?

NICK

Nacho Cheesier, no question. I'm just waiting for the Nacho cheesiest to come out. Its like they've been just stringing us along our whole lives waiting to drop that load on us.

ELLIOTT

You've got the Nacho. You've got the Nacho Cheese. Then you go Nacho Cheesier, obviously they've painted themselves into a corner on this one.

NICK

There's only one place to go.

ELLIOTT

And then what? Where do you go from Nacho Cheesiest? You've blown your wad. How much of that flavoring can you pack on to a chip?

NICK

Deep thoughts, my friend. Deep thoughts.

ELLIOTT

So, what are you going to do this year? No more school, man.

NICK

I don't really know. I feel like I'm going to just drift for awhile, and I'm OK with that.

ELLIOTT

Yeah. That sounds really sweet, man. If my mom wasn't on my ass so much to use that scholarship that I got, I'd be right there with you.

NICK

No man, more power to you. I just feel like I'm filtering to the bottom like a heavy stone. But I have some burning ambitions of my own.

ELLIOTT

Do tell.

NICK

Well, I've never told anyone this, so don't blow my cover on this one, man.

ELLIOTT

Wow, I can tell this is going to be earth-shatteringly awesome.

NICK

Alright, just follow me here. And, let me preface this by saying that I've been thinking about this plan for years.

ELLIOTT

Continue...

NICK

OK. So, you know how when you go to Subway to get a sandwich, its always some greasy-haired, pimple-ridden reject manhandling your lunch?

ELLIOTT

Strange folk.

NICK

I think they round them up by putting in ad in the paper advertising appearances by Bill Shatner at fake star trek conventions.

ELLIOTT

Or free hand jobs and mountain dew.

NICK

Regardless, I don't want those douches making my sandwiches, let alone touching my food. I mean, I know they wear those flimsy plastic gloves, but that shit is semi-permeable. You just know those guys have less than normal bowel movements from subsisting on fast food, and I doubt they thoroughly clean up after all of those numerous bathroom breaks. I mean, there's just not enough time in the day.

ELLIOTT

Indeed.

NICK

That and a sandwich is all about ratios. Mayo to bread, meat to cheese. Crucial, razor thin margin for error ratios. These guys could give a hoot, and I just don't have the hubris to sit there and be like 'can you please but exactly eight tomatoes and two handfuls of lettuce?'

ELLIOTT

Yeah, I hate that, especially when you are behind some OCD guy in line that is having those hapless scmucks make his sandwich like he is John frickin' Woo directing an action sequence.

NICK

So anyway, my fantasy is to get behind the counter, to step into the belly of the beast, to get a job at Subway for just one day so I can finally live out my fantasy of creating the perfect sub. I'd go with the old cut, you know the one where you extract the core of the bread, and I'd make a spicy italian B.M.T. with like three times the amount of meat and cheese that it normally comes with, jizz-loads of mayo and oil and vinegar laid over a bed of perfectly aligned veggies, lettuce, tomato, bell pepper, olive, pepperonchinis, and a dusting of jalapenos.

ELLIOTT

Sweet christ, you really have thought this out.

NICK

Yeah, I know. And right after lunch on my first day, I'd pull a Jerry MacGuire and throw down my apron and be like 'who's coming with me?', just to try and emancipate a couple of those poor bastards.

ELLIOTT

Man, I don't know if you'd make it out. I think that's how they rope people in, with the promise of perfectly made subs. Christ, it all makes sense now. Its like they are smack dealers. 'First one's free' and whatnot, and all of a sudden you are an assistant manager and waking up in cold sweats thinking of new subs to make for lunch.

NICK

Jesus... (pauses a beat or two) Maybe you're right. What the hell am I going to do with my life now?

ELLIOTT

Have you ever thought about school?

NICK

Eh. I'm pretty resigned to a life of mediocrity. Juneau has broken my will, I guess.

ELLIOTT

Wow. That is dire sounding. You've got it bad. Might want to double up on those Nacho Cheesiers.

NICK

Guess I might.

(The boys pull up to the beacon of convenience, the Breeze-in. The parking lot is full despite the late hour with other cars-full of youngsters up late and wresting with their futures during listless, caffeine-fueled nights that are more like displaced days. Everyone here shares a sense of collective oddity like expatriots from the normalcy of daytime hours. College and high school kids biding their time and cabbies and truck drivers and other denizens of permanent night time living comingle and wander well-lit aisles of ready-made food stuffs and pastries and bagels looking for something that can't be neccessarily found amongst the kettle chips and cooler-chilled beverages...)

enumerations of love and how it feels to be lonely for one C. Scott Fry

2008-11-24T22:33:00.012-09:00

Tonight we will be exploring the mythic ex-mayor of downtown Juneau, C. Scott Fry.

I pondered his amazingness recently during an especially rad train of thought. Rather than attempting to describe it with inadequate words, I will instead draw you a diagram.

So, in honor of Juneau's lost prodigal son, I give you the many enumerations of why I love C. Scott Fry interspersed with selected pictures and dialogue borrowed from his myspace page. We miss you, Fry. People still call the front desk of the 'Skin looking for you all the time.

Filed under "Interests: General" - accordion stop motion animation

I love Fry because he's my life coach. One time he broke into my house to make sure I was ok. I know that may not make a ton of sense at first blush, but if you consider that I was basically on the outskirts of a drug wasteland for many years and basically for the entire time I knew Scott, it comes into focus.

Thanks, Fry.

Filed under "Interests: Music" - zydeco music - second line - cajun waltz's anything with some feeling and soul oh yeah blues blues blues

I once wrote a piece about C. Scott Fry that ended up getting heavily edited for the Hooligan, a local weekly. I love Scott Fry because he is a bluesman in every sense. He really lives it, and has given the entirety of house district 3 lessons on the banjo or guitar or bass or what-have-you. Scott is the king shit of the Folk Fest scene at the Alaskan, and any time you can be the coolest hippie hitting a bongo in a sardine-packed hotel full of the same, you know you're doing well for yourself. Kudos!

Filed under "Interests: Television" - never paid for cable in my life. cable companys have all just finally converted to digital. and now only have a couple of broadcast network. so to say the very least i have been addicted to the t.v all my life and now have just recently been forced to go cold turkey. gonna write a book about it.

Scott Fry is a magical person and so was his homestead on first in between Gold and Franklin. It was a local landmark and a pad where I had watched innumerable broadcasts of WGN baseball and a place where the ceilings and walls and my lungs had been darkened by many puffs of la.

He is also a man of many interests, one of which is a yearning to enter an accounting of his many insights and tales into the posterity of prose. He was always talking about ideas he wanted me to write up into short stories for him, and one of his most frequent refrains was an idea for a book on television that he briefly touches on in the description of his tv interests above.

Filed under "About Me" - where to begin. left juneau behind for warmer & dryer grounds now in madison wisconsin electric and upright bass player acoustic singer songwriter solo performer

C. Scott Fry, the video golf machine misses you. I love Fry because he is the Basho of video golf and served as a Ty Webb-like mentor to me in my efforts to master the zen of the trackball.

"Just stroke it nice and easy like she's a pretty lady. Nice and easy does it, Leo."
He'd say. He had the most fluid motion on his shots. In one easy flick, like an Ernie Els of the video world, he'd take a backstroke and smoothly issue a forward torque of top spin and his drives were surgical and his long puts money.

His name is still there in the high scores and everytime I see the FRY I think to myself:

Where art thou, C. Scott?

six scenes of great meaning and depth i decided to document from the outside world

2008-11-23T20:48:00.011-09:00

Having a camera phone again is amazing.

When I first bought one a few years ago, I used to take photos of mullets and odd, fleeting moments in the world. Those two things. That's what these crappy image-makers are great for: Saving in a rough wax shell the stuff that simmers on the borders of life and strangeness and everything else that comes to pass along the synapses of a restless winter mind.

I thought it was funny that someone put this sign up not knowing how wrong and dirty it sounds to a certain limited segment of the populace. To me, when I hear "used spoon", I'm thinking about the kind of spoon you cook up dope in. This image is from the inside of Heritage coffee, Juneau's answer to Starbucks.

This here is from the man cave, Metcalfe estates over there on 4th by the Bergdorf. A dewski and a petes-er. A typical night during what I've taken to calling "the winter of man". Lukewarm's girlfriend left for school for nine months, so basically all of the societal norms have taken an extended vay-cay with her. God bless you, Emily. Your cleaning products miss you.

Ever since the long-awaited release of Fallout 3, its been an interminable stretch of swamp-ass inducing, bong smoke-saturated bliss over at the man palace. In the words of Martha Stewart, its a good thing!

From the Mendenhall mall's community board in the far away valley: Jonah the cat is missing!

I felt so bad for Jonah and his folks. He looks like the best cat ever and seeing poor, wayward Jonah made me want a kitty of my own. Then I thought that I might be moving soon and maybe I don't want to take on a responsibility that could be lasting me for ten plus years. My first cat Joey lived to be 16 or something like that, I mean...

What if there was a tiny cat that was miniature and cute but only lived for like 3 months? I would totally go for that. This thought was partially inspired by a tiny fake cat that sits atop the tv at Lukewarm's man cave. In fact, I need to get a picture of it because its so rad. It has real, life-like fur and Luke bought it at a gas station in PDX for $5. His name is Alpert. The fur must be like rat fur, but its strangely soft and life-like.

Jerry got back from the far east this week and I talked to him today. I filled him in briefly on everything that I've been doing and he told me all of these amazing tales of high adventure. He told me a story about a bamboo bridge falling out from under him as he crossed a large chasm and the ensuing chaos of children and families clinging on and the whole thing just sounded positively insane and life-affirming and real to the maximum amount that you can experience. I have been thinking about going to Asia a lot myself, and its just another incentive to not encumber myself with an animal.

From the handicapped bathroom in the Alaskan: A true story. My buddy Jeremy got a BJer from a 43-year old cougar the other night in the 'Skins bathroom, so someone decided it fitting to mark the occasion with a little tastefully rendered graffiti. Splendid!

And finally, two fortunes that seem to have had remarkable impacts on the uncaring void.

This first one I got a long time ago and I just found it on my floor like an unexpected omen. It says, if you can't make it out, "Soon someone new coming into your life will become a very good friend."

I remember getting it and thinking that it was bullshit and preposterous. For basically the entire time that I was a junky, having a long term, committed relationship just wasn't a priority for me, so it just seemed odd and out of character for a fortune cookie to be telling me something about finding someone. Maybe that's just my interpretation of the fortune, but recently I fell deeply into love and seeing the scrap-of-paper premonition struck a chord with me.

This one I have tacked up outside of my office. I work for a law office here in town, and we have a lot of clients that are going through some strife, to put it mildly. This small ribbon of paper acts as a ward to all of that negative, anxious energy. Even if its just a passing mental affirmation for people who happen to notice it, it exudes a strange and powerful aura of calm; or it seems to.

