Run-ons: An Experiment in the Style of John Wesley Powell

You know what it’s like?

You know how you wish other people could understand economics enough to get why a used pickup truck with a Holley 500 carburetor and a loud as hell V8 can get the worst gas mileage in the world and have random parts break once a month and still be cheaper than paying payments and interest on a new car as well as giving you actual pride of ownership, not just a payment book and a promise to the bank that you’ll take good care of their car for the next five years, even though you have to fix everything that goes wrong on it, wash it, and in general do all the work while they sit around collecting your money so they can buy nicer cars?

You know how you try to explain that “Organic” is a only a dubious marketing ploy and not an actual food group, but the pasty yuppy ass white people you hate but your education dictates you must hang out with argue that it means the Earth loves those farmers who grew the special garbonzos, transported by rainbow unicorns and crushed under the lavendar and cinnamon cream soap washed feet of well-paid and educated Tuscan teenagers who wear nothing but extra-virgin, stone crushed olive oil that has never seen any sun but that of Modena, and then that is why their hummus is special, because the Earth loves them and their REI equipment they wear around town where they complain about lack of parking for their Saab anywhere near a decent Sushi place?

You know how you thought that possibly she wouldn’t act, in the long run, like a girl you’d slept with the first day you met her, but then she acts predictably like a tramp, which pays off at first because tramps are awesome, and then you lose the ability to remember why this wasn’t a two week fling and then you get attached, then she acts  exactly like a girl who slept with you immediately after meeting you and ends up being a Pam Beasley from The Office, who I decided was a tramp in season one but everyone else seems infatuated with, probably because she is obviously going to fuck around on her boyfriend then find some bullshit female empowered reason to do so?

You know how you’re all happy at first, and everything you two do is great and adds to universal happiness quotient, then one day your that guy taking out the cat box, somewhat unreasonably as the dog has offered numerous times to clean it out for you, but the woman, the original happiness vector, doesn’t like or want the dog to be happy  so you keep a smiley face on and keep saying reassuring things while you really, truly, desperately hope for the day the dog loses his mind and finally kills all the cats in front of all the startled powerless tittering social climbing house guests and leaves broad confident master’s strokes in the white carpet you never wanted with cat blood so the bipolar alcoholic skank with her leash on your left hand’s second from middle finger will finally completely lose her shit and leave you alone with the dog in a trailer somewhere out in the gorges of Wyoming where you’ll never have to worry about a primadonna spoiled cat or a dinner party ever the fuck again?

That’s what it’s like being a Broncos fan.  At least you can buy booze on Sundays in Colorado now.

Lignonberry

What the hell is this shit?  It’s about the least appetizing fruit based filling I have ever stuffed in anything.  Is it Swedish? It looks Swedish.  You really cannot trust the cooking of the surly Swedes.  They have complicated rules and mores against flavor and overall pleasant experiences.  I could see them being responsible for these berries.  Are they even berries?  They taste like mediocre over ripe plums.

Who is worse than the Swedes that have that peculiar “ign” thing in their language?  They might be responsible.  The Finns?  Probably.  I have a hard time trusting anyone from a penis shaped country. Or are they the scrotum?  It could be either.  But they are urinating on/teabagging continental Europe, and I think that’s sort of awesome.  I’m pretty sure no one up there makes anything better than borscht.  I don’t want to blame the Norwegians.  They make Kipper Snacks.

Lately I have had some mad cravings for canned fish.  Not tuna, or even the new Chicken-of-the-Sea pink salmon in a can that I am very excited about, but real tins of fish.  Sardines, kippers, octupi, oysters, etc.  I’ve been really digging the mustard sauce they use.  My favorite tinned fish by far are the King Oscar Kippers in mustard.  They have a slight smoke, not a heavy carbonara flavor, and the mustard is a real white wine mustard that would go well on any sandwich.

