My Robot Is Pregnant theme song!

I’m part to blame. I don’t cowboy anymore. I turned in the shovel for a tape gun. Used to be I was an honest-to-god ditch digger. Now it’s just a weekend thing, like an old guy shootin’ hoops with some pals, I head down to Woodside with a square point shovel in the back of the truck, trying to capture a memory, a fleeting glimpse of the strength I had at 22.

I could trench twenty feet for 3 inch pipe, back fill with sand and get the topsoil back on in a day. Now I stick with the easy lay-ups of transplanting a rosemary bush.

These photo shoots aren’t the right place for macho. It breaks my heart I can’t prove myself the old fashioned way, with brute strength and a yelling match.

I do get to drive a big truck, but that’s a bone they threw me. It’s a Japanese import. Loaded with candles and cookware. I remember the days I used to haul sacks of cement, loads of horse shit, $3,000 bucks worth of redwood heart lumber.

I used to start the day carving a hole in the earth with my hands and a crude steel blade. It wasn’t building sandcastles at the beach; I would take a miner’s pick and hack out roots, rocks and old cement posts. Is this cement we’re digging or sun baked clay in the dry dead heat of summer? Same difference, pal. Just keep moving.

Or how about digging mud? The mud sticks to the metal, half your energy is spent shaking the stuff off so you can take another bite, when you do the blade gets sucked in. Wrestle it out of the ground – like pulling a dead body from the water. Think about the time you walked in the woods and your boot stuck in the mud and your foot stepped clean out of it. Remember the suction as you teetered on one foot and tried to yank that boot free? That’s digging mud.

I used to work. I felt like a killer. I used a six foot steel bar for breaking up slab foundations, a Sawz-All to smooth the edges of the trench where roots would snag up the pipe…I had an arsenal and my body loved me for it.

Now I come to work and socialize over yogurt and granola, drink a coffee and some juice. I’m changing, just like America. We’re losing our macho together. A service economy demands interpersonal communication skills of gold. No more throwing a clunk of dirt at my boss. No more pissing by my truck. I’m giving up a lot, and it’s scary, but I’m trying to keep up with the world.

Here’s a real page turner. Not available at the Barnes & Noble, but worth a visit to the proctologist’s to get a copy.

That title was too obvious

I would like to have enough free time this week to make this sign and stand by the freeway on-ramp and see what happens.

This late 1950′s/early 60′s Quik can was filled with pepper packets, as one would expect what with the word “pepper” written all over it.

found a jacket in a garbage pile, washed it and started wearing it. Had my camera and my cell phone in it at the show, it got stolen. Weird thing was, I knew it was going to be stolen so I took the keys out before I set it down. That jacket had been giving me a funny feeling since I got it two weeks ago.

Rus is hoping to sell this old Bolens tractor soon. Trying to figure out the model number though. If you recognize it, drop a line.

The Flagpoles are playing tonight at the gallery space right next to Hemlock Tavern on Polk Street, the transvestite whore area of town. 9 pm. If I had a choice, I’d stay on the sidewalk and watch the action in the alleys. Alas, I play bass in The Flagpoles.

K sent me that title up there about the drunks, asking me to turn that found phrase from email spam into a poem. I sent one back, and she edited it, and then I digested her edits, and here it is:

A good looking T-Rex that wondered about love
is reborn as a plastic bag
with two cans of beans inside
clanging into each other
because things need to touch
for love to happen

It’s been too long since I wrote poetry. Anyone who finds a good line in their email, send it to me. I’m feeling hecka poetic.