It says, if its too small to make out, "Your troubles will soon cease and good fortune will smile upon you". It has really and honestly happened for me, and I'm not saying that there is a correlation, but sometimes all it takes to change the polarity of a situation, one's situation, is just a small thing. A fractional burst of inertia to take us through the friction of adversity. That's why I believe so completely in visualizations and the ability and potential of man as a celestial creation.

a St. Martin's Summer full of unseasonably warm weather

2008-11-17T10:36:00.016-09:00

Last week I was given a free car, which has really turned out to be a gift that you open only to discover a hundred more tiny gifts inside of it. I described the transfer in "short exchange", a post from earlier this week.

The entire thing just felt right. I'm feeling good right now, in fact, with the toasty knowledge that the good hands at Capital Service are giving the old girl the best LOaF job in the city. It surely needs it; the oil was gritty and opaque like a cup of well-brewed espresso when I checked it this weekend.

From the Wikipedia entry for "Indian summer":
Indian summer is a name given to a period of sunny, warm weather in autumn, not long before winter. Usually occurring after the first frost, Indian summer can be in September, October, or early November in the northern hemisphere [...]

It's been something of an Indian summer here in Southeast Alaska. In other parts of the world, an Indian summer means actual warm weather in month traditionally associated with autumn and falling temperatures. Here in dreary Juneau, it means the gauge trembling towards 50 degrees Fahrenheit on a early winter's day in the ides of November.

This weekend was mostly clear with one large patch of rain. As it stands at eleven-oh-one here on Monday morning as I steal money from the State, the skies are free from burdensome rain and there is a faint frost in the dark terrain beneath the foot of a building's shadow or the shade of the skeleton limbs of a sickly tree. Things are well.

In Canada and in the Northeast part of the United States, a ground frost must have been present before the wave of warmer weather, if the period is to be considered Indian summer.
The term is also used metaphorically to refer to a late blooming of something, often unexpectedly, or after it has lost relevance. This is comparable to the use of the term renaissance in the sense of "revival", but it carries the added connotation that the revival is temporary.

There is some sadness for me in the last gasps of this endless Spring that I've been in. Ever since I fatefully left Juneau a year ago and went into the jungle wilds of Oregon to lose myself, I've been in this amber-coated Spring of eternally warm weather. I don't want it to end, and its always doleful to linger in the last of a good thing.

The car I was gifted is a Ford Explorer from the nineties and it's instrumentation is similar to the cars of my high school youth. To drive it feels worn in and comfortable like a beloved pair of high tops carved by time and many steps to inwardly resemble the attributes of your feet. In the glove box, amongst many other, lesser presents was a gleaming jewel of largesse. It was a copy of The Counting Crows album August and Everything After, which is amazing and insanely coincidental on its' own because my heart bleeds for that album, but what is even more amazing is that it is a copy on audio cassette. Dropping that son of a bitch in the tape deck felt like putting a key into a lock, like it was the natural order of things coming back into harmony after a period of great malaise and discord.

In former times in Europe, Indian summer was called Saint Martin's Summer, referring to St. Martin's day, November 11, when it was supposed to end.

In Galicia (northern Spain), it is called Veraniño de San Martiño, and in Portugal it is called "Verão de São Martinho," both of which refer to St. Martin's summer. In both cases, it is celebrated in rural areas with Magostos (Magusto in Portuguese, from Magnus Ustus, Big Fire in reference to the magical nature of fire), a celebration of Celtic origins in which bonfires, roasted chestnuts and wine have an important role.

I've been eating out at a lot of different, valley-based restaurants lately. I feel like I should almost start a food blog here in Juneau, but upon deeper reflection, I've decided that the idea is crazier that Britney Spears trapped in a carnival fun house full of fat-mirrors. There is just nothing to be gained there; nothing to be added, really. What can you really say about dining out in Juneau? It sucks? Rodfather's the Broiler might be the best restaurant and I'm not totally kidding?

In Bulgaria, the phenomenon is sometimes called "Gypsy Summer" and in some places "Gypsy Christmas" and refers to unseasonably warm weather in late fall, or a warm spell in between cold periods.

The car has also allowed me to finally retrofit my apartment with such features as a bath mat and window shades, which could have taken potentially months or years under the previous regime. I feel like I'm living in an actual place now like an actual adult and its a realization that is both frightening and kind of rad. I feel like Tom Hanks in "Big" a little bit; like I shouldn't be allowed to live on my own but am only because of some weird manifestation of science or magical thinking.

In Germany and Austria it is called "Altweibersommer" (Old Ladies Summer) because the many white spider silks seen at this time of the year have been associated with the norns of Norse folklore or medieval witches.

The Finnish term Ruska describes a similar spectacle in Lapland. In combination with polar lights, midnight sun and leave color is a major tourist attraction in September.

In short, the red Ford Explorer has been a boon on what could have been a cloistered and constricted winter. Being in the Valley has a feeling of transference like I'm not really in Juneau anymore but somewhere else; a place with people I've never seen and streets I've yet to travel. Its not that I haven't been there yet, but there is a little more room for deluding myself in a place just slightly less familiar.

[...] the term originated from raids on European colonies by Indian war parties; these raids usually ended in autumn, hence the extension to summer-like weather in the fall as an Indian summer. Because Native Americans were sometimes perceived as deceitful and treacherous by the European settlers, the phrases Indian summer and Indian giver connote falsehood.

So I look at it like found money. I have never been in a better place internally than right now, and the car has only a marginal effect on the stars and planets in my personal solar system. Its an invitation to adventure, a vessel for my charge. A steed to crash the castle upon, if you will.

short exchange

2008-11-10T00:04:00.009-09:00

"I just don't want you to think I'm an Indian giver. Run it into the ground for all I care. I've got my money's worth out of it, but when I get back into town, if she's still rolling I'd love to have her back."
He said as we sat idling down the road a bit from the airport drop-off. He was drinking a tall boy of Bud Light. A few cars passed by on the four one-way lanes that looped around the concourse.

"Dude, thank you so much. This is going to be great. I'll get it an oil change and keep it maintained, my good man. I'll even do some bullshit errands for you if you'd like. Really."

"Don't worry about it. Thanks for the lift. I'll pull up here and just drop myself off when I'm done with this guy."
My companion said, swishing around the last few sips of swill in the slowly warming can. The night was full and soot-colored coming through low lying clouds.

"Oh, and I left you a couple of presents in here..."
He opened the center console to reveal a treasure chest of random found goodness.

"Here's some Dayquil. You should know what to do with that. I was using it to try and get rid of this constant, nagging feeling of having to burp, but it didn't work; so hooray for you. I also got you a packet of crumb donettes. Very tasty little item."

"Oh, I'm familiar."

"Yeah, normally really great, but I noticed earlier today that they feel really hard even though I just bought them like three days ago."

"Odd."

"Anyway, there's also some cords for an iPod. Do you have one?"

"I broke it."

"That sucks. And to top it off, there's a half pack of Extra Spearmint flavored gum. Maybe a few dollars worth of change."

"Spectacular."

"All right man."
We pulled up to our gate.

"Thanks again, pal."
I said.

"You got it. Later."
And I watched him enter the terminal as I hopped in and set the newly acquired ride into drive, headed off to a faraway and exotic place called the Valley.

things to do in Juneau when you're dead

2008-11-08T20:52:00.013-09:00

We had nothing to do and a random old guy had just given us the keys to his sweet '86 Mazda 323 hatchback. Sure, it smelled like a gas leak and there was a tampon dyed to look like it had once been used in the rear view mirror, but we were young and didn't give heed to such small considerations. That's what Juneau was like during my childhood: There was only so much happening, so whatever we happened to do, we did with both feet barreling in at once; we grabbed with both hands at the ass of life and it was good.

Now as I find myself staring down another potentially ugly Juneau winter, I think to these distant memories and reflect on the lessons that can be gleaned from a childhood filled with simple pleasures. The natural inclination is to give up and draw a chalk outline on the couch and hibernate for the next six to nine months. I always think of Chris Farley on that SNL commercial pitching "Hybernol", a medicine designed to put you out for the entire flu season, and I can imagine my fellow Juneauites deciding that dunking their heads in a vat of sleep syrup and calling it a year woudn't be that bad of an idea.

Break out from your placid winter long dreams and get out into the small and wonderful world of off-season Juneau!

One particularly memorable mission in the hatchback involved a miraculous water balloon toss and a death-defying chase sequence with an angry truck owner. We were always throwing a brick in the other guy's window and really, there wasn't a whole lot else to do. That Mazda with the leaky seals and foreboding scent of fiery deathtrap just gave our mayhem the dimension of distance. We chugged out on Egan, barely getting her to the max warp speed of 50 miles per hour. The old girl had given us almost all she had, and the pistons whirred and the oil burned and as the small metal convoy crossed the low lying wetlands. Its power plant sounded with the fury of two and a half gerbils frenetically churning out a charge on a rickety hamster wheel.

An enumeration of things to do in Juneau when you're dead: A gift from a native son.

1. Go bowling

Embrace your inner dude and venture to the Channel Bowl, or whatever it happens to be called now for a night of cosmic bowling. You can drink while on the lanes if that happens to be your cup of tea and there is amazing people watching to be found at any and all bowling alleys in the known world. Couples dating, kids at a birthday party, the passion of league bowling. Its all happening down there...

2. Read a book

Take a look. Its in a book. A reading rainbow!

I can go anywhere!

The library here is that best place to witness the strangeness of Juneau. The people that hang out at libraries are like the outcasts who have been driven to the inner world of books by the harsh realities of the land of the living. People with rich interior lives. You know the type.

3. C-SPAN

Feel like life isn't worth living now that the momentous election cycle is over? Feeling the after burn of all-out advocacy? Are you simply intrigued by the non-stop action of televised legislative sessions? Friend, welcome home. The internets is what C-SPAN is all about. Feel free. Go check it out. Three channels of pulse-pounding, heart racing, gavel-to-gavel excitement all yours for the taking.

We were approaching the McNugget intersection, cruising at terminal velocity with a back seat full of water balloons. My friends Luke and Jared and I blazing a trail across the cold Alaskan night with only a sense of adventure and a remarkably bald set of tires between us and the hard grit of the road. To the right, a group of people were running or just out enjoying the crisp winter eve. To the left stood the eery glow of the golden arches. Like a cinder from heaven, Luke threw a balloon and my eyes were fixed on its parabola. It was like the streaking of a celestial bit burning across the atmosphere; unmissable, unmistakable.

My focus was drawn to a woman jogger in the pack of people out in the night. Her and the balloon seemed to be traveling paths that must eventually collide, impossibly because we were moving in a strafe across the highway and the bent of the balloon's arc was changed by this distortion and she moved, too. Fate conspired, however and I will never, ever forget the memorable impact of that balloon and the poor woman's head. Sploosh! and everyone in the car shrieked in a mixture of fear and wonderment and unparalleled glee.

4. Miniature indoor gardening

There is something about tiny things that just does it for me. I don't know that I'm sure why, but I feel like the maintenance of a bonsai would be a splendid winter activity.

5. Winter sports

A guy my mom works with gave me a great bit of advice. Leo, he said, take up a winter sport. It makes living in this town a lot easier. And while I haven't taken his advice as of yet, even though I plan on perhaps doing some tobogganing, it makes all the sense in the world.

