Gratuitous Topless Picture

I was out digging river gravels, and I don’t want to jinx it, but I may be onto something pretty big.  Not like, holy shit Forsterite-Fayelite VIII in the mohosphere big.  Just locally big.  I might have some news on it later.  Anyway, me and the Scout, we went out to the badlands and found us some rocks.  Lots of them, in fact.  One terrace is probably thirty feet thick.   The Scout got up it in two wheel drive.  See, International built their shit with a stock locker on the rear Dana 44.

“Look, I’m Casey…blah blah blah rocks, blah blah blah Scout, blah blah blah obscure drivetrain componentry, blah blah blah terrace structure.”

I beat you to it, those of you who like to poke fun.  And poke you do.  Bitches.

The Month of Suck: Fail

I don’t know what my motivation was to get shitfaced on a Monday afternoon. It was just a perfect storm, I guess. Job I hate, school I’m no longer motivated to do, the best woman in my life is a dog, my Scout is really that fucking cool, it was a beautiful day to drive over the Colorado National Monument, I have a free pass to the park, Mabel was acting almost like a regular dog, Johnnie’s in Fruita is one of my favorite bars, beers at $1.50 a pint. I mean, the motivation was there, good and bad.

So, while the Scout carried the proud souls up through the schists and gneisses, I put down a road beer. Then we went up over Glade Park and it was heart-brakingly beautiful up there on the Uncompahgre yesterday.

In the summer, the Glade Park Rural Fire District has movies on Saturday night. The have a part of their shop they painted white and a little stand built for a vintage projector. There are no seats, and since you’re outside, mosquito spray is a must. You just pull up a lawnchair or back your truck up and sit on the tailgate. They play a lot of old movies. Last time I went, they showed The Yearling, an old Disney movie about a deer. It’s a family event, so the movies are mostly the old Disney shows. One time they showed Where the Red Fern Grows. In the summer evening on the Glade, there was a wet eye or two, including some on the faces of old men who might have remembered back a few decades more than I.

The Colorado National Monument is part of the federal park service, so it’s more of a Disney Land than a wilderness. I prefer my desert wild and unpaved, but the drive is spectacular, in a wholly shameless way. With the top off the Scout, it made for a good drive. Then we Fruita and got thirsty. It was nice to get away from the city, with its antithetical relationship to the Colorado I grew up in.

This is ramble, I realize. And grammatical crimes have been committed.

I really like this post. She nails a lot of what I hate about everyone my age that was not born on a dirt road in a shithole corner of a backwater state. I was ushered into life by my aunt and my grandma, both accomplished midwives in the Old church, in the house I would spend the next ten years growing in. My best excuse for my generation of spoilt halfwits, besides their parents being pussies, is that they were delivered by a detached and highly educated person they had no familial relationship with.

And last night I dreamed I strangled a squirrel the devil had commissioned to bite through my throat. It was sad, really. The squirrel allowed itself to be killed after explained to the charcoal red-eyed critter why I had to. He said he’d rather not live at the devil’s proxy; his words, not mine. So I looked away and squeezed his warm throat for a minute or two. When I looked down, he was a regular old gray squirrel. But dead.

I woke up with a regular gray squirrel on my sill. He didn’t seem up to anything, so I decocked the shotgun.

Craigslist Friday

So, since yesterday I mentioned the guy and my possible inspiration for the character, I decided to throw down on Dwight Schrute again. Also, I get a shit load of hits from search engines. Some of them are frightening for this sempai.

I should mention that I have made some interesting email friends through these ads. And people are still offering me mangy creatures they found under their shed from the first one. So, at risk of great personal entertainment, this weeks ad:

http://denver.craigslist.org/m4w/656016935.html

Dwight is the Best Character On TV

I had a wicked-awesome (thanks Laurel) Dwight Schrute moment the other day. I will get to it momentarily.

I laid down some words on paper to someone. Right after the scrawled note: The venison tenderloin, roll it in dijon mustard, thyme and rosemary (also garlic) and roast. Potatoes? I took a break from riding around an area called Easter Hill (two Grand Junction readers holla!) and penned most of it. The letter is probably the best thing I have ever written. The slower, and more methodical approach of pen on dead forest yields a product unassuming in grandeur but stunning in scope. It is not a literary writing — I will come back to that — since the intended audience is not the sort to appreciate intentional fine grained metaphor and subtle graded obscure reference. That means she is honest. And if there is one thing I owe to her, and I only owe her one thing, it is honesty.

