God is Great, God is Good…

Sometimes I make it seem like love is lost and that I am one man too jaded to understand the word, outside of guitars and old trucks.  But I do love.

I absolutely, positively love naked women. 

 

That is all.

Flat Bread, Vaguely Meso-American, Slightly Greek Tasting, Pizzaesque Round Things

I made this up a few years ago, when I found out that I had accidentally began dating a vegetarian. I wrote it up to post on an old website I had back in them days, so it was a very rough draft. There was no less than ten times I said “fucking olive oil.”

It was like someone got sloppy drunk and made hummus in their back yard or something. I revisited this recipe in spirit recently, and would add pictures were my camera not stolen. The only real changes were cooking it inside and using a little havarti along with the mozzarella.

The black beans add a sweeter and earthier flavor than chickpeas would, at least to me. Also, the style and amount of seasoning makes for an almost Moroccan feel. I could see adding some mint and tumeric and dropping the cocoa and cumin. I’m curioius to see what people come up with.

The barley I used was a combination of Irish red, a dark crystal, and a chocolate (very dark) roasted malt. I don’t remember what I used back then, but I bet it was some manner of light roast. If you don’t have access to brewer’s barley, just use more whole wheat flour. You could use anything, really. The flax seed is, of course, optional. I honestly think that this flat bread is almost too good to go slathering in sauces and cheese. Try making it, you’ll see what I mean. It’s almost a shame to not eat it just with some grape seed oil and some salt.

Other ideas I had for the hummus:

• Sweetcorn
• Pine nuts
• Wine
• Olives
• Roasted peppers
• Grapeseed oil (I live in vineyard alley)

Again, if you feel like trying your own take, let me know.

The recipe is as follows.

Flat Bread:

I used regular old white flour, whole wheat flour, barley (making beer leaves you a large amount of good roasted barley), and cooked flax seed. The proportions were (roughly) 4:4:4:1, flour, w.w flour, barley, and flax. I obviously am an expert at this sort of thing. This is the basic flatbread recipe I used:

Ingredients!

• 3 cups of the grain mix
• 1/4 olive oil
• 2 teaspoons baking powder
• a small amount of baking soda
• 1 cup or so ice water
• some salt
• Paprika

This is where my cooking style gets complicated. Take about a tablespoonish of the olive oil and get it heating in a well seasoned cast skillet or, if you have not cast iron in your residence (and you should die), use a nonstick pan. If the teflon thing is the case, I think you should use less oil. But I’m not sure.

Now, I am aware of the heart palpitations baking powder causes some gourmands. To which I say, quit being a bitch. I use corn starch in gravy, to0, sugar tits.

Onward. Combine the ingredients and make it into dough. This is a highly technical process of mixing shit together and wallering it around until it forms a big ball of crap on your counter. This is the “dough.”

Divide it into around five pieces if you want roughly eight inch loaves. I like to flatten them out, dust them with some flour and some paprika (not too much), and stack them in a plate next to the fire. Right, forgot to mention. The whole reason for flat bread is that my oven is broken and my landlord’s a dick. So I built a fire in the back yard. Which, again, cast iron works the best. And you never know when you may have vegetarians show up for dinner after the apocalypse comes. Cast iron, bitches. Get some.

So, take those loaves, poke some holes in them for bubble control and place them on the medium hot skillet. Watch them like a hawk. They cook really fast. I don’t have a clock in my back yard, because I am a dangerous criminal, so I just watched them start to bubble. If the bubbles get big, you burned it. Dumbass. Now go back inside.

So, after you got those done up, you now have flat bread.

The Hummus:

This is where I expect hateful comments. But, they will cry, hummus is made from chickpeas! Tahini! Lemon juice! By brown sensitive people wearing sarongs!

To which I say bullshit. Hummus literally translates “bean.” It’s bean dip for pretentious (nearly) white people. Like myself.

So, this is my Vaguely Meso-American Hummus.

Ingredients!