6. Arts and crafts

I mean, when was the last time you went to Joanne's? That place is great. Have a spring roll at Peter's Oriental and pop on by. Maybe you need to be investing your time in knitting a loved one a nice sweater or pair of mittens. Are your window coverings all that they could be? When was the last time you made a fucking scented candle?

High on our successful bombing mission, we traveled in the ambit of the far away valley until growing tired of its' nearly endless folds. We jettisoned the last of our water balloon payload in the direction a an oncoming truck, producing an amazing and violent explosion. All seemed like it was on the comedown until we realized that the headlights in our rear view mirror, still gilded by the dangling tampon, weren't going away. In fact, they were getting closer. It seemed that we had company, an angry truck-driving wild cat that was on our tail wanting revenge in the form of a terrified apology, I'm sure. While our little hatchback may not have had the high end speed capacity of the newer ram charger or whatever penis-compensating vehicle this gentleman was driving, we had the spry maneuverability of a short wheel base. The quick-thinking driver, Jared, took advantage of this and we ducked into the K-Mart parking lot.

7. Rec-league sports

There are a million venues here in Juneau and one of my great regrets from this past year is not joining a softball league when I had the chance. Be it Holiday cup soccer, an old man pick-up game of hoops at the gym or some invigorating and strangely erotic sets of handball at the Club, the local indoor activity calendar is strong.

8. Cultivate friendships with bums

The bums get restless and wild during the winter months here in town. Their drinking spikes and only the hardest baked street people stay and hold it down. These are the real lifers and if you plan on getting anything done they are the people you need to know.

I mean, who hasn't had thoughts about starting up a remote viewing academy or an offshoot leg of Scientology up here? That stuff isn't going to just happen without any man power involved. I'm currently making a movie and that is just another example of things bums can be useful for. Just the other day we gave the bum Chief some cash to play a part in our little film project. Bums are the grease that skids the wheel, and if you want to get lubed up, you need to be knowing these folks.

9. Compose an electronic symphony on a synth

Bring out your inner disco and dedicate a winter to crafting the world's greatest robot rock opera. You can do it and all you need is a keyboard and a lack of shame. Go to it!

The mad trucker was trying to destroy us. Jared kept out-turning him and as the furious old man kept careening headlong towards us, I thought of what we each had to lose, us and the livid stranger in the powerful beast. It gave me inner peace to think of our advantageous situation as Jared maneuvered in the palatial parking lot with the nimble acuity of a rally car pro. The truck was like toro, the manbeast, and we were the lithe, strong arm of the matador; enraging the bull with our insolence and subterfuge. After many close passes of the metaphorical horns primed to gore the red steel flesh of the coke-can-hatchback, we escaped into the labyrinth of Switzer village.

And isn't that what being entertained is all about? We want to be in close proximity to danger but still safe from the potential impact of it's ugliness. In Juneau, we get a really good mix of those factors. We can hurtle down a snow-packed hill or set out into the big wild or we can turn inwards and face the unknowable total of one's self, which may be the most frightening thing of all. Welcome home.

richard, its really happening!

2008-11-04T23:26:00.010-09:00

So its happening, it would seem. Barack is set to right the ship as it stands here at eleven sixteen in the post meridiem, Alaska standard time.

I don't even know how the state and local stuff is going, and maybe I will by the end of the night, but I want to just let this wash over me. You know, I'm pretty hard up about the universe being an uncaring, random place, but sometimes the coincidence or connections between world events and the mundane details of my own life are so strong that you can't help but associate the two. I think everyone has at least some optimism going forward here. Maybe the expectations are too huge and burdensome. It can't be any worse, though... Right?

I was at the Alaskan tonight as the numbers rolled in. By the time we knew he had Ohio, it was inevitable. It was like everyone was so on top of the electoral college shit this time; people on the laptops at realclearpolitics.com or 270towin.com or whatever other infinite spur of online polling data. Everyone was burbling and effervescent as a case of champagne was uncorked in hushed gun-fire sounds of sudden exhaling. One wasted girl kept yelling barely coherent shit during Barack's acceptance speech.

"Fuck. Pipe down, sweetheart. I'm trying to hear the man talk..."
I said to no one in particular.

"Now don't you let us down..."
Said Chuck, the desk manager to the luminous image of President-Elect Obama which was blooming vibrantly from a flat screen television.

"I think its going to be cool, Chuck. He's got this."
I tried to reassure dear Chuck, looking resplendent in a pair of gold hoop earrings and his usual warm winter tones.

Out on the street, people stood in circles of smoking cigarettes and in a glut of words and emotions and relief and possibility.

Expectation leads to disappointment.
If you don't expect something big, huge and exciting...
Then usually, uh... I don't know. Just not as... Yeah.

-The Books

What an unbelievable, unforgettable day. It seemed like it might never come.

The sky is dark and there are no visible stars over head here in Juneau. The rain is at a drizzle and it lets the streets shine under the phosphorous colored light of the shimmering sodium bulbs suspended atop the power lines. The mountains I can see sitting on my bed on a clear day are completely obfuscated by the steel wool of a blue rain cloud bleeding its' ink into the already onyx sky.

Tomorrow?

good bye to Costa's Tin Pan Alley and other strange lamentations amounting to not much

2008-11-02T08:03:00.006-09:00

"Hey, its me! Marty!"
Said the bum with cigarettes in his ears.

"Hi Marty."
I said.

"Guess what? I got a plane ride tomorrow morning at ten."

"Getting out of Dodge, huh? Good idea, Marty. This place is no good for you."

"Yeah. I sure would like a beer before I go. Can I have some money?"
Asked Marty. His stubble was coming in now, a week after emerging sober and salient from jail. Now he just smelled like sour liquid and had a bum patina once again.

"Fuck no, Marty. That was a one time thing, guy."

"Well, why'd you give me ten bucks then and nothing now?"

"Because I pity you. You're pitiable, Marty."
I began to walk towards the clock in downtown, towards an overwhelming field of darkness called the future.

"Hey! Hey! Marty wants to party!"

***

Halloween is too intense, man. Its like people save up their craziness and look to one day during the year to just let out their pathos and strangeness in an alcohol-fueled frenzy. Its something to behold. I saw a unicorn on roller skates and John Evans the grossest and sleaziest bum in the downtown borough dressed in a skirt and other sundry items of women's clothing. Its like this whole masquerade is an outgrowth of the absolute need to be someone else, to live vicariously. For me, that inclination doesn't exist, and I'm not saying that I'm better or worse; just that I am who I want to be.

Oh, to be fully realized! Its pretty great to be who you are.

Most of all, the world is a place where parts and wholes are described
within an overarching paradigm of clarity and accuracy.
The context in which makes possible an underlying
sense of the way it all fits together,
despite our collective tendency not to conceive of it as such.

-The Books

Today is the last day of business for my favorite diner on planet earth, Costa's Tin Pan Alley. The place is run by Collette Costa, the biggest personality in this shit town. I usually wander there once a weekend for biscuits & gravy and a dose of the eclectic and kinetic diner atmosphere that Collette has cultivated. The place is a hole in the wall with an ice cream shop and a late night gyro place and morning-time diner all rolled into one and today is the terminus of all that good and wonderful food and community-minded eating.

Inside is a dense labyrinth of eclectica and ephemera from a life fully lived. Collette is all over the walls, literally and figuratively, I'm sure. A black velvet portrait of Kenny Rogers. Mementos from the Boardwalk Boogie, a week long festival of debauchery put on by Ms. Costa herself. The real treasure amongst the magical objects in that place, though, is Collette, a woman of consequence and candor and great intelligence and wit. You can't replace people, that's what my father would have said.

It's too bad, and I don't want to write some sad, drawn out elegy for some random diner in a nowhere town, but man, I've grown accustomed to it like you grow accustomed to someone's face who you really and deeply love; and damn you, powers that be, damn you all to hell for taking my breakfast people away. I'm not the type to drag my feet against the tide of progress, but there is something viable and something essential about community eating places; places where high and low meet in the middle for hash browns and white trash eggs benny.

So, short and sweet: I will miss you, Tin Pan Alley. I won't forget our time together and I will soon be within your haphazard walls once more for the last time, toasting your excellence and forlorn, fleeting beauty.

notes on a vampire movie and a weekend of unimaginable promise

2008-10-30T17:45:00.008-08:00

The rain has relented, it would seem. On the eve of All Hollow's Eve, events are as they should be; all is right with the cosmos. The air is dry this morning. As I walked the half block to work under the pallid beginnings of day light, it seemed suddenly and impactfully different to be without rain for just one day.

Naomi and I did the Blazer Club last night and we played some really good tracks. I thought it would be very divergent musically from the normal show that Lukewarm and I do, but we stayed in character for the most part. (Sans the ABBA track we led off with. That was pure gas.) I really wanted to play just emo music because I've been in a happy emo sort of mood these days, but luckily cooler heads prevailed and Naomi talked me down from the veritable ledge there. What can I say, I've been listening to a little Saves the Day lately and I'm not ashamed to say that I like sappy pop music.

And then after the show last night we went to "Nosferatu", a silent movie with a reworked soundtrack played live over the film. The score was amazing and it was something else to watch people compose like that on the fly. Bridget Cross of KXLL fame (And a million other types of notoriety. Read Andy Kline's excellent article on the subject here.) was behind the sonic resonance. The music was tonal and industrial sounding at times with the thrumming base connoting the foreshadowed danger and elements like a high pitched, creepy sounding refrain that followed the on screen presence of rats. It was sort of like "Peter and the Wolf" or "The Royal Tenenbaums" in that the music was driven by the characters and the score follows them and tonally dictates the way you connote them.

The lighting on the musical equipment was shimmering, neon green and purple, the color scheme of evil in comic books. The pacing of silent movies is interesting as well to note. The technology only allowed still shots, so everything moves through the frame instead of the frame constantly and kinetically accommodating the action. As a putative filmmaker myself, it put a lot of thoughts in my head.

The light looks poured out and thin like spilled milk spreading itself over the pale, cold counter of the sky. It diffuses the trickling light and the morning has the quality of softly glimmering safety vest material; a gloaming light plucked from evening and transmogrified into a brand new sort of effulgence for the early hours.

This weekend promises much. Today is Halloween and that means people merging into new identities for one strange night amongst the salt water and sea kelp smells of town. As all the slutty nurses and Sarah Palin clones file in and out of bars filling the streets with wounded cans of beer and broken bottles and the torsos of a thousand and one cigarettes, I'll be the one that has materially changed, even if the facade seems the same.

welcome back, Marty

2008-10-26T11:23:00.011-08:00

Marty, the bum with the fake fishing poles and cigarettes in his ears got out on Friday. I saw him while I was waiting for a haircut in between work and the KXLL party downtown in the dim evening light. I was standing outside Capital Records on Seward street there by McDonald's.

"Hey, its me! Marty!"

"Hi Marty."
I said.

"They let me out, can you believe it?"

"Pretty amazing, Marty. You look good."

"Yeah, thanks. I gained twenty pounds in there. Hey, do you have a cigarette?"

"I don't smoke, Marty."

"Oh shit. Man, I could use a smoke."

His hair had grown out a couple inches and he looked like he might be able to momentarily function. His face looked ruddy and full of nutrition, unlike his normal sallow cheeks and jaundiced complexion from the pickling chemicals of malt liquor.

