My Robot Is Pregnant theme song!

“Shut up George Washington High Marching Band!” my roommate, hung-over, would yell at her bedroom walls. For her, a noon riser, it was a sound only the Blue Angels could top for annoyance in this neighborhood. Fleet Week is short lived – a week of six navy jets screaming through the airspace two hundred feet above our flat. I’ve thrown bottles. This band over on the soccer field is something far more powerful.

Not a half-time marching band, no glee club harmonies, these are future military drummers. ROTC drum corps. Not exactly killers. Irritaters. A row of steel marimbas chiming out over the lowdown march of bass drums and the goose stepping snare sent for cover by the un-timed explosion of brass pie plates slamming together. The sound of war.

What is the point of a military band? Play loud enough to really bother someone? So the enemy might shoot a little prematurely, expose their location? Take out the one with the baton and blue ascot rather than the radio man with GPS and air strike coordinates? Are these drummers suicide musicians? I don’t understand the entire concept, for sure. One thing I understand, ROTC is under fire.

“The worst marching band in the city. Shouldn’t practice be held in the boiler room? As a community service?” These were the disgruntled words of the other flatmate – his bedroom window faced the back gate of the high school. He worked nights, slept late in the morning. Like a lot of people in S.F., he wanted to put an end to ROTC.

It is sad that San Franciscans are so adamantly against the military. Even ones who wake up before school starts. Sure, the music is like a very determined ice cream truck tune, 12 bars of orchestrated melody pursuing you throughout the neighborhood. Relentless. Tireless. Stalking. Determined. That is the nature of practice. But to ban ROTC from high school because you don’t like the tune will not prevent wars. It will prevent these kids from learning music. From learning how to work together. From learning how to iron wool uniforms.

While two cranky alcoholics who are prone to headaches won’t stand up for it, I will. I met these kids and they are doing something positive with the experience. They stay late after school and play music. They aren’t breaking into my car or tagging my apartment. They aren’t smoking weed on my back steps. I’ve seen the kids who do that stuff, and they are never dressed in khaki uniforms with bass drums strapped to their bodies.

I do not believe San Francisco should prevent students from signing up for ROTC just because the band practice is so loud. When I was learning how to play my first electric guitar I must have played the opening riff to “Crazy Train” three hundred times between 3 p.m. and when the Fall Guy came on. All year long. I want these kids to have a chance to play music. I’m for the ROTC program in San Francisco schools.

This is Doug’s hair. I’m in his band now. Honestly, I can’t figure out why this picture looks so weird.

16th & Mission, San Francisco.

The older guy with money got to use this compactor.

I had to use the hand held compactor, which jumps up and down and shakes your entire body like alligator wrestling.

These are some pants i made out of an old blue tarp. I’m trying to make a suit for homeless people that can serve as both clothing and shelter. A strange bird came by last night and gave it some cowboy boots. Now it walks around on its own.

hard at work sewing the suit coat

Sean and I figured out some major cross dissolve effects in order to give you, dear viewer, a real sense of a rolling truck on this number.

Went to the dentist. I know one cavity I have that they won’t be filling. If you get my drift.

I voted last night, even though I just watched this movie : google video

It shows how easy it is to rig an election, from the optical scanner to the main accounting computer. I really felt like crying, and I voted straight Green party as I was reminded that both Gore and Kerry refused to challenge questionable elections. Democrats are more evil than Republicans.

But that’s just my opinion. Here are the facts:

I fed my ballots into the reader and a young guy gave me a sticker that said “I count because I voted”. I asked for a reciept, thinking it would be nice to confirm that the scanner read what I intended to mark. The kid pointed to the sticker in my hand, and to the little stubs from the five separate ballots I completed. The stubs only showed I’d been given a ballot. There was no way for me to confirm the machine read my ballots correctly. Isn’t that weird? How hard is it to print a reciept, like at a grocery store? But it’s not an option. So I have to trust people who program machines. Great.

This is my boss, Rusty Peach. He taught me how to operate a Bobcat and other heavy equipment. I moved West to be a cowboy, and that is as close as I got.

This is Juan. He used to come into the bar where I worked and buy the nearly dead roses a wandering Mexican would be hawking on Friday nights. Juan would buy the whole lot, then hand them out to the young women at the bar. My job was to sweep up at night, and there were always trampled near dead roses all over the barroom floor. I hated Juan for this.

He gave me his business card. He was a dentist. But such an odd dentist. He rode a bicycle, as you can see in the photo, and he would sit on the curb in front of the bar and change his socks, then pull a strange sparkly shirt out of his bookbag and put that on. Then he would rub colored zinc oxide under his eyes.

One night my boss, Joe McGraw, told me not to let Juan in anymore. Joe had seen him sleeping in some bushes earlier in the day, and that was the final straw. Juan did bothered the woman a lot. Always looking for hugs and kisses for the roses. But everyone missed Juan. His name was written in Sharpie on the wall by the jukebox and we moved on to other characters.

Bedhead Indian? Why is the haircut so goth? Siouixsie and the Banshees…

I hate getting punched.

Tommy Trippin’ Balls was a fun and educational game for youngsters of the atomic age. The game involved getting Tommy, a purple bear with a big appetite, to move around the forest game board eating blueberries and honey and not “Trippin’ Balls” and devouring backpackers or attacking tourists in their vehicles.

I wish we weren’t living in an age where all the bears have been caged in zoo’s and this game is no longer based in reality.