I realize this is all old man food.  I have also been drinking Coors Banquet (old man beer), or as it is known colloquially “Yellow Coors.” The two main beers you will run into from the Coors breweries would be Coors Light, or as it is known colloquially, “deer piss,” and the aforementioned Yellow Coors (it comes in a yellow can).  While Coors Light is the typical tasteless American light, full of rice or some other tasteless shit, Yellow Coors is made only from cereal grains and locally malted barleys.  What this means is that you get a very distinctive malt, but it is well balanced with the crisper and somewhat more evenly drinkable corn and wheat alcohols.  The hops in Yellow Coors, as in most beer meant to be drank at very cold temperature, is understated and has an almost exclusively floral texture.

It goes well with breakfast, should you be in that sort of mood.  I haven’t been in a while.

My mom makes an apricot jam.  There’s an old tree in their yard that is the only remaining veteran of the orchard that used to stand on their property.  It was planted in the ’20s by a good friend and a missed friend named Arnold.  He drug out the sage brush and leveled the 400 acres with a team of horses.  Wet land farming is back breaking and terribly taxing work.  He got old, but was generally healthy.  Arnold was fine until they knocked down his orchard.  Then they moved him into a home because he never wanted to go outside anymore.  There, he just sort of quit living.  Until he died, he had a fresh pint of my mom’s jam on hand.  The rest home made terrible food, but he could eat one of their flat and hard biscuits if he had the jam.

Had he been given lignonberry paraphanelia, he would have laid down and died years before.  And to blame would be the Swedes.  A surly and benighted race of vitamin D defficient, abnormally blond individuals. I have never seen one, but I think they are terrifying.  I saw a Finn once.  She was smoking kippered fish hot.  Black hair and blue eyes.  Some sort of weird nordic lankiness.  The weird talk got to me, though.  It’s always hard when you hear a new accent.  Are they terrorists? Chimney sweeps? It’s hard to tell.

I remember the first time I heard a New Zealand accent.  At first I thought they were just respectable Australians.  Then I found out they were from some weird island where people dance the Haka and orcs live.  Obviously, they are not be trusted, but are probably not terrorists.

Unless they produced this lignonberry crap.  Whoever cultivated this shit and decided it was jam worthy probably is evil.  These are the sorts of people who want to take over the world out of sheer hatefulness.

Abundance

It never rains when you want it to.  And when you want a torrent and tumultuous monumental clouds shooting blue fire into the ridgelines and thunder rolling down off the Mesas, the sky is clear and the stars are hung in the cold to dry and fall.  But they never fall.  Have you ever laid back into the seat of your car and pondered how amazing it is to live on a liquid sphere floating in space?  Gravity pulls you into the middle of the Earth, where you will eventually find yourself transported, by erosion, by weathering, by execution, down and on into the depositional basins.  The heavy iron heart of the Earth, so heavy it is beyond hot but refuses to melt, pulls on you and sucks you in.

But it won’t win.  The passing of time will find the continents colliding and mountains thrusting up out of the previously concave basins.  Your bones, long since rendered unrecognizably atomized, will be thrown in the form of carbonates back into the sky.  At least for a while.  Someday, the Earth will be swallowed by the sun.  Someday the deep mantle convection machine will run out of fuel and the Earth will die.  And with its death, the continents will no  longer move.  The Earth will be a frozen ball, just a preserved forever record of whatever might have been.  A Mars.  A Venus.  Forever dead and lovely and written in the sands will be all the amazingly beautiful meaningless history of what we were.

I dreamed a dream the other night.  I was crossing Glade Park, the northern edge of the Uncompaghre, the leading edge of an ancient island arc thrust onto Laurentia,  where once the raging main, the Iapetus and Rheic Oceans, washed and swashed into Wyoming when the first four legged land animals were living and dying in the sweltering coal swamps of Antarctica.  They were memorialized in the coals of Pennsylvania, but 99% would die off in the Permian.  As I tore across the rolling cedar plains of the Park, I was answering a question about math.  One of those simple juvenile questions about the efficacy of learning the higher functions numbers have to offer.

