My Robot Is Pregnant theme song!

i went to an estate sale and they were selling this weird dentist stuff. for a buck each. they may have some aids on them. i don’t know.

I shaved my face and cut bangs in my hair. I think I’m bored. I wanna leave town, put some miles behind me, shake off this city living. Ask someone to water my plants and ask someone else to write my name in sand down at the beach – I’m gonna wash myself clean of San Francisco, head south and meet summer on its trip north, meet it halfway, say Big Sur maybe, depends how fast I go and I’m not rushing I’m just trying to stop circling from work to the bar. I wanna straighten out and wear down my heel on some fresh highway. I’m leaving my old truck behind she is like a horse – wanting to get to the barn before nightfall – and that’s the problem isnt it? Waking up in the same bed every morning with the bridge out the window and the bees below…a fog horn, street sweepers, the hum of the gas line at the meter, the neighbor shutting his garage door…I want some strange bird…in a tree I’ve never seen…calling out to the one it loves…and I want to taste something from soil I’ve finally stood on for the first time and I want all that stuff that is strangling me back in the city to start looking good again. That’s why roads lead out of town. I didn’t forget.

This is down the road from the tile supply store. Just a fun indoor firing range in a business park.

This guy Fred Einaudi has an interesting view on the world.

she once had yaks….

Here’s an interview with Annessa. She lives in West Oakland.

myrobotispregnant: You’re from Montana? What happened back there?

My parents raised yaks.

mrip: Did you drink their milk?

They were ornery when they were pregnant. Or had babies. It was too hard to get near them to milk them. Moms were really protective. They go have the baby somewhere hidden. They disappear and you go find them. They hid in the bushes.

mrip: Why did your parents buy yaks?

It was a pyramid scheme. The biggest ripoff. The idea was you buy a rare animal, they have babies and you sell them for a lot of money. But when a lot of people buy rare animals and they have babies, they aren’t that rare any more.

mrip: Where’d you keep them?

So my dad hadn’t built the fence yet, just a fence around the house. So they were in our yard. Every morning my sister and I went to catch the bus, and we’d go to the screen door and try to figure out where they were at because of the big bull. We were so afraid of it.

mrip: Did they chase you?

One of the things you’re supposed to do is grab a can because they’re afraid of noise, so we had coffee cans with pebbles and we’d shake it. But coming home we didn’t have the cans. We didn’t take them to school with us. So one time I made it to the front door and I heard my sister screaming. I turned and saw my sister running and a yak chasing her. She ran and grabbed on to a big tree and hugged it. It was actually pretty smart because the yak wouldn’t want to head but a tree. It just ran off.

Then someone gave us a horse. Yaks love to run and they’d be running with this pretty horse running along with them.

mrip: Do your parents still have them?

The yak market, the bottom fell out of the yak market so we used them mostly for meat. They had a lot of babies…you know that movie Seven Years In Tibet? They were looking for yaks and we ended up selling them to them and they took them to Argentina. They left them there. So there’s a yak herd in Argentina. They liked our yaks because we had a really big bull. It was beautiful.

mrip: What else was on the farm?

We had long horn sheep and they can jump too. One jumped over my mom and its hoof hit her forehead. She had a welt. I watched it happen. I couldn’t believe it.

They had black tongues. The yaks. They burped all the time. The babies looked really cute. We tried to tame one.

mrip: did you ride them?

In Tibet they ride them. Not ours.

i watched this guy fall off his bicycle and slide into a parked car. he dented the rear quarter panel with his head which proceeded to split open. a nice little river of blood. i could see the entire thickness of the skin on his scalp. it was gnarly.

i don’t wear a helmet but i recommend you do.

we had a fun time playing at the elbow room monday. thanks to everyone who came to see it, or tried to make it, or gave it even a thought. for those that weren’t physically there, we brought my cactus collection and some statues for the stage. it felt real nice.

This came in the mail awhile ago. Some art show. Never went.

photo taken with the pathetic iphone camera.

Was doing my taxes a day late this morning. Went to get a glass of water in the kitchen and looked out the window to see an ungodly amount of bees in the air, way up here on the second story. “SWARM!” I shouted.

I love this time of year, everyones making babies. The crab fishermen are sitting in the bar waiting for the crab to stop humping and starting eating again, so they can lure them out of bed and into the pot with a little bait. The bees are overcrowded in the hive because so many young ones are growing wings. I’m doing taxes. It ain’t natural.

self portrait with the crappy resolution of an iphone

I trimmed away some branches then cut the two main branches the swarm was clinging to. The bees follow the new queen and huddle up. They are basically locking legs and crawling all over each other to form this bunch. Golf ball sized clumps of bees rolled off when I accidentally shook their branch while cutting away others to get at them.

They will hang out here until scouts come back with news of a location for a new hive. I took matters into my own hands and stuck them in an extra hive I had. Hopefully they will stay.

