photo posted from my iPhone
There are some docks in Sausalito, just over the Golden Gate Bridge, dedicated to house boat folks. I noticed a few grocery carts out there in front of ramps that led to homes. One inconvenience of living a long way from your parking spot. Sophia noticed how diverse the houses were. Modern boxes, crackhead slapdashery, mastercraftsmen. Probably not a lot of zoning ordinances apply to boats.
photo posted from my iPhone
Looks like they took the little ones out for some fresh air.
photo posted from my iPhone
This Valentine’s Day I took my lady up to Vallejo in the truck filled with Elaner’s personal belongings. That’s Elaner in the photo. She’s headed to an assisted living situation. After the move Sophia and I hit Thrift Town in El Sobrante and there was a cool one armed bandit toy bank. I’ll show you that tomorrow. So thanks to Sophia for letting me do this job today when we were supposed to be hot air ballooning over vineyards. Maybe next year.
photo posted from my iPhone
Fisher and I got our first attendance star at the February meeting of the Bay Area Searchers last Thursday at the First Baptist Church of San Bruno. That puts us in the running for a silver half dollar if we are the most consistent over the course of the year.
There was a raffle as well, for coins, two bottles of wine, a strange Chinese urn, it looked like disreputible flea market booth and the spinning hopper with raffle tickets inside didn’t lend legitamacy to the affair.
There I sat in the Church gymnasium, the basketball hoop ratched up towards the ceiling, MDF tables with metal legs unfurled set up in a square. You’re looking at Bobby, the club’s president, and Joy sits to his right and tells him what to do next.
To be continued. (I’m driving)
photo posted from my iPhone
Would have been awkward to call someone cheaper.
< Step One: Cut the bottom out of the coffee can, then cut it in half. Fold back the rough edges on themselves. Tools Required: Metal blade in jigsaw, pliers, a vice helps. Mines drinking. 
i>
Step Two: Affix to inside of coat sleeve in hopes people don’t notice how abnormally long your arms are.
Tools required: Sport coat. Abnormally long arms. Choice of fastener. (I used Velcro)
I got a call that Bart might not be happy with his ARMY picture being up for the world to see. So, here’s a picture of me and Donny from back in the day when I did Ogilvie home perms. Remember those Vermont Drug Sweaters we used to wear?
Allenwood Penitentiary
A letter from Sean Ahern, our high school friend in prison for bank robbery:
My robot is Pregnant
“On the road again”
(12-24-08) A Chapter closes in my life. U.S. Penitentiary Lewisburg is turning into a gang lockdown and shipping non-ganstas else where. I’ve been in three different prisons in the past three months. Three different security levels, but no real difference since they were all spent in SHU. Well, that’s not really true. Let me explain.
Just like Dante’s Inferno had nine levels of hell, SHU (security housing unit) is much the same. My first stop was FCI Aleenwood which wasn’t bad, except for the standard sand blasted plexiglass super safetey double bullet proof glass you couldn’t see through, and the mariachi band next door. It was one of the “tortures” they were using at Guantanamo Bay, however, the food was pretty good.
After about a month of the good life I was sent to Allenwood Penitentiary which was like going to hell on fire, being put out with iced piss and left to dry in an air conditioned outhouse in December. In fact it was December as I shook in my bunk reading “The Audacity of Hope.” Oh, the audacity indeed! But my hopes were heard, and after about a week of extremely cold sensory deprivation, a strict diet of cold shit and lettuce & no phone or visits, I was sent to the Low Security Correctional Institution at Allenwood, which was and is an improvement, but again hell on a different level.
I should first mention that everyone who works in prison thinks their job is the hardest thing since ditch digging. Well, I can’t say everyone. Only cuz they read this, maybe its me, or maybe solitary (although I’ve had 2 cell mates who talk non-stop like two old yentas) just gets to you…I just can’t explain beyond the obvious (no phone, no visits, no store, no clean laundry, no medical attention, no books above a 3rd grade reading level, crybabies for baby sitters, wardens who make “two snaps up in a cricle” ghetto girl faces, windows you can’t see out of, cold waffles, no pillows, no sleep, the list goes on…) Finally I found a way out.
(12-26-08)
I’d been working on Etheric Projection for a while and had been making progress. Etheric Projection is when you project your “inner body” out onto the etheric plane or earth, while you dream. They say that once you can become conscious in your dreams that you can project yourself where ever you want, fly, walk through walls, frolic with unicorns in a field of fresh daisies, visit your girlfriend, what ever you like.
