“You know, we should not be giving cash to people who basically are just going to blow it on drugs and not take care of their own children.” — Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah).

Dear Sen. Orrin Hatch

My children are all grown up and doing as well as they can. As for myself, I haven’t done drugs since the early 70s. A rebellious thing of the 60s/70s, you know how it is. Well, maybe not. You seem like a pretty uptight, straight asshole to me, but what the hell, different strokes and all that.

I assume you receive a paycheck for your, er, services to the, er, people of this country. We are your boss, right? I mean, it is our tax dollars that pay your way, right? Anyway, I assume you receive a paycheck and are able to pay your bills on time. Well, guess what? I don’t. I’m one of those unemployed through no fault of mine. Indeed, I’d say it’s more your fault I’m unemployed than mine. You and your cronies are the ones handing millions to your friends on Wall Street and driving all the jobs over to third world countries.

Anyway, I also assume you like to eat. So do I. I like to keep the lights on, too. A little AC is nice in these hot climes. Laundry, too. Clean clothes are so important for that pointless job search. I say pointless since you and your cronies have all but killed any hope of a job.

Anyway, I was just wondering, since you seem to have your fingers on the pulse of the issue, just where do you think we unemployed are going to get the money for food and clothing and the other essentials a human needs to survive with you and your cronies cutting off the only lifeline we have left?

Yours in hoping you rot in hell
AnonyMoose

Will no one stand and scream that enough is enough? Jefferson would weep over what’s become of his beloved land. He would be on the front line of change, holding a banner high, making secret plans to overthrow a government that is no longer representative of its people.

I have no problem with Obama. I think he could be a good president, if it’s possible for any politician to be anything but a lying piece of shit out to fulfill his or her own personal agenda. He is young and idealistic and came up from the streets and you would think he might have acquired a clue along the way. It sure doesn’t seem that way. And none of those around him seem to have a clue either. Maybe they should step out of their protected door and ask the homeless, jobless guy walking down the street what’s up? He might give them an earful.

We need a WPA program, Barack. Remember FDR? What he did when the whole damn country was going down the toilet? He sent them out to every nook and quiet corner of this land. They built roads, bridges, rail lines. They wrote stories, took pictures, slapped paint on canvas. They rebuilt this place, rebuilt themselves, rebuilt their pride.

We are in shambles, Barack. We are hurting and divided and in need of guidance. Don’t be a political prick. Fuck the Republicans. Fuck the Democrats too. You’re the fucking president of this great nation. Do something.

And, on yet another sad note, Truman disappeared. I don’t know what happened to him. One evening he was there, trilling away as he did when you petted him and the next day he was gone. I suspect an owl, he was just a kitten. The loss of someone you love is always hard but somehow harder when they disappear without a trace.

Little Truman, gone to blue. Miss you, buddy. Looking forward to seeing you on the other side.

Another thing I got involved in was an update to my Wordpress plugin Birthday List. I received an email from Christian Schuster from the Blackwood Forest area of Germany. He asked if it were possible to translate the plugin into German which I thought was a great idea. Together we worked it out and it will soon be available on my plugin page.

In the midst of all this, I’ve been learning first-hand about dementia, the proper perusal of baby food and feeling more than a little like an out-of-shape Heracles cleaning the Augean stables or, in my case, the Red-Neck Jungle Haven, while having to endure 24/7 television as background noise. In this last regard (TV), I’ve become convinced that the world has gone utterly mad. I’m making progress wading through this nightmare, though there are far too many moments when it seems hard to tell.

Flannery

Chaplin

Chaplin and Flannery, Gone To Blue. See you both, and all the rest, on the other side.

Except for Chaplin, a new kitten much too young to be without its mother, found by the side of a twisting, isolated white limestone road a week ago, it is way too quiet around here. The Ginger Snap family has adapted well to this mild Floridian climate and spend most of their time outdoors. Only the old guys stayed indoors nearly 24/7. Spook was the yowler, LB the clinger. Now they both are gone. I miss them.

Spook came to me in 91, a bundle of white fur with a chunk taken out of his face. He was a pit-bull kitten, you see, the star of a little game some folks like to play. You have a pit, you bring in the pit-bull, you toss in a kitten. Big fun for all. Not much fun for the kittens, of course, but this little white thing executed an escape which I’m sure pissed off the humans in attendance.

My friend and I managed to trap this feral little bundle between two houses. I grabbed him as he tried to dash past me but as he had only one eye to see out of, I had the advantage. He countered that advantage by sinking his teeth clear down to the bone of my thumb. I still have the scar.

I managed to get him in the house. One side of his face was all swollen and I was sure he had lost an eye. He was feral and vicious and the vet wouldn’t let us bring him in nor would the SOB come out despite what I offered to pay him. Chicken shit. Not that I think we could have taken him in. It would have taken a ketamine dart to get him out of there and I didn’t have one of those handy.

