My Robot Is Pregnant theme song!

I gouged out some crud from under the corner of my big toe with the round end of my nose hair scissors. So many little things to keep up with. My desk is always cluttered, but that clutter doesn’t have the rank stench of what comes out from my toes. Is this a visionquest? So bored laying in bed for two days now, it’s all I can do to not fix a tall Tequila and OJ over ice and crawl under the blankets, only to prolong the illness.
Here’s what I’ve thought about as far as why I’m living the life I am.
I like working more than I like creating things and I’m embarrassed about that because I want to be creative more than I want to be a worker. But if I have the choice of staying home and writing or going to clean out a garage, I’d rather do the clean out. It is more immediate and exciting to me.
I’ll be 36 shortly and I’ve become someone I didn’t want to be: a wage slave.
Is a visionquest supposed to bum you out? No, it’s supposed to give you a path to a new life.
Fear of being poor keeps me from sitting around the kitchen table drawing comics, so unless the visionquest comes fully funded, I don’t see myself having the courage to take the path suggested. This whole weekend has led me to recognize the dark vortex of a reality I’m afraid to escape. Wage slave.
How to be free? I want to sing it like a bird. Like an opera. Like the beginning of the Star Spangled Banner. “Ohhh How Can I Be FreeEeee?”
I should know by now there is no freedom. Like the crud under my toes, life is always gonna stick crap in my way I have to deal with. Money can’t buy me anything but a more appropriate digging tool for the job, but whatevs, the nose hair scissors work fine.
I’ll be a junk man with a junk shop and piles of stuff and always wonder why I didn’t work harder at writing a novel or getting a tv show. Then I’ll remember – I was more interested in collecting stuff.
It’s like I have two sicknesses. The one is the hording compulsion. The other is the egomania that wants to be in the public eye. My visionquest has revealed to me that hording is a stronger compulsion. If I want to be more creative I have to get rid of everything. I have 12 bicycles in the shed. I have six old doors in the back of the pick up. I have 800 pounds of steel in the form of a chair lift to bring disabled people up a flight of stairs in the back of the new truck. I have two couches, three fish tanks, a locker, a slip’n slide, throw rugs, and boxes of clothes and books in the back of the third truck. The garage doesn’t have a path to the back, but there is a route of things I climb on top of that I know can support my weight when I need to get there. I have more doors behind the bushes alongside the house. Under the back steps are old windows. Sometimes I feel insane.

photo posted from my iPhone
Here’s Kal. Sandblasting parts off an old motorcycle on a sunny Saturday afternoon. The 20 gallon air tank on his compressor woke me up, but it was two thirty so I couldn’t complain. I’ve been ignoring a cold but today I addressed it. This was my visionquest, to lay in bed as long as I could and not think about anything. Perhaps tomorrow the wisdom will come. I’ll keep you posted.

photo posted from my iPhone

That’s what the Comcast ad says. This sign is right on Castro and 18th, heart of the gay district. Has anyone seen this ad anywhere else? I wouldn’t expect it anywhere in Woodside. Learn the local dialect, gain their trust and suddenly everyone in the neighborhood has cable.

photo posted from my iPhone
It’s a banjo crossed over an m16 caramel almond ice cream cake for Dougs birthday!

This woman came over and checked out the bee’s awhile back, she developed a new look for Burt’s Bee’s as a class assignment. Check out her blog!

(I still haven’t figured out how to upload images from my desktop, only from my iPhone, so I can’t grab an image from her site. But Cristina told me the colors of my kitchen inspired her palette. Take that Matt Conway, you said it was gross.)

I stopped bloggin for two days as an extended moment of silence for two journalists held captive in North Korea. see more here

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the boredom of being in San Francisco. Being sentenced to 12 years hard labor in North Korea doesn’t sound exciting, but being a pawn in a nuclear struggle does. I hope the two are released soon and can come home and binge on oreo cookies and Jack in the Box. Which is exactly what I did when I got back from Italy ten years ago.