• About a pound of cooked black beans. Cook them yourself, buy them in a can, whatever.
• Olive oil. Not sure how much (as you shall see)
• One jalapeno
• Seven cloves of garlic
• Some cider vinegar
• Some red wine vinegar
• About a teaspoon of Mexican oregano
• Cinnamon (pinch)
• Cocoa (pinch)
• Cumin (pinch)
• Salt
• Lime juice
• About two tablespoons of oatmeal, raw (note: this is just for texture, omit it if you want)

This is pretty straight forward. Make sure the beans are dry, or at least that the cooking fluid is drained off as much as you can. I usually set them to drain first, while I do everything else.

So, about this olive oil. The jalapenos were a present (such are my friends) out of a friend’s garden and were canned in olive oil. So, honestly, I have no idea how much eventual olive oil went into this. I recommend just figuring it out on your own. So, I chopped raggedly and doggedly at the cloves of garlic, but didn’t bother making them too small. I browned them slowly in olive oil with the sliced jalpeno that I had to vein and seed to cut some heat (Goddamn, that woman knows how to grow a chili). Go ahead and brown the garlic pretty good, just don’t burn it.

So, then I dumped everything into the food processer and got it spinning. You’re best off adding the beans last.

Let the blades chop up all the peppers and garlic into the vinegar (only add a little for now). Also, the oatmeal needs to be chopped up before the beans, in my experience with any other bean and oatmeal mixture. You can put in the oregano now if you want, and I really do recommend the Mexican species, but if you only have the regular, whatever.

So, once you got the liquid part processed, dump in the beans and turn them into paste. This is where I added juice of a small lime, the small amounts of cinnamon, cumin, and cocoa, along with rest of the vinegar. I would just add vinegar in slow amounts and keep tasting it until you get what you want. I wonder, and if you experiment, let me know how it goes, if adding a really rich and dry red wine would help this out at all. Like maybe a Sangiovese or Chianti.

That will make more than enough for five of these pizzas with a little left over.

Final Construction:

I slathered some fancy/schmancy bean dip onto the oiled up bread and added a couple chunks of mozzarella and a few slices of zucchini. On top of that, I laid down some spinach and a few more pieces of cheese. I give it a good squirt of olive oil and placed it over a medium hot part of the fire with the skillet turned upside down on top of it, like a lid. This could be done (probably better) on a barbecue grill if you wanted to. Again, the fire was necessity. I can say I love the smell of cedar smoke, and the smoke did get into the pizza.

This recipe is easily modifiable, and any part of it can be adapted to a shitload of other recipes. If you give it a shot, let me know what you did.

The Bread Was Marginal

I’m having a stout for dinner and washing it down with a steak. It’s a flat iron, the top of the shoulder blade, what we used to call the cutting tips when we would process venison or elk. It’s a cut that needs some trimming, but no help in flavor. I generally avoid marinades like I avoid fruit in my beer, but this cut has obviously sat in some garlic butter and rosemary for a few hours. I would have used sage and black pepper and a three hour slow poach in clarified butter, I told her. She had asked about my steak and my beer. The beer: a chocolate stout that was precisely $2.00 a pint. The steak was one of the so-called value cuts. I agree with the term, as it is indeed valuable.

The cut goes against the grain, and since it is in the family of chuck, the beef flavor is strong and present. Due also to its origin up in the working quarter of the steer, the flat iron is a lean cut. I have long since given up on the fillet mignon or any of those other overpriced and under-flavored bastard cut slices of baby food consistency pink mush.

She stares at my plate and asks if it’s good. I tell her you can tell when the price of corn goes up. And I take another slice, one half inch wide along the axis of striation and one inch long with the marbling. They used a sort of butter complication with whole peppercorn and tasteful applications of bleu cheese to top the steak. The snap peas and green beans are slightly over steamed, but they’re good in their own right. The potato is slightly undercooked, but it is late on a Sunday night.

“So, what about that guy earlier, right?”

Oh, I say, he was drunk.

Because stating the obvious kills conversation.

“I know! But he sure liked you. He was totally gay.”

“Sure enough seemed it.”

I talk with my mouth full sometimes. I take the beer down to half mast. It’s a chocolate stout. They’re all the same.

“And he was drunk!” She pronounces drunk as a two syllable word and my steak is down to 25%. It is now time for the potato.

“I’m used to drunks talking me up in this bar, but usually they’re pushing forty and got implants.”