I have always loved mathematics, but I love them like I love women.  I appreciate the beauty and I love to see the intricacy, but I have no real desire to ever truly understand them.  It may rob me of the wonder.  But some days I see the secant pull off something magic or a black dress flowing in the autumnal breeze and I know my heart is taken, forever dead and lovely, into the ground.

The answer had something to do with understanding the world as it is, rather than as a series of approximations.  I looked over into the passenger seat and into a set of blue eyes under a shock of white hair and knew somehow I was responsible for the little person barely able to see out the window of my Scout.  And it was my Scout, not an approximation.  Hank was playing on AM 580.  The kid wore thick glasses, like I used to.  There was an awkward intelligence and some deep welling of understanding there, floating behind those eyes I look into everyday.  He was smarter than I was at that age.  A terrifying prospect for me, the father of this blackhole of curiosity.

1²+√(3)²=2² does not, can not, exist in this real world.  It is an approximation of what we see.  But it is amazing in that the numbers are both imaginary and imagined real and they work out in so faddish a display of logic.  There are many times for powerful and beautiful functions found here and there, but that’s the one I thought of first.  When one plate is thrust onto another, it generally makes something ≈30°.  When islands collide with cratons, you get something like that.  It is obviously enormously more complicated.

The boy, my son, was satiated for a time, but I knew he had more to ask.

I woke up to traffic sounds and a Norah Jones song playing.  I went outside and began working on the details of my Scout long neglected.  Someday I may need it to be around.

Explanation

Or: Psychotic Rambling

I’m not in the business of ever explaining anything I write.  Generally, I just figure if someone got the wrong idea about me, it doesn’t really matter.  Because, honestly, if you really are the person you reflect toattlay in your blog entries, you are probably boring.  I do, however, feel the need to explain that last post.

For one, it’s almost a direct copy of something I wrote a long time ago. It’s sort of a bar fight poem.  So, the hostility there is not really that hostile.  I remember this one camp fire discussion of martial arts where it was postulated that the purpose of any sort of martial art, or what passes for them in your envrinment, is to codify violence and keep it safe.  Sure, a boxer will break a nose here and there, but the rules keep him mostly safe from being beat to death.  Now, anyone who has ever been part of a rougher crowd knows fights don’t just happen.  It proves nothing to anybody to just slug a complete stranger in the face with no lead up.  That’s why there are elaborate posturing mechanisms in place.  They give both people plenty of time to back down and also alert bystanders that the environment may be unsafe in a few seconds.

So, anyway,the broken knee.  My room mate was drunk as hell.  In his defense, so was everyone else.  We got in a spirited discussion debating who would be better based fundamentally to win a real (non artistic) fight, a wrestler or a karate student.  Of course I took the position of wrestler and he argued for the merits of karate.  He had been trained in it.  So, as the rhetoric escalated, but all friendly, he decided to prove one of his points.  I’m not sure which one, but it was over pretty quick.  My brain doesn’t work quite right when people jump on me.  There are ways I respond before things like rationalism can find their way into the mix.  One of them is to get low, adopt a wide stance, and when available, find a joint.

As any person versed in anatomy can tell you, joints can respond to shear or torque, but never both at the same time.  So, if you want to end a fight, it’s just torque and shear, then things pop and move.

So, yes, I meant to break my room mate’s knee.  Not his knee in particular.  Just the knee of the person on top of me going for a choke.  I felt bad about it, and drove him to the hospital.  He was lamed up for a while. We’re still friends.

I can tell you that I am about the nicest person you will meet.  Not in a smiley way, but in a very empathetic and peaceful sort of way.  Just don’t try and choke me.

Bring it

It took me nine months to admit I broke me room mate’s knee on purpose.  But it wasn’t on purpose.  I just responded. Not to the threat of the nicest man I have known, but to the threat of one man attacking.

Discuss.

Because I don’t know why I did it.

God, please forgive me of the violence I have committed.  Should you exist.  Otherwise, fuck it.  Motherfucker had it coming.