It’s inspiring to see someone take off and dig into a story. I need a break from hauling garbage and painting apartment walls. Any ideas?

photo posted from my iPhone

photo posted from my iPhone

met a locksmith. went to switch out locks for an old woman who’d been punched and robbed. That was sad, but not every old woman has him over because she’s been robbed. He held onto one old lady who had to hold onto him just to walk across the room. He switched out some locks and finishes up, asking, “Is there anything else I can do for you?”

from here I’ll let him speak for himself…

“She looked me up and down real slow and creepy and said, ‘Yes, but I don’t think you’re man enough to do it.’ I dropped my head and said ‘O.K.’ and walked out of there as fast as I could.”

This guy was funny, like a combination of Ian Loch and Ken Hawkins and all the funny kids from NH who loved to tell a story where they realized they weren’t man enough to do it.

He must be from New England. I never asked, I just knew. We beat each other up back there, call it conditioning for the winter. Just yesterday I took notes on the inside of a ripped up cigarette pack as we made jokes about having sex with a pregnant woman.

Here’s some backstory. We cleaned out a garage and found a bunch of porn on VHS. “Knocked Up and Horny” was the name of a loose cassette stuffed behind an old wooden dresser. Cleaning out garages teaches you about the world.

“Is that a threesome, if you do a pregnant woman?”

“Yeah, but one third of it’s pedophilia.”

“Could you get arrested for that?”

“What if it was a breach baby and you got it pregnant?”

“That couldn’t happen.”

So we had a reality check. We were mocking motherhood and innocence. We needed to. It was a very New England moment. Something that derives from rebellion. An urge from reading “Live Free Or Die” on snow-tired Subaru license plates back east.

It’s fun to regress once in awhile. I spend a lot of time learning about other cultures and how to say, “where’s the bathroom?” in Cantonese. Learning acceptance and tolerance. To rip into my own flesh and the flesh of those who look like me is like medicine.

photo posted from my iPhone
An extended cab trailer. First I’ve ever seen.

photo posted from my iPhone

been workin with collin lately, and his sewer line broke which flooded the basement where his landlord had a bunch of stuff so collin got us the job, hauling wastewater soaked mattress’ to the dump. Today was so weird because last night we played a show at a cafe that had power issues. the amplifiers turned on but not enough juice reached them to power them. so we did the show with out electricity, which is hard for an electric bassist, but we did it. then i slept in my truck on a coffee table and woke up at collin’s, ready for our yard sale which the cops quickly busted up since we didn’t have a permit and we’d set up on the sidewalk and started drinking bloody marias.

the point was, the landlord threw out a foldable boat. So after the yard sale we folded the boat up, went to the boat launch, unfolded the boat and went floating around the bay. in a boat that floats. covered in sewerage from the leak. back at collins. but it was an aluminum boat that folds up.

i’ve been busy, my relationship is all messed up with my lady, lyle says everyone is going to the cool new blog instead of mine, but today was perfect. perfect. i woke up with stiff hips from sleeping cold and cramped but got up and walked down the hill to hang the yard sale sign and by then my hips felt great and i kept realizing my life is good. like things were so good, once wasn’t enough. i realized again life was fun and i had good people around me.

photo posted from my iPhone

photo posted from my iPhone
Looked like heat lightning over Berkeley, no bolt, no thunder. Only the second time that’s happened in 6 years. Just before dusk and the pigeons are home and cars are parked and a dirty front is riding in above the city like it doesn’t give a fuck and the Flagpoles are on my roof smoking and their little puffs of gray are pathetic dribbles floating out of their mouths compared to the unbroken rush above taking the hills and homes away from us. A long dark cloud coming from the ocean and crashing into different unexpecting east bay air. And the sky lights up.

AM radio guy is preaching as I cross the Richmond bridge and the steel construction cracks his voice like sun cracks the paint but the message is – wait till marriage.
“You sisters are jacked up. You think you have to let him just to have a relationship. Uh uh. You don’t let him touch the package, let alone be eatin’ chips out of it.”
The Richmond Bridge is an epic, small islands with sheer cliffs and no occupants but trees pass below you, San Quentin Prison is built on the shore, rotting piers finger out into the bay and empty oak hills roll on into the distance.

photo posted from my iPhone

It’s an old tradition, painting your number on the side of your truck and setting out into the world hoping to survive. Not exactly a good Samaritan, just offering service for bread money. A dance of symbiosis. In the days of wagons without cellphones it was a name on the side, and before the wheel was even invented, well, we can’t be sure but likely a man would set out holding something that told the world he was willing to work for a bit of food.