I won’t post the letter on here. For one, I wrote it on paper. And it is too much about her, and not enough about me to justify posting it.

Note: I will be publishing on this site, or another as a full fledged nerdy writer-blog project something called Four Letters. I have talked about it before on my last site.

Dwight Schrute moment:

I was making a map of such boring scope and application as to draw tears from a normal human being. This required I sit in what has become my favorite hang out on campus, the GIS lab. It’s like a library for cartographic purposes. The people around the plotter, awaiting an equally boring, but enormous printout of something, discussed among themselves some local fauna.

“So,” said a girl I catastrophically dated, “Have you noticed the cactus blooming south of town?”

“Indeed”, said the croc wearing hippyfuck with dreads, “I noticed upon my journey yesterday that they were rife with flowers and red fruit.”

“Forsooth! I have heard tell of a wonderful concoction made of the fermented nectar of those red fruits,” said one young and horn rimmed woman.

“Cactus? Dude, I heard it has, like, water and shit in it and you could eat it,” said the lone (and probably lost) English major.

Chorus: Cactus! Zomg!!! OoooohHhh Grosss!!!!1! lols!!1!

For whatever reason, their pointless banter crept up through my haze of river gravels and unbalanced RGB bands and I, uninvited to the conversation and probably not noticed thus far, said:

“Cactus tastes like kiwi.”

Silence, crushing and cold settled upon the room.

It wasn’t about bears, but it might as well have been.

12/30

The laundry at this point has become sentient and may be planning something big. It rests heavy on the floor and hints at heavy doings. Paranoid? Did anybody see stromatolites coming? No. And they turned the previously inert mostly CO₂ atmosphere into a damn quagmire of corrosive oxygen. You can’t trust life that is willing to lay around looking innocuous. Sure, now we can breathe and all the really cool mountain bikes are built out of the banded limonite, hematite, and goethite from all of that mess, but think of all the happy rocks that could have lived on forever with no oxidation? You did not think of the rocks, did you? No, you did not.

I would move that an average person thinks of rocks once every fifteen years or so when one hits them in the head. Of course, unless you live in a grass hut and chip tools out of surficial flint or chert, you are responsible for untold rock trauma. You, yes you, with your bullshit post consumer recycled reusable shopping bag and rdidculously small fruit loop car think you are not responsible for earthen trauma. Indeed, let it be known that every single human in a Western (and Australia) developed country is responsible for an average of 1.5 million pounds of gravel mined out of river beds the world over. That means you. I know, you don’t even know where the gravel goes. You never worked concrete or put in a subgrade for a road.

Damn, I need to lay off the R. L. Burnside and coffee first thing in the morning. I haz a hostiliteh!

I need breakfast before I fucking murder a motherfucker. The return of Rock Hammer is imminent. That portion of my mentality needs quelled. And all I have is smoothie stuff. Useful advice:

If you hate the nasty taste of whey powder, substitute two eggs. The add a real nice texture to the smoothie as well.

And I’m out.

Douglas Pass (11/30)

We spooked up a herd of elk, around thirty head. Some of them still shagged out for the winter. On the far side of the valley the hanging on snow caught the wind and give it a chill you could feel on your neck. There at one of my oldest stomping grounds, I held the Scout at a crawl through the canyon, elk scampering ahead and on up the steep hill of Uintah and Mt. Garfield sandstone. The beach rocks full of shrimp burrows and worm tracks led their trek. Up and away from the noise of the foreign and up into the cold altitude they know men to dislike. If I had been in my old half-ton Ford, with its larger cargo area, one of the younger cows would have been sent to its end of the real with a .357 slug. And tonight I would be eating good and red meat. For those raised on beef, or worse, no meat at all, the hematite maroon seems a totally unreasonable color for food. When a flank strip of elk is breaded and fried, the crisp golden outer shell takes on a beauty borne out of contrast with every slice, with the brick red and bright blood showing through.

And the Colorado I have known still lives on in cold corners. A golden field of memory, hanging heavy with ripe grains beats in the breeze and on the wind of You.

I do, but not desperately.