I’d wanted to see my girlfriend, whether I took a unicorn to see her or not didn’t matter to me. As long as I got there. That was the main reason i took an interest in projection.
I started a dream journal, waking up an writing down what happened, how I felt, was I conscious, and if so did I act upon my consciousness? That’s when the strangeness began to happen.
First there were reoccurring dreams of being homeless and living in a red van, my clothes in a green ARMY dufflebag. I was conscious though, when the van began to roll I jumped out and pushed it back locking the parking brake. This was followed by long vivid dreams of running up trees, over rooftops, into houses, over trains and into underground trails. Others of meeting a person named “Quinn Lasses with glasses” a bespeckled teen with bleach blond hair who runs a club called, well it doesn’t have a name the sign out front is a symbol – a guy on computer looking up a site called “Asian Kitty” (there’s no way that not a porn site) my having to choke him and put him in the trunk of a car.
All dream stuff, and in a few I’d made decision, or thought I had. I still had questions. Who was Brandy Corso? Would I be going to court soon? The last dream bothered me the most. Still does. And still no visit to my girlfriend.
I had dreamt that I was watching a serial killer dump bodies in trees in some type of State Park or National Forest in California. I just remember that he had long hair and knew, somehow I knew he hadn’t been caught. In fact, I believe that it was in the past. That it already happened. Not that I want to write the name down, but I also know who it is.
I’ve asked a bunch of people to look it up on the internet, but people think it’s a joke. It is, right? Who is Brandy Corso? Did anyone ever kill people and put them in trees in a California State Park? I can’t even see out my window! (AM 1060 tells the time every five minutes though.)
Maybe I’ll find out when I get to wherever they send me, but what if its not in the past? What if its happening now? (They lost all my property)
(1-3-09)
I haven’t slept since last Friday. I hate holidays. I haven’t gotten any mail all week. I still don’t know if any of that shit is real. It sounds crazy, but I know it is. It was too real not to be real. I’m not sure if this is even real. I could be asleep for all I know. (to be continued)
Authors note: The ending is that you ask your readers to – please email president elect Obama in support of federal parole, the abolition of mandatory minimum sentences, and the restoration of 65% “good time” for the federal prison system. We can always dream, right? –
Let me know some subjects you’d like to hear about , when I land I’ll get on it. – Sean
photo posted from my iPhone
One of big-Pharma’s greatest recreational inventions, Oxy Contin, right here at the pay scale of SF’s dump.
photo courtesy Jason at jasonlandry.com
Jason Landry writes:
I am in the home stretch of my MFA program…4 more months left. I have begun my thesis on The Photo Collector / The Photo Collection. This won’t be the title of the thesis, but mainly what it will be about. I am writing to you because I want your take on people who collect. Do you think there is a unifying thread that connects all collectors?
Please think this one through, and feel free to analyze it from all angles. I consider you a collector of things, ephemera, bees, plants, etc….and know there is some reason you do this,…it is the same reason that I collected baseball cards and now collect photo books and fine art photography.
Me:
I’d be happy to help. Off the top of my head, collectors get a rush from finding things. It feels like a successful hunt when you come home with an object you like. I think it has something to do with a program in our brain telling us to store things for time of need. I think most collectors don’t see the stuff they have, they only have eyes for what they don’t. So it is never satisfied, the desire to hunt. Which evolutionarily speaking, is good. If you get one tomato and think your work is done for the day, you won’t survive.
In the modern age of supermarkets we don’t have anything foodwise to collect. No firewood gathering, no aberrying’ we go. We go thrift shopping. Or bargain hunting. Antiquing. Because we look for things that sell below their value. A junk man/collector does not pay full price. He will go without rather than pay what the asking price is. I went to an estate sale today and like always, I walked out with something from the free pile in the garage – an old can of charcoal lighting fluid. I collect the old metal cans of the stuff. Why? Because they are old and often free and I believe someday I will have a valuable collection.
Instead of gathering nuts, we collectors gather items we believe contain value. So we convert from nuts to money. Money we can cash in when we retire, or want to go on vacation. The old coin collection, the mint condition baseball rookie cards, they are our nuts. People that don’t like to collect think we are nuts. They don’t see value, they see clutter.
This was given to me because it smelled like a lifetime of nicotine and a little bit of cat piss. So I washed it with Murhpy’s Soap, primed it with shellac based BIN, and gave it some paint. Now I hope someone buys it cuz it doesn’t match my bedroom.
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