Consequences

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Adam and I have had a chance to discuss many important issues. We agree that attitude is everything. He's convinced I've manifested my own ailments. He could be right. Basically, I've come several thousand miles across the desert and ocean to say goodbye to someone who wouldn't slow down for me if I was crossing in front of her car.

Oggy must walk in old man crouch due to spinal arthritis

One of the questions that needs answering is how to live with our modern comforts while not destroying the planet. The answer, I'm pretty sure, is that it isn't possible. It's basically like a gambler who has bet and lost the house trying to figure out a way to bet more. Or a shopper who has maxed out her credit card trying to spend more. How can it be done? The only answer is by getting more credit, by spending more of what you don't have or own...and that has now reached a global scale. Of course, not too many Kenyan refugees are reading this and unless you are a Doctors Without Borders volunteer then your electrified world is totally out of harmony with nature and you like it that way. I want to be positive but the possibility of owning iPods and gold based electronics without nasty consequences is too unrealistic even for my own twisted fantasy of living. See, my approach to the international insanity is to live in such a way that you would have to be offended. And then your mind might be in a position to realize that the modern world is living EQUALLY out of touch with reality. (I'll point out that EVERYONE IS TOO DUMB TO GET THE MESSAGE but my motives were pure.)

No, for some people to live in a future like Star Trek then most people will have to live in a world like Mad Max. That's the trade off. For every master there must be 20 servants. There can never be 21 masters and no servants. So it's a paradigm of servitude and exploitation that is in our nature and can't be expunged. It's a big game of King of the Hill like we used to play at Little Harbor elementary school, kids scrambling to the top of a plowed mountain of dirty snow in the December recess before Christmas break, our Star Wars toys wrapped in attic packages, hidden, noses red and running, mittens torn, boots squeaking, plaid pants wet with the salty runoff. We learn young to kick at those who reach for our leg, never to reach out and help. The recess monitors nodding in ignorant amusement as the children learn their hardest lesson: that only the select can stand at the top, that life is a competition and a savage struggle. Nearly 40 years later I question what I was taught but am helpless to unlearn it all and neutralized by the gigantic scale of the problem. 9 dying puppies in a cave made from flotsam. 500,000 Africans with no food or water. An oil industry determined to suck the earth dry and a populace content to fund and authorize or ignore it. Polar Bears needing air drops with survival food. Wolves plodding in silent, ageless stoicism. But communication now aided by satellites and gold from Peruvian mountains. We learn to rely on the bones of our past for nutrition. I carve my name like a hunter gatherer on the underside of this virtual cave. The Kenyan child clings to his mother's arm, dying. The puppy limps to an empty food bowl. The drought farmer sifts the dry soil. We learn to avoid consequences and embrace them.


"If the greater good is too lofty a subject to ponder then what does that mean about the common good?" Oggy Bleacher

cachorros

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what is the word for puppy? Perrito.

Adam found a dozen puppies living by the panga boats near the ferry starving and crying for milk while their mother languishes in the shade with dry tits. Unlike most Mexican street dogs these are not total mutts. He wants to take one to Panama on his overloaded peace motorcycle. I guess their fate hangs in the balance. They aren't the first pack of desperate dogs I've walked away from.

Confessions

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Mexico is a Catholic country so I thought I would spend my Sunday at the church in Todos Santos confessing. These are normally anonymous but I have nothing to lose by sharing with the world.
The poet grieves so his words may be bitten and bleeding. Beer cans offer no solace to the wounded philosopher. The mountains protected certain Indian tribes from the conquering Spanish but an old gringo sucking in his gut and blowing his nose on his memories has no such bulwark. He is unshaven and haggard and at war with the mirror of his demise, vainly inspecting his chin for drooping fat. He liberates the words of his own delusion so that they might highlight the road to salvation, if not for him then for others who follow in his path. The human experiment is generations long and each family preserves their own traditions or, lacking traditions, builds their own illusions. Affection for the young and innocent is paramount as the roots of trust are planted early and are easily torn up. Throbbing music and pulsating hearts march us to a destiny we might  write down in our own history, painting on the crumbling walls of our emotional caves the hieroglyphs that tell our story or myth to the future. Where does the heart hide when the wounded wolf drags his bloody paws to our door. Polar Bears survive off of food air drops to Labrador remoteness but the solitary rider awaits the scorpion bite to end his misery.

our branches ever reach for the sun

espinaza del diablo

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never again that sierra occidental mountain road crossing. still weeping tears of fear. worst road on planet.
wouldn´t be so bad if I was driving but taking a bus was brutal. like a 6 hour roller coaster ride in a curving tunnel where you can´t see what you are about to hit. the floor was wet with vomit but I managed to hold  my lunch down.
the return trip will be los mochis to Chihauhau on the train.

