The past month is a bit of a blur for so excuse me if at times my facts get a little muzzy. The weather was problematical and the cash flow almost non-existent but despite all of that as of tomorrow I will have a four wheeled vehicle that runs, is legally registered and insured. Hell despite my trepidations about Black Helicopters and such after reading LITTLE BROTHER I even bought a FASTRACK to get around the bay easier. I have a farday pouch for it though so that will help.

It is going to take me some time to get my mind out of mechanical mode and back into "clever bastard" mode but I have had a lot of things plowing around in, my head as the paint chips fell on me and grease flowed.

Today I have to do a little automotive house keeping on some remaining problems before finally picking up my tags tomorrow but for the first time in a very long time I feel like I am making progress. The Subaru is running, the Mitsubishi is gone and the sun has returned (the latter is a big deal). I have been waiting for SO LONG to be at this place in my plans that I am a trifle shell shocked. The repersussions are staggering though.

I can haul my cameras around now
I can haul my son around now
I am no longer limited by inclement weather
I can fetch materials for projects

As simple a list as it seems to you it is a checklist of wanders to me. For the first time in a long time I have new options, new options breed new ideas and new ideas breed good portents.

I have to go bend some wrenches just now, more later.

This is for my Dad who passed away ten years ago yesterday.

They say that when you dream about losing all your teeth that that is a dream about losing your personal power. So try and apply that to your life whenit is really happening.

When I was 20 years old I went into the mountain with some friends to go sledding on inner tubes. It was on January 23. I didn't come down off the mountain for two months because I wound up shattering my jaw into 13 pieces and pretty much destroying my teeth for the rest of my life. Over the years on an irregular bassis things would suddenly come adrift, a tooth would crack while I was brushing. A tooth or crown would pop off when I was flossing. It is not the sort of thing that encourages one to have the best dental hygiene when it feels like you are doing more damage with your routine maintenance than helping. It has become a major source of discomfit in my life, centering on the tooth that had to be removed two years ago when, for no reason, the rook simple cracked in half.

Well this year is a year for change and facing fears. I wish I could say it was when I was brushing but when I took a bite out of a piece of SEE's cand the other day one of my long stnading crown came adrift. I have vacilated about it but today I took action. Going to the dentist tomorrow to start the long, painful process back. Hopefully I will not have to have a plate put in but we will have to see.

Isn't this glamorous stuff well worth the time you spend reading it?

HEY ya'll!

Just a note, probably will be more later, but I wanted to let you know that the reason I haven't been writing is NOT that my DONATE button is not being used but rather that I have had some thing come up that have had to cone first.

First and foremost after my trip to the emergency room, and a further consultation with my Doctor, I have been put on a course of treatment that has finally started to stave off the "flu" that I have been fighting since Christmas. Turns out said flu turned into Bronchitis and I had not been able to function. 3 in halers later and I am on the mend.

Being on the mend has brought to light the fact I have been behind on a game project so I went head down to finish that, gotta pay the bills somehow. I finished that up Friday and delivered the last of the assets, and a last invoice.

Since then I have been working on getting the studio space I have allotted at the race shop functional. I started dropping hints that I might be back in the airbrush business and the results have been pleasently surpriseing.

Clutch for the Subaru has yet to arrive, why am I not surprised, so that is on hold still. All I can do when I get it running is find a place to park it and cover it for now as I am short the $622 required to register it. I think I will be taking it off my insurance for now. Ain't life grand?

So yeah, I added a DONATE button in the column to your left. Why? Simple, 'cause I am a starving artist. You can use it or not. I would, of course, PREFER you USED it. Often. Generously. Used it until you broke it. The main reason, which I will be writing about here real quick, is that I found out that the GOVENATOR has slapped over $600 worth of penalties on the registration of my Subaru, the one I am in the process of trying to get back on the road. The new engine and parts have taken all my spare cash and the next big gig is a bit away. I haven't had a car in a year and a half now and it would be nice to be able to take my son out to a movie ALONE or be able to drag my camera gear out to WHERE EVER to shoot some silliness that would, no doubt, wind up on here and be at least MILDLY entertaining.
Now I have tried this kind of thing before and, quite frankly, have had little luck. I am not surprised as I go to websites all the time that have one of those buttons on it and I rarely contribute, although I admit that I have done so and the feelings of joy that coursed through my entire being was like unto an epiphany.

