My Robot Is Pregnant theme song!

Built a manger scene. Well, the manger is another name for a trough, where you throw the hay when you feed the livestock. So we built a nativity scene. Even built a sheep. Just the one. The eskimo dog may not be part of your tradition. It works in the north.

Here’s another one for the it’s a small city box. I’m helping a guy demo out the old CItizen Cake restaurant in Western Addition. It was a trendy spot known for desserts and old roommate Matt was the bartender.
Now I’m sawzalling out the copper pipes from the kitchen sink and unscrewing steel studs from the 15 foot ceilings.
Being a junk man the contractor asked me to keep an eye out for 1 by 6 doug fir tongue and groove or ship lap, about 500 board feet.
“Sure,” I said. I had very little idea what all that meant. Probably about half made sense. Doug fir is Douglas Fir, a tree that covered much of this area in the 1800′s and even today is available for construction. 1 by 6 is the thickness and the width. Tongue and groove is a board with a groove on one edge and a protrusion on the other so the boards lock into each other. Ship lap, I didn’t know. It means a rabbet, or notch is taken out of the edge, allowing boards to overlap. Research revealed a board feet is 144 cubic inches of wood. So you measure width times height times length and divide by 144. This becomes algebraic and thus impossible for me to calculate. Mrs. Mace would have written like, “You need 500 board feet of lumber. How many linear feet of 1 by 6 douglas fir do you need to buy?” Then the bell rang.

Nick’s not dealing with the holiday so well. He installed a bottle opener on his headboard last evening and this morning I heard his alarm, followed by “chhhsss” as the frosty cap from a bedside cooler of brews cracked.
The new roommate Kathleen still isn’t working, but shit, neither is half of America. She wants a christmas tree bad but they aint cheap in the city. She threw on a bikini and threw a wool coat on top. Went down to the lot and flashed the guy deep in a row of Doug fir’s. “You sure you can’t go a little lower?” she cooed. We got an 8 footer in the living room now and it cost her 6 bucks. She took a cab home.
Tis the season for dealing. Hope it works out for you too!

Been working so much lately. Isn’t that nice? Don’t expect a Christmas gift though. Defeats my purpose. It got cold here in San Francisco. 40 degrees in the daytime, under this golden California sun. I saw a homeless guy and actually felt bad. Pulled out a buck and then realized, “You want to be homeless.” So I put that buck back in my wallet. Spent it on a scratcher later. Lost that. But there was a winner this week. Sitting around inventing food again, we came up with bacon guacamole. What do you think?

“Shunned by all like a leper and left to expire in its own dung and ashes.” Greece.
That’s how Henry Miller described it in The Colossus of Maroussi. He was talking about Crete in particular, the largest Greek island. The year was 1941.

“Every foot of the land has been fought over, conquered and reconquered, sold, bartered, pawned and auctioned off, leveled with fire and sword, sacked, plundered, administered over by tyrants and demons, converted by fanatics and zealots, betrayed, ransomed, traduced by the great powers of our day, desolated by civilized and savage hordes alike, desecrated by all and sundry, hounded to death like a wounded animal, reduced to terror and idiocy.”

Sounds like he’s explaining big banking’s effect on not just Greece, but all of us.

I make love in this room. It gets loud even though we are whispering, the intensity is so high. Eventually it comes to a lull. The heater makes a weird humming. I can’t sleep. I’m thankful for heat, it’s cold, but I can’t sleep with this noise coming from the radiator.
Happy Holidays.

God I love the garbage. Garage garbage is my favorite. Old men saving bits of pencils well into the internet age. I carry the torch.

That was weird. First no internet. Then the server holding my website was “under construction” for a few days. That’s what the white page was all about. I got the local soccer mom group to hold a benefit bake sale of vegan cookies in the meantime so don’t worry about me.
Up next, the scanner is broken and I misspent the bake sale funds so I’ll just tell you what this letter dated July 5, 1936 says.

Burke Idaho –

Dear Aunt H- and Uncle F-
Thank you very much for the nice sweater it fitted me fine and is just what I wanted. My Uncle Pat is sick in the hospital with pneumonia and Pluracy. I broke my arm riding a horse. It stepped on a live electrict (sic) line and bucked me off. Our swimming pool opened the 4th. I am entering high school this year.

Your loving nephew
John

There you have it, live but delayed from Burke Idaho. You probably wonder what Pluracy is. It’s a misspelling. The damn boy meant Pleurisy, an inflammation of the membrane that surrounds and protects the lungs.
But what about a horse stepping on a live wire in 1936 and shooting a kid off! That was living! That was youth!

This guy was chillin’ at the flea market last Sunday. Napkin in the bloody nose. Not weird at all.