You do not fuck with me.  Your knees are nothing but a little weight and torque to this motherfucker.

You have been warned.

Find a reason in that string of text.

Motherfucker.

From the book

Heaven and hell came and went through the tarpitch sky lit by the stream of the Milkyway stretching through the desert of the Universe.  The thinner, cleaner and colder air of Colorado stood by, without moon, without city lights, without any lasting disruption to the progressive dousing of a Tercel with gasoline.  The dashboard was pulled out, with its damning VIN and the door panels scraped unreadable with a nearby sandstone.  A two wheel drive white Ford with a gun rack and a timing issue held court nearby, a keg already floated in the trashcan full of ice.  A ring of spectators watched while the last touches were applied to the bitter warrior coated to the last inch in accelerant.  A cheap 200 foot parachute line, also soaked in gas, was tied off inside the car and ran out to a nearby rock.

Two rocks wedged in front of the rear wheels were kicked loose and the car started a slow roll.  A slurred cheer rose from the back of the Ford.  Then the Tercel slowed and stopped, held fast by the cretaceous sandstone laid down when this desiccated mesa was a thriving coastline.  A few of us got behind the car and put our shoulders into it.  Our determination and the aid of gravity started the Tercel down a vector it could no longer avoid.

Me and Andrew had read Ibn Fadlan’s recounting of a Viking funeral.  It struck us as peculiarly heroic as far as funerary practices go.  With a short appreciation given to the gods of somewhat ancient shitbox Toyotas and Subarus and Fords, the mighty vessels that we used and destroyed fighting our wars of attrition with our own mediocrity, the parachute line was lit.  The gasoline didn’t burn fast enough to catch the Tercel, an oxidized veteran of somewhat retarded teenage angst.  The Tercel fell down the steep slope, rolling over and over and knocking down sagebrush until it rested on its side against a cedar tree.  The parachute line made a damn good fuse.  The flames went steady down the cheap poly rope and found the hull of our destroyed ship.  Many a vestal virgin, or what passes for one in this town, had lost their virtue in the back of that cat shit smelling beast.  No hags had cut any throats.  Analogs are totally never complete.

The car did not explode.  Later in my life, I would see cars explode with a concussive sort of dusty finality Hollywood never bothers to capture.  This night, the car just went up in a whooshing ball of yellow flames.  A mongrel cry from all the ugly poor mostly high school drop-out Druids worshiping at the stainless forty gallon alter in the back of the Ford erupted into the ether.  We were far back in the canyons long since abandoned since coal quit turning a profit.  That car burned spectacularly for a few glorious minutes, then settled into an anticlimactic smolder.  The cedar, burned through, failed to hold the car anymore and it finished rolling into the bottom of the canyon.  At some point, the gas tank must have went, but we didn’t notice.

We packed up in a hurry.  We were all high on our crime and wanted to clear out before we ended up doing time.  A last look around for any objects left behind that might have some damning evidence and we loaded up.  Andrew drove out of there way too fast and way too conspicuous.  Me and a strung out angel I met earlier that night sat in the bed of the truck and watched the orange glow over the rim of the canyon disappear behind us.  Andrew liked to run from the cops.   They never actually chased us, but he liked the general motivation.  The straining old Ford got us back to what passed for civilization and our crime was boasted of.  The cheap warm beer made its rounds there in a culdesac in a Clifton trailer park and we woke up under a gray, cold dawn.  I was laying in the back of his truck wrapped up in a sleeping bag with the strung out angel.

The sun come up over the Mesa and the frost turned to dew.  She groaned at the cold and sort of melted backwards into me.

Vacancy

I walked through the graveyard, with the sun cutting the heavy mercury and cadmium clouds into pieces and the green farmland sodden with Fall rain.  The pinyon and juniper stood a sort of unassuming green along the ridges with the silver sage.  The good red earth of the Montezuma County highlands contoured itself in draping skirts and concentric rims along the islands of erosion fighting natural vegetation.  The clouds started to come apart, drawn by their own gravity into droplets and then to the earth below.  The sun still shone where the clouds were not.  The cottonwoods burst into a sort of October flame.