spellbound no more

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He stood a block from where he had seen her last and thought
¨This is where I saw her last.¨
The spell had lifted finally and his mind flowed with flighty dreams and a flood of language bound liberation. His suffering had borne fruit afterall. Her charisma was no different than before, of course her heart had moved on and he vainly and selfishly wished only to bask in her charm for a moment, like a deep canyon flower that only sees the sun an hour a day. Her lips and voice should be declared a national treasure, her face representing all of mexican lust. at first he was repulsed with how cosmoplitan she had become but as he was accustomed to realizing that his loathing was for himself, not her, and the way he was purchasing $300 ebony and rosewood guitar accessories with mother of pearl inlay. was that any different than Kipling bags and eyeliner applied with blatant casual indifference?
The flood of language he had waited for and dreamed about during the terrible term of his haunted love had finally arrived. He spun a mental tale like a Dennis Leary acid trip into magical circles of lunacy in front of him that made him laugh with delight. He was not Ashley to her Scarlett, like he´d initially thought, but he was Scarlett, independent and romantic and perhaps she was also Scarlett and they were both in love with their own ideas of love projected onto one another, her for a few days or hours, and he for  4 years...and this kind of mental recreation was the material he would need to disect in order to move to the next level of creative production. Her heart had moved on, as he knew, but his poet´s core needed more convincing...and now he´d been convinced. His emotional shadow was no longer an orphan. She´d kissed him goodbye, off to Rome, and he to his destiny with drama.
Men strode past in dirty trousers, women in new high heels, children in delight at the world, taking no notice of Oggy as he became reaquainted with the small corner, el rincon, of his heart that had been left behind, trapped behind her imaginary grasping designer jeans. ¨So, this is what it feels like to be complete.¨ The spell was lifted and he had reunited a portion of his consciousness with its other majority. Yes, one thing had been missing from his travels to Labrador and the distant corners of the continent, the darkness in the van, the scolding lights of the police, the drunks and degenerates decaying in a world of excess, but it wasn´t her, as he´d dreamed because her memory was worn to a high polish in his lazy brain, but it was him...his own unified heart and trust in the nature that had led him to the brink of continents and walking on crust of subducted grief. He had been incomplete and her presence was not the answer but it was the easiest excuse and the most romantically inclined to fulfill the desire of completion, the distant mother, the absent affection from his adult life, the cruelties of the world represented in the scolding glances and hurtful remarks of women who had stolen covers and snored and thrown his own humility in his face. He was a boxer with a long memory of low blows, resentment failing to protect him from the disgrace of his own futility and the invulnerable insecurity that had torn his soul asunder intentionally to provide and excuse to keep others at arm´s length.
The rich soil of his analysis would reveal the seeds of creativity and provide the nutrition his spirit needed. He was complete again....and was his education over? He wanted to believe that he had made the last of this genre of mistake...wasn´t it time to move on? He was a writer because he wrote and composed and lived as a writer would...and the trance needed to compose had been an oasis of serenity during his tortured years away from her. But now that the spell had been lifted he felt the dam of emotions he´d failed to transcribe already waiting overhead to be drawn in cement. Writing is descibed as duck hunting where you wait for the moment to shoot. Now all he saw were the multitude of ducks that had been there all along, but hidden by his grieving poet´s heart. A man couldn´t be more devoted and faithful to a woman than he had been to her ghost...and it had come to nothing...an empty wrapper...adios...so he´d felt the continent shift beneath his feet and incrementally his vision had been resurrected.
He walked slowly by an old building and saw a poster about pianos...?
Que?
Pianos?
He went in and immediately recognized the pianos from the Triunfo museum where he and Nicolas had bonded in the desert near the abandoned gold mind...symbolic of the end of his own futile mining operations into her heart.
The pianos had been moved following the death of Nicolas.
Lo Siento
The man invited him in with courteous, mexican hospitality.
He bowsed and played a simple Mexican cancion on a 120 year old Piano.
Pedestrians outside heard the music and smiled, holding hands tighter, but they didn´t see the tears on his face as he realized he wasn´t playing the song for Her anymore, no it was for life and the gift he´d been denied...but had pretended was his..but was now actually his again. The cycle had completed. Fortune had smiled on him. The spell was lifted. Goodbye to her, his love, may she have the time of her life with him, and hello to his heart that had been reunited, returning on a long journey, to where it belonged and in the uncertain soil of reality and not the virtual furrows he´d invented. He played the mexican waltz and the song carried into the zocalo near the church. The carnival celebration was resounding outside but no one bothered the gringo at the old piano as he played the simple mexican melody and cried.

espinaza del diablo

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never again that sierra occidental mountain road crossing. still weeping tears of fear. worst road on planet.
wouldn´t be so bad if I was driving but taking a bus was brutal. like a 6 hour roller coaster ride in a curving tunnel where you can´t see what you are about to hit. the floor was wet with vomit but I managed to hold  my lunch down.
the return trip will be los mochis to Chihauhau on the train.

News Cycle

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The predictability of our chew toy mentality and devotion to the lap dog media is grotesque. I force myself to watch the television to see what America is being spoon fed like fat babies with Gerber juice flowing out of our mouths and down our gullets. So, the nation has borrowed its limit, 16.5 trillion. I'm tempted to fillibuster my own ego in the pursuit of justice but the truth is that none of it is real. It's all a manufactured "event" to keep media whores occupied until the next mass murder or celebrity divorce. My disappointment in American mythology is so deep that it can't be salvaged. We live in a false and phony nation full of mysticism and superstitions and sports fanaticism and lip service to Jesus with an unread bible in one hand and a rifle in the other espousing peace through mystical dimensions.  There are over 7 billion people on Earth. 400+ million Americans. A million could die from flu outbreak this year and it wouldn't even turn the population graph line down. We are the ant colony that immediately forgets about the tidal wave of Big Red soda that drowns our habitat. The reality is that we're all redundant except to our own fabrications and the media feeds our false acceptance of the lies.