"Do you have a couple bucks, man? I'll pay you back. My mom sent me money and I need to go out to Fred Meyer's to get it, and I sure could use a forty and a packet of Top."

"Fuck, Marty."

I thought while digging in my pockets. I didn't want Marty to drink for obvious reasons, but he was just so helpless and its tough for me as an ex-addict myself to see someone else like that. Its really painful to watch.

The smallest bill I had was a ten. I looked up at Marty and thought about the chaos that this money was going to beget. It was totally inevitable, like deciding whether a hurricane is going to land now or ten minutes from now.

"Here you go, Marty. Just don't get into any more fuckin' trouble."

"Thanks, man. I'll pay you back tomorrow, honest!"

"Sure, man."

I said almost in his wake as he lept towards the cold comfort of a liquor store.

The Rocky Horror show at the Jack was really amazing. I think it was maybe another sign that I'm becoming an old man, however, because I felt out of place at times. There were also times that it was interesting to be sort of invisible, to be a voyeur watching all the strangeness ensue amongst all the trannie costumes. One guy had the most brilliant costume ever, and I'm glad I got to witness it. He was dressed up like an oxycontin being smoked on a piece of tin foil. His torso was covered by a giant cardboard base covered in tin foil, and in the corner of it was a green approximation of an oxy 80, and across the tinfoil were the telltale dark streaks that crisscross the metal as the drugs are being smoked off of it.

Lots of kids in Juneau do this shit nowadays and in many ways I feel partially responsible, like a patient zero in an outbreak, so to speak. Not that I was the first person to ever bust an 80 open here in Juneau, but that stuff moves from older kids to younger kids like old clothes or kicks. Anyway, the costume was funny and at first I was almost angered, so it was more like performance art than a costume. It evoked emotion, and really isn't that one of the main goals of any sort of creative pursuit? Well done, good sir in the oxy 80 costume. The kicker was that he was holding a giant straw, or tooter, so he had all of his bases covered. Son of a bitch.

You know, I'm coming to realize more and more that most of the interesting stuff that happens to me never makes it into the pages of this blog. That's too bad, I guess. Its making me find more alternate outlets for writing. When I first started this page, I didn't tell anyone and I assumed that no one really knew. I was living with a friend at the time, my best friend and I'm talking about Jerry here, who is still somewhere in Asia as far as I know having unprintable adventures of his own. I tried to call Jerry last night and I left another voice mail.

I was living with Jerry and this was over a year ago now, maybe closer to two years ago, and I had less than no direction. I was running away from huge issues that I had with substance abuse and I had no outlet and so I started this page as a way to disclose or displace some of that baggage. Now its more a vehicle for something else entirely, and its been a pleasure for me to make that transition, but I still feel wistful for that pure and painful honesty that there was at the beginning.

So, if you're out there, Jerry, call your buddy. I'm wondering what it is he's doing, what sort of adventure he's in the thick of as I sit in a fog of fragrant marijuana smoke back lit from the gleaming light of the gray cloud diffused sun bouncing off the brilliant first-of-the-season snow that crusts the singular spines of trees and lines the tops of houses; Sunday morning, not yet noon.

rager this weekend and the first sign of the season of decay

2008-10-24T15:37:00.008-08:00

Its fucking snowing.

October is all but expired and the winter long struggle with months connoting snowmen and chestnuts and turkeys and ice skating or whatever has begun in earnest, I guess. I noticed the first flurry of snow from my office window, and it made me decide that I needed to sit and reflect on the omen. A large crow or a raven, a haggard, black bird was picking at a parcel of trash at the edge of the rooftop that framed the bottom of my view of the city.

Blazer Club Radio Hour(s) was splendid last night. (Go to the rager at the armory tonight benefiting KXLL! http://ktoo.org/kxll/ to listen live!) I think we may have had one of our finest shows. Captain Billiam, the newly christened radio persona of good friend Bill was on hand and the banter was easy like microwave singles.

After the slough of rippling snowflakes totally fell, the sun dawned from behind a breaking cloud and downtown was lit up and free of the darkening torrents of rain. From a fleeting sucker hole in the damaged-looking sky, a ray of unimaginable beauty shone and smiled with sparkling aura bleeding through the borders of the assembled topography of rainforest flecked hills that make up this strange millieu of downtown. Southeast is a network of sheltered islands, and each hunk of earth that heaps up from the ocean bed is its' own microcosm, its own little lonely planet.

We played a lot of new music we had unearthed, some classics from the recent past and bantered at length about topics as diverse as our movie making efforts, the Rocky Horror rager this weekend, upcoming beer tastings, our immense local following and so on. We're into the self-bloviating on the Blazer Club.

I have many ideas for random radio shows that I may or may not have touched on here on stickpaste, but I had a great conversation today with the Radio DJ Jessie about a new channel that we want to start with all way out there-type programming on it: A show hosted by a random bum from downtown; Juneau Loveline, a live call-in dating show in the most incestual dating town ever where half the fun is trying to figure out who the caller is talking about; After Hours with Lukewarm, a show that starts at like 3 am after the Luke-ster gets done with a shift at the 'Can and so on... These ideas need a home! Make it happen, K3.

Hit up the Rocky Horror party at the JACC tonight. Its going to be a bear of a party for sure and if you live in Juneau I absolutely promise you that there is nothing more exciting happening tonight. A rock solid choice. Its an all ages show with a beer garden for the over 21 types and there should be a room full of Juneau celebrities in attendance.

notes on another week centered in the deluge of late autumn rain

2008-10-21T00:58:00.008-08:00

So the Red Sox lost in game 7 and I'm over it.

Whatever. I felt like we were there, having done almost all of the heavy statistical lifting on the way to digging ourselves out of what seemed like yet another insurmountable hole. In the end, it came down to a game that was basically a coin flip in the suddenly rocking Trop in Tampa, foreskin flap of the contiguous U.S.

In more relevant and interesting news, we filmed some Beef Billionaire sequences tonight with Trevor the desk clerk from the Alaskan, which has now matured to a fraternity of sorts; the unholy union of current and former desk clerks of the Alaskan Hotel. Lukewarm, Bill and I were all formerly of the employ of the Alaskan, so we all share a sense of what its like to stand sentry to the town's most amazing and ugly debauchery. Its like the one cops or ambulance drivers or soldiers in a not especially dangerous but perhaps lively theater of conflict have as they exchange a wink and a back slap and a knowing grin.

The hotel has amazing stained glass dripping all over it and the furnishings have a certain sort of stately elegance, but verging on the Ms. Havisham's house in Great Expectations level of decrepitude. The old girl is rotting slightly on the insides and like I was telling Chuck, the always sober minded desk manager who is a man of good means himself, the hotel is just hanging in there until cascading system failure. Its a bit of a basketcase, I won't couch it, but I would hate it to be any other way. Its perfect in its imperfections, I guess is what I'm saying.

The scenes we filmed with Trevor at the desk looked great on the dailies we watched tonight. He has a way of adding something little or unexpected to a scene that takes it to another level. With very little cogent direction, he creates and inhabits this character because, smartly I think, we've told Trevor to basically be himself; and I don't think he can he but do so anyway. He's a natural actor.

We filmed some other sequences with Rob, another member of our underground cabal. He looked so perfect in his shorts and sandals and Jimmy Buffet-Parrot head-type shirt that we had to have him playing the jobber in the scene. The thrust of the scene is that this guy is looking for some herb, and he plays a little "hey mister" with some random Juneau celebrities including Chief the spiritual leader of downtown.

Rob ends up being directed to the Beef Billionaire in his quest for the Herf man, who the viewer encounters for the first time in that context asleep, working behind the front desk at the Alaskan. Its as if he was born to play this part, it was acted with such startling realism. (End overwhelming sarcasm.)

There's a huge rager this Friday going down that the station is throwing that culminates with a midnight showing of Rocky Horror, so shit should be pretty saucy on the old radio this week. Its a great station to listen to because it has some of the great, familiar qualities that a sitcom has in terms of recurring characters but it just so happens that those characters are real people. The tension between Uncle Andy and Jessie is a hilarious touchstone as the morning verges to afternoon and the two vast weather fronts of blustery radio personas collide. Fireworks.

stickpaste radio went really well and Andy, the X in KXLL, did some amazing production on it. There is no way to descibe the shows randomness. I wanted to create something that just struck a tender and unexplored tonal note. Something that would make the listener stop and ask themselves what the fuck it is that they are listening to. The "Liquid Television" of radio shows. Short, impactful bits of interwoven narrative and pop music.

Eventually I'll post an archive of old shows so they'll be available to check out. Until next time, stay classy Juneau.

Hold on for one more day!

2008-10-18T20:08:00.002-08:00

Sox win game 6! Tomorrow night. Lester. Garza. A decisive game 7.

strange fate and the Red Sox: Or how Bill and I become interstellar adventurers just by watching the tv

2008-10-18T11:30:00.015-08:00

Thursday was the sort of day that splays out over what seems like a longer period than just one set of waking hours. Work was harried; it was get away day for a three day weekend followed by a conference next week, so things kept creeping out of the saw dust pile. All-in-all, it was one of those days that hangs heavy at the end of the week like a lead weight. I could have easily gone to sleep after work and just called it good.

Alas, fate conspired against such an attenuated ending; fate and the Red Sox and a certain radio show that kicks major ass and so on and so forth, but first let me preface this with a short thought on the beauty and charm of October baseball:

Its not really about the games. That’s the secret. It never has been about witnessing the unpredictable, un-scriptable drama play out over the course of a few fall weeks. I mean, I love the pastoral beauty as much as the poet that first called it that, but my truest connection to the game is through my dad. That’s the long and short of it: I love baseball because my dad did and him and his and so on down the line.

So, the ledger was reading like this at around seven o’clock Alaska time, an hour before the Blazer Club Radio Hour(s) starts (Listen live on a series of tubes at http://ktoo.org/kxll/): Red Sox down 7 to 0, last of the seventh inning; the announcers were eulogizing the Red Sox’ season, the funeral arrangements were being made, but if the time period between 2004 and now as a Sox fan has taught me anything, its to never count out the Boston nine. Not when they did the impossible and dug themselves out of the grave in the 2004 ALCS, finally casting the almost 90 year monkey off their back against the hated Yankee machine. Not when we’ve got gritty guys like Dusty Ped and J. Bay and the grittiest of grittys, the hand clapper himself, Big Popi.

The Milky Way Galaxy is filled with clouds of gas and dust. A small telescope resolves these clouds as either black regions on the sky where background stars are blocked out or as glowing nebula in the case of those clouds that are illuminated by very bright stars.

These clouds are the birth place of stars and the material in them is the raw material from which stars are made.

Bottom of the seventh inning, two out. Sox are up, and Fenway is strangely still a little frisky even with absolutely no hope for the season and just seven measly outs left with which to score seven runs. Not a chance, but these are the kind of fans that there are in Boston; which isn't to say that there aren't bandwagon fans in Beantown, but those kind of transients were on their way home on the Mass Pike. Oh no, the 30-odd thousand left in the Fens were all true believers and standing with two outs and two on and Dusty at the plate, down deep in a hole.

