My Robot Is Pregnant theme song!

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The junk mail factory is breaking my spirit. I ended up right where I never thought I would. Right where I said I wouldn’t. It’s a corporation dedicated to money, and money comes from buying and selling. That leads to destroying the earth. Trust me on that one.

Open up the next fancy catalogue you get. I work on the fancy ones, not valPak bulk shit. Open up LL Bean or Williams Sonoma, whatever it is, one with staples in the spine at the least, and make sure it’s printed on glossy color paper that’s a bitch to recycle, and look at the picture. The pretty one with windows in the background, and a hazy outdoors beyond that glass, one lit with HMI lights splashing down through silk so that just behind that clearly focused hero stack of linen on an in-house well appointed table it looks like a fantasy land milk bath for goddesses is just out of camera shot and satyrs standing by with champagne and golden Belgian bunion scrapers wait to be called on. That’s what I work on. top budget stuff. I operate a pallet jack through a fluorescent lit cavern of banded pre-addressed pallet stacks of those catalogs. I am somebody. Wal*Mart tried luring me away with more money, but i have a rep in this town. I don’t work for Wal*Mart.

I know what goes on behind the scenes. You wouldn’t believe what happens to create that illusion. Huge crates with directions written in Vietnamese come in with red stickers and customs labels slapped across them. A couple guys run over with pry bars and safety glasses and start springing nails loose. We get that sucker unwrapped and discover its a chair. Big deal. Someone else’s forest is disappearing. Have a seat.

i take that thing and put a few pad wraps around it, couple’a furny blanks, and throw it in the back of a rental truck. I beat the piss outta the tranny on it, jump curbs – you know what a neutral drop is? Put it in neutral, pin the gas to the mat, an’ drop it in O-D. you’ll lay a patch like a mustang slow clutching in a side show. Because working for a corporation sucks and I let myself do it. Steal every chance you get. The corporation would do it to you if it could, but it isn’t human. Its worse than human. Its a parasite bigger and smarter than you. It doesn’t have to crawl out behind the baseboard and jump in your bed at night, it invites you down to his place early in the mornin’ so he can stick it in and stir it around without getting out of his own bed.

I get the furniture to the location, release the ratchet straps and haul this upholstered monster up the flagstone walk to the massive front door of some American success story who is about to pocket 5 grand for letting trash like me bring mail order crap into his estate to be photographed and marketed to you, your neighbor, your own mother. 5 grand my friend. For a one day photoshoot.

I know what you’re thinking…”They could shoot in my house for that price”. Sure, they’ll go to your place, if you have furniture for me to move out of the way that is better made and more expensive than what I’m dragging into frame. but you’re reading this, you’re a friend of mine. You don’t have it.

Good for you, I say. You aren’t caught up. Too many catered lunches at palatial mock tudors, Eichlers, Napa Valley villas. I was caught up. When’s the last time I helped someone out i didn’t know? Besides the Douglas’s who finally got the floor to ceiling drapes they’ve always wanted… I did an afternoon with Habitat for Humanity a little over four years ago. That felt nice.
I got to helpin’ myself and i don’t wanna go back, and I’m sick to death.

Was workin’ today, walkin to the kitchen and this lady who isn’t really my boss but is like “more important” than me asked me to wash off the lunch table. Don’t play me like that. “Where’s the studio manager?” I said, ’cause that’s her job, right? And I thought that would shut her up, like it was a one two punch, but this lady, she has an authentic Austrian accent, and she looked at me and said, “Just wash the table”, like she was Arnold Schwarzeneggar. It was like in the movies when a regular guy punches a superhero, and the regular guy hurts his fist and the superhero just laughs.

* * * *

found a great new place down in the mission. super fresh food, i tried their sopes – a fried corn tortilla the size of a silver dollar pancake with a bed of shredded lettuce, not hand ripped lettuce, but shredded up fine like important documents going in the garbage, and juicy chicken breast set on it and tucked under real thin sour cream and a pillow top of that crumbly mexican cheese. It was hella ill. Culinary madness. The chicken ejaculated her brine in my mouth. Shocker. The flatware was sturdy. Kife it – you could loose your shank and take their spoon down 16th with complete confidence. She won’t bend when she hits soft tissue, and might stick in the ribs if you really lean into it.

black velvet county fair edition

Mr. MacDonald come over last night, we turned the house into a print shop with his new GoCo, a Japanese silk screen machine. Back at his place his two year old daughter has her toys all over the floor. At my place, it was the adults who trashed the place. The GoCo prints with oil based paints so you have to lay each one flat to dry overnight. The living room, dining room and hallway were covered with drying paper.

Check out the master plan edition, that shows me hauling money bags to the bank.

master plan edition

A poem about the weather, read to you by Jon Rolston, in that voice poets use that’s kind of stupid. Garrison Keillor uses this voice on the Writer’s Almanac and I always want to punch the radio waves when I hear it, but that would be futile.