She says nothing. I turn the plate and begin to stir in the butter pats I had inserted into the incision along the potato’s keel earlier. Salt, pepper, and sour cream add to it. And I fold in the sides and eat some of the peel to open up the steaming cavity.

“It’s my birthday today.”

“Idn’t that somethin’.” My mouth has potato in it and I decide I don’t like this person.

“I’m twenty-one!”

The ‘one’ stretches out on the vowel until it breaks off into pointlessness. I am now sure I do not like this person.

She punches my arm while I lift another bite to my mouth, “I had this totally awesome day, though! My mom took me out for lunch and we had a bunch of wine, then my friend took me out to see a movie, then my friends said we should meet here and we’ll do a bunch of shots, and then we’re, like, gonna take the party home and get even more crazy.”

Hmm. My mouth has food in it. SportsCenter is on. NASCAR highlights are somehow fascinating this very moment. And I try to watch the closed captioning scroll by. And she talks on interminably.

And I think. Everyone knows you can’t divide by zero, I tell her in my head while she updates me on the status of her friends relationships. But it’s the why. I thought of it the other day. I heard someone explaining the rules of zero.

Zero can ride the numerator out. He doesn’t put it that way, but I always think of terms in an equation or function like seats in a car. A Mustang tubed out with a 427 with those Weiland heads. Suck, squeeze, bang, blow, motherfucker. Fight the annihilation with inertia and combustion, son. Send it out back through a Powerglide stalled at three grand and to the wheels through that Ford nine inch. Light ‘em up, baby.  Get the smoke rolling. Let it breath her in. Like when she smiles at me quicksliver and lost highways and I don’t want to write about about her because she may go away. Sometimes I don’t like to think about her. Same reason.

So zero can be the numerator. The man says, “Get it? Like, I can take zero dollars out of my pocket and share with everybody, right? And, like, what do they all get? Nothing, right? That’s dividing zero, but if I divide by zero, what does that even mean?”

And his hands are out palms up and his shoulders shrug and a few people get it and I find myself falling. Like that time I was on the mushrooms up on Old Powderhorn, when the trees above me, reaching up into the alpine blue, turned into the benchstones around the rim of a well I was in, and I was falling, forever and away into darkness. Not to say it was unpleasant. All galaxies fall away into eggs spread out in the skillet working up to over-easy. And the bacon grease shining that iron is our consciousness, dude. Or so I said to whoever the fuck had sold me the shrooms and was about all pupil over on my left. I mentioned the well falling scenario too, which brought a sort of tear to her eye.

So, my mind said as I fell off and away into the egg of universal mind, fertilizing it with question and doubt, what does it even mean, to divide by zero? If the analogy is that you take a number of dollars out of your pocket (numerator) and you split it with a number of people (denominator), what does it even mean to divide by zero? And I saw the pocket disappear. But more than that, there was no me to share the dollars. And no friends to take them. And no dollars to share because all the world went up in a white hot flash of holy fuck, I am high as hell right now. But I wasn’t high.

I was listening (to horribly abuse that particular verb) to her go on about her party and she would not stop. And the world was still here. She was not dividing by zero and undefining the universe. The steak was good, if spongy and grassy tasting. Again, you can taste the price of corn in a good beef.

She asked how you could tell. Because, I say, corn makes it sweet and fatty and the meat doesn’t hold together. Cows are real unhealthy on corn, but it makes them taste the way people expect them to taste. Grassfeds are spongier and the meat has less sugar to it.

And up on the TV the captions roll on, white on black, and the cations roll on in my head, and I think about quicksilver eyes and dimpled up smiles.

And writing about her would be like dividing by zero. And the universe chokes on me just then. I am grass fed, it seems.

Update

1. June approaches. Nothing is done.

2. The Scout lives.  The computer does not.

3. Calculus goes poorly.

4. I find math, even (especially) math I don’t understand, to be particularly inspiring.

5. Rocks.  They are still the fucking schist.

6. Geologists make the bedrock.

7. I am done with bad jokes.

8. I sort of want to start up The Five again.

9. GSR is a punk.

10. Those double super secret goals of mine come along nicely, most days.

11. All is well on the guitar front.

12. Shortly, I shall take yon Scout up Elephant Hill in Canyonlands National Park.

13. Booze is involved.

14. So are rocks.

15. No real complaints.

16. Fuck you, I am NOT selling my rowboat.

10 PRINT “I WILL KILL YOU”

Goddamn right I will.

