My Robot Is Pregnant theme song!

The Robot has been silent lately. Focus has been over at the store Jimbo and I are opening.
Here he is with a $44 receipt at town hall for registering the business now known as Mixed Nuts.

A bit blurry since my phone went in San Francisco Bay and no longer focuses.

Mixed Nuts was not my idea or first choice, but I am a silent partner and learning to let go of my control issues.

My choice was Silverfish & Foxing. A name that in the end sounded both trendy and pretentious.

Pretentious because it sounds like a law firm, although it refers to two scourges of paper. Silverfish being the little insect that eats books and foxing being the term for the brown stains that appear with ago as the elements in the paper break down.

Trendy because in San Francisco everybody seems to be naming their business in this English countryside manner.
Butcher & Hog, bourbon and branch, I’ll keep you posted as I think of more.

They serve white pages thick steak, mashed potatoes and lettuce diced to postage stamp bites on Monday nite while the football game is on and men are scrambling each others brains on the field.

Mr. Louden sat at a table in the corner tonite, drinking an IPA and cutting into the entree. He affected an elderly man’s voice and asked, “Have you ever made love to a stroke victim?”

Others at the table laughed and the conversation turned to thrift. At one point, during the Great Depression for example, it was beneficial to take the little salt packet from the restaurant home with you, and to keep the small bar of hotel soap when you’ve checked out.

“At this point the advertising machines are disgorging such voluminous amounts of trinkety drek a man would become victim to a hoarding death in a matter of months.”

Crushed under reusable tote bags emblazened with pharmaceutical brands and real estate agent’s complimentary pens. The urge for thrift takes on a new expression in that one must refuse items today in order to be thrifty.

He cut away a golf ball of fat and with his fork trucked it to the edge of his plate.

“Look at that. It’s like seeing my heart.”

There are no cases for him to solve anymore. The once paid observer gives it out for free now.

Worked with the English Accent the other day. He has a blue velvet lined board on the wall in his workshop full of his father’s foot race medals.

“He ran against Eric Liddell, the man from Chariot’s of Fire, and beat him several times. In those days they had separate changing rooms, Liddell was a commoner.”

I was demo-ing out a Victorian era kitchen chimney with the son of an aristocrat.

“No,” he corrected me, “My father was the doctor to aristocracy, but not titled himself.”

We were both covered in soot, he was in the attic with a small sledge called a single-jack, smashing the clay lining of the flue to bits. He handed chunks down through a hole in the ceiling and I loaded them into 5 gallon buckets and walked them to the truck. Neither of us had adequate health care.

The honey badger kind of gave a fuck his boat sank. But looks like he dragged her back to shore.

Can you people let me know how to make this easier to comment? I tried to adjust it so that anyone with an already approved comment needn’t log in again. Is that so?

Haven’t been blogging because my eyes hurt now when I use this little phone. Another sign of age. “you’re old enough to change your own diaper now,” my girlfriend told me.
I had her look at my ass, it felt like a lot of hot sauce got spilled in the crack.
“Diaper rash,” she said. There is something awesome about making your girlfriend look at your ass.
But that’s another story. The point of this is, as a truck driver, I’m prone to diaper rash. I work a bunch, sweat either drips down my back, the spinal column channeling it into my piggy bank, or else the cheeks themselves are creating a damp micro climate conducive to a crazy itch.
After my underoos are good and moist, I sit down in the truck and drive around for 40 minutes and it’s like a stew down there, like a crock pot or something. The butt sweat sits there and every corner my hips sway, every stoplight as I step on the brake, the damp gets rubbed around.

There was Angel’s auto repair, Angel’s grocery and Angel’s tire shop, one after another, grocery in the middle on the corner, Angel wrapping around the corner, controlling one end of the block.

The grocery had two coolers stocked with grape soda cans and such, but they weren’t plugged in. Large aluminum spaghetti colanders were stacked on top of the coolers next to cowboy hats.

A white shelf ran down the center of the store, on the far side a weight bench was set up, and some clothes, not looking for sale, were draped across it. The shelves were stocked with religious icons of the catholic persuasion, and napkins, and odd flea market scraps.

It’s a place like this that makes me realize how precious space is in San Francisco, where every inch has to produce income, retail square footage is so costly turn over must be constant.

That leaves no room for the seldom used, the misunderstood, the lost. A dusty corner is left for an elderly man in a rent controlled unit on the edge of town by the transfer station, but that’s about it.

Thankful for top ten lists and five common mistakes. Thankful for twice as fast and half and half. Thankful for numbers and how they add up. Learning division is a sign of maturity.

I’m bitter the generations before me haven’t left me a castle. Not even a horse. Oh, to have stonework from the time of guilds. How can I be thankful for my good health in the face of so much loss?

I’m not thankful for elections, the junk mail, the exception from the national do not call list for campaigning.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m thankful my parents raised me knowing they loved me, and telling me I could be successful in this world. But how can I excuse forced church attendance?

What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. Or it really confuses you and you end up out to sea with prescription drugs tumbling through your blood and whores and fags and Muslims…well never mind.

It is important to be given a sense of right and wrong, to realize there are consequences to your actions, that’s how you come back to port alive. Thank you Jesus.

By the time a nation understands the reality of its traditions it is on the decline, and as we gather together with our families celebrating what evidently was the beginning of a genocide of American natives, we at least have each other.

Chicago ATM with walk-in freezer flaps….

Looked like an old man tinkerer crossing the street. His back hooked like a scythe, his old green sweater puffed up along his spine from the bones. He dragged an old suitcase made of nylon with tapestry fabric on the zippered cover. It was dirty, the streets were dirty, it’s a city.

A variety of bottles hung off the side, like you imagine a pack mule might be rigged for trekking – jute rope looped around the bottle necks and tied off to the handle so they clunked together like dumb bells with no news to toll.

He pulled on a strap and two wheels carried it along behind him. He passed out of site and I stood there thinking about money.