The common response to the Oggy Problem is that a quest to rescue wolves from Shell Oil or learn Hindu ballads on the Ud is pointless because it doesn't recognize reality. But my rebuttal is that those with loose lips and chicken scratch intellects only suck on the medium hot salsa of the world and ignore the countless arrays of picante. Basically, monitoring their own toes in the limitless cold water of reality to the depth that they can accept and then imposing their own shallow delusion onto others. It's all disgusting to me as are the television programs that horrify me. This is mass media and I will turn my back on it one day but it's like studying the cartel trade of broken virgin whores and then playing dominoes on slippery barstools of defeat with a crooked smile under sightless eyes.

So there is no solution as long as media influences reality perception. If we even took the $17 trillion debt as reality and accepted that the stars and stripes are like that junkie stoner kid you meet at a Phish concert who has a stolen credit card and he is buying everyone cool stuff and you can sleep in his luxury suite hotel for free. That's the reality of our negligent pride. The entire premise of America is to outlive our pimp so eventually we can fuck and give blowjobs to addicts in the cold alleys of our grotesque indifference and keep all our money. Maybe, we collectively hope, the pawn store will burn down and we can scavange the debris for our blood diamonds. We pawned our children to spread disease and pollution to every corner of the continent and then we hired marketing executives with counterfeit money to wed strippers wearing assless chaps made from Kickapoo Indian chief hides to promote the glossy new world as progressive and the manifest destiny of our nightmares. Congratulations. I always wondered how the Germans living outside the death camps rationalized their inaction. Now I know. They read the propaganda pamphlets and made excuses. Don't cause trouble. Don't ask questions. Protect your own. Fear the unknown. And they have a point because the American and Russian Liberators only made the citizens dig mass graves as their punishment for doing nothing...while the Nazi soldiers definitely would've executed them all. And that's the painful product of indifference and the demise of sad repose: it usually is safer to be the coward and after 40 years of an environmental holocaust we've manufactured the most indifferent citizenry with Fox news puppetry in our assholes making our mouths move like Kermit the Frog. The collusion is complete and the ironic generation now mocks rape...because that's their defense mechanism in an insane culture. Everything is a greater symptom of madness that becomes one more illness to ignore in our all u can eat buffet of greed.

But that's the road the media wants to invite me down. They want the futile conversation, the rant, the blog, the fillibuster; they goad people to revulsion because that's the best strategy handed down from Socialist Republics and propaganda specialists. "Ensure the public never has a moment of peace unless we manufacture that peace. Always keep them on uncertain ground." In two weeks, Fiscal Cliff...now Borrowing Limit. Next in line...Asshole Propositions Balls for Shit Legislation. It's excellent think tank strategy but I'm a hippie with conspiracy theories as my breakfast sandwich so pay no attention to me and keep watching American Dad and Football.

Blues School

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Earl's Tune - Errol Garner by boberwig

 I had no idea Errol Garner was a brother. One of the ladies at the rest home asked for this tune, Earl's Tune, and now I'm schooled in the playing of blues. If my father was Garner or Ray Bryant or even merely listened to Garner or Bryant, then I'd play like this today. But no, I got a psychotherapist and now earn a gold medal for mentally masturbating. So I've got 40 more years to devote to playing in this style. (or about 8 if I die when Garner did)


I'm not a Jazz snob. Misty is a song I've probably tried to play for ten years. I took a piano class once and this was the song I was supposed to accompany a singer with. It was terrible. And I remember reading Errol Garner as the author and not researching anything about him. I figured he was white because the lyrics are real margarine flavored. (Garner didn't write the lyrics) But no, now I see him playing his own melody and I understand. To discredit songs like Moon River is to discredit Garner because while Mancini isn't a blues musician he wrote during the same period and all those songs are lumped together. Misty is one of the all time classics with All of Me and Ain't Misbehaving and Some Enchanted Evening. You can't play lounge piano without knowing this song. You probably won't play it like Garner but you have to appreciate the tradition of lounge piano. I will post my recording of it when I get to the real piano at the old folks home.

Jawa

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1976 Jawa Babetta Moped 207

American Restoration would never hire humbled Oggy

In an effort to barter my services at a garage so I can use their car lift to remove my transmission I have been trying to "restore" this Jawa moped. Maybe restore isn't the right word since that would imply a restoration and I'm not in that league. I'm trying to get this thing to run. I'm trying to fix it. You might say this is crazy but I've seen the restoration folks totally restore a 1964 Worlds Fair tour buggy. Why would they go through that $7000 expense? Or to restore a gas powered washing machine? That makes no sense. This moped will actually be useful.
But I've got one foot in the water and one foot out. I want to restore it but I want to use exactly the same parts that I've got on the moped. That almost can't be done except rewinding the 40 year old coil magneto by hand or dismantling the  carburetor that sat for 3 years with old fuel until it crystallized and pitted the throttle sleeve and needles and everything. It's frustrating because the only reasonable thing would be to buy a used carburetor but Oggy insanity has me in its grip and I have to use everything that was originally on the moped and shipped from Czechoslovakia to be ridden around Texas. Maybe a serviceman brought it back during his secret service operation to subvert the soviet empire. But this is a different kind of project than the 1950s electric furnace because I don't really care if the moped ever runs. I'll learn a bit about eastern block mass manufacturing and maybe move it a step closer to working and stay busy and out of my room that reeks of dog fur. The furnace was life or death with additional stress of desperation and back pain. The moped is a hobby.