You think standing hip deep in someone’s guts with wearing their face for camo is tragic. That is motherfucking Thursday for met, bitch.

Steal my shit one more time, you goddamn crackheads. You know what you got waiting for you? .338 Weatherby, asshole. It doesn’t have to be silent when I’m a mile away. Yeah, I saw your meth mouth face walking away with my bike wheel. Well, you have misjudged this biker.

I don’t wear spandex. I don’t drink PowerGel. I don’t carbo-load or shave my arms. I am a big, scary, murdering motherfucker. And you stole my shit.

If I see your cheap Wal-Mart Mongoose running my Mavic X rim on stainless spokes spinning on that XTR hub with the brake disc I made my GODDAMN SELF, then you will meet my two best friends. The one on the left with the grinder burns and the broken pinky is Thunder, the one on the right with the knife scars is Lightning. You will be aquainted.

That’s right.

20 GOTO 10, motherfucker.

Snap, Crackle, Pop. You are not ready for the fate that awaits you.

RUN, bitch. RUN.

Excuses, Appeals, Gratuitous Boobies, and Apothecaries of Fire

I’m entering a literature contest.  The prize? A totally sweet bike!.  The runner up gets a bike frame.  Still pretty sweet, really.

I do plan on taking it over some sweet jumps, or whatever the exact quote of that movie is.

Point being, I will be busy on that, not on this blog.  I’ve been working as much as I can on writing some different things, but with my computer awaiting a powerjack/USB daughterboard and me needing to buy a spade tip for my soldering iron, it may have to wait.  Speaking of soldering irons.  Remember this post? Of course you do.  It is the third most active post (I’m not sure what WordPress means by that) on the whole damn two years worth of blog.  Maybe not two years.  I have no idea.  I think coming up on a year.

The dark matter body in that picture is a Fender Jaguar HH guitar.  I recently soldered in a bridge new pickup from guitarfetish.com and recapped the pot and the guitar recreated itself.  It has a super smokey sound.  I love it more every day.  It has cost me homework time and probably kept me single.  But holy Jesus it sounds good through my Fender tube combo amp.  Goose it a little with a TS-9 and it takes off.  Why is this important to mention? Because nobody on the internet ever talks about mods to this guitar.  Now I have.  Google will love me.  You want any advice on mods, wayfaring query makers? Email me.

Also on the equipment front:

I fabricated a few new parts for my Scout. Pictures forthcoming, should I ever find my mini-USB cable.

This is the most circuitous apology for not commenting on anybody’s stuff I have ever read.

That was the point.  Been busy. Computer broke. Can’t comment.  I still check everybody in my reader once every few days.  Well, NurseMyra over at the Gimcrack takes up most of my Friday computer time, but everyone should understand.

She should have a Guitar Friday.

Continuing Work

This is a continuation of these posts, in sequence:

http://voxproletariat.wordpress.com/2008/11/08/down/

http://voxproletariat.wordpress.com/2008/12/28/session-work/

And February thaws outside her window. The window is a small box of access, showing the opposite wall of a very small and unkempt courtyard. Outside, through the warbling ribbons of melt water on the glass, I can see a kid staring at the wall. The bandages on his sides and the stump under his right knee catch the sun and scatters brilliance and whiteness.

Her office has one other window, an inconsequential and out of place rectangle on her left. It lets in a solid shaft of dizzying sunlight, illuminating the dust swirling through the air and the lines of her hand as she scratches on her pad. Today, she has a little makeup on. It’s beautiful, but her lack of perfect proficiency due to rare practice shows a little. Her skin is a little too smooth. Her lips are a little too pink. Our appointment is her last of the day. She finishes her words and looks up at me. Her eyes give me the critical hardness around the edges and gradually fall into ease. Her skin loosens around her cheekbones a little and she smiles.

“So, how are we today?”

“I can’t make any accounting for your mood, but I’m pretty good. No real complaints.”

“You were right, you know.”

“I generally am,” and I see her eyes roll, ” But you’ll have to tell me what I’m right about this time.”

