Life On The Road

Slow down, watch for potholes, and always stop to indulge in the strangeness.

Road Side Shrines

I finally set up a little shrine to where I started trying to produce text for publication. Maybe it will help me get back to the roots of writing. Word-processing is wonderful and all, but it is just one of the tools of the “creative” process. I think it was in the movie Reuben, Reuben that the poet points out that his whole being rebelled against the idea of regular employment, so he took up poetry. “It certainly wasn’t regular, and it certainly couldn’t be considered employment.” At least that is the way I remember it.

https://www.blogger.com/blog/post/edit/6412071412890340754/8606893002891445440

Newspapers

Once upon a time reporters wrote stories to sell newspapers. The owners of those newspapers probably made a tidy sum off of advertising. Now, the media probably makes most of their money off of advertising. Do television networks and cable companies have to pay media companies to run their stories?

Myth

The myth of the golden cracker-jack toy persists.  It is just fake gold, a veneer plastic, or gold coloring mixed in the P.E.T., a little boost to sell sugar.  Plastic army men, plastic creatures, plastic tokens, it is a petroleum industry side hustle.

                I found a cool green alien-beer-stein in the plastic recycling bin.  It must have come out of Roswell or some other U.A.P. hotspot.  I stuck it on a windowsill with lots of sun.  In a year it grew brittle, crumbled to the touch.

                Give people lots of light, the real ones will last longer.

Biological Weathering

Moss On Concrete

Bindweed

Gardening tips: You have to get at the roots of bindweed, otherwise it just grows back. It thrives in bare soil. It needs three to five years from being cut off from the light to die. New plants might germinate from seeds in the soil.

Flags

RUSSIAN FEDERATION’S GOVERNMENT: We love the American people; it is their government we hate.

U.S.A.’S GOVERNMENT: We love the Russian people; it is their government we hate.

“Government of the people, by the people, and for the people shall not perish from the Earth.” –Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address.

WHAT PEOPLE IN GOVERNMENT REALLY THINK: ‘We hate those guys.’

Houses On The Hill

                It was in his early days of trying to figure out what a Wobbly was, that he stumbled across “Utah” Phillips.

    He wanted all those old worker songs to help him get through the last 20-year hitch in his worker life.  With the songs he grit his teeth and powered through.

                He had learned about The Revolution long ago.  Hell, they even taught a version of it in grade school, The American Revolution.  But they didn’t teach him that the Revolution shouldn’t stop, or about the other Revolutions around the world that stopped too.

                Phillips introduced him to two images for his brain as markers to watch for in the world.  One was rich people’s private Pullman cars pushed off to the sidings of railroad switching yards and the other was mine owner’s homes on the hill.  He had seen wheat rancher’s homes on the top of the hill through the years, and old lumber baron homes left over from the early days of the logging industry.  Then there were always the college administration’s houses.  The strata in society that helped the International Workers of the World to become Wobblies fighting against The Man.  It all had been above his paygrade.

                Cory had used those worker songs with a mix of heavy metal in his Sony Walkman and later his MP3 to get through the last 20 years in grounds maintenance at the university.  It was lines like “Dump the bosses off your back.” that got him through.

                In his current world of retirement, mass media was filled with pictures of parasites that lived in their high towers.

Then again, he had never met more than a handful of rich parasites in his life, most of them had been miserable sots, but sometimes they bought a round of drinks when they got pissed enough. Most of them just turned out to be wannabe wealthy, what people called the Nouveau riche, new money, tacky people who liked those little fake umbrellas on their drinks. Working people had to self medicate without the benefit of doctors and legal counsel.

Fetishist

P01135809 is not a germaphobe; he lies. He is a pervert with fetishes.

Who’s going to change his diapers when he is in prison?

Fantasy

Some day I hope to hear during a hearing of the House Judiciary Committee the question, “Are you, or have you ever been, a member of the Republican Party?”

It is a fantasy I have.