For some reason this Star Wars creature was named after my moped

In case you are wondering my Vespa design is superior to this cheap Czech slave factory knockoff. No wonder they lost the cold war! There is something called a Thrysistor and the carburetor is installed backwards. The fuel tank is removable, which is a nice feature, but the gaskets appear to be made from Stalin's underwear.

However, if anyone has any idea where the ignition coil is mounted then I need to know. This one was taped to the back rack since the piston had no rings. The owner is the owner of the garage and he had it apart 3 years ago and has since left it to rot. I'm the last hope.

War

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The North's National Defense Commission said the moves would feed into an "upcoming all-out action" that would target the United States, "the sworn enemy of the Korean people."

You know, war leads to more war. There is no military solution and as the escalation of critical climate related resources being lost continues to obliterate a gluttonous way of life I melt into obilivion. I watched a hedge fund futurist speak with total glee about the future of technology and it was obvious he knew only the technical details about gold mining, tar sands, oil, solar, circuit board assembly. He's scratched the surface of many fields and kept his own reality isolated from the cause and effect of his choices. Some people can allow laborers to do their dirty work but I'm repulsed when those same people pretend the dirty work is clean and the lettuce pickers of America sing work songs in merry solidarity. Their ignorance is the fiber in the pillow they lay their empty heads on at night. Because the disparity of lifestyles now allows this effrontery even Charlie Rose nodded happily. "Yes, tell me more about the future of the world for white imperialist Americans."
I'm trying to do the math on the number of slaves in 1840 compared to the number of black people in jail in 2013. I'm thinking the inmates have the slaves beat. Percentage-wise there are more free black people but the net number of slaves is higher today. There is an breakdown in ethics that I want to go on record as having strong concerns about. I'm puzzled as the pallet of my experience fluctuates like a bullfrog's throat.
There will either be an age of enlightened peace or there will be endless conflict until climate prevents any form of tenable existence on earth. Our digital memory will capture our gluttony and ignorance like dying lions in staged safari parks. The blighted desert will be renamed "paradise" and the meek will flock with peasant skirts and ragged faces to bow before the bleak fortress of the mighty. The lexicon is already under siege.

"If humans make it possible then one day it will be necessary." Oggy Bleacher

Digital Memories

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Maybe it's a blessing in disguise but my previous laptop computer didn't have enough memory to fit my whole library of wolf quest video footage so I put it all on my external drive, which was supposed to be my emergency back up drive, but when it has the only copy of data then it's a primary drive. I meant to transfer it all to my new computer but never got around to it. Well, that drive failed the other day with no warning after 3 years and this picture of me walking into the New Foundland gloom wearing my bell bottom pants is the only thing I saved to my computer of 8 hours of footage.
Maybe I was spending too much time obsessed with the past and now this failure has freed me from the bonds of editing that video. It's all gone along with 190 GB of pirated porn and music.

Heritage

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If by some miracle I fathered a childthen that child would never know his great-grandparents. He wouldn'tknow Abraham Lincoln either so that might not come as a big surprise.But my point is that he would not know people who were instrumentalin his own existence and formative to my own.
I drove both of my grandfather's cars.They preferred larger 8 cylinder cruisers with power windows andblue or brown interiors. Neither of them owned as much as a socketset. Their cars smelled like baby powder and aftershave. Their wordsas we cruised down the street were casual references to my beard, jobprospects and girlfriends.