“You do get more country in your accent when you go down there. How was it?”

“Good. I mean, the weather and such was good. Truck run good. He isn’t getting any better.”

And I hear my own voice drop into some deeper and thicker place. And I hate it.

Her smile fades and her brow furrows into the sympathy she knows I hate. In the months I’ve known her, she’s learned me well. She knows not to let sympathy turn into a drip of sickly sweet consolation. She knows when I am about to shut off. And she knows when she can do nothing. And that is what shows as the sympathy flickers away, the resignation.

“Is he just old?”

“Yeah, ninety-five. And he’s had a stroke. And since they don’t believe in doctors, he just toughed it out. He’s slow. And he can’t talk right. But you can tell he’s still all there. Just got that about to die exhaustion.”

“How big was he in your life.”

“I ain’t sure how big. He give me my name. He give us all our name. When he adopted my dad.”

“It does take a lot of love to adopt and raise a kid.”

I squirm. She uses that word to gauge me. Some days I can take it. Some days it makes me squirm. She has something like mirth creeping up from behind her eyes. She scratches in her light hand a few words. I’m lost to what I try and open to her. And myself. At least for a little while. And her eyes get a little hard when she looks up and a little disappointed. I’m not sure about what.

I look past her to the window and through the falling down thaw the kid is being wheeled back across the brown and dry grass into the double doors. He wasn’t staring at the wall before. His eyes are set stationary. He has them set on the same nowhere as the world turns around him and he’s pulled inside by the nurse.  I watch the drama of nothing play out behind her desk in the courtyard as she tries to find me. I know what she’s doing and I wish I could help.

We sit for a few minutes listening to nothing and snowmelt while the sun cuts the room into wide sections through the filterpress of the windows. The wide swaths of light on the carpet drip with the shadows of the water running down.

“I know,” she says.

“Sorry. Just drifted there a while.”

And through the haze of a million other thoughts, her voice forms its own writing on the wall of what I can handle right now.

Was it good otherwise, she asks me. And a larger melting bunch of snow slides fast down behind her.

It was. Beautiful. I’m from there.

Scratching on paper and some words are percolating out of my chest while my mind is seeing the broken cathedral of Shiprock cutting into the haze ahead of the Luca Chucas and the Ute towering up, the skeleton of a failed volcano. And the San Juans to the east, giving birth to a new sun that gilds the snow on the hay fields and in the cedar and on the blue silver branches of sage. You always feel right when you get close enough home, I say. And we were kids running through the house. Playing with the old guitar and wondering at the bellows and brands and pokers over the stone fireplace. And we were listening to the Word, argued out like Joshua was alive and still God’s wrecking ball. The grating basso voice of him. The Stetson hat and the turquoise and silver and cowhide of him. The God in him and through him and ever reaching out into space from his deeds.

I tell her about the time he set my brother’s broken arm. And the time he came to the house and prayed for me with olive oil on his fingers rubbing into my forehead. And the shaking of his voice. And his tight closed eyes over me as he asked God, if it be his will, to keep this one alive as the Church had had to bury too many young ones.

“Were you sick? Was this still before your family started going to doctors?”

It was before, I tell her. I was bit by a black widow seven times, I may have been six or seven. I was seven. It felt like I had been stabbed and set on fire. I’d also been tickbit the same camping trip. I was all kinds of fucked up.

And I come back to her. And she welcomes me back. And I want to tell her something but it hides under another thing that I can’t move. So I keep watching her write.

After we make our next appointment, I get up out of her chair and gather up my backpack. It’s about a mile to the gym and a mile more to my house. I pull the straps over my shoulders and hop little a to set them, a trick I learned from carrying heavier and more important packs in other more important places. I leave before we can change our meeting time again.

And the gym is the same and the gym goers are the same and my heart is still up on the high cold and long gone lonesome blue of that place. But I work hard. I don’t know what else to do. And I think of strength, what it means, where I learned it. And I think of a strong man, a homesteader of some thousand acres of still hostile Ute country and adopter of children he owed nothing, and I think of him laying still and needing bathed and changed and fed. Then of the world, ever loving and dying and screaming low with winter without him in it. And the weight of the dumbbells doubles and trebles and they fall down beside me.  And the veins and battered pinched white scars show heavy on my hands in the sidelighting evening sun.