Did you see that? The internet went down. Yeah, just went down. Somewhere over the hill over there. Yup. Just like that. No more sports scores. No more weather. Didn’t know if mama was wantin’ to talk. Couldn’t put money in the bank. That little old internet cord sure is important.
Spent three days on the phone with gals from the Philippines. I told them “Ing at”. They said, “What?” I said, “My girlfriend is from over there. She taught me that. Can’t remember what it means. Thank you or something.” So much for India.
Finally after talking to 22 people from AT&T, Linksys, and the SF Police Department I’m back online and able to blog.
Doo do Doo….
13 year old girl found bound and gagged in his basement. The Dow is up 100.
Ya da da da dee…
I’m no Bukowski. I sleep on a memory foam mattress. You could lay it down on a bed of drain rock and still sleep like Ambien got slipped in with dinner. I was reading Hot Water Music last night before bed and thought how easy I have it. If only he had become a junk man. He wouldn’t have written so many stories about tearing open cheap bottles of vodka.
Yup. The internet is back on. I’m out.

I thought I was stronger than a cup of coffee but then I was using a French press and I guess that makes a difference. The French ground their coffe not so thin, like cookie crumble at the ice cream shop. Maybe a little finer. Then put it in the glass carafe. Pour in the hot water and let it soak for a bit, then you plunge down a filter that exactly fits the carafe. Sometimes the plunger resists, steam pressure I guess. At this point, don’t get pissed off and press down with all your years of moving refrigerators by yourself, don’t lean into it like your little glass coffee maker is an evil man and you need to get your thumb up his nose far enough to jab out his brains so…shit, neighbor Cal just knocked and we gotta go to work. I’ll deal with the burns later.

I hadn’t noticed. Oh, you mean that was his name. Thanks Safeway. It’s all about names. When you are young and have time to be in a band, you think up band names. Or you hear something and think, “That’s gonna be my website.” All that naming fun stops when you have kids, and you start thinking up names for them.
Briar.
Reagan.
Jupiter.
Jetson.
Wyatt.
Brody.
Real names of my friend’s children.
The Flagpoles.
The name of the first and last band I was in. Kind of an odd name for a band. Doesn’t conjure up much imagery. Maybe the lawn in front of the Town Hall. Is that rock and roll? Not for me so much.
Nick and Jeff are in a new band now.
Casual Dolphins.
Now, Nick’s my buddy, but these names are going from bad to worse. Jeff and I rode around yesterday and tried to think of new names. It involves reading every sign and calling it out. “Wholesale flowers!”
No, I say.
“Pork, Beef, Poultry Reno Neveda”
Try Again.
Jeff says,”Nick had a dream and saw a vision. Now he wants to name the band Golden Escalators. I said, ‘How about Coastal?’ Can’t we just have something boring that doesn’t sound like we’re a bunch of fucking hippies?”
“Nick’s kind of a hippy though,” I say.
“He kinda is,” Jeff agrees.
“I like the name ‘Gold Dust’” I offer.
Jeff thinks it sounds too country cowboy Neil Young. And that’s the problem. If you don’t like someone’s idea, they won’t like yours.
“Steamy Jeans?”
I just laughed at his idea.

Yeah so anyway all this pot farming out here is good for business. Had to haul a bunch of fertilizer jugs, silica stuff to help indoor plants fight off bugs and whatever. They aint strong like outdoor stuff, pampered 24/7 with optimal everything, lights, food, Co2, the whole life of a king. Or queen cuz you kill the males. It’s not like you can throw 60 one gallon jugs of hydro-helper in your recycling without raising a few eyebrows. And all the cardboard from the ballast and lights and bulbs and timers and sensors and pumps, I took it down to the paper yard and got 20 bucks that’s how much there was. That’s like a thousand pounds. If you’re looking for a new career, get out west and sell all these visionaries chemicals and hardware – they’ll be calling you Levi Strauss of the green rush.
But whatever, the other thing is this book of short stories in the truck. I keep it there for stop lights, lunch break, waiting for whoever. All Hemingway. And he wrote some short ones – one paragraph. Two paragraphs. I’ll read those in slow traffic on the 101. There’s one, and here’s my whole point, that starts off, “In the city of Madrid there are thousands of boys called Paco, the diminutive of Francisco…” and so maybe let’s call San Francisco Paco instead.

ever try to throw out a balloon? If the garbage can doesn’t have a lid they won’t stay and you’ll look pretty foolish tying balloons to a garbage can. Think the janitor or garbage man is gonna know you are disposing of them? It’ll look like you love your trash can so much you are celebrating its birthday. So then you find a garbage can with a lid. Every time someone opens that lid out float your balloons. Who is mean-hearted enough to put balloons back in a garbage can, besides you? No one. Throwing away balloons just proves you are a jerk who doesn’t know how to party.