My mother's father, Sam, rubbed hisknee replacement while he drove with a hand covered by white hair onthe knuckles, his blue polyester slacks binding at the thigh. He worepatent leather loafers and white socks and button up short sleeveshirts with a white tank top underneath. He wore silver dollar bolo ties and didn't think that was unusual. He had a way of working thesteering wheel like it was a ship's anchor line that needed turning.That was a sturdy steering wheel, by the way, strong, indestructible.It's probably still out there somewhere!"Well, Oggy, you won't get richdoin' nothin'. Clothes a mess...face all a hairy. Boy-o-boy!"His tone, a toothy New England farmfolk slang, said it all, that I was hardly worth lecturing with mygirl hair length and fake frame glasses and flowery tank top shirtwith nothing to cover it."Good looking boy like you hidingbehind all that hair? Look, there's a barber. How about it? I'llpay!"Never mind that this grandfather hadlost his hair by the time he was thirty so the option of growing amane like mine was never one to choose. I would nod because when heframed the topic thusly I really had no rebuttal. He had enjoyedtaking photographs and one picture he took of our house in Maine willforever represent an idea and image I have of my early childhood. Icould have argued that like his interest in photography had bornfruit, I too had amateur designs on a life as a writer and my firstassignment to myself was to read. But raising the lofty example ofHermann Hesse or Jack Kerouac would have been futile so I was contentto listen to the talk radio station and watch the college studentsmerrily march their books to class. Our big blue Oldsmobile thundereddown the street under my grandfather's sure hand. I'd say he was 83at the time and we were on our way to visit his wife in the long-termcare facility. He made me banana pancakes for lunch with maple syrupand butter and considered it the height of acceptable gluttony. Hiswife liked playing scrabble and getting postcards from her daughters.She didn't drive at all from what I could remember.
The last time I drove with my father'sfather, Bob, the source of my middle name, it was down a tree linedcorridor in the college town of his adult life. I was certain wewould crash because he was genuinely oblivious to other drivers,pedestrians, obstacles, stop signs, lights, cats, everything. Hesquinted through his glasses and muttered with grumpy dissuasion.He'd had a stroke some years earlier and a man of few words became aman of no words. He was probably 92 years old and we weregoing to fill a prescription at the drug store."Stop sign!" I blurted as weglided through a four way stop.He muttered while I gripped the doorhandle.His wife had been the talker of thefamily...her elocution and mannerisms borrowed from KatherineHepburn. Bob was the keeper of the cigarettes, the guy bringing inmore wood to the fireplace."School?" He askedtentatively as he had long abandoned my fate to the Gods.My college career had beendisillusioning so I'd decided to take some time for independentstudy. I summed this up by saying, "One day. But latelyI'm reading.
I emphasized this last word like he washard of hearing, but he wasn't. His lack of voice command made methink he couldn't understand words either."Bullshit!" he said andmuttered something to the effect that this was blowing smoke up hisass and that I was malingering. I tossed my hands up futilely,surrendering. I had to save my strength up for real arguments with myfather about the nature of violence and the effect hunger strikeshave on world affairs. My two sets of grandparents lived inthe same small town for most of their lives, a detail that isn'tcommon and is becoming less common as biology and chemistry becomeless reliant on sociology.
If my son were born I would tell himhis grandparents live in Australia and Holland and I'd need a map ofthe entire planet to show him where those places are. Mygrandparents, on the other hand, lived in the same zip code andprobably shopped at the same grocery store and had their paperdelivered by the same paper boy. I could find both their houses on asingle town map. More importantly, I'm thinking of the lack ofemotional connection my child would have with his predeceasedgreat-grandparents. Most of us don't know who our great-grandparentsare so we can all relate. We come into the world and can only hearthe echoes of their voices in the behavior patterns of ourgrandparents, whom we hardly give a second thought to until they dieor are stricken or send us large Christmas checks, and in the barelycontained battle our parents wage for control. It's already laid out,our genetic infrastructure, and the architects are dead. We drivethrough town oblivious to the stop signs and intersections theypreviously paved, plowing through the fields they planted and parkingon their flower beds.

Recuva data rescue review

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The outpouring of concern over my losing all the footage from one of the most implausible adventures of the 21st century was overwhelming. The letters arrived from all corners of the globe. But never worry! I'm too obsessed with the past and my ego would not allow the loss of all these photos of my crippled feet and Bakeapple or Bunchberries and birds and hundreds of pictures of my bell bottom pants. I decided to get serious. There was at least $1000 worth of music on that drive not to mention irreplaceable pictures of me wearing 70s clothes in Labrador. But Three different computers coughed and laughed when I tried to get that hard drive to mount. The computer repair place looked at me like I was trying to dub a John Denver cassette tape from 1982 to Blueray DVD. Another failure. I even put the thing in the freezer hoping it would work but it didn't. Maybe I should've baked it at 350 for an hour. The external drive had no fan so it always would overheat. I was a fool to use it to edit video. It was strictly designed to be used while it was backing up files and then shut down. I mean, it had an ac/adapter plug!

But my malware software could scan the rocketfish Chinese 350gb external drive disk though it would not mount. "Unreadable/parameter failure." So I downloaded something called virtuallab. That eased my worries because it immediately read all the files but cost $99 to allow me to save them.

Being the penny pincher that I am, I then checked out this site and downloaded two freeware applications. One was called PCinspector. and the other was Recuva. The first time I ran Recuva it only searched for deleted files and scanned my hard drive but I wasn't looking for deleted files so I figured it was the wrong thing. It also didn't find any deleted files. So I checked out pc inspector and that could not read the disk at all. something was still wrong with the parameters. I couldn't even close pc inspector as it froze trying to read the disk. I still had virtual lab to fall back on but I tried again with Recuva and discovered the options tab was checked to default as only hunt for deleted files. so I checked the box "search for undeleted files" and set it to work again. And it rebuilt the folder tree and then, since I had purchased a 500gb toshiba external drive already, I copied 190 gb of files onto that while I was working on my moped. It took about 4 hours.

 

recuva screenshot of options window

So I know everyone was real concerned and you can all sleep easy knowing I will eventually complete that stupid Arctic Wolf Quest video.
Something like Recuva should be standard on any pc. It's obvious that a logic failure on a hard drive can easily be circumvented so why doesn't Bill Gates stop trying to save the world and provide something on each windows operating system? Thank you to Recuva...

Tire Failure

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1974 Vespa Ciao in the shop

I admit I am living with one foot in the past and one foot in the present. The future and I never cross paths. My moped has a bad crimp in the rear rim from someone going over a curb in Mexico drunk on false love and tequila. Then a spoke broke so it was like riding a fucking Carousel horse down the street. I got a replacement spoke (real easy to find for a 1974 moped) but the whole rear wheel and chain assemblies have to be removed for this to happen. I did that since I'm finally feeling human and mobile and Spring has apparently arrived on January 20th to Texas (84 degrees) meaning humanity is totally fucked because the climate is completely upside down.



