My Robot Is Pregnant theme song!

The Golden Gate Bridge, San Francisco side

Oxytocin. Don’t let a gold digger get her hands on some. Or the guy who buys Spanish Fly through mail order companies in the back of Hustler. It’s the love drug. Along with vasopressin, oxytocin is the chemical your body releases during orgasm, (and childbirth, for women). It’s part of what makes you want to bond to another person.

Sometimes I don’t want to bond to my partner. There’s a whole world out there full of back alleys and bars where you can get into a lot of trouble. But my girlfriend and I are eating dinner and watching a movie, so the excitement passes me by. Instead of scoring some coke in the men’s room and getting in the cab with strangers to party in a loft down by the strip clubs, I’m offering to wash if she dries. Then we’re gonna watch Benjamin Button.

Who are these people that get married? I’ve seen my parents. Each still on their first marriage. It seems to involve television. Is there a study on how many marriages that appliance has saved? Let’s face it. You wake up, go to work, come home and eat, then it’s about time for bed. It can’t be too hard to stay married, you hardly see the other one. You see your work mates more than your spouse. You have a little sex, some natural drug washes through your system and you decide to stay married another night. Oxytocin. One day at a time.

As my parents both know, I was born on the fourth of July. That is one good reason I am so into independence. That, and I bought into the mystique of a lone cowboy, a wandering martial arts master, and a writer living high on a lonely mountain ridge in a fire tower. Archetypes of freedom.

To perfect a craft requires isolation, and I want to be the best. America asks no less of her citizens. The American dream is to leave your family and head west, alone across the prairies, killing wild game in the snowy mountains and wrapping your feet in their fur, then descending down the western slope of the Sierra Nevada’s and staking a claim in California gold country. Alone and young. Soon to be rich.

Meanwhile I’m also supposed to be married and working hard, too. That’s the other America. I threw in with the low oxytocin kids and took off west. I’m getting older and it still doesn’t seem important to get married. But breaking up is hard to do. You can read the 8 page New York Times article I did, and tell me if I got it wrong: men suffer from lust, and women love to be desired.

I got lust in my heart. Which is a real motivator for staying single. My girlfriend, she likes to be desired. Ladies, tell me if I’m wrong, but being desired doesn’t need a sex act to be fulfilled. Not like lust does.

I’m not a science writer for the New York Times, but look at it like this. It’s easy to stay in a relationship if guys are yelling “Nice ass” out the window at you. You know you’re desired, and you can go home to your mate and he’ll stroke your thighs and kiss your mouth. But that lust is a ball breaker. Yelling, “Nice ass” isn’t enough. I wanna know where that ass lives, where she works, I wanna buy her a drink, I want to have sex with her. My body is telling me to try. But I gotta go to my girlfriends place instead. I’m gonna do laundry.

People wonder why bad relationships last so long. Couples develop chemical dependencies, that’s why. Your girlfriend is your high. Jesus didn’t have the vocabulary for it, but he was warning people pre-marital sex was a recipe for disaster. Hearts get broken. God gets cursed. Jesus says “Don’t do it.” He’s trying to protect his fathers name.

My lady and I have been going through a few rounds of breaking up and making up, and we’re trying to figure it all out. She’s a beautiful woman, smart and fun. She cares about me, I care about her. I just think back to some words of wisdom from my old friend Rusty Sunshine.

“I don’t care who she is, after ten years, twenty years, you’re gonna get tired of fucking the same woman.”

God damn. Is there really ever an answer in science? I need an anti-lust drug so I can concentrate on one woman and start getting some housework done.

photo posted from my iPhone

This is what the living room has looked like for too long. So I got a bunch of old lath (the stuff these old San Franciscan homes were made out of before sheetrock was invented) and nailed it to the wall. That’s what being unemployed does for you.

photo posted from my iPhone

Aaron is the white dude sitting on the curb. Those are day laborers standing behind him. They’re all in the parking lot at Home Depot in Colma, California, just outside of San Francisco. Novemeber and December were incredibly slow for Aaron, a self employed landscaper and San Franciscan native.