Saturday
Patchy fog this morning. Mostly cloudy with a chance of showers and thunderstorms. Some thunderstorms may produce gusty winds and heavy rainfall. Humid with highs around 80. South winds around 10 mph. Chance of rain 50 percent.

Saturday Night
Mostly cloudy. A chance of showers and thunderstorms in the evening. Patchy fog. Humid with lows in the mid 60s. South winds around 10 mph. Chance of rain 50 percent.

taken from wunderground zip code 03840.

Greensboro, N.C. – In a plan to reduce temperatures and human suffering in the arid regions of Africa, the American cigarette manufacturer Newport has offered to mentholate the entire continent.

“Cigarette sales are stagnant stateside” said Bradley Bush, Chief Analyst of the parent company Lorillard Tobacco. “This is a real opportunity to expose our brand in a positive way to millions of people eager to adopt ‘Western’ traditions.”

Africa is facing drought in many regions, and is casually considered to be either a hot desert or a steamy jungle. “Either way, the cooling effect of menthol will provide desperately needed relief to those in need.”

Heavy marketing to African Americans has proven so successful to this cigarette manufacturer that one out of two African Americans who smoke, smoke the Newport brand. Advertisements featuring a well dressed black couple laughing over drinks at a Mediterranean bistro late in the evening, or a non-white (but passable) co – ed party of four in brightly colored swim apparel laughing and splashing water are credited with this loyalty.

“We believe we can parlay our success with menthol products in this American ethnic community and translate it effectively in ‘The Mother Land’” Bradley says, referring to Africa as though he were interested in its historical significance.

My producer, Dave Luzius, sent me this troubling email.

jon,

I think it’s either everyone has the same wheel and
their ability to navigate it is different, or
everyone’s wheel is different and we’re all the same
at navigating.

This was troubling to me because I’ve noticed producer types have wild ideas about how the magic of music works. Think about Rick Rubin. Or Brian Wilson. Charlie Manson. These are people with philosophies. And the emotion wheel is one I didn’t want to be involved with.

But Dave came by my place and started asking if I had made my own emotion wheel yet, so I had to explain to him I was creeped out.

***dave is talking now, this is me DAVE in person:

So, john thought this wheel wasn’t funny because he thought it was serious. Which, is like totally stupid because if it was totally serious, that would be funny and interesting. I’m actually somewhat flattered that he thought I could be this serious and know anything about this kind of bullshit, but if he really thought I really thought this, he definitely should have put this on his website and made fun of me for being kind of lame. So, I think I actually was a little too successful with this stunt, and obviously my audience isn’t ready yet. But, by the time my audience would even get my jokes, I’ll be long gone, and onto other shit. It’s not that I’m above things, it’s that I’m like perpendicular to things.
It’s like that NIN song “I was perpendicular to it! Now I’m just tangent!”

****This is jon

See what I mean? Dave is weird. So many levels. He just said to me, “What if the spell check was a bad speller? He was a stressed out about his job…couldn’t remember things…”

I’m in San Diego right now, helping a friend deal with her father’s funeral and estate. Please be patient until I can get back to power blogging.

You get paid 4 cents a pound for recycled cardboard. 80 bucks for a ton of it. You have to build side walls on your truck, tolerate having the whole vehicle covered in gang tags. But there is something about prowling around the alleys in the evening, stacking boxes in neat rows, watching them stack up like money in the bank, that has grabbed my attention.

I’m looking into it.

3rd street, hunter’s point, san francisco

Watching green paint dry…open the windows, turn the couch around, put my feet up, watch that paint dry – mercedes

My mother could be putting away groceries and decide to redecorate the kitchen. No warning. She’d fold the empty Shaw’s bags and tuck them in the closet beneath the pencil sharpener, then pull out paint, brushes, rollers, pans. That was it. The kitchen was now blue. She never went to college or did a lot of traveling, so she gave herself a change of scenery with paint and wall paper. I was 8 when I first helped her hang the stuff. Water, paste, scissors, it was a big fun mess.

My Moms got soul. She hangs up every terrible drawing and dying flower children give her. She isn’t designing her home to make visitors jealous, she wants guests to be comfortable and drink some coffee. She wants company to stay. “Take a look at that blob on the wall. My son painted that for me. Isn’t it beautiful? And that one next to it is something our cat Fritz did when he tipped over some grape juice on a napkin. Isn’t that a hoot?”

When she starts to think about this great big world, she paints the walls. Keeps her from ramblin’. I’m the same way. We build homes, sow gardens. Some plants we kill – pull ‘em out and try again. That’s my mom’s philosophy. She gets sad sometimes, but she picks up a cat and puts it in her lap. That seems to do it.

This is my desk. I got the poster at the flea market. After writing that long winded tale about where I’m at the other day, I have decided to quit working at the junk mail factory and just start picking through the garbage full time.