He spent the next several months hiding amongst the cobwebs and dust-bunnies under the futon couch. I rarely saw him, hunkered down as he was in the far shadows. But the food I set beneath the couch was always gone when I checked it. It was one of those ‘he lives or he don’t’ situations and I was doing everything I was able to do to slant it in favor of the ‘he lives’ side of the equation. One day, I can no longer say how long that day took to come, but one day he emerged, covered in cobwebs, and lo and behold, he still had an eye. I found out later he was missing several teeth and part of his gums but otherwise he was fully intact.

In all the time he was under that futon, he never really acquired a name. It didn’t take him long though, once he was out, to grab one. Any sudden move, any loud noise and he was gone like a ghost even a ghostbuster couldn’t find. I named him Spook. Like all cats, he had nine lives and therefore nine names. One, of course, like all cats, he kept to himself but over time he failed to answer to Dukes, Honky Cat, White Boy and any number of expletives. Bottom line, though, he was always Spook.

I had Neb then, and Pinkerton and Treacle, and despite being dogs, and despite Spooks somewhat negative experience with dogs, they got along well enough. Spook lured Mooch to the house, another cat who was with me for quite some time. While Spook was nearly pure white save for a faint spot of black-tipped hair on his head, Mooch was nearly pure black save for a faint spot of white-tipped hair on her head. They were the perfect bookends.

When things got too strange in Oakland and I abandoned it for a bit of Northern exposure, Spook and Mooch made the journey in a dresser drawer of my t-shirts. It wasn’t long after I got settled in Guerneville that Booth appeared, another black cat with a fringe of white, this time on his chest, and the three of them became fast and furious friends. They remained that way for many years, sleeping together, grooming each other, scaring the shit out of each other, a regular Three Catketeers.

When it all hit the fan in California, yet another death I’ve yet to write about and probably never will, Spook and Mooch shared a cage to New Mexico. What a mistake that was. New Mexico I mean, not Spook and Mooch sharing a cage. The other mistake, one of many, was not tossing Booth in there with them. The poor boy howled his way over the 1300 miles. His voice was never the same after that.

Mooch went on her way first, a heart attack and one of those weekend, emergency vet horror stories I’ve never been able to write about. Booth followed a year or two later. Spook left me today.

She went fast, my little old baby, and for that I am grateful. I’ve known it was coming for awhile now. I mean eighteen, that’s mighty old for a cat. I’m glad neither Mooch nor Booth had to make the trip to this god forsaken place I find myself in now. They wouldn’t have liked it here anymore than I do.

As Spook lay dying, I begged him to let go, to go to the light, to go to blue, that Mooch and Booth were waiting there for him, that he could once again jump and play and groom and sleep curled up in a three-way ball. I prayed to the spirit of all things, fuck your christian god which I don’t believe in anyway, not that I’m entirely sure any great spirit exists either, still, I prayed anyway to take him fast, to not let him suffer.

I don’t think he did. Suffer, I mean. And he did go fast. Too fast? Too soon? No answer to that because you just don’t know. I feel some guilt because he wanted in my lap a couple of times today and I denied him because I was tied up with other things. But how do you know what the right thing to do is? I knew he was going, I just didn’t know it would be today.

You outlived them all Spook, my beautiful, toothless, noisy as a Siamese cat baby. The pit-bulls who tormented you and, hopefully, the human owners of those dogs. If it can be said that I pray, then I pray you are now with Mooch and Booth and all the rest of the gang. My only wish at this moment is that I could have gone with you.

And you can save your ‘Go EJ!’ ra-ras cause it ain’t like I really want to quit cigarettes. I enjoy my Nat Shermans. Nice clean tobacco without all the crappy additives, a light taste of mint, what’s not to like? And I’m not quiting because of the alleged health issues? Hell, if I were that concerned about health issues, I’d have to give up everything I eat, drink and breathe. Have you read the ingredients on the things you eat and drink lately? You damn near need a chemical dictionary to figure out what you stuffing down your throat. And what the hell is with all that high fructose corn syrup anyway? It’s in every damn thing on the shelf. What the hell is wrong with good old sugar? And salt! Do they even put salt in food anymore?

And what about the quality of the air you breathe? Planes, trains and automobiles oh my. I’d rather spend a day in a room full of smokers than an hour walking down any major thoroughfare. Nah, any health issues associated with cigarettes don’t bother me. Everything kills ya.

So, why am I quiting? Well, I hate to say it but Uncle Sam’s the cause. This last tax hike has just pushed the price way out of my range. Eight plus bucks for a pack of Nat’s finest? Sorry, but I don’t think so. And I’m damned if I’ll smoke those additive-ridden cheap things. Those additives are gonna kill ya faster than the tar and nicotine will. What with all these price hikes, it’s gotten to the point where the Nicoderm patch is cheaper so I guess I’ll just smoke through my skin.