“I figured, I’m just as broke and hungry as these guys, why not?” Aaron says. It wasn’t so easy, he found out.

“Turned out to be an oppressive situation, being a minority of one. At first they were happy to see me, they thought I was a contractor gonna hire them. Then they realized I was looking for work too. A lot of those guys were not cool. I don’t speak a lot of Spanish, but I could tell they were talking shit about me. And I saw a lot of racism in the contractors. ‘You’re a white boy, you shouldn’t be out here,’ they’d say to me. No one could accept a white guy doing day labor. I could see contractors looking at me, but they wouldn’t hire me. I asked one guy why not. ‘You probably cost too much,’ he said.”

According to Aaron and others I’ve talked to, the hourly rate for straight labor jobs, moving rubble, digging holes, that kind of labor, is 12 bucks an hour. Other guys postion themselves as painters and charge $15 or more an hour. Guys who claim to be experienced carpenters might charge $20 an hour.

“They might be experienced in their country, but building materials and building codes are different. Maybe they build with pine, which is really soft, and to be safe in earth quake prone Bay Area, you’d have to make a 4 by 6 work where a 2 by 4 would normally go. They use recycled cement in Mexico too, which requires more water. If you put four times too much water in our cement, it’s gonna fail. Not right away, but in a few weeks it’ll crack all over.”

Aaron showed up at 6:30 am the first morning, one of the earliest on the scene. He waited ten hours without getting any work. He was back again the next day. Still no luck. “Some of those guys drink or smoke weed on the side while they wait. One guy tried to get me high, but I was like, ‘No way. I’m standing out here because I need to work, not because I wanna get high.’”

He carried a backpack full of tools with him and a portfolio of work he’d done. It wasn’t until six hours into the third day of hanging around the parking lot that someone finally gave him a job – painting a living room and bathroom.

“I felt like an omen . ‘Now Americans are doing this? Uh oh. Shit must be getting bad.’”

Aaron talked about being embarrassed to see people he’d worked for in the past seeing him stand out there. There was also an attitude among the day laborers that he was encroaching on the immigrants gig. They’d staked that turf out for years and didn’t want a white guy moving in.

“A lot of my friends are mixed race, and they all say they don’t feel like they’re accepted by any group. If they are black/white mixed, blacks don’t think they’re black, whites don’t think they’re white. That’s kinda how I felt. I was looking for work, but workers wouldn’t accept me, and I’ve been a contractor, but the contractors wouldn’t hire me. No one wanted to see a white guy standing out there.”

Here’s a spliced together interview with a guy selling Obama t-shirts in front of a grocery store when I was in New Orleans a few months ago.

Take a listen totrueplayers and learn the difference between pimps, players and true players.

It’s skate or die time for America
From an Al Jazeera article: “(MLK) fought his whole life against the forces of militarism and economic exploitation, while (Obama) empowers, and is empowered by, bankers and militarists…

If the Obama-ites had more presence of mind, they would avoid comparisons with Dr King, which can only redound to Obama’s great detriment.

King’s break with his one-time ally, Lyndon Johnson, the former president, set the standard for both political and moral behaviour.

When it became clear that the war on poverty, a programme of government aid to help the poor in the mid-1960s, was doomed by the war in Vietnam, which acted “like some demonic destructive suction tube,” devouring all available resources, King publicly declared against the war.

In doing so, he severed what had been the most productive relationship between a US president and a black leader in US history.

But the war gave him no choice, since military expenditures made “rehabilitation” of the American poor impossible.

Both morality and politics led to the same conclusion: the movement could not coexist with war.”

So let’s not forget there is still a War on Terror and we are fighting that war in Afghanistan. Mr. President is committing more troops to the region. The next four years aren’t gonna be a party. Shouldn’t we try to finish the War on Poverty before we proceed with Afghanistan?