But to repair a spoke I have to deflate the tire and what do I find but a 2'' long nail sticking in the tube. For some reason, maybe the angle of repose or the material or God smiling on Oggy, the tire never went flat. Amazing. But there was nothing I could do but remove it and set into motion a shit train of problems. The nail had managed to puncture both sides of the inner tube so one patch didn't work. I could not find a 2.25x2.50'' x 17'' Italian inner tube so I spent hours trying to repair the tube with shoe goop. The tire side held up but the rim side wasn't flush so air managed to escape. Failure after failure until I finally used my emergency tire repair spray rubber bottle for the van. That fixed it. The whole can went into my moped tire and I reused the tube and tire. A bit of grease under the nails and I was back on the road. Unfortunately, it did hardly anything for my rim problem.
Then I really got crazy and tried to manufacture a head gasket out of aluminum foil. The backfiring woke up dogs in Houston. This engine is best with no head gasket. It has a cylinder to engine gasket but no head gasket.

No TV

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My time off from the oil field after the embezzlement and fraud scam cost everyone their job was mostly spent in recovery as my spine, shoulder, neck and knees all revolted. And I made the mistake of putting my television near my bed so I could watch it at night when the spasms of pain made moving impossible. I also have a mirror so I could watch myself lose my mind as network television has sunk to incredibly low depths of reality shows and then shows that show bloopers of the reality shows with commentary.
 It reminds me of the lifestyle and mentality of Hollywood when I lived there and you don't know vacuous and frail and vain behavior until you spend some time in Santa Monica. That you can get paid taking pictures of celebrities picking their nose and then get paid to mock those celebrities while your video plays in slow motion with thought bubbles and sound effects and then you get a spinoff sitcom based on your own celebrity stalking...that was all considered totally acceptable and even desirable. Killing someone is only cool if you behead them or do it to perpetrate a race war.
As a friend said once of L.A. culture: "If this isn't tasteless, then what is?"
Truly, if you took the most depraved person in Labrador and brought him to Santa Monica he would be immediately humbled by the most commonplace events perpetrated by average Starbucks baristas. I almost let that kind of paradigm suck me into the moral mire when a friend ran into a homeless lady and her shopping cart riding his motorcycle and THE ONLY RESPONSE I THOUGHT OF WAS HOW TO TURN IT INTO A CLAY-MATION MUSIC VIDEO OR COMIC BOOK SERIES. Before I could even finish plans the homeless lady had her own agent and a fan club on Twitter and her panties were up for auction on Ebay. We are talking about essential corruption, poisoning the well, core rot. I fled in the nick of time.


Well, recent news events have made me realize this kind of fundamental sickness has spread across the country. People truly believe elves make ipads. Ironic attitudes about rape, murder, shooting sprees, environmental apocalypse proves we're no longer in a concrete universe. Or we ARE but we don't act that way. It's all an issue of vanity and fame and fraud...Hollywood staples. Did you know that penitentiary systems were invented by Quakers in the early Americas. Why? Because before that the punishment for crimes such as counterfeiting WAS TO BE BOILED ALIVE IN PUBLIC. Not much need for jails with that attitude. Then someone figured out how to make money off prisons and we were fucked! Now the punishment for counterfeiting is being put in charge of the federal reserve or a bank.

Anyway, I felt myself skidding away into insanity as I watched one reality show after another. It's a mirror of our own demise...armies of cameramen actually videoing themselves videoing gold mining. It's a self-reflective demise of ego...like positioning mirrors so you can see smaller and smaller reflections of yourself and your fake smile.

I tossed the television in the closet with the cockroaches and rat shit. I felt much better, played the piano more. Without internet access I started to read and study Mayan dialects for my trip to Belize.
I went to find a PG Woodhouse book but the library has none so then I found a book by Kurt Vonnegut, whom I admire, but this book was non-fiction, a collection of his commencement speeches and such and his own commentary about the speeches.

Vonnegut was a prisoner of war in Dresden the day it was firebombed simply because it was the only German city that hadn't been firebombed yet. It was a city that manufactured china plates and chocolate...a refuge..not a military target...renowned for old world architecture and quaintness. probably 200,000 people died and Vonnegut survived because the slaughterhouse the prisoners were living in was brick and didn't burn. His combat history was brief...he was captured in his first battle (of the bulge) and immediately went to prison camp. He basically had to compete with concentration camp escapees for food as he wandered west after V-E day. Then The Russians caught him and threw him in their prison. Most people in his situation died.

This probably shaped his view of the world which was scathing satire of man's follies. Sound familiar? I feel that whatever I could say bluntly (We must try to be more reasonable and peaceful) to American graduates of Yale and MIT and Harvard, Vonnegut has already said it. It doesn't matter...and it made Vonnegut depressed and he eventually tried to kill himself with pills "to get out of here" and they pumped his stomach and he went to want he called "the laughing factory" to talk it out with a shrink.
I don't know what his hurry was since he'd be dead in a few years naturally.