They don’t call it “making out” in the Philippines, it’s “lips to lips”. When you lay down next to your lover and she has removed her helmet and the pressurized suit you are lips to lips in the cockpit while electric charges jeopardize the mission. Whenever you are lips to lips there are only two people in the world but what about in space? How much more important is it now to circle a mouth with the tip of your tongue?

The small corners of your lover, the teeth that make the flesh give, small goosebumps arise on your arms and spandex “long underwear” that is laced with thin plastic tubes through which cool water flows is down around your ankles.

The Lower Torso Assembly is a single unit, which includes knees and ankles, boots and lower waist. A metal connect ring facilitates its fitting. It is in a rumpled pile drifting past you.

Lips and fingertips lead the way up and down the body, kiss here, touch there, everything moves in such small circles, hips and shoulders even as the two want to connect, bodies are aligning.

EMU Electrical Harness is a set of communications wires and bio instruments worn by the astronaut inside the suit. It connects in the suit’s backpack. You don’t fucking care as readouts blink on and off and instruments chatter in the darkness of space. It helps in communication and monitors the astronaut’s vital signs such as respiration rate, heart rate and temperature but by now you have come into her and you hold it inside her as she holds you inside her and you are lips to lips and fingertips are pressing so hard into flesh the skin will leave their trace for a moment when the release comes.

They call it lips to lips in the Philippines. You’ve never done it in space, so you can’t give it a name.

(drawing by Sonja Lueschen courtesy of her newest ‘zine, “Social Studies”)
(spacesuit information courtesy of space travel guide)

I came west and ended up here and decided to stay

The truck’s shocks are all shot to hell and it kicks just like a mule heading up the rutted dirt road to Russ’. He’s got loaders and brush hogs and drags and every other kind of implement in the high grass waiting for the right buyer. Dust is flying up and coating the windshield as I round the corner up top and here are the horse people’s trailers parked off to the side, the tongues resting on their own jacks. Owning horses is a good way to lose a lot of money.

Rus comes out of his stall* and we shake hands.

“Have you gotten anything to eat?” he asks.

“I could use a little something,” I answer.

Chicken feed sacks converted over to trash bags are piled up alongside his pride and joy, the 1939 John Deere “D”. A rat trap baited with peanut butter on a cracker is nestled in with the garbage.

If you don’t look too close things always look the same around here. We have this conversation about eating first thing every Saturday I come here. We get in his truck and I set a foot on the pile of mail that collects on the passenger side floor and push a work shirt over to sit down and we ride into town to the breakfast place.

“Gonna go down and see my sister next week before she dies,” he tells me. She has stomach cancer. He’s been putting off going. “While I’m down there gonna make my way t’wards Las Vegas to the Antique Tractor show.”

“So next time I see you I should expect you to have a new baby?”

“Got yer seat belt on? That motorsickle cop’s been settin’ up in these driveways. No, it’s not like that. Just go there to look. No bargains to be had. Kinda like guys with Harley Davissons…they like to stand there and look at ‘em. That’s all.”

Rus has been talking about the motorcycle cop and his speed trap for 15 years. I don’t have to say anything, just look out the window. This stretch of road is famous for bicyclists. Packs of them in matching spandex team jerseys with their feet clipped into the pedals tour up and down the one lane road every Saturday and Sunday. Horses stand in their paddocks and stare. Rus waves to a guy in an oncoming truck.

“Old Pete. You’ve probably seen him settin’ up to the bar.”

We drive a little more. A couple of pretty gals are walking together in tank tops and shorts.

“It was in the beginning of the ’80′s when women began to take it as an insult when you whistled at them,” Rus says.

“How did you know when it changed?” The two women were behind us now.

“Well, it was…the college educated ones…wimmen’s freedom…what do you call it? Rights?”

“Feminists?” I answer, trying to fill in his blank.

“Libberation,” he figures.

“But how could you tell they didn’t like it? What changed?”

He leans down low towards me and says, “They’d return the favor,” as he boomed out his arm and gave me the finger, lifting his fist real slow.

“That’s clear,” I said and we both laughed.

*denotes an inside joke

Rusty Sunshine’s barn has been falling down so slowly I won’t even notice when it’s gone.

Mom sent this along too. My Dad bought a coin collection from some guy who’d saved his coins in freezer bags and buried them in his basement. Here’s some other ice cream bags from my collection

So here’s that dump in Pacifica I was telling you about. An unspoiled coastline as far as the eye can see. Ubiquitous seagull standing sentry on the roof, spare tires for the loader, the man in the day-glo safety vest. It has it all.

Here’s that loader.

This would have been my grandmother’s. Got a package from my mom today, she sent this along with some cookies she baked that turned out wrong. She didn’t use brown sugar so they were brittle. They say it’s the thought that counts, but they aren’t hungry when they say it.

I’ve saved my Mad Magazine Game since I was a kid. That magazine really helped me understand the world.