My Robot Is Pregnant theme song!

The windshield wipers are slapping towards the ends of their arc as Paul furiously turns the window crank like he’s jump starting a seized model T.

“As long as I have a hole in my ass I’ll never buy a Chevy. Designed all wrong…. Controls are in awkward places and if there’s any water on the windshield at all it blows in the window.”

It was another California winter rain blowing over San Francisco. They had already turned Mount Tamalpias from burnt yellow to green. For the moment turkey buzzards that circle the highway for roadkill were holed up somewhere keeping dry.

The white Chevy Express he was driving had just over 900 miles on it. It was a rental from Enterprise, full of flatware, champagne flutes and hemstitch napkins that matched the patterns on the service for eight. He was headed for Larkspur, a small town in Marin county, just over the Golden Gate bridge, for a photo shoot. In the world of catalogues, winter is the time to shoot summer.

“Pedal on the right sweetheart…” Paul tells the woman driving cautiously in the rain just ahead of us. He passes her mumbling, “fucking twat…” The word twat ryhmes with hat in his South End of London accent. “Sowfend” he calls it.

“England could explod and sink into the North Sea and I wouldn’t care… except for my family and my favorite chip shop’s there.”

It is seditious talk, but only the start. “I don’t care one bit for the Royal Fucking Family. It’s not just the obscene amount of money they have and how people run around powdering their asses…what really pisses me off? They live off you. Off the working classes. Does it make sense, having a parasite you worship?”

The Golden Gate has no toll Northbound. One is always half consciously watching the people walking across, looking for a jumper. What a pretty bridge, the rust colored red art deco spires with strings of suspension wires looping in natural apogees between them. Ocean bound tankers leaving the port of Oakland swing wide around Alcatraz, leaving rips in the water behind them.

There’s a lot out here that can kill you, things much larger than us, bad weather, strangers, hard work and parasites. A guy like Paul talks like he has chopped pipes and there’s a rumble that’s unsettling, but his heart is running on all four and it makes me glad to be alive.

Colic grabs a horse and kills ‘em quick. Their insides get twisted up and they die. But what do you do with a dead horse, after you’re done crying over him? It’s a mighty big hole to dig, and a lot of uncooperative horse to move. So you call somebody with a truck and winch to come by and drag it out of the corral and haul it away. Sometimes that takes a day or two.

That isn’t the victory sign, it is a peace sign, as in “Rest in Peace, Number Seven”.

Old German money with images of captives and killers.

These old gas cards are from the late sixties/early seventies. Great graphics…

These old credit cards were a little narrower than todays. (the blue Montgomery Wards is about the normal size today) I wonder why the U.S. mint doesn’t issue a credit card instead of spending all the money to make money that most people don’t even use any more.

Normally I come home and sit in front of a computer monitor for two hours. It’s nice to light some candles and watch fire move around instead.

The same can be said for going to the ocean, sitting on a rock and watching water move around.

Click on the photo to check out Thomas Allen’s great photos of pulp fiction book covers he’s altered. (thanks for the tip Landry!)

How Did Pagers Work?

Within three hours of posting a free broken stove on Craigslist, the phone rang. “Are you at home? Because I’m in front of your house looking at this thing, and if you help me get it in my truck, I’m taking it.”

A stranger, late forties, white guy with a pick up ten years old. He had all the loose parts gathered up and loaded in the bed: burners, couplings, the chrome griddle and venting. We got on it and tilted it back into the truck.

And then we began talking. About remodeling. About the Indonesians and Chinese making all the cabinets and shipping them over here in “flat packs” to be assembled on shore.

I told him photographers take their digital files and email them to Indonesia where they are processed and color corrected. Almost any American today can contract out slave labor to help them with their job. We talked about that, this stanger and I.

“I used to work with Motorola, designing pagers,” he said. That brought a smile to my face. Pagers are obsolete technology, like the Okeefe & Merritt gas oven he had in his truck now. I like obsolete. “It was only a buck cheaper to assemble them overseas than in Florida, where we were. But we could mark up the cost and not pay taxes on it. That’s why electronics corporations go overseas. There aren’t any human hands touching that stuff, it’s all automated. It’s mostly to avoid taxes.”

His wife gave him a call and he had to go. I was up the stairs heading into the house and I heard his truck rumble away. I hope he enjoys his oven.

Just got a call from Alina, she is the one who shot my script in LA and she is editing it now. She wants ideas for the intro. I thought this might work…

a dear friend sent me a beautiful email…

“i always felt more comfortable in southern california. you dont
need to make it hard for yourself down there. the sand softens, wears down
your bristles. the bay area is buzzing with so many culture clashes, so much
confusion, compact kinetic tension. down in the desert whiskey is simple.
the sun is simple. how can you drive off the road in the desert?”

This is the “Git ‘er done” attitude that makes America great.

There seems like nothing to report. This weekend I’m turning in all the bottles and cans I saved through February. We’ll see how much money I make. I’m guessing under $30. I’d be happy to get $29, the price of the ticket I got for not having the toll fare on the bay bridge last week. Yes, I had hoped to get a palm sander. But living in the city robs you of your dreams.