My friend Bill and I were watching, and I was feeling a little melancholy. After all, I spent more time watching this bunch than I do with most of the people I know. I looked over to Bill and told him that we had a less than one percent chance of winning, and yet we still held out some hope for one more day of Red Sox for this cold and dreary October. If we can just score a couple here, Bill, I said. Lets get one back, Bill said.

The formation of a star begins with a collapse. Perhaps a supernova shockwave or the wind from a massive star triggers it off, but once it starts the collapse proceeds until something stops it. When a clump of material in the cloud begins to contract, the first stage of stellar life begins. As the particles in the clump get closer together the force of gravity between them increases. This in turn makes the star contract faster, pulling the particles closer together still, thus increasing gravity's pull further. A feedback loop is produced creating a self sustaining gravitational contraction.

Dusty being Dusty, he laces a single and the Sox get on the board. 7-1. Spitting in the tsunami of inevitability. Our chances of winning the game improve a tick from the 99.4% probability that the axe would fall when we had no runs, but still...

But still, the batter after little 5 foot 6 inch Dusty Swingsfromhisheels was none other than playoff super hero David Ortiz. Playoff god of 2004, he of the two walk off hits on the same day.

But that was then, and lately Popi has been looking more and more human, more and more pedestrian. He didn't play a lot this year what with the wrist injury.

But still, this was Big Popi. A graphic came up: No home runs in last 61 postseason at bats. I got a little angry. I yelled at the glowering image of the giant, dark-skinned hulk. You fucking hit one, here Popi. You son of a bitch, I said. The Aussie fireballer on the mound, Balfour, was giving Popi fits and he fouled off some nasty heat until the sweaty, bugged out looking, rugby-loving shit bag on the mound decided to try and bust Popi inside with his fastball. Decided maybe the rumors of Big Popi's demise were true. Decided to go for the strikeout.

Big Papi turned on it and crushed it to right. 7-4 bad guys. We were back in this fucker, our foot was in the door. Bill and I were stirring and we yelled to Lukewarm to come watch.

A protostar is a young star that has started its collapse but has not yet gotten clear of its circumstellar envelope. This envelope is opaque to optical light and thus protostars are generally invisible to ordinary telescopes. Most of what we know about protostars comes from observations at infrared and millimeter wavelengths.

So the seventh ends and Papelbon comes back in for the eighth and does his flamethrowing thing, grimacing like a maniac every time he'd look in to get the signs from 'Tek. The pursed lips, the fiery disposition. The fastball with filthy movement and he did what he does and turned it over to the Sox offense once again, back to the mill with lunch pails in hand, still down three with but six outs remaining.

Jason Bay, the great, young British Columbian slugger from the remote vastness of the Friendly North works a walk and up saunters J.D. mutherfuckin' Drew, who I always have high regard for in these situations because he always looks so unaffected. It drives some fans nuts, especially in Sox-crazy Boston, but he's as cold as ice with his pretty left handed swing, like a latter day Splendid Splinter.

Tampa's reliever, Dan Wheeler, wasn't having an easy go of finding the strike zone and Drew took a couple of balls. Wheeler is one of those guys who is always a few whiffs of smoke away from getting pummeled, but he always seems to find a way out. Add in the fact that he is a sweaty, fat in the ass-type feller and I couldn't have been more confident in the outcome at this point.

It was also at this juncture that the show was about to start, and dutifully Lukewarm departed down friendly 4th street to Egan drive via Main street to the palatial K3 studios to do the first break of the Blazer Club Radio Hour(s), the best radio show in the history of Thursday nights in Juneau.

Bill and I stayed, rapt and watching J.D. Drew work a great at bat, cold as a freezer-bound cut of cucumber. Wheeler was drenched with sweat and looking more like he was taking a schvitz than pitching in the 8th inning of a crucial playoff game.

A T Tauri star is a young object that has emerged from its opaque dusty envelope and has become visible at optical wavelengths. This line is believed to be produced by interaction between the disk and the stellar surface. Recently there has also been some direct imaging of these disks by the Hubble Space Telescope.
Classical T Tauri stars are about 1-10 million years old, and are Class II infrared objects. This means that most of the infrared emission from the object is from the disk, since the envelope has mostly dissipated. Classical T Tauri stars are strong X-ray emitters and can also produce powerful winds.

Wheeler hung one and J.D. unleashed a perfectly balanced swing of intent and forcefulness complete with a picture perfect follow through and quiet flick of the bat and the ball traveled on a frozen rope into the right field stands. 7-6 bad guys. Sox on the rise, sweat hog still on the mound. Bill and I high five and bear down like two kids enraptured by Saturday cartoons, cognizant that we could be watching something incredible happening.

Mark Kotsay doubles off the waterlogged one. Coco crisp comes up and proceeds to work the most amazing at bat of the season. 11 or 12 pitches and Wheeler's pits and back and ass are all drenched in dark flop sweat; Coco fouling off pitch after pitch until finally rapping a tidy single into right. The throw to the plate from the right fielder is horrible and is awkwardly cut off, Kotsay scores and Coco is subsequently thrown out at second. One of the strangest plays in one of the most unbelievable postseason series of all time. Game tied and we're going to the ninth all within a hiccup of time. Bill and I are a startled mess.

Classical T Tauri stars are easily identified by their strong emission lines produced by the disk/star interaction. However, once the disk has dissipated enough so that it no longer interacts with the star, these lines are no longer present or are very weak.
The primary difference between the Classical and Weak-lined T Tauri stars is their disk properties. By the time the star has become a Weak-lined T Tauri star the disk is very weak or no longer present. But where had the disk material gone? The simplest explanation is that it has formed into planets. First, the dust grains form small bodies about 1 kilometer in size, called planetesimals, and then the planetesimals in turn collide together to form planets. Thus, Weak-lined T Tauri stars may harbor very young planetary systems.

Young Justin Masterson is left as the best and only option for the 9th inning. He has been good as a reliever, not great, during the 3 months that he has been doing it having been converted from a starter towards the end of the year.

He gets a quick out, but then a couple of guys get on and the dangerous Carlos Pena is at the plate in his low, tight-wound crouch, looking ready to take the youthful hurler way deep, but something else improbable happens: Pena hits a double-play grounder into the modified shift after hitting into only 2 all season (Which is an amazingly low total and very lucky and of course this comes back to correct itself during the worst possible moment.) and the half-inning is suddenly over and Bill and I let out a collective heave of anxiety. Last of the 9th, just needing to score a run to let the Sox play another day.

As the star collapses the temperature and pressure at the core increases. After about 10 million years or so the core gets hot and dense enough for fusion reactions to begin. These reactions convert hydrogen into helium and liberate energy in the process. This energy in turn heats up the star and halts the collapse. This phase of stellar evolution is called the Main Sequence and the star remains relatively stable for a long time (a star like the sun has a Main Sequence phase lasting 10 billion years.) The star has left its childhood behind and settles into a long middle age.

The final sequence plays out as if destined by the threads of fate:

Youkilis gets on with a double. The Rays decided to walk Jason Bay to face J.D. mutherfuckin' Drew; once more, with feeling. Lefty on lefty, J.P. Howell gets shown what it means to have two worthwhile first initials and J.D. rips a ball to right that drops in and Youks barrels in to home and it's a mob scene. We are part of the lucky few, Bill and I, the faithful few who wanted to watch the Sox go down swinging and got to see the greatest postseason comeback™ ever.

Like a star being born, its something that happens against immense odds and pressure and the most powerful force in the multi verse of dimensional realities: Regression to the mean. Things fall apart, inertia moves things with the force of solar winds and once things are set into motion in the mechanistic cosmos, the chances of them shaking out are slim; the chances of human life lasting on this planet for as long as it has are slim and becoming slimmer with each passing moment that acts like a rolling dice or grain of trickling sand. Every day supplies more miracles.

In the end, I think its most significant to note that for two and one half innings on Thursday night, Bill and I became more than just intent watchers of a baseball contest; we became cosmic travelers, falling like streaking star parts into an unexplored and as yet unseen dimension; we witnessed something rare and something that had that the rare quality that magical events can sometime have: A sense of inevitability but still disbelief. A sense of witnessing something positively happen. A shared sense of wonderment.

Game 6 is tonight, first pitch at 8:07 pm Eastern time. The odds may be stacked against us, but I couldn't think of a better place to be, a better group of guys to watch with their backs firmly against the wall of bitter fate.

Do we have one more day?

100.7 is an ancient Hebrew numerological code for kick ass radio station

2008-10-14T18:15:00.009-08:00

One thing that is disorienting about the KXLL studios is the preponderance of quilts that line the walls. All manner of them, stitched with a nearly limitless array of designs, blanket the hallways making it sort of like trying to navigate in a paisley blizzard. Its intense to say the least for the directionally challenged like myself.

I've been to the place maybe a few dozen times, and yet, I still can't decide which way it is that I need to go to get to any other particular destination. Its like all of these places exist, the studio, the downstairs exit, Jessie's office; but there is no spatial link in my head between them. They might as well be in different buildings entirely. All because of what I would describe as a fanatical devotion to the crafting arts. I mean, we've all had our minds drift a little at that Hobby and crafts store.

That yarn is rad looking. Maybe I need a bundle of it. Skein of it. How do you even pronounce that? Fuck it.

Next thing you know you're thinking about hammering together a bird house or a series of structures for an as of yet unpurchased guinea pig that may be taking up residence in your walk in closet. Its at this juncture that I usually snap to and run like hell out of that place, in Juneau's case the craptastic Joanne's, out the door and directly to Peter's oriental where I get a couple of egg rolls with sauce on it and maybe an orange soda to round out the experience.

Anyway, to make a long story short I went into the studio for the second half of work on the next episode of stickpaste radio. We picked out some really good music and things should be a go for this Friday at 6 pm. Check it out live at http://ktoo.org/kxll/ or listen on the old FM dial at 100.7 in the Herftown area.

The theme of this episode is going to be the changing of seasons, or something to that effect. Also be sure to tune into WTF up tomorrow during morning drive time with Radio DJ Jessie. I'm going to be waking up in the still dark morning to guest host, so throw a guy a bone! Shit. Oh yeah, and Blazer Club will be convening at the normal time and place as well this Thursday at 8 pm and Lukewarm is back in town late of PDX, and he seems to have come back with a little of it's musical shine.

The enthusiasm level is out of control and things are assuredly happening. Trevor, the desk clerk who is to have his star turn in our movie spectacular "The Beef Billionaire's Big, Big Weekend" showed up for work with a black eye and a his wrist in a sling looking haggard from another young man's weekend consisting of maybe, who knows, a week or more of exuberant excess and he looked shook up like a salad dressing.

I thought two things to myself: Thank god this kid is going to be in the picture, he's perfect; and the second thought is that we have to figure out a way to use the black eye. It has to fit in somewhere. I mean, the Beef Billionaire is the kind of guy who mixes it up; gets up in the ass of life.

More to come...

a weekend full of excellent radio is pretty fucking rad, i would say

2008-10-13T19:55:00.003-08:00

This morning I walked to the plush KXLL studios. I took the route that leads through the massive State Office Building, or S.O.B., down across the tiled streets of the Capital on 4th; past the Dimond court house and across the wide delta of Main street.