When I talk about going to Mexico people say that I'll be kidnapped and killed. My fear is that I won't have anything like that happen but will incrementally deteriorate naturally. I'm not invincible, but I'm going to be taken in pieces. I'm past the point of playing it safe. Now the question is if I can play it dangerous enough to actually die a romantic death. Executed in Mexico with bongo drums hung around my neck would fit the bill. Eating mashed peas and pissing myself at the long term care facility doesn't work for me. I'm a few shitty jobs away from not having the option of leaving a good looking corpse. One guy was concerned about dying magnificently and he eventually died of convulsions under a grand piano. I think that would be good enough.

Do yourself a favor and don't watch television. Live. Yes, the bogey man might get you and that's tough luck. Or you could witness a charming German city reduced to steaming  rubble. Vonnegut said the bombs missed the slaughterhouse but they didn't miss the zoo. "You should have seen the giraffe," he wrote. "I did."
...and he didn't need to provide any more details.

Really? 90 degrees?

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If it's 90 degrees in late January then I'm pretty sure it's going to be 150 this summer. I did the math last year and figured it would be 130...and that's exactly the temperature my van reached this summer around late july when I was patching drywall in crumbling mobile homes in Flour Bluff. 130 degrees in my van as I tried to sleep on the street, my thrombosed heart palpitating with fear and revulsion as the thrum of 10 million air conditioners mocked my lifestyle. The most ridiculous situation since I was north of Quebec City in the van with no heat, balding tires, frozen face no destination or visa. But it's too late to talk about warnings. America has turned into a clan of freaks who counterfeited money for so long they bought power to make real currency illegal. That's the solution to debt: Make it illegal. Good luck.

Trivial Facts You Would Know if You Were A Man

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1) How does an underwater welder manage to weld metal underwater? Don't worry, it's only something that your entire destructive way of life depends on. Nothing too serious. I'm sure you could figure it out given enough time and starvation was sniffing at the door of your emaciated children.

2) How many volts are the power lines carrying when the linesman works with them? When the electromagnetic pulse occurs at random intervals during the day what must the linesman do in order to avoid being cut in half by invisible electrical currents?

3) Average lifespan of an Ivory Coast gold miner? Yeah, GOOGLE IT! THAT"S REAL FUCKING IRONIC>!

Take your time. It's only a short quiz to demonstrate the stark difference in what you like to think of as your life and how ignorant you actually are of the foundations it is built on. Then you can get back to the coffee and donuts and reality television about fat chicks in tight dresses hiked above their ass like baboons in heat.

Fun

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Of course you know modern culture is repulsive to me and symptomatic of a corroded worldview.But when something forces itself past my blighted and depressed attitude then I will share it.The sr500 ibanez bass guitar for instance. Or the credit card sized HIV test. Or tacos made with Dorrito flavored tortillas. And a few songs by a band named fun.Their "Some Nights" album is not bad. It has at least 5 quality tunes. Probably won't win best album grammy but maybe best song. But the title track isn't my favorite. It's a good video but the song is actually unrelated to that video so I have to object. This song, "Why am I the One" is reminiscent of The Beatles with a strong chorus and good phrasing and good structure.If George Martin were alive today he could make this band huge.

End of Road

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He'd lived withtwo Puerto Rican fags for 8 months. The Vicodin prescription had runout long before the pain. Larry had faded Polaroids of decks andstair bannisters he built when Reagan was president. He was graspingto dreams of pretty roadies in dirty bathrooms, panties pulled downto their knees, he was rock hard and could fuck all night. Now he hadto hunt for his shriveled cock when he went to release the pressureon his cancerous prostate."62 yearsold, and working for a fucking nigger wage." he said with hishead crooked to one side to relieve pressure on his spine.
He could play asong on the $10 plywood guitar, Milk Cow Blues and other songs helikes to say he wrote. "Jimmy Buffett stole this song from mewhen I was in Key West," he'd say before playing Margaritaville.The nut on his Korean plywood guitar was the wrong size so he shimmedit with a piece of plastic he found in the backyard. It didn't stayin tune but he could fake it. His hearing was so bad that intonationdidn't matter. And then there were the screws in his leg. The damntitanium leg that he thought was funny when he mentioned it at first.He been beaten after trying to play the hero in an alley where a girlwas getting raped."Hey, leavethat girl alone," was all he had said and the hero's reward wasa busted leg and a broken jaw. He woke up under a police horse. The police even tried to pin the rapeon him. Why not? When it rains it pours. Like the time he was cominghome from a day wrestling with locust thorn trees, bleeding, tired,looking pissed, trying to maneuver his bike to the liquor store. Three federal marshals lock their assault rifle sights on him."Get on the ground!"He matched the description of a man running wild in the neighborhood with a gun.He fell as ordered and in falling his chainsaw dropped with an awful sound to the pavement...never to work again.
Bunch of bullshit. $8 an hour at his age? Doing Mexican labor? Forwhat? He was broken, working for pain pills."Thedoctors think I'm a junkie and I tell them, 'Hey, I'm not looking toget off. I hurt."
When it rains itpours and though the country was gasping in the middle of a deadlykilling drought, Larry was soaking wet with bad news. Couldn't catcha break. He could bet on the 1924 Yankees and they'd lose by a run inthe bottom of the ninth."These fingers," he said showing the stubs on his right hand, were burned off by caustic acid...in the wrong bottle.And the worstpart was trying to sleep on the crooked mattress. If he didn't takean overdose of pain pills then he couldn't even fall asleep. He wastired but the pain of relaxation, the release of tension on his tornligaments, took hours to subside."40 yearsof carpentry. I could build you a deck or a staircase. Now look.Fighting for dollars with the Mexicans. It's a race to the bottom."He rubbed theprotruding screws in his tibia and tried to lick a few more dropsfrom his 16oz can of Natty Light beer.