The burning cedar and juniper raises up out of the pit assembled far inside the crotch of a wash. Orange and yellow snapping flames, unique to burning these high altitude trash pines, crawl into the air and cast Mabel and I into shadows on the trees and the sage brush. Mabel lays down in sight of the fire, but not next to it, and she stares at us. She is as at home here as she is anywhere else, which is not at all. She seems a creature in constant transience. I remember some the stronger older widows of the Old Church. Even with their abodes solidified into the ground and their gardens producing a host of canned jellies and, sometimes, sweet wine, they seemed only temporary. The tragic deaths–the most common kind of death in that religion is tragic– of husbands and children preyed upon their welcome and abundant beliefs in some real home far away in the clouds. The widow sisters would live on, and they made all of their life count in a very real temporal way, but they were not of this World. They never set foot on unstrange land, not as long as they breathed in this world’s rich and full air. But they would be home one day. They only wanted their name on the roll called up yonder and just a little cabin in the corner of Gloryland.

The odor of burning cedar bears my rational mind away on its silv’ry or snow white wings, to my immortal home. Back into the shadow world of anointing window sills and doorways with olive oil and elders praying over sick mothers. And pleasant Old Church dinners where everyone knew everybody, often with pan fried backstraps of elk or venison chops simmered all day in crockpots older than I.

Prophesies and prophesying eat away at a person’s sanity, over time. Often, it was those with a piety born of tragedy who were the most eloquent and frightingly accurate mouthpieces for the Almighty God who still had no problem smiting people. Indeed, a few were still smote from time to time, depending on who got the blame for fluid filled lungs or tumors eating away a person’s mind.

And as the gray and lightning blasted logs burn away to white and bed down into all night hot coals, I wish I had known you long enough for you to have met that old and ancient part of me that is at the root of all I say and do. They are all so different from you and from me, though they left a forever stamp on the soul I don’t believe I have most days. They are a tough people, a group marginalized and persecuted like the cedar and sage glades and rims they cling to.

And the golden frosted sage fields of a Colorado you will never know live on in my mind. They carry the hope, old and ancient as the taste of juniper berries in cowboy coffee over the fire, that you will meet them. I do not lie to the sage and red dirt, but I do not tell it the truth. That you will never know them.

And I do again, but not with remorse.

In the dark, while I lay in the thick bedroll and the mostly full moon turns the world a monochrome silver and the snow into clouds, I stare up at the stars. Mostly the same stars I have known my life through. Whether on the fantail of a vessel on the ocean or laying on the hood of my old Ford drinking cheap beer and philosophizing with the sort of friend you would never talk to. Satelites cut through the fields of stars and the Milky Way runs away from sight. A high lonesome cirrus bursts into the pale silver blue flame, ignited by the languid moon. This is the world you will never find within walking distance to an outlet for a curling iron or blowdryer, I can’t remember which. In the slowly circling and traveling field of stars, and the stretching out Milky Way (the wheel within the wheel way up in the middle of the air) I can see you warm and safe, and so lost to me and my world forever.

And I do, but not with asphyxiating sadness. Not with remorse. Not with desperation. But with the sage and cedar and the high lonesome, I miss you.

6/30 or Something

Yes, this post was entirely different a few hours ago.  In fact, it wasn’t even this post at all.  I just reread it and puked.  See, I rolled out of bed and was worried about not living up to the expectations of yesterday’s post, but also slightly comatose from staying late last night at work.  Suffice it to say that post is gone.  I even put up an awesome picture that I was planning on tying in.  I forgot to, so there’s just a picture of a bunch of rocks. 

So anyway, one thing I did get right was my closing to a misanthropic meandering entry.  I got the ending right.

So go fuck yourself.

Mabel Would Eat Oprah, Given the Chance (8/30)

Took Mabel out for a hike today. I wanted to know what sort of animal she is.

She is a fascinating creature. She has never had the benefit, if it were truly a benefit, of prolonged adolescence. The sick extended childhood we presume to offer our companions. Where most dogs would be giddy and tail wagging, she maintains a calm and awaits direction. She keeps her tail tucked in the way of a sled dog, a mannerism learned the first time a tail is pulled in the traces.

She makes me wonder about the value of youthful magic moments. She is a capable and loving animal, regardless of the fact that she is not inclined to worship you or fetch objects you throw away. Unlike most pets that are kept by owners in a prolonged state of juvenile delinquency because stupidity amuses, Mabel refuses to be entertainment. She enjoys getting her ears scratched and loves a good walk, but she does not seek approval. Doting makes her nervous. She has never made a sound, saved a reserved growl at the dog park when one of the childish canine replacements for lost youth attempted to engage her in play.