Think of it as the "PBS BEG-A-THON" for the site. Lurking in thsidebar like a perky faced young blonde volunteer in pigtails, probably dressed like her favorite Doctor, staring out at you through her red Harry Potter frame glasses with all her hopes and dreams of doing GOOD THINGS for TEAM ELF, of fighting the good fight! Of MAKING A DIFFERENCE! Just because by NOT pushing it you crush all her young hopes and dreams and doom her to a life as joyless hausfrau in Pacifica with a two pack a day habit and a penchant for bracelets made from the skull of small animals it really NO BIG DEAL

If you don't press the button, it's made of CANDY BTW, it won't kill you. Right away anyway. Slowly though it will eat away at that corner of your mind that reminds you of all the GOOD TIMES we have had together. The laughs, the tears, the melodramatic rants and the thoughtful anecdotes. The cool links and the hip bits of trivia you threw around the water cooler with your friends that made you seem just a little bit smarter.

So use it or not, you know I will keep writing about whatever, I am part of that fatuous slice of society that feels like what I think a do matters, no better than a beehive haired soccer Mom at a Tea Party with a sign and a 45 on her bounteous hip.

Boy...not really the image I wanted close with...'scuse while I go wash out my eyes with bleach!

The Passing of the Automotive Culture - Pt 1


SING IT DINAH! The America I grew up in was a highway paved with hope and dreams. We ran on fresh WPA asphalt with a bright, freshly painted dashed yellow line down the center, the herald of all the good ways technology and optimism would create a better tomorrow for us. Our parents had just fought a war against evil, REAL evil, and they had KICKED EVIL'S ASS! The general feeling in the air was that we could do ANYTHING just give us a goal, a plan and Rosie the riveter and let us RUN!

The personal automobile was the personification of these ideals. Powerful, stylish (one Chevy stylist was quoted that the '50s were the time they were putting chrome on with a trowel) and cheap! Everyone had to have their own car, it was the AMERICAN way!

Industry needed it to be this way as well. America was blessed with an over abundance of manufacturing capability. The factories that has cranked out bombers and tanks at unbelievable rates had to either be turned to peaceful means or allowed to return to the dust whence they had sprung only a few short years prior. Additionally the fruits of the workers movement needed jobs, our boys returning home had fought the good fight and they not only wanted to work they needed to work. They needed to feed the millions of hungry mouths that millions of horny soldiers produced with their wives as soon as they could close the bedroom door!

These Gi Joes and Janes became the workforce that picked up their industrial strength lunchboxes and went to work in the factories building the cars for America! ALl of the reassured by UNION CONTRACTS signed in the blood of their fathers from the noble struggle against the tyranical cash hungry industrialists! A far day's pay for a fair day's work! The Utopian dream come true.

Remember the plot in "Who Framed Roger Rabbit"? The company that tore up one of the best public transportation systems in the world to build freeways? Did you know that was true? It's wasn't a tune though, it was a triad of Chevron Oil of California, Firestone Tires and Chevrolet. They were taken to court over it but political wrangling got the case moved from California (where the collusion happened) to Detroit (where Chevrolet was based). The companies were found guilty of a Traffic Violation and fined $1. Meanwhile California was suddenly riding in Chevy buses, rolling on firestone tires and burning good ole' CHEVRON OIL brand gas!

In Southern California GAS WARS where competing stations on opposite street corners would under cut their competitor on the opposite corner. For some reason I remember driving along in my family's old FORD wagon, standing up in the rear seat as there were no seatbelts in that car, and seeing a hand lettered sign saying GASOLINE 12 CENTS a gallon!

The American dream was upon the face of the land, nothing could stop us...or could it?

Simply Amazing

Well yesterday evening was a laugh riot. As I have hinted at for the past month, if "hinted" can be translated to "has whined about incessantly", I have had some sort of nasty respiratory bug that ebbs and flows with the weather. Unfortunately we have descended into the REAL wet season in California, not the one everyone expects. California's rainy season is an awful lot like Christmas in New Zealand, confusing. Although the culture of NZ in primarily Anglo based, coming from a little island that resembles a cocktail ice cube around December and made the term "figgy pudding" socially acceptable, NZ is in the Southern Hemisphere. Thus the Yule time is celebrated in thongs and cargo shorts. And THAT is just the MEN!