Conclusions: A/B Closure in Higher Order Primates

The subject has come up a bunch of places lately.  I think it’s just the spring time.  Soon, you’ll start seeing relationship advice leading the Yahoo header istead of celebrity gossip or political news.  People get flight in the spring, which I guess is normal.  Maybe it isn’t right, and maybe it isn’t nice, but if you’re going to leave someone, you never seem to do it in the cold winter when you need their support or comfort.  I’m not much of a leaver, as that would require me to be a commiter, but I can observe the actions of others.  And so you feel the pull of life and you leave, never to look back or some such bullshit Lifetime Network philosophy.

This is what I don’t understand:

Why is closure necessary?  Not closure as far as leaving and calling it over.  That is easy.  I have been on both sides, and the easiest part is calling it over.  It’s like figuring out someone is dead.  It’s easy to tell.  They are no longer alive.  It’s harder to find this nebulous goal of closure.

To me, there are two(2) ways to handle it.  One is the way men handle it more often than women (Type A), and the other is the way women handle the burden more often than men (Type B).  Not to say that one is the male and one is the female way to attain this closure.  We’re all people more than we’re the product of our reproductive plumbing and I’m sure we all do both of these throughout our lives.

So, Type A Closure:

No drama, just pretend they died.  This sounds dumb, but it really works.  Just forget they still breathe.  That they still live and love and fuck or any number of those things you imagine them doing with anyone but you.  Hard to be jealous when the person does not exist.  In this case, closure, strictly speaking, is really not necessary.  It just sort of happens because the person you miss is dead and buried and you grieve and then remember there’s still a lot of wine and lonely girls, in the words of a wise man.

Type B Closure is complicated.  You need closure.  The curtain must fall.  The lessons must be learned.  The character arcs need to terminate on a y-intercept where they only matter as lessons learned, puppies loved, etc.

Horseshit, in other words.  Type B is total horseshit, and often results in cruelty.

The closest I have been to Type B closure is when a girl left and I found the roots of my belief system all over again.  For a while, I was a Theravada Buddhist, and in all honesty, still live that way.  Not the crystals, vegetarianism,  and incense bullshit new-agey Buddhism of most Westerners who want to feel some ancient moving something.  The easiest way to describe the belief system I have would be to say that it is appreciative atheism with codified methods to reduce suffering.

When she left, it took a while, and some bad decisions, to remember the realities of being mortal.  Attachment is bad.  I forgot about impermanence, and it led to suffering.  So, I got back into it.  I started focusing on presence.  I started believing again in the truth of the falling away of everything.  Even the rocks, as eternal as they seem, are records of extinctions and death and of the dismantling of even older rocks.

So, it was not closure, so to speak, it was just picking up my fuck up and moving on.

The girl on the other hand, she needed Closure.  Now, the worst part about Type B closure is that you don’t have it until you dismiss the other person from your one person melodrama with an audience of mirrors pointed at the stage.  So, you are not able to treat the other as dead.  You have to tell the person how great you are without them.  You have to let them know they don’t matter.

And the girl found reasons to stay in touch and when we talked, she would let me know how much better she looked with all her time working out or how happy she was with the New Guy who was nothing like me.  And how she was richer.  And how she had all the time in the world in this new spring time of freedom and love and flowers and rainbows.  And how she could never have had that with me.  It hurt, but I guess I knew what she was doing.  I don’t believe in karma, as that is not an espoused doctrine in my Buddhism, but I do believe in suffering, which is always to be avoided and never, ever caused if you can help it.  I just took her bullshit and let it hurt, and then started over the truth in my head that she had just died, never left.

She got her tidy Type B closure, I think.  But I have a feeling she still feels me in her bones sometimes and in her one person play with the curtain never falling on her Next Big Act.  Just like I used to when I cared about my imaginary play where the hero writes, directs, and produces.  And all the supporting cast is there to further the narrative of the One Who is Unknown finding some fucking thing or other.  I have never been happier than when I let the narrative go.  When I give up on trying to make my life mean anything greater than existing and when I quit writing subscripts and little notes in the margins.