I was to do the morning show with Radio DJ Jessie and it was the ghastly hour of before seven in the a.m. and the light was just breaking over the backs of the mountains. The sky was still deep in a volcanic rock black but almost imperceptibly at first the day was bleeding white into the palate. As I emerged from the other side of the behemoth structure that straddles the bedrock of the lower foot of the mountains Juneau and Roberts the murk of the the sky started to shimmer a little blue from the breaks in the foreboding clouds. It wasn't raining and it was brisk but not cold.

Doing morning radio is totally different than what we do on the Blazer Club, but even though I felt out of sorts a little, it was made easier by the efforts of DJ Jessie, who is a firecracker to even be up that early five days a week. A good radio voice is important, and she's got that, a good morning radio voice in particular. But to be able to get excited about music at that ungodly hour without the aide of caffeine of heavy doses of drugs and booze is inhuman. I'm convinced she's really a well-mannered zombie.

The show went well last Thursday as well. Its been a few days since then, which pretty much means I've forgotten every meaningful detail, but I recollect having a really good time. You can tell its going well when time is unspooling quickly from the clock, because it has the potential to be grueling if you're stuck on a lame show. Naomi and Jessie were there with me, which is an unfathomable upgrade in the attractiveness department over Lukewarm, which isn't to say that Mr. Warm doesn't have his moments.

We played a lot of newer stuff and if I recall we ran with a lot if electronic and indie type stuff, which is way more up my alley generally than the typical fair of hip-hop. I like hip-hop and definitely anticipate being able to listen to it when we do the show, but left to my own tastes I listen to a lot of indie stuff; a lot of stuff that can't really be defined by a genre.

I've been infatuated with The Books lately, so I've pasted one of their videos at the top of this post. Its the kind of music that begs to be put into a movie, and I think I like music that sort of scores my life, is able to describe and add tone to what is happening.

This morning I was listening to the song as I walked back across the vast cubicle mesa of the S.O.B. As I walked out of the labyrinth and back into the morning, the sun was in full bloom across the isle of Doug and a shimmer of color was coming into the clouds like a lining of cobalt metal; and it was glinting, too. Photo luminescent like everything above was the body of some vast, undulating jellyfish.

And I went to work and there was one million and one things happening in that tight spiral of strangeness that transpires between the hours of eight and four thirty and after the grave digging work was done I left and walked out into the sporadic fits of lithe rain and it was the last of it, it would seem, as the city's clouds have had their catharsis and the sobbing was thick like the lump in the back of a throat until at a sudden juncture where it dissipated.

a fortune from a fortune cookie told me autumn would be warm and unlike the cold falls of my youth

2008-10-08T22:52:00.010-08:00

In retrospect, my youth had a much larger component of "Dukes of Hazzard"-type events that I seem to selectively remember. I always default to this notion that my childhood was bland and non-descript growing up in the isolated berg of Juneau, but that's just not the case; and the thing that got me thinking about all of this is the changing of the season. The smell is something we can all sense when autumn is first born and crisp like the crease in a new pair of pants.

The winters in an Alaskan childhood are treacherous and full of expectant adventure. My backyard was the Gold Creek basin and surrounding areas as connected by a vast network of trails created by hikers and miners and other men and women of sturdy industry.

I remember once sledding down a hill the led from my backyard to a baseball field; the path of its decline parallel to Gold Creek and the muffled static of constant rushing water. The season was further along than it is now, and back then the snows seemed to be more abundant. The snow was soft packed all around us in fresh dunes of powder and we glided down the hill at a terrifying speed until the next thing I knew I was coming to about a hundred feet down the steep slope and I remember looking back up the hill and seeing the mangled toboggan and my dad, limping down from the point of impact.

The only other parts of that incident that I remember is that my dad didn't want to go to the hospital, but it became apparent to him that his leg was broken, so he called my mom who came and drove him there in one of the many wood-paneled station wagons that our family employed during that era.

We used to go sledding a lot, the kids in my neighborhood. We would build the hills up; pack the snow firm and even to increase the potential velocity of our slick-bottomed sleighs. There was Death Hill over by 5th street, a bear of a hill that descends parallel to Starr Hill or 6th street but a block down. Capitol school was also a popular if short and underwhelming sledding destination. The real hellions took to the streets and shot down in risky forays past oncoming traffic hurtling up and across the dicey winter hills. The top of Gold street from 8th on down is a beast of a sled hill and one that should not be attempted, really, under any circumstances.

You also shouldn't roll tires or marbles down it. Or rollerblade or skateboard down it. Or ghost ride a car with no breaks as the inertia of a few thousand pounds of wicked steel pulls you towards your possible doom, but of course we did it all. We did it and we did it for the love of gravity and its' uncanny magnetism on all things of mass.

As is custom on Thursday nights, we will be convening the Blazer Club for our two hour weekly meeting which just happens to be broadcast to the listening public. From 8 to 10 p.m., Alaska Standard Time, we will be playing some cuts and speaking of the things that concern the membership. Lukewarm is out of town, so Naomi and possibly Radio DJ Jessie will be special co-hosts this week.

(http://www.ktoo.org/kxll/)

In other news, good friend Bill started cutting up some of our footage for "The Beef Billionaire's Big, Big Weekend". We are really playing up the musical element. The score is so important to a film, I've always felt. Like in a Wes Anderson movie, part of the joy of cinema is the marriage of pictures and music. Hopefully we'll pull it together and get some more material to work with this weekend.

Things are well, though. The weather was warm in late September and early October, unseasonably so; and the we had a little of an attenuated Indian summer attached to the back end of a damp and overcast summer. The frenzy of tourism has receded until the next summer which lies at the end of a million light year long tunnel known as the other nine months of the year. October is going to be interesting, I think.

update on all the amazing action!

2008-10-02T09:00:00.005-08:00

Man. So much has happened since I last had the chance to check in.

The main thing that has been going on in terms of artistic pursuits is that we have initiated the filming of "The Beef Billionaire's Big, Big Weekend". This weekend we captured the opening credits scene with the professional stage actor Gary Garble playing the only role in the day of filming; the landlord angrily walking to his tenant's house.

We filmed Gary in a series of shots starting from an apartment in the Mendenhall and then walking down 4th street to the Beef Billionaire's house. Using a variety of tracking shots and pan shots, Bill, Lukewarm and I crafted the raw material to make the opening sequence. The idea is for the credits to be rolling through the whole process of Gary waiting for the elevator, Gary walking out the door and down the street; Gary knocking huffily on the Beef Billionaire's door, all accompanied by a snappy tune. I think that using almost no actual sound from the filming would be the most effective mode of delivery because it would leave you with only Gary's exasperated expressions to watch.

And from there the movie opens and we begin to follow the Beef Billionaire through his exploits. I am working with my production partners to form some good ideas for shooting scenes this weekend. We want to start filming with young master Trevor, desk clerk and now thespian extraordinaire. We want to see the gears of our machine turn a little. It should be rad.

I've also started working on a 'zine which I plan to leave randomly all over town. Its pretty dark and it delves into some difficult parts of my own experience. I have just felt the need to look inwards lately. I've been crafting it at night on my typewriter. About a week ago, an omen dropped into my lap like a penny from heaven. I found a book in the lobby of my apartment building, an old photography book about photojournalism. It has some amazing, amazing photos in it and I immediately, instantly had the idea shoot into my brain that I needed this thing and I needed to cut the pictures out of it and create something. So, dear reader, fear not. stickpaste goes on with or without you. Within you without you?

Anyway, its like a proto-stickpaste that I've been creating. Its what I might have been doing if I was born twenty years earlier instead of writing some random bullshit on this here series of tubes. Its a lot of fun. I think I will try and scan it in here when I'm done to add a whiff of irony to the whole deal.

Things are happening out there on the aspirating earth. A couple of nights ago, it was warm at night here in Juneau and it felt disorienting like I was down South again, dog paddling out in the comfortable currents of a ocean breeze. The warmth beget wind and the night had a certain whipping fury about it. Since then the status quo has returned, reversion the mean being the all powerful force that it is. The rain has re-entered our lives here in Juneau, the kind of dampness that is pervasive and saturating.

Right now I'm listening to the J-Team doing there thing on KXLL. WTF-up is the best morning show I've ever listened to outside of Howard Stern, which is ha-yuge for Juneau. I will just say this: Juneau has the best radio for a small town in the world. I mean, we have three public radio stations. We have another pirate radio station, KBJZ 94.1, in the downtown area. Juneau is just a radio kind of place.

In other news, its the playoffs in baseball. October is a grand time of year for sports fans here in the U.S. and A. The promise of football season and the dramatics of the Fall Classic. Last night, the Boston nine won their first game with the Los Angeles California Angels of Anaheim, and all is well with the cosmos.

Baseball is a silly and frivolous thing and I understand how self-indulgent it is to love such a random thing, but I do. It makes me think of my dad. Its sort of somber in that way, but it becomes another way to keep him on the top of the shuffle of my mind. Baseball means box scores and following the Sox for life even if they suck. Even if they leave too many men on base, which was my father's constant refrain of a gripe with the team; even if the pitching isn't getting guys out. Even is Spike Owens is your starting shortstop and you are out it by the first turn of the page of August every summer. So be it, it was never about winning or losing anyway, but rather a larger allegory for life and the movement of heavenly bodies in our days and hours.

If Jason Bay hits a majestic bomb to put us ahead in the late goings, its a sign that all is right with the universe. My dad was like that. He always parsed the entrails of everyday signs and wonders. It was like a touchstone, something to keep coming back to.

Speaking of touchstones, the Blazer Club Radio Hour(s) is having its weekly session tonight from 8-10pm Alaska time. Check us out on KXLL 100.7 or on the interweb at http://www.ktoo.org/listen/kxll.cfm/31AC81FDA9FEEA7B6240E7098D04F63C2B/kxll .

Listen live! Good times! I promise if you listen you'll hear the latest info on "Beef Billionaire" and all of the other things happening in Blazer Club world. Yeehaw!

a pitch meeting between western powers turns into an occasion for nerf herding

2008-09-25T09:44:00.006-08:00

Holy hell we got Gary Garble into this fucking picture.

Last night, under the cover of darkness and the blanket of a thicket of Juneau overcast, Lukewarm and I found Mr. Garble the Randomist at the one place we should have expected to find someone interested in the strange peculiarities of the Universal folds: Wednesday night Trivia at the Imp. What better place for a man bent over the knee of chance than a night devoted entirely to things that barely matter; facts that are so minimally useful as to be labeled "random" themselves? I submit to you, dear reader, that question.

Gary was wearing a zip-up hoodie and cotton shorts. He was sitting at a table in the back, and over our greetings the sounds of someone reading off quiz questions boomed over the PA in the background.

"So we have a pitch for you, my friend."
I said to Gary.

"We want you to be in our movie. We think you are perfect for it."
Said Lukewarm.

"What... What, ah... What sort of movie? Like, uh, is it, uh, an independent film?"