This was not the graveyard of an assuming people.  There were no great monuments.  The stones were on the small side, a few hand carved and weathered into near unreadability.  Somewhere under the stone, the home-made coffins of mothers, daughters, sons and fathers were long since reduced to splinters spilling their biological load into the surrounding loam.  Some of the graves were new.  The soil still mounded up so that the soaking and sinking and the collapsing coffin wouldn’t leave an indentation.

A few brethren milled around in their denim work coats discussing where the likely good hunting locations would be in the glade.  The women cast wary eyes on their own children, the mortality of whom had been made manifest in the tiny coffin waiting to be lowered into an empty grave.  The parents of the coffin had tried their whole life to conceive and God had not seen fit to bless them until earlier that year.  The lord then saw fit to remove the blessing a few months into the arrangement.

The Brethren are a tough people. Laconic and a little more in touch with the pain of being sentient mortals.  They don’t believe in the trappings of modern life.  Lawyers, doctors, politicians, warfare.  They rely on God exclusively.  They will send sons to war when they are asked and they will allow the laws to come and go.  But they let God tell them through a system of prophets and prophetesses what God would have them do.  Generally God is pretty common sense about the whole thing.

He did tell these parents they would conceive.  He never gave them any reason to hope to hold a live son or daughter.  The faith of the parents is such that they never questioned God on this niggling allocation of blessing.  Babies still die in the world of The Brethren and life is not something to be taken for granted. Neither is the soil or the rain or the game in the fields.

After a few shaky bars, the hymns got stronger and the voices reached up into the disintegrating clouds where the sun was losing ground.  One of my cousins put his hand up on the shoulder of the father whose jaw was set into concrete and whose eyes were staring intently into the hole. The hand shook him.  The jaw moved a little.  Not to talk.  Just a vague back and forth movement they eyes got a little more intense.  My cousin’s dad took the hand off of the Father’s shoulder and gave my cousin a withering look.

The Father returned to his stoicism.  And the coffin was lowered by rope into the hole to sit in the mud and water pooling in the bottom.  The Brethren don’t throw dirt or flowers into graves, or any of that other Catholic nonsense.  We filed away from grave.  Reassurances were uttered and not listened to.  God was invoked a time or two, sometimes with alarming conviction.  The men lounging around on the nearby backhoe perked up and lit cigarettes.  My dad and the Father were good friends inside the already closeknit church.  We hung around until the other cars were gone with the two of them discussing the benefits of the Ford 352 vs. the 351 Windsor small block.  Finally, the grieving found its way deep into the man where only he could deal with it by thinking and grinding the world into his own mental mortis pot. We shook hands and made plans to hunt.  The Mother had long since retired to the cab of their pickup.  The Father joined her and started the truck.  There was no embrace or screaming drama.  Just a silent dialog of survivorship.

Me and my dad loaded up in our old van.

As I shut the door, the backhoe fired up, blowing black smoke into the rain.

*************

Just a nice October thought for you nice people.

Honesty

The subjectivity of truth is more or less obvious to any thinking person.

Don’t be concerned.  I’ve just destroyed the world I’m living in.  I’ll be alright, in a little while.  But you’ll be permanently lonely.  I’m not sure why, I just felt like quoting (poorly) Willie Nelson.  And I’m not even sure who I would write that to.

Lately, I’ve been struggling.  I never can seem to find myself a step ahead of whatever crash is coming my way.  When you’re caught in a river, at least the mountain type as opposed to the lazy flat and tired rivers of the flatlands, you rarely drown.  Mostly, you’re beat to death.  It has nothing to do with your ability to swim. You never can get above the rocks that the river uses to kill you.  That’s sort of how it is now.  I can’t seem to get ahead.  Just constantly finding myself behind the overthrown ball.

Not really.

I find myself constantly focusing on the wrong things.