And so she walked out of my life forever.  Curtain.  Short intermission, then Act 312,002.  Fuck that.

We’ve all left or been left or been generalized shitheads of high order to one another.  Fuck that.

Hear the bell toll, my friend.  The truth doesn’t have a conclusion.

Interview

I submitted to an interview from this person who was assisted by this person.  The rules of this game are simple.  I linked back to her, and if you want me to ask you five questions, then just ask. Then you post the answers and you link to this post. It makes a superb post when you got nothing else.

The questions:

1) What do you want to be when you grow up?

More awesome than I am now.  It is hard to imagine, but I see the glittering hope of a future impossibly bright and the gods walking away from their forge fires in absolute awe of what I will become.  Then I will buy one more rock hammer and the world will explode with disbelief at how unbelievably great I am.

That and a racecar driver.

2) What are 1 or 2 defining moments in your life?

I honestly don’t believe in defining moments, so I’m not sure. I gave this one a lot of thought and I can’t think of any singular occurrences. They were all part of larger systems of experience.

Ok, here is one:

We were out hunting with some family from the old church. I may have been about six. I think I was in kindergarten. Anyway, hunting was something we all took very serious. The economy was such in that part of Colorado that not getting a kill in the fall meant no meat in the spring. So, it was a whole family thing. The kids who were too young to carry rifles were set to go down into this canyon around the Delores River valley south of Dove Creek and walk the arroyo flushing out game so the men and older boys could shoot them from the rim. This was pretty wild country and there was sign of bear and cougar all over. I mentioned to my dad that I was worried about wild cats. I asked him what I should do if a mountain lion came after me. With some great solemnity he handed me his bone hatchet and it was heavy and covered in blood from hunts before I was even born.

He patted my head and said in all seriousness, “If you don’t fight back, you ain’t my son.”

Then he set me off into the sage and cedar.

What that defines, I don’t know.

3) How would you be different if you didn’t join the military and have the experience?

A. I would be in jail. I needed to get as far out of town as possible, and in a hurry.

B. Every time I feel like not doing something and have some excuse, like being sick or being hurt, I hear my RDC (the equivalent of a drill sergeant), who happened to look a lot like Chris Farley on steroids and sounded like he drank an entire bottle of whiskey every night, saying, “Bullshit, you’re just not motivated. I have an idea, sweetie sugartits, how about you punch yourself in the GOTdamn ovaries and knock off your sissy lala bullshit!”

So, I guess in short, I would have no idea what the human body and human mind is capable of, good or bad. Also, I would not have been married, divorced, awarded, reprimanded, spent any time in executive officer inquiries, had immorally awesome times with genetically diverse and very eager women in countries I had never heard of before, felt the thrill of killing, the guilt of the same, the absolute rage at authority, or the peace of the Straits of Hormuz.

I guess I don’t know how to answer the question.

4) Why is Dexter Colt your fucking idol?

Because he manages to be a bigger dickhead, a more miserable loudmouth, and a less lovable motherfucker with every post but he’s got a cyber harem full of hot women that will rally in a few seconds into a massive estrogen army such as the world has never seen.

That and he is actually a gold plated cow.

5) What is your favourite rock and why? –> my lame ass question

That is not a lame question. It’s just hard to answer.

I would say my favorite rocks are the ones that tell the best stories. I like the precambrian basement rocks, mostly gneisses and such, that you find in the Colorado Plateau because they tell the story of an old island arc colliding with Laurentia. I like the ultramylonitic rocks of Death Valley because they tell a story of a continent torn apart. I like the microquakes of the moho because they tell the story of olivines compressing into smaller solids proving Plato right about those platonic solids. I like the salt collapse structures of Paradox. But you know, the volcanic necks and sills of Shiprock, New Mexico, and the Abajos, and Lizardhead have played a large part in my life. Fuck, I don’t know.

I guess if I had to have a favorite, I would say the eolian sandstones of the Western US. Specifically the Entrada formation. It’s the one that forms most of the arches and the jointed rocks that make the Desert Southwest so ethereal.  But then there are the laccoliths of Monument Valley.  This question is unfair.  I don’t ask you to name a favorite shoe.

And I think you spelled ‘favorite” wrong.