"Yeah. Its going to be great. The picture is basically about a kid who wakes up from a runner of a weekend to discover that he is totally broke, and he needs to scheme his way to paying rent."
I explained to Mr. Garble.

"OK. Alright. Alright. Alright. OK. So what is my part in this?"

"You are the catalyst for the action. You would be playing the landlord, the guy that has the Beef Billionaire by the proverbial balls."
I said.

"The straw that stirs the drink, Gary."
Added Lukewarm.

"Wow. Ok. Alright... Alright. I'll do it, you know. I just need to know what sort of frame of mind I need to be in. I mean, is this something that happens often with the rent?"

"Yes, Gary. You're fed up. You have basically had it up to here with it. We want frustrated, slow burn, basically."
I told Mr. Garble.

Just then a hippie-looking fellow with long flowing blond locks and a backpack smelling like divine pack animal, nerf herder grown ganja walked in.

"Holy schnikes. That's the guy, no?"
I asked Lukewarm.

"My god. He smells like a week old shit sandwich."
Said Gary.

"Good gravy indeed."
Said Lukewarm.

"So, Gary, here's my number."
I said as I handed Gary my number scrawled on a ripped off portion of a brown paper bag.

"Call us on Saturday. Whenever you're free. It'll be fun. We'll be you some beers, make it worth your time."
Lukewarm said as we collectively contemplated the pungent array of smell laid before us by the auspicious appearance of the hippie fellow.

"Alright. Alright. Ok. Great. Sounds great. I'll, uh... I'll, uh, call you. On Saturday."
Gary said.

"Ok, Gary. Well, we're going to go beg that hippie for some of his magic beans, but we'll check ya later."
Said the Luke-ster as we wandered shambling like shot-up zombies with the other herd members towards the wall of odor.

putting the Beef Billionaire into blinking lights

2008-09-23T22:30:00.005-08:00

This whole Beef Billionaire thing has been taking some interesting turns as of late.

I think we just might actually make this son of a bitch. We've cast the Beef Billionaire, selecting the desk clerk Trevor out of a pool of potentially tens of people. He works really well because he has that sort of shit-eating, conspiratorial glee to him that makes you want to knock off an apple truck with the guy.

Bill has the camera and the movie expertise, I'm writing the thing with my collaborator and the producer, Lukewarm. The whole thing is very organized. We take many 'meetings', we have our people call other people who call their people's people. Its great.

Right now, I'm waiting on my people to get with Bill's people to network on a meeting to discuss casting. Lukewarm and I want to put Gary Garble in the picture. We went searching for Mr. Garble downtown. We saw many hot ladies, Deering & Down were playing at the 'Skin, but alas at every turn we were held Garble-less. The bartender would always direct us to the next watering hole saying Gary Garble had just left, and each time we arrived, like an apparition he would dissipate.

We feel like filming the opening scene is important to "discovering" the rest of the movie. The story is based on my own experiences, the experiences of my collaborators and the feel of the character. We need to see how young Trevor responds to the script and the direction, and the rest will come. We need to flesh out the other pieces soon, too, for filming is set to begin on Friday at the strike of midnight. More to follow.

episode one of The Beef Billionaire's Big, Big Weekend

2008-09-22T17:07:00.002-08:00

CLOSE-UP OF FACE

Eyes opening despite a crust of dry tears around them.

SLOW PAN OF TRASHED HOTEL ROOM

Bottles and the confetti of drunken debauchery ring the shit-housed room. The facilities are strangely small and irregular, being the Alaskan Hotel. In my mind's eye, its room 223 or one of the ones in the front of the hotel over-looking the street. A curtain is ruffled by the passing winds outside.

NARRATOR:
Waking up on Monday mornings is always super shitty. The feeling of dread as you trundle off to the shower, awaiting the spikes of scalding water that never quite fully awaken you. That drifting feeling of not being fully inside of your body yet.

NORMAL SHOT OF BEEF BILLIONAIRE STARTLED, QUICKLY AWAKENING IN BED

BEEF BILLIONAIRE:
Oh fuck!

CLOSE-UP OF OPENING WALLET EMPTY BUT FOR A ONE DOLLAR BILL WITH "RANCH" WRITTEN ON IT

NARRATOR:
What's even worse than waking up on a normal, dry hump Monday is waking up on those ugliest of Mondays where right from jump street you can tell that its going to be a motherfucker.

BEEF BILLIONAIRE:
Fuck! Shit! Oh man. How the fuck did I spend all of that dough?

NORMAL SHOT OF BILL SITTING UP ON THE BED

NARRATOR:
Sure, in the moment a weekend can get away from you and it becomes apparent at some point during any truly wild weekend that the piper is to be paid come Monday. This may keep some smaller, less bold men from doing the types of things that cause a feller to awaken on a Monday when rent is due with but one dollar to his lonesome wallet.

MONTAGE OF BILL WASTED, PARTYING WITH BITCHES, SHOOTING DICE ON A STREET CORNER, BETTING ON SMALL ANIMAL RACES, PLAYING CARDS WHILST SMOKING CIGAR, DOING A LINE OF BLOW OFF OF A HOOKER DRESSED LIKE A NURSE, BARE-BACK RIDING A MIDGET, MAKING A SNOW ANGEL IN THE GRASS, WRITHING ON THE PAVEMENT IN DRUNKEN JOY, TAKING A SIX-FOOT BONG HIT, ETC.

NARRATOR: After all, how much will he regret the carnal joys of that weekend looking back on the whole thing twenty years hence? Not a lick if all turns out well by the end of the day. Of course, that would mean rounding up seven hundred and ninety-nine more dollars by five o'clock.

So, will the Beef Billionaire make the grade?

Will he atone for his drunken largess with some combination of plans, plots and schemes?

Who is the Beef Billionaire?

Find out on the next episode of ...

THE BEEF BILLIONAIRE'S BIG, BIG WEEKEND -

Soon to be a major motion picture. Check your local theaters for show times.

things better left written on dollar bills and a hard rain fell

2008-09-18T16:00:00.000-08:00

Strangeness seems to come in shifts, in sporadic fits every so often. Occurrences magnetize themselves to other strange occurrences and suddenly everything is a bizarre web of weirdness.

I am of course referring to the recent up cropping of dollars with writing on them in my days and hours. I've always thought that it was kind of funny to find something interesting written on a bill, not that it happens all the time. Those stamps that track where dollars have been are a good example. I just think its a great, funny little idea to do so. The life of money, huh?

A couple of weeks ago, I went to dinner with some friends at a nice pizza and beer pub over in the yonder of Happytown, a.k.a. the isle of Doug. The joint is in fact called The Island Pub. Nice place. We had a couple of their pies and a pile of other entrees and appetizers. Salmon dip, salads, other sundry table items. Our party was also drinking of the sweet hops bevs, and I was drafting on a Diet Coke. Things were good.

There would be, of course, no story if everything went off without a hitch. Those fuckers never gave me a side of ranch. I asked for it maybe 3 or 4 times. I almost felt bad asking our douchy waiter after a while. The guy looked burnt out, like he was about to start punching out the soda fountain or something if he dropped a tray. Just a real nerdy fellow. Anyway, long story short we have a huge meal, everyone loves the food because they are wasted; I think its OK, but I'm still pissed about the fact that I'm minus that little container of ranch. Unbelievable, right? I mean, how many times do I have to ask the deckhand to throw me the god damned life preserver, right?

We get the bill. Everyone is raving about the food. I don't really think it was that great. The pizza was rather workman-like, I thought. Balderdash, they all say. Poppycock. The bill was as long as a house and whilst parsing over it like a Lehman Brothers stockholder searching for a ledge to jump off of this week, I noticed a little entry towards the bottom.

RANCH.............$1.50

No fucking way, I thought to myself. Now am I going to have to ask this ass clown four times to take the charge off of the ticket? Unbelievable. So, a few minutes hence, once all of the money was piled like a stockade of sandbags in the middle of the table, I took the fleeting opportunity to comment on the sad sack state of affairs.

I pulled a dollar from the pile like a jenga block from a rickety tower. By the grace of the random universe, Brook had a black, permanent marker with her. On the dollar, in large, easily legible text I wrote "RANCH" and underlined it to emphasize how awesome I thought ranch was.

This all leads to the second strange dollar I've received in recent days. Yesterday, in fact. I was downtown after broadcasting another episode of the wildly successful radio variety program "The Blazer Club Radio Hour(s)" with my cousin and co-host, Lukewarm. Andy the station director at KXLL joined us in the booth for a couple breaks in the second hour to discuss important, bell weather issues like "female exercises" and Tom Churchill the electronic weatherman in a box. (Listen live at ktoo.org/kxll)

We were downtown, standing under an awning outside of the bar. DJ ASTROnomar was in town playing a set at the Rendezvous, and Lukewarm and I walked in to town and planted ourselves outside of the establishment to survey the scene. The street was littered with hundreds of soggy cigarette butts and the rain was coming in visquine sheets. Interlopers stood everywhere, and for a moment I had an unsettling and deeply placed thought about how lonesome and free it would feel to be one of only a few people wandering the slick-coated streets of dear dirty Juneau.

We stood for a moment outside, and I was drained from work and from the week and from laughing so hard at the radio show that my ribs felt pushed out. Out of one of the South Frank bars, a familiar face sidled into view, a strange looking fellow who spoke to me the first time the day before on the street. This guy, who was wearing a Broncos jersey the day before, had told me that his sister really wanted to meet me. At our first meeting, he tried to convince me to go have a drink with him and his sister, stranger that she is.

The whole thing is strange. Normally if someone wants to meet you, they just show up and shake your hand or step into a conversation or so whatever normal people do. I certainly wouldn't think of sending my brother or sister or some other distant proxy to try to coax someone into an awkward meeting. But this guy had other ideas. I told him that I don't drink the hard stuff and at the time I was sipping on a DDP, so I had the evidence to back it up. Eventually he left and I just put the incident behind me. Strange, I thought. I wondered for a moment if this mystery girl who wanted to meet me was a looker, but her brother was such an odd fellow that the whole thing was just off-putting.

Fast forward to last night, me and Lukewarm standing outside of the bar in the burning rain. The mist spattered up from the street and obscured the view of the Alaskan across the street of South Frank. Broncos jersey guy approached, but he wasn't wearing the Broncos jersey anymore. Just a blue sweater or something.

"Hey man. Remember me?"
Asked the guy.

"I guess. What's up man?"

"My sister really wants to meet you still."

"What does that even mean? She wants to meet me..."
I asked, befuddled.

"She's interested in you, man. She wants you to call her."
The dude handed me the dollar, the second strange dollar.

"Here, call this number man."

On the dollar was written a young ladies' name and a cell phone number. Below it was a message scrawled and underlined. "Call or Text Me!" it said.

I thought about my situation for a moment. The strangeness of it all. I conferred with Lukewarm, who witnessed the whole incident. After a few moments of assessing the weirdness of standing outside and under an awning in the pouring rain and getting propositioned by a strange fellow in a mock-turtleneck, the only path became clear.

I walked with Lukewarm up the hill, back to the lair of Bongs at Barrett Manor on friendly 4th street in the hard, driving rain of an ides of September evening, but not before stopping at the Liquor Cache to trade the newly acquired dollar in for something of real value: A candy bar.