That isn’t true either. Not totally.  I’m focusing on the right things. I’m saving the right amounts of money. I’m fixing the right problems.  I have the right parts on order and the right motivations and the right skills.  The transmission will get rebuilt (by me) early next month, along with the oil pump in a new motor for my Scout.  Already got the new carb.  At that point, the entire drivetrain will be new.  At that point, I can focus on tires.  I might as well go with a bias ply, I hardly drive anywhere.  I’ll be changing up my gym routine next week and focusing on toning and anaerobic endurance.  I’ll have a good running vehicle and a good running body.  I’ll also have a 3.2ish GPA for this semester, which should pull up a somewhat struggling record from the last two semesters.

I’ve also maintained single and unattached as a lifestyle choice for a damn long time.

I decided not to buy a set of headers for my Scout.  Headers are a type exhaust manifold made out of pipes that are all the same length.  It dresses it up, makes it all sound better, stronger, more desirable, but in the end, it’s just another expense with no real net gain.  Fact: headers are good for a 2% horsepower gain.  Fact: temperature and relative humidity can swing your performance by as much as 10%.  Fact: I can gain 7% net horsepower by making sure my tires are properly inflated.  Headers do spice up your sound and make you a more impressive beast rolling down the road.  They are shiny.  But they gain you less power, and by extension efficieny, than something simple like proper tire care.  Why spend the money acquiring something like that and spend the energy installing it in an already cramped engine compartment?

Did you spot the metaphor? It was subtle like that on purpose. That’s what writers do.  That’s a tip, kids, write it down.

I bought a new guitar stand.  It holds two of them back to back. It’s nice to be able to move the Jag out of my bed and somewhere I can grab it when I need it.  Or when I want it.  I guess I could just keep it in its case, but that makes it out of sight and out of mind.  I could just sell it.  I could sell all of them, except for the old Strat I’ve had since my teenage years. It’s good to keep something with some history on it around.  Even if you don’t play it, it’s nice to know its there.  And it always looks good.

Me and my brother made a pact once in which we promised ourselves never to buy another old truck.  With those reassuring solid lines and the light odor of gasoline and history.  With the smooth thrumming vibration when you close the metal door.  With the wooden beds like the old stepside my dad had when we were little.  Me and my brothers used to ride in the back of the truck and stare up at the stars as we drove through Disappointment Valley or Unaweep Canyon or huddled up under blankets crossing over Lizardhead.  But old trucks, we decided, were bad.  We decided our habit had got out of control and we were being dumb.  It cost us a lot of money, and we were constantly slaving away for and on these old trucks.  A few months later, I bought the Scout.  A few weeks after that, my brother bought a ‘67 Hi-Boy.  Once I came home from a deployment and bought a little old stepside Ford.

Once I wrote something pretty incoherent and a little hateful on love.  Or heroism. Could have been either.

They’re both the same sort of bullshit.

Gratuitous Colorado Porn and a Question

The camping trip my brother and I planned went terribly.  Snow.  Ice.  Fishing poles engineered from aspen saplings.  I would guess it was around -129° F or so.

That may be an exageration.

But the waterfall froze.

As did everything else. Check out my Facebook page for the rest.  I’m trying to get them on Flickr later.

Anyway, the point of this post, I have decided is something else entirely.

I think I need glasses.  Now, if I had to say what I look like, I would have to say you should imagine something between “Yippy ki yay, motherfucker” and “I live my life a quarter mile at a time.” Only with a more square shaped face.

Questions for the women:

So what the hell kind of glasses would I put on?

Do they make badass glasses?  Seriously, I Google image searched every query I could think of.

If a man is built like a linebacker, what glasses would you like to see on him?

Assumptions:

Contacts are out of the question, I only need the lens conditionally.  They have to be a little tough, since my lifestyle is pretty extreme.  The glasses can’t have color or crazy style flourishes.

Development

I guess I won’t be able to send half the emails I write anymore.  Thanks bunches, Gmail.

I hope for and dread wordpress coming around to this technology.

http://www.nbc11news.com/home/headlines/30688884.html