Not that the patch isn’t a real pain in the nether regions itself. I have to go that route cause the gum is even worse. A taste like old sweat-socks. Pop one or two of those between the old teeth and my stomach begins to do flip-flops. The patch only makes my skin itch, my muscles ache, my ears ring and plays havoc with sleep. Can’t complain too much about the dreams, though. Like taking acid in your sleep. Weird and colorful.

It’s a damn good thing I haven’t turned into one of those snarling, craving beasts ready to snap the head off anything that comes too close. A real bitch bitch bitch, complain complain complain, kill kill kill, can’t find a good thing to say about anything kind of guy. Don’t ya just hate it when someone gets like that?

Oh, and you know another thing I hate about quitting? I hate that most everything stinks. Do you Nicotine Nazis actually get used to this smell? Yuck. I’m going to have to start carrying a nosegay or something. Won’t that do wonders for my image. As it is, I find myself following smokers cause, you know, that smoke sure does smell fine.

Technorati Tags: coffin nails, cigarettes, Nat Sherman, high fructose corn syrup, Nicoderm

I slept in that trailer long ago, spent a winter sitting by a roaring wood stove and sneaking peeks at Playboy magazines in the shed nearby. That shed collapsed long ago, it’s green shingled roof now covering worm eaten books and all those pretty girls and who knows what other once-upon-a-time treasures. I can see the old freezer where once we stashed the butchered remains of a cow hit by a car and left on the side of the road to die. There is a box of old hand guns in there as well as several rifles. More piles of rotting clothes, twisted leather shoes, canning jars with rusted lids, several suitcases, a leather satchel so aged and weather beaten it disintegrated in my hand when I tried to pick it up.

The ground around the shed is littered with washing machines, stoves, row boats, lawn mowers, metal chairs, a swing set, ladders, and tools of every kind. There are metal garage doors, a pile of sheet-metal roofing strips, rolls of aluminum wire and steel cable and enough automotive parts to build a whole, if somewhat weird looking, car, as if the eight or nine rusted hulks I’ve so far found in this Floridian jungle weren’t enough junk cars already.

Not far from the shed, the all but buried remains of another out building becomes one with the earth. I slaughtered rabbits and cleaned catfish there long ago. From what I can see of it now, it looks as though my mother may have converted it to a small green house. Numerous panes of glass, rows of red clay pots merge into the darkness beneath a thick canopy of green. I’m told she planted the giant Magnolia tree that stretches skyward amidst the tall Pines and Oaks draped in Spanish Moss and I’ve noticed other plants growing wild amongst the dense ground cover that I suspect aren’t natural to this area. She was into growing things, my Ma. That’s one of the few things I know about her.

There’s 30,000 square feet to this property, nearly an acre of land. What I’ve described above sits on maybe a quarter of that. The grand tour continues in a couple of days. Y’all come back now, ya hear?

Grey-boy, who was a girl, went to blue on Wednesday. She was barely a year old, came when you called her and loved to chase bugs. The world is never the same when something you love dies.

Miss you, baby.

It’s been a long time since I’ve lived on this side of the continent, much less this far south, and in all those years I never thought I’d come back to this particular spot. The Dead had it right, a long strange trip indeed, and I’m not yet sure if this particular point along the way is the cherry on the sundae or the lump of coal in the solstice stocking.

The last time I was here, the gunshot over the Grassy Knoll had just begun its echo around the planet. Water fountains and bathrooms were designated “˜Colored’ and ˜White”. Black folks lived in their part of town, enduring the nightly terrorist tactics of the Rednecks of America Youth Corp. Wrap-around shades, Sam Browne belts and beer-bellies were de rigueur for the local law. Every town was a speed-trap. One town even had the stop-light lenses reversed to trip up the Snowbirds.

Confederate flags were everywhere back then; front license plates, flagpoles, arm patches, porch over-hangs. If there was room to put a symbol of a war that ended a century before, there you would find the Southern Cross. I mean, like, give it up, man. You lost. Get over it already and move on.

I, to my great misfortune, was a switchblade packing, “a little too tall, could’ve used a few pounds, tight pants, points, hardly renowned” Westside Detroit JD with Vasoline and baby oil slicked-back hair – waterfall, ducktail, sideburns and all – and sporting a black London Fog trench coat, a look not all that uncommon on my own turf but one that glowed like a neon red target down here in the Old South. To say my short stay here was unpleasant would be an understatement.

But, here I am back again, 45 years later. A lot has changed in that time and yet I find myself listening for the distant strains of banjo music. And me without a paddle.