So goes the unfathomable universe. I can't get too tethered up in its' puzzling folds.

PFD-day and the world finds mercy in the form of a roach for John Evans

2008-09-14T11:32:00.014-08:00

This weekend heralded the arrival of two important signs of the coming autumn: The darkening nights turning ugly with Taku winds and sullen, sideways salvos of sickening rain and the appearance in bank accounts of directly deposited Permanent Fund Dividends. Like a salve to a burning man's flesh, the loot trundles in each fall and is immediately thrown at every liquor and drug selling soul in this strange, isolated town. On Friday, the disbursement's effects were visible in the horde of thrill seekers marooned downtown amidst the four-corners of alcoholism: The Alaskan Hotel and Bar, Alaska Liquor Cache, The Imperial and the far point of the Viking.

Everywhere else was dead, but a steady herd lined the door to the Liquor Cache. In they filed and for each that entered empty handed another would pile out with a couple of half racks and a couple of fifths. And a bum who was buying a bottle of Monarch on Thursday was splurging part of his $3,200 of state fed pennies from heaven (~$2000 for the PFD, and tack on another $1200 from the Gov'nah's energy bonaza.) on a nice little bottle of Wild Turkey. And the guy who was buying Wild Turkey on Tuesday of this past week was taking liberties with a liter of finely attired single malt.

All around town, people were spending their newly discovered hood riches. Stoner kids with brand new, top of the line bikes. A guy that makes me sandwiches at Subway at lunch sometimes taking his brand new Dodge Charger out for a cruise. Bums basically wallowing in the cash; I mean if your whole goal in life was to score a couple bucks for a 40 ouncer, what the fuck is it going to look like when Uncle Sam and Auntie Sarah drop a sack full of over 3 large in nickles on the fuckers?

Mayhem. Pure, unadulterated mayhem.

The hippies were so thick in the Alaskan the walls were shaking with their frenzied movements even next door in the nerve center of freaky-deaky downtown, the Hotel lobby. I stopped in to talk to the desk clerk and get a gauge of the general feeling of the night.

"Hey Rob. How's the night treating you?"
I asked the weary looking desk jockey.

"Man. Fucked up. I've already had like, ten complaints."
Rob massaged his temples and gently swayed his head in the knowing acknowledgment of the strangeness that brews upstairs in the 'Skin that is witnessed by all who take on the heavy harness of employment behind the Front Desk.

"Raw. What are they complaining about?"

"Good question. Nah, there are just like a bunch of out-of-town drunks , fishermen and villager types having too much party."

"Too much party, huh?"
I asked.

"Yeah. You know. There's party, and then there's just too much."
Rob said, sentence trailing into a couple walking in a drunken, discombobulated stagger up to the Front Desk, holding on to each other for dear life.

"We want a room."
The gentlemen requested of Rob, the suspenders-wearing desk clerk-extraordinaire.

"Well, I'll just tell you again, then. We're all booked up. Totally booked solid. I think I may have told you this about 30 minutes ago when you checked last."

"30 minutes ago?"
Said the woman, a mess of permed hair and blotchy make-up tied together with a tasseled leather jacket.

"Yep. About 20, 30 minutes ago. You came and asked me for a room, and I told you then and I'm telling you now, we are fresh out."

"No rooms?"
Asked the man.

"Not the one. Maybe check the Bergmann..."

"Burger man?"
Asked the lady friend. At this point I decided to walk outside. I had a roach in my hand from earlier and I always try to pawn them off on a bum, usually I give them to Chief because he's the unofficial Mayor of Downtown now the C. Scott Fry has departed for what seems like it could be good.

Outside the streams of rain and people were equal in intensity. A group of smokers stood arm-to-arm around the hearth of the cigarette trough. John Evans, my friend Leo's least favorite bum, was lurking on the outskirts of the merriment of nicotine bliss. Darin Danza smoked his filthy-smelling clove, looking like each cough would bring forth a barf full of loogies. Leo and Cedar smoked American Spirit Blues, or maybe Yellows if the fancy was for lighter flavored smoke. Lukewarm smoked a Spirit, the desk clerks all smoke rollies or Marbs or Camels. And there was dirty old John Evans, hissing his requests for smokes through a mouth full of broken tombstones of teeth.

"Can I have a shig?"
Asked John Evans, full up with filthy, rain-torn clothing and smelling like a barnyard beast.

"Dude, I don't smoke cigs."
I said, thinking for a second after how awesome that sounds now almost a year away from having smoked the rag smoke.

"I don't smoke cigs. That sounds kind of funny. Here, have this."
I handed him the fat slug of a marijuana roach, a turd of herf surrounded by the resin-crackled paper of a joint smoked to the fruit and the nut stage where each draw tastes alternately like corn nuts or dried fruit.

"Wha...?"
At first, Mr. Evans was taken aback, not sure what sort of goods had been placed in his fingerless-glove sheathed hand.

"Oh, wait! Oh yesh! Shank you so mush! Thiss'll make the morning so mush better!"
Said John, now aware of the nature of the small, pungent parcel in his possession.

"I have a 40 for later tonight in my bag..."
John pointed to his duffel sack, basted in the seeping blackness of once spilled malt liquor.

"And I have enough money fer another one now, and now tomorrow when I wake up wish the shakes, Thiss'll help me ssoo mush!"

"No prob, man. Keep smokin'. Its much better for your constitution than that booze, man."

"You know what? I'm an alcoholic. A drunk. Thas's why I'm like thiss. A drunk and a shtoner."
John said, seeming a little more sullen now than his kid-waking-up-on-Christmas, wide-eyed wonderment stage a few seconds ago.

"Alright, man. Have a good night."
I said, giving John Evans a hearty pound 'cause I don't slap skins with no dirty assed bum like John motherfuckin' Evans.

"Hey, what are you gonna do with yer PFD?"
Asked John.

"I don't get one. I was an Oregon resident."

"Shit. Me neither. Gov'ner take it for garnish."

"Take it easy, John."

"Shanks again!"

a bing, a bong and a Beef Billionaire; or how to attend a poetry slam and not slit your wrists

2008-09-11T11:27:00.011-08:00

Last night there was a poetry slam at the Alaskan. The first annual slam, apparently. Now, I will just let you know straight off that I hate slam poetry. Hate it.

I love poetry, however, which may be why I hate the slamming. Normally, any event involving poetry I am in favor of, because the world needs more good poetry and good art. The thing about slam poetry is that it encourages poetry for the purpose of self-aggrandizement. It forces people into a mold of words that is boastful and self-centered and rarely focuses on the true beauty of the written word.

Maybe its because I love the way a poem moves across a page. Maybe its because most slam poets are militant lesbian bikers or whatever. To me, when someone reads a poem with all of the bullshit inflection and syllable emphasis, they just come across as sanctimonious ass clowns. Real art is good enough without the window dressing.

Anyway, there was a poetry slam and a few random ass clowns read some shitty poetry and in between every snippet of garbage was another spoken word smorgasbord from the one man who should always have a mic, and I'm referring to Juneau's Tony Danza here, Darin the Bush Man. Darin Danza was sitting in as Master of Ceremonies and he read a few charming limericks and one really good long form poem that I caught. Darin Danza has a way with words, and he was looking like a more drunk, less drugged out Pete Dougherty of Babyshambles fame with a bowler hat and a well-stitched blazer.

So the slam went well for how poorly it could have gone and Lukewarm and I snuck in a round of video golf in which I melted down on the 18th hole for the millionth time needing a bogey to tie the course record. The pain of the loss was quickly blunted by a couple of doobers smoked on a walk along the docks downtown. We stood in the darkness next to the library, under the mantle of stained glass that peers from the top floors of the building into the channel of water between Juneau and downtown Doug. The water, some twenty feet below us as the tide was waning, was eerily dark but for a few streaks of light rippling across the sound.

Soon after, we walked up to friendly 4th street, back to Barrett Manor where good friend Bill was waiting, recently off of work. After a few more bingers, Lukewarm and I decided that Bill's new nickname (Old ones include Beelo, Billy, BJ, Beej, Will, Willy, Willard, Bill-ster, Bada Bill, Rumplebillskin, Bill the Builder, Willdabeast, Captain Awning, Bill the Pill and just plain B.) should be "the Beef Billionaire", partly because of his fondness for Hamburger Helper and also partly because it just sounds hilarious. We were held hostage by one of those fits of delirious, stoned laughter that comes in a tidal swoon every so often. Good times were had by all.

ranger for whom? a mystery unfolds downtown on a random street corner

2008-09-08T22:05:00.011-08:00

"That's because I'm a Ranger."

Said Iago the strangely sweet looking bum. We were standing outside of the Liquor Cache and it was Sunday night and the town was calm and free from the assault of rain that battered the asphalt earlier in the soupy strands of morning time.

"A ranger?"

I asked, looking credulously over the bum's child like expression, trying to decide how crazy he had become on account of the booze pickling his brain.

"Like a star ranger, captain? A Power Ranger? What kind of ranger are we talking about, Iago?"

"An army ranger. Fort Benning, Georgia."

"Wow. Beast, my friend. You're a goddarned beast."

As the words fell over the plaza of the sidewalks abutting the murder's row of dive-y bars ringing the downtown loop, the mist started to saturate the air once more. There was a grouping of bums behind us, laying siege to the entryway of the Imagination Station, a children's store. The mass of perhaps two people lay in a heap of swaddled mummy parts in the stoop. One storefront down, Bumwood and another cadre of rabble drank quick steals from a cask of rotgut.

"I need to walk home now."

Said Iago, sounding like a child trapped in an old vagrant's clothing. Iago pursed his lips and stuck his yellow and grime coated fingers into his mouth half full of teeth as if to whistle sharply.

"Man, please don't..."

I implored.

"Come on. Let's hear the whistle."

Bumwood chimed from the next stoop. Iago obliged and blew a harsh tone from the reeds of his filthy hands.

"Fuck, man. Fuck, Iago. I asked you to kindly not whistle, man..."

"Let 'em whistle. He's a good whistler. Got to give him that."

Bumwood said in his whiskey-soaked timbre. He pulled a lustily drag off of his rolled cigarette and held the draw in.

"Yeah. You're a whistler alright, Iago. Finest in the county."

I said.

"Finest in the universe!"

Screamed Iago out into the drifting bustle of a broken down Sunday night in late summer. Iago then headed on his way, back to the shelter to sleep it off and do some more of the lord's work.

"Alright. Later Bumwood."

"Hey, let me ask you something..."

Bumwood beckoned to me with his warped digit, crinkled at the knuckles like an extinguished cigarette butt.

"What's that friend?"

"What do you write in that little book you got there?"

Said Bumwood, referring to my little black Moleskine that I keep notes in.

"I don't know. Just stuff I don't want to forget I guess."

"You're taking down everything so you can be a famous writer, huh?"

"What do you mean?"

I asked.

"What do you mean what do I mean?"

Bumwood replied.

"Shit, Bumwood. That's not it, but it's weird that you would say that. I just like to write down the way people say things sometimes, that's all. Sometimes people have an interesting way of saying things."

"Oh, ok. Well, alright. Have a good night, hombre."