In the same way everyone in US of A, whose culture is STILL measured by the world of New York writers and minstrels, believes that California should have it's rainy season in November and December. Yeah, well you can shove THAT in you chestnuts and roast them on the open fire. Anyone who has lived in California for any amount of time knows that in the last quarter of the year the sky TEASES us with impending storms but they don't actually open up on us until Dick Clarke's mummy tells us that the ball has dropped in Time square (much to the rejoicing of a bunch of drunken mooks who proceed to go home and fall asleep while attempting to demonstrate their prowess to their big haired girl friends).

On a sidebar there is a group that in California that does remain oblivious to this weather pattern. Those are the legions of transplanted New Yorkers who sleep away most of the day because they are too busy staying up until all hours of the morning complaining about how they can't find an egg creme at 2 in the morning. As if anyone civilized would want such a thing...GO TO JAMBA JUICE YA MOOKS!

Anyway, around the first of the year spurred on by months of large breasted weather chicks repeating the word DROUGHT in a staccato humm that sets your fillings on edge the sky finally complete the "circle of life and dump water on the state in a manner that would have Noah saying "HOLY SHIT!" (only he would say that in hebrew of course).

During this time YHN remained bound to his two wheeled steed of steel and starting on Christmas eve I came down with a cold that grabs and hold on. A couple of weeks ago I got so bad I called a doctor , got some anti-biotics, and started to feel better. Trouble is the anit-biotics went away and the bug came back like it had been hiding behind my liver like a superfluous kidney. Two more weeks of coughing like a hyena and I finally called my REAL doctor.

He said I should "get me to an EMERGENCY ROOM", either that or come in tomorrow and see someone else as he had surgery tomorrow (and probably a gold date, he is a Doctor after all). Trouble was my Doctor is near my son and my son is 100 miles from me.

Now the last time I was in the hospital they strapped me down to the table like a was a runaway calf and stuck a mechanical hitchhiker in my chest. I was alone in a strange state far from anyone who had ever known me more than 3 months. I saw in the trip to the emergency room the same sort of thing. The small child inside me grabbed a box of RITZ crackers and ducked behind the refrigerator in my mind...

WHAT?!?! You don't have a REFRIGERATOR IN YOUR HEAD????

...and was not to be seen. In the end I stuck a note to my iMAC saying "Gone to the ER", grabbed my phone, my sketchbook and my journal and saddled up up my Suzuki. Yes, with a hacking cold I jumped on my motorcycle on a cold and rainy night and headed off to the ER. It was actually a relaxing ride, not too far and being on two wheels always makes me feel good. I got checked in then hustled into a corner to tell Nick. He freaked a little (he is my kid after all) but I was able to settle him down. ALl the time I blew off the little dwarf in the back of my head with a war hammer that said "You are never coming out again".

For a late night visit they were through. Chest x-rays, blood work and two hours in a darkened room alone. At such times the eight year old in all of us shivers at every shadow and sound. I coughed so hard one time that I think I passed out from hypoxia (I know I have been coming close at times of late). EVERY doomsday scenario came to mind. Pacemaker failure, strange blood disease from sleeping with amazonian slave girls. Confusion about contracting that latter disease without actually having had the FUN of sleeping with those women. The little kid behind the fridge came out for some cheese for just a minute, shrieked and went and hid even deeper.

Finally a kindly young Doctor came in and told me all my tests had come back clear but that I had Bronchitis and could look foreward to 2-3 more weeks of this fun once I started on the meds he prescribed. I felt relieved and a little foolish. Still on the ride home the air was a little fresher than on the way in and I actually took a longish way home. Not really a life affirming eveing but I guess a life reassuring one. No matter how bad I felt and how nasty I played out the cinema in my psyche it was never that bad.

Now if you will excuse me I have to go back into my brain with a box of Sees candy. That kid is still hiding in there and I am getting a little worried.

Well I have been fighting the flu monster still which has left me not unable to write but unmotivated. The best I could muster was watching re-runs of FARSCAPE and doing NYQUIL shots. Unfortunately I didn't have some sultry "Naughty Nurse" whose tummy I could do said shots off of. At the same time I got yet ANOTHER invite to join a dating site for free for a month. I was bored, what the hell, let's see what we will see.

Now you have to understand I have tried this route to meet women before and I will NEVER do it again. There is a certain TAINT attached to people who use these sites. I learned about it when my ex Girlfriend, Teresa, and I used to make up phony personas for a site back east and then sit on the couch and smirk over the invites we each received. We also alternated being Gay or not. Yes...I know...it was bent. We stopped the gay thing when I got an enquiry that turned out to be attached to the father of one of her kids friends at school.