At 9:30 this morning while checking email, I heard Obama’s voice out on the street, like he was driving around on the back of a pick up stumping. It was just the garbage man with his radio turned up loud enough to hear the speech as he got out and collected bins from the street. This president means a lot to people.

If you need a copy of the best movie ever, overdubbed in Turkish and recorded in Beta format, give a call.

I am from the future. My jet pack is biodegradable. Sub-zero emissions on my way to work. Moon boots at the antique store fetch thousands. I wish I was born in the old days. I would like to throw my garbage in a bucket. Drink unfiltered water. Brush my teeth with a tooth brush.

Mr. Fisher and I are getting ready to do a pod for current.com about metal detecting. If anyone has any ideas or questions relating to the subject, let me know.

You probably don’t have much idea about metal detecting, or “coin shooting”, as they call it. It appeals to a hard core audience of dreamers. Men, mostly, who think they will find buried treasure. Articles in the treasure hunting magazines lay out a cold case of a missing fortune. Like this one about “Outlaw Gold In Kansas”. In 1895 badman Bill Doolen was arrested after a string of bank and train robberies. According to the story, “Until now Doolin’s outlaw career had paid off handsomely. He had organized a gang in Oklahoma Territory, and for their first venture they rode into Spearville, Kansas. They robbed the town bank of $11,000. Next was the bank in Cimarron, Kansas, which provided them with $14,000 in gold. They rode to Southwest City, Missouri, robbed another bank of $15,000, then loped leisurely towards Oklahoma. Passing through Pawnee at high noon, Doolin noticed a bank and waved towards it.

‘Let’s stop here a few minutes,’ he yelled to his men. This one they cleaned of all it had, several thousand dollars in gold. Next they struck in northwest Texas, robbing a Longview bank of more than $50,000.

With a string of successful bank holdups behind them, the gang began stopping trains to blast open safes in the express cars. They held up several trains around Wharton, Oklahoma, stormed a depot in Woodward and made off with a $7,000 payroll destined for Fort Supply. Then they moved up into Kansas to hold up trains, and it was here that Doolin cached most of his savings.”

You’re about ready to get involved aren’t you? Doolin escapes from jail but the sheriff tracks him down and he is shot off the springboard with his wife left alone in the wagon. Doolin was a family man. The secret of where his stolen loot lies is buried with his corpse. By the end of the article ten men have decided to buy a metal detector. You want a piece of the action.

But it isn’t just heist jobs gone wrong, there are stories about gold rich mines the prospector could never find again, valuable artifacts from Civil War battle sites, and occasionally you get a gripping article like the one that made the cover of True Treasure in April 1975. Take a look and tell me you aren’t sold.

please note the crocheted PBR can hat Marika is wearing in the photo.

photo posted from my iPhone

Cabot street used to be a bad little street in a small little town called Portsmouth, NH. For some reason the neighborhood got more money, but Cabot Street still has a sense of illegality to it. I encourage anyone who wants to post a little story about this place to do so in the comments. Then, when it eventually gets converted to an upscale organic food store the memories won’t be lost.

I got lucky with the scratchers here. If you call breaking even lucky. A lot of people do, that’s why gambling is an addiction. It makes no sense. I spent two bucks and won two bucks on cat scratch fever. Then I left the state without cashing in. So really I lost.

photo posted from my iPhone

Mr. Pooperlooper restored this old giant mudbug for Earl Sanders lobster pound.

photo posted from my iPhone
These are the slow runners, the nearly dead lobster culled from the tanks at Sanders. Jarret Celli, my old math class pal, told me they’re called weaks as well. Compare the size of these critters to that 33 pounder. How much do you figure these weigh, Mr. Celli?

photo posted from my iPhone
This is the heartbreak of junk hauling. Perfectly good sand, but where do I store it? Who needs it right now? Where do I sell it? Instead, it gets thrown in a dumpster.

photo posted from my iPhone
Got a six foot yellow birdcage yesterday.