Mabel has no use for balls or for children or for affection. She will live, lean and hungry, until the end of her days never having needed me. She will stay truly her own animal, possibly cold and ruthless, but unashamedly individual until the last bitter agonal gasp.

That is the sort of animal that Mabel is.

Me and a woman had a conversation about one of her less productive siblings. The sibling was obsessed with enjoying her young college years. I mentioned that I generally don’t like people that think some era of growing is owed to them. Were the girl in another country, or simply born not too long ago, she would be far into the thankless servitude of motherhood or factory work. People trying to truly appreciate their youth and immaturity are doomed to backward failure. Your life is not a game, though it is fatally inconsequential and often humorous.

So while the sibling was living out her youth she perceived as owed to her, she ran thousands of dollars out of her parent’s account. This seems ridiculous to me, but for those raised with a silver spoon instead of a kick to the teeth, I gather the forces at work are irresistible to them. Regurgitated daytime TV philosophies about what someone is worth or the need to find themselves spew out involuntarily. I know, I go to college and hear it daily. To try and attain your youth or freedom is a dead end road and a hacking and a grasping and often exploitive practice. Youth was never yours and freedom is always lost to those who seek it. Seeking is the sincerest form of slavery.

The dogs at the dog park with their pointless distraction by every moving or shiny thing and their lolled out tongues seem ridiculous next to Mabel. Just as any person trying to exploit their freedom or youth (bought and paid for by doting and worthless vomitous masses of enabling parental communities) seems ridiculous and cruel compared to so many I have known. Those of us whose youths were ripped out by the roots and their tender innocence burned away until we were made of burnished steel. We live on when the earth grows cold and night falls on us all. The end of grocery stores and utility companies could come and sweep the chaff away and we would survive. There’s a truth to the standing gnarled juniper and cedar. They are blasted to pieces by lightning and water starved and continue to thrive. They have scars crisscrossing them from teeth and wind blown sand. But they live, and they have lived and survived since long before the tender orchid or columbine.

Mabel is not a creature of fun or whimsy. When she is outside and the gate is open, she will not run after a cat or squirrel and get lost. She is reliable. She is not concerned what aspects of her life may be passing her by, what critters she is letting escape, or what fears she may have in another twilight part of her life. She does as she sees fit without fail and without remorse. She was not raised with toys and doting owners. She was raised without bullshit.

Me and her understand each other fundamentally. She is not a dog for everyone. She is a dog for no one. She is her own animal, unconcerned with bullshit fantasies and unchased distraction.

She is ruining me for other women.

I finished up a letter today.

Forever until the end, I hold you with all the esteem owed to one who mattered most and loved best. Forever until the end, when the Sun swallows our bones and the night falls forever, let it be known that I held fast to the monument I created after you. Forever until the end, and on until we all fail our sole living commandment to survive, let your breath leave easy knowing you were loved, and that I regret not being able to tell you that truth with my own voice.

Your friend, if you would have it,

Casey

Craigslist Friday

I’ll be gone all weekend, so a two tiered post.  The first is a recipe I made up that I really enjoy.  The second is my new bad habit for Fridays.  So, if you’re allergic to eggs or hate food, scroll on down to the bottom to see this week’s ad.  Also, since I’ll be gone, feel free to make your own awesome ad for the Antholgy here.  Link it in the comments.

One:

Ingedients:

4 eggs.  One small green onion, sliced (discard most of the leaf).  One clove garlic, sliced.  One quarter cup diced or sliced mango.  One tablespoon brown sugar. Teaspoon of salt.  Two small slices of medium (sharp if you’re adventurous) cheddar.  Black pepper and red pepper flakes.  Cooked bacon (optional).

Begin by beating four eggs with your altitude specific amount of water to get a thin omlette.  in a buttered pan, cook omlette as one does such things (it’s all in the wrist).

Melt down a tablespoon of butter over medium heat and put in a small sliced green onion and the clove of garlic.  Add the teaspoon of salt.  Saute for a couple minutes.  Seperately, dice or thinly slice about a half cup or mango and very lightly press in a towel to remove some moisture.  Place mango in the butter and stir for a few minutes until the mango starts to settle and lose some sizzle.  That means most of the water is gone.  Add the brown sugar (trust me here) and stir until it begins to bubble and froth into a caramel.  Once the fruit is evenly caramelized, remove pan from heat and allow mixture to settle.