((AHEM! Move Along))

Now since I know how I was acting I didn't trust anyone on the sites. That is until I got dumped (the first time, yes there WAS a FIRST time which also implies a SECOND time, I am a fool after all). When I got serious about the whole thing, well as serious as I can get, I talked with a couple of women and actually met up with one. Recently divorced, dental hygienist... a sort of Woody Allen dream. I was still smarting from the last time so I was a gentleman and just was myself.

She Jumped me, used me like a two dollar mule then left me by the side of the road. Thus was my first experience with digital dating.

So when I was lonely I went back to looking at the sites, not contacting anyone but part of me began observing. I noticed that all the women my age were divorced, kids had left, they had beautiful houses, nice cars, pictures of themselves in Cancun WITH THEIR GIRLFRIENDS or of them holding their dog. They also shared one other trait, most of them did not list an occupation. Curiouser and curiouser.

I also noticed that if all these women went to the theatre and to the symphony and the Opera those institutions wouldn't be suffering such bad times financially. They all like to dance, find skinny dipping a turn on and are "fine wine connoisseurs. All that with their pictures in their new MACY's finery.

Then I realized that the role reversal was complete, that these were the "liberated" women I saw marching in the streets, burning their bras (Back when they didn't need them, though few of them need them now because of silicon support) and proclaiming that they were freeing themselves from MALE CHAUVINISM.

Yeah right. Like so many of the ideals of that generation the idealism gave way to human nature. Some of those women did seek out new opportunities and I salute them. I like strong people no matter what their gender, but a lot of them just went down the road of so many of their mothers before them, They married and raised a family. The Reagan era APPLAUDED this sort of behaviour and stopped JUST SHORT of bringing back bee hive hairdos. Well... in California anyway.

The ideas you get in you head though are as indelible as a Sharpie on Silk, they don't fade easily. So while they were being "super Moms" or trying to hold down a job while they raised the kids they did something perviously reserved for 1950s mean, they got disillusioned and dissatisfied. They DESERVED more because it was their RIGHT! FUCK that old man who worked day in and day out, his gut is too big and he doesn't have that luxurious head of hair I married! Not to say that the husbands were never at fault but in my experience amongst the circle of friends I have, and the circle of tertiary acquaintances they bring with them I can say that 75% of the divorces I have seen were brought by the WOMAN because SHE was dissatisfied.

Put succinctly, the women who earnestly struggled for liberation in the sixties and seventies has succeeded. Unfortunately they had not ELEVATED women to the loftier position in the corporate world they sought, rather they freed women up to become just as bitter and shallow as had only been reserved for men in the past. Now women had the right to leave the family just because her "needs weren't being met".

The thing that set me off on this tirade was a link a buddy sent me to the NATIONAL COUGAR AND CUB CONVENTION that recently took place here in San Jose. The article made it look like it was a nice event. Those women I had seen on the sites obviously got out to DANCE (which their rat prick husbands never took them out to do!) and flirt with all sorts of round faced, eager eyed young Silicon valley boys. The ladies need to learn to detach themselves form the past a bit better though, I mean they guy they chose as the "Cutest Cub" looks like an Asian version of "Huggy Bear" from Baretta. The guy, who looks so much like a PLAYA from some snarky YOUTUBE video, won a free cruise. NICE! Great payback for charming a bunch of Wanna be MILFs for an evening!

One of the organizer "Miss California Couger" (c'mon, you haven't been a miss since before WATERGATE!) said:

A cougar is a woman who is confident and who knows what she wants,

I have to finish her thought for her"
"She has had the stones to divorce her husband of 25 years, using a lawyer that sucks his assets out of him like a spider does a fly slurpee, and cast his carcass aside. Now with all his assets in her Well Fargo account she is off to find her own perfect "Pablo the Pool boy".

I have some experience with cross generational dating, so ladies let me clue you in on what you should look forward, or maybe I won't. The Journey is the thing after all. Through all the struggles in the latter half of the last century you have earned the rights previously reserved for men. The right to be shallow (Who needs to talk to him if he will do whatever I say and has an ass like THAT!). The right to be delusional (Yeah! I look just like I did when i was 22!) The right to beleive that you can have all those things you gave up when you were younger so you could have security.

Enjoy your freedom ladies! I will be over here in the bleachers with my popcorn watching the show that is to come!