The football came back on and he started to snore.
"Did I ever tell you about these stubs on my finger," he asked, delirious.
Oggy shook his head and out of the corner of his eye saw one of the Puerto Rican fags stand elegantly at the doorway to Larry's room, smoking a cigarette like he was modeling cancerous cool. The fag locked eyes with Oggy so Oggy's eyes darted nervously from side to side. The fag licked his lips and then looked at the bathroom without turning his head. Then he looked back at Oggy...the fag pantomimed giving a blowjob and then quickly lifted his eyebrows, "???"

Oggy laughed, waking up Larry.
"I guess it's time to go home," said Oggy as he bent over to get out of the squat kids chair Larry had found in the trash. Oggy felt his fat roll under his polyester disco shirt.
"Oggy," asked Larry, "I hate to ask but can you lend me a couple bucks. Anything'll help."
Oggy gave Larry a ten dollar bill then stumbled into the dark, almost falling off the decaying front porch. A mutt Chihuahua with a limp barked at him.
"Chula!" yelled the fag, and the dog was quiet.
Oggy found his moped and ran down the sidewalk until the engine turned over. He got on and immediately hit a pot hole that jarred his aching spine. He went the wrong way down a dead end street and almost hit the barrier of trash and a chain link fence separating the neighborhood from the golf course.
Where now?

Warfare

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"Then you are a fool."

Kurt Vonnegut once asked the anthropologist Margaret Mead when men were most happy. I'm sure it had something to do with happiness eluding Vonnegut for most of his life. Mead not only studied many cultures I think she was predisposed to observe objectively, not buy into the Walmart sales bargain propaganda of the world. But some people are not hung up by the endless lies, they see patterns in the lies and truth in the horror...they see it all as destiny and humanity in an endless array of variations with some common traits. That's anthropology. Vonnegut (an anthropology major but not a very objective anthropologist) thought men should be motivated by reason. Mead probably saw this as totally naive. In general, men are not motivated by any one thing...but culturally we find meaning in completely different goals. But there is overlap and correlation. The trouble starts when the culture and the man do not match and Vonnegut is a good example. Another example is T.E. Lawrence. Oggy struggles but weakens in his scar tissue and flagging belly rolls.
At least how Lawrence is portrayed in the movie about his Arabian Revolt years and leading tribes in war against the Turks sometime around the first World War.

Lawrence was no good at following orders but he did have a reckless regard of his safety. I'm not sure what their final goal was. Militarily, the British wanted to rid Arabia of the Turks so they could install a puppet government to sell them cheap oil. Lawrence wasn't a politician but he embraced the lifestyle of the desert with gusto.

In the picture above, Lawrence, in the white robe of a sheik, watches as Auda Abu Tayi argues with Colonel Brighton. The gist of this argument is that since Auda has finally seized that white horse, "an honorable" loot, he will go home and cease the attacks on the Turkish trains.
Brighton says shamingly, "So, now that you have what you want, you will leave?"
Auda responds, "Yes, and when the British have what they want they will leave."
Lawrence says nothing.
Brighton is offended, "No, we won't leave. We will stay."
Auda smiles. "Then you are fools."
He rides off.
Auda is played by Anthony Quinn, of Zorba The Greek fame...back when male actors leaked testosterone and were not chubby geeks with emasculated jokes.

I'm not in the business of film criticism anymore so I will go no further.

Margaret Mead said that men are happiest, in general, over all cultures, when they are preparing for war. Anticipating war and planning and arming themselves for war is when men are most engaged with each other and single minded and happy. It's a different story once they are actually getting shot at, but I have no reason to contradict her assessment.

Vonnegut liked to theorize that men were created "for maintenance". But the evidence is not in his favor. Men were created to kill.

I wish he had asked Mead when women are most happy.

Bongo Tour

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"Esta Machina Mata Drogistas"

I tried to thwart my destiny with piano fantasies but the river always leads to the source and I am undertaking a "Woody Guthrie Memorial Bongo Tour" of Mexico with the intention to sow the seeds of sobriety in the insane drug war. It has to end and like Booth thought he could take revenge for the humiliation of the south, Oggy is going to man up and meet the problem face to face. That can't be done in the van because it will seem presumptuous and haughty. No, I will travel with the people, I will drink their beer, but I will insist this insane cocaine trade must end. They have the power and maybe they are operating under some kind of sabotage theory that will destroy America from inside as we snort more and more cocaine but I don't care. It has to end. Yes, hydro fracturing is much worse overall than snorting cocaine but we have to start somewhere and maybe the cocaine is keeping our brains addled. I don't say I have the answer but I know what information I need to find the answer...and that's in Mexico as a bongosero disguised as an aging gypsy. If I die, then say I did it for love.