Fold into your omlette the small two small slices of cheddar, pepper, and bacon and pour caramel over the top.  Serve after the cheese has begun to melt.

Two:  The real fun of Fridays!

Employment Needed! 

Murder/Morality, OMG! (4/30)

One of these things is true, one of these is mostly true, and one is not true at all (in no order).  The last is directed at no one specifically, not beautiful you.

Something:

You warned me, anonymous probable daily reader of my blog.  Yes you. 

You warned me about her.  I wrote it off as jealous bullshit, and honestly, I’m not sure that was not your motivation.  I have no faith in human charity, so jealousy resides in the realm of logical motivation to me.  However, I owe it to you.  You were absolutely right, which is too bad.  Please don’t hold court in your head where commendations are awarded and promotions given for your intuition proving true.  It is a tragic truth, full of pain and regret.  Know simply that you, anonymous reader, were right all along.  Whatever the motivation may have been. 

It is a great discredit to humanity that so upstanding and outstanding a person as her was a moral failure, at least this time.  If she is that kind of person, it draws me into a world of suspicion and cynicism directed at all of humanity, especially your gender, and tragically, even you.  So, you were right.  And that is unfortunate.  I wish I had the naive bullshit philosphies to be truly shocked and dismayed.  Instead, it just reminds me of why I doubt every person’s honor and integrity (even yours) in the first place.

 Another:

I saw a 1960 half-ton Ford stand up on two wheels, screaming apocalyptic exhaust and blue flames shooting out the sides harrowing the fields of the holy fucking cool.  That was four hundred and sixty cubic inches, and then six more, roots supercharged, dual Demon love and death blowing away from it.  The famine of awe was halted and reversed in that quarter mile.  Anyone can build a tubular framed hundred thousand dollar beast that can scream out to 170 miles per hour at the hundred foot line.  It takes an artist to get an old piece of Detroit rolling iron up there. 

I saw the Last Supper eaten and expactorated and the Pieta hacked into mortar in that quarter mile run.  God loves us.

Another:

“Well, not exactly…”

Single. That’s what they left out.  Now I am that fucking guy.  I am become an asshole, destroyer of homes.  Merely the threat of two men wanting my blood, and I know–sweet, sweet experience–that they will, makes me worry.  See, that sort of male motivation is not the one that will make you call a man outside to slug it out like honorable Paranthropi.  That sort of male motivation will have you wating in the shadows with a sawed-off.  That motivation will run a man down in a crosswalk.  It’s not honor, it’s homocide.  I know.

That hot acid rush through your veins when the truth comes out makes a sane man a murderer and a duped man murdered.  Speak to any man every truly fucked over, somewhere in the story (when he’s honest) there is a hammer or a hatchet or, for the natural born Neandertal, a night black shotgun.  Nothing gives a man some moral superority like a shotgun.  The thunderous ratcheting and oily metal sliding true sound of a round jacking into the chamber makes my blood run cold and my hackles raise.  I just got chills.  In a good way, at least when I’m that kind of motivated. 

 

The last thing:

I pushed my hands into the cold ancient river today and ran my freezing fingers over my face and mourned everything I used to be.  Draw some blood and shed some tears over strangers, and you would too.  Then wish you could see an iPod, an LCD television, a pink cellphone, an Escalade, or a piece of steaming shit yuppy in Northface shorts getting out of their SUV and not see warm blood in the sand.  You will understand then.  You will wish you had never been the way America, and all her pathetic BFFs, afford their rock and roll lifestyle.  That’s why your consumption makes me want to vomit.

I have too many friends living in 2X2X6 metal boxes out on the ocean or in 2X2X6 wooden boxes buried in the dirt for me to see your tri-level square footage as anything but obscene.  

It makes me hate you.  It makes me want to plant some H6 in your three car garage and blast your eyesore bullshit castle back into the silica from which it was mined, you selfish fucking ass.  You are ugly, you with your modified and tucked and labored over body.  You disgust me.  I wish it was your blood I saw glowing spectral white on the field of black night.  You deserve it.  They sure as fuck did not.  I want to write on the sky that I hate you and what you have done to my Colorado.  And I want those words to rain down the steel and nitrate rain your lifestyle forced me to use on the mostly innocent.  

I want you to die.  I want the mountain lions to strip your flesh and the coyotes to eat the marrow out of your bones.