My Robot Is Pregnant theme song!

A look in the backroom at mixed nuts

Just pissed in a storm drain while I was on the cellphone because the burger shop is sorry, no restroom. Went in to order and realized piss splatter was all over my shoes.

This is a dirty life and I’m not prepared.

Went to the bank to open a business account and had the business license in a frame I’d taken off the shop wall. Pulled out my pocket knife and found the Phillips head. Backed out them screws, parted the glass and handed the document to the woman.

My girlfriend calls me an animal. I guess so.

There’s a particular funk that comes over the cab of the truck after a few weeks so unique in odor it can only be one thing: dried and aged dump juice.

The tang of male cat urine, wet rust, decomposed cardboard and mushrooms, the muck of low tide and the mud from a stagnant pond, the whiff of an old unplugged refrigerator door opening, cheese induced flatulence – these are some of notes ringing in your nose when you sit in the truck.

Sign of the 80′s, the molded plastic internally lit advertisement. More often seen with a yellow background, here we have the white “hot boys” version.

Saw this getting lost in the southern reaches of Oakland. A long strip of Taquerias and old auto body shops, all worn and faded. Then we pass a new gray/black block building with the hells angels logo on it. Oakland headquarters. It looked impenetrable. No windows, steel doors. Will dared me to go knock and ask to see the gift shop.

Found the infamous Anton LeVey’s business card at the flea. He started the Church of Satan at the site where my local postal branch is today.

Looked out my window after a weekend of rain and someone tagged the truck. Why take a picture and show you? Why even mention it? Just a routine thing now. It doesn’t even make me mad. Just another line on the to-do list.

As far as the shop goes, by the time you figure 9% sales tax, 3% for the credit card company, 2 grand a month for rent and bills, the money spent on inventory, and the time spent watching the shop, I earn about 80 cents an hour. Then the IRS wants 30% of that.

None of this makes me mad anymore. I’ve learned to love my destroyer.

Is there a special name for car accidents involving all the same make? For instance here on Fulton we have two BMWs collided. Perhaps an “auto auto accident”?

In other thoughts, what kind of friends do you want? Here is one guideline: one who will try to break you out of jail but wouldn’t try to convince you to rob a bank.

It’s important to disrespect the law until you get caught. Then remember to act nice. Americans love renegades but they gotta have class.

Also, a friend who is so manly the question arises, “Does he have two penises?”. This is a good friend to have.

And if she’s a woman, you wonder if she’s so together she doesn’t even need one. Especially yours. This friend will be invaluable.

Found these photos on the ground at the dump and scooped them up for Chiraag. He came by the shop to get them and explained who this man is. Rajneesh, a guru from India in the 60′s who eventually created an ashram in Oregon in the 80′s. There were many problems with neighbors. For one thing, he advocated free love He owned over 90 Rolls Royces and imported homeless people to influence a local election. Things got weird.

While Chiraag explained all this to us, a woman came in the shop with her sister and they were from Santa Cruz and remembered when the group decided to stop wearing the orange robes similar to Hindu priests and went to purple.

“The thrift stores were full of orange clothing!”

That’s the great thing about having a store and inviting the public in. All these old things mean something more than we can tell just by looking at them or holding them. It’s the conversations they start that really make it interesting.

Heard someone say that. Who cares what a car part sells for on eBay at 6 am on a cold morning at the flea market? Just sell the thing to anyone who even looks at it.

The rain has come back and that means the trucks won’t get tagged.
There are other nice qualities to the weather. Laying in bed feels better.

Watching the runoff turn into a stream against the curb reminds me of chasing alongside streams, pretending a stick was a boat. Today it was cigarette filters and they became yachts. The power of imagination has strengthened.
Thanks to the rain.

Anecdotal evidence suggests eBay is morphing into eNay, as in, “No, I’m not buying it.”

At the dawn of e-commerce you could put a broken pair of Vaurnet’s up for bid with the word VINTAGE and the things would sell.

It didn’t really matter what you had, people in cubicles across the country were fascinated with the ability to shop while working. eBay was the only destination on that highway of information.

Then Craigslist came along and there was another round of economic orgy. People loved CL. They bought their kitchen table, found a mechanic and had sex with strangers through the bare bones portal.

Those fun days seem to be over. Craigslist killers and the hustlers casing your house have scared people away from interacting with the whole morass of the community at large. The amount of flakes who string you along or pitch insulting lowballs makes a CL transaction several steps below a flea market experience in terms of destroying your faith in the human race.

People still shop online of course, but the Internet turned into boomtown, a virtual outlet mall, with etsy and the millions of Shopify independents creating a specific look with their HTML and hipstamatic photos that turn on target audiences.

That being said, brick and mortar retail seems to be having a Renaissance. It may be because we at Mixed Nuts are the only people in a twenty five block radius offering people a chance to hold an item in their hand before paying for it.

Is it too far off to say retail can be the only exercise some city folk get?

There is more to that thought, there are more thoughts too, but its time to go to work.

That’s a reality check. Perfect isn’t out there. Just do what you want to one day be good at. Because 98% of us aren’t good at much unless we work at it.

This neighborhood I live in has impressed me. I always took it to be in a coma. The walking dead automatons on autopilot leaving their homes in the morning and returning at dusk to lock themselves into their television lit crypts.

Jimbo and I still opened a store here because we wanted something nice in the hood. We live here and wanted it to be fun.

After our first week, we are already breaking even. I honestly expected to lose money for the first few months until people discovered us. Turns out people have been waiting for us.

Mixed Nuts hasn’t been an instant success but we are instantly sustainable. The depression has lifted.

Someone such as myself, college educated, active blogger, slight predilection for alcohol but no serious addictions, would normally think himself a cut above the average scrapper.

We wear the same dungarees with a patina of rust across the upper thigh from hiking water heaters onto trucks, and our dirty shoes have the same oil drips and scuffs from work.

But are they spending their evenings reading up on historical San Francisco or are they dulling their minds with Internet pornography?

Do they develop their palettes at the City’s freshest restaurants, sampling exotic Japanese cuisine, drinking sophisticated cocktails mixed without soda, ever?

I think not. But ever since that stack of wood fell on me I’m limping around, grunting and moaning as I bend, pulling myself up on the truck with great effort of my upper body, and really, I see I am a fallen man.

It was my vigor that gave me the cockiness. It was the physical stamina, the perfect body that rose above the stooped and derelict husks of men on the tailsides of career addictions and poor diets.

The stiff right knee forces a hop with my left leg, a kick and a swing to gain momentum. People notice. A wounded man, grimy hands, torn work clothes chosen for thrift, not fit.

The world falls apart as you grow old and the next generation calls the rubble home, but it’s sadder to be rendered unfit due to injury rather than age.

Was just at the coffee shop. Got talking to a guy who is considering the possibility the ancient royal families were the product of hyper reptilian aliens who bred them to rule humans and direct them to mine the earth for precious metals needed on the reptile home planet. He had a book with him that had some pictures.

It sounds crazy but as I sat there listening, I was also thinking,”I was just sorting the scrap metal pile in my backyard. Up at 630 am to put aluminum in a barrel, stainless steel in another, dragging toaster ovens by the cord and lugging filing cabinets to the truck.”

As the man at the coffee shop explained that the handful of elite families control health care, global financial markets and national education, he made the point we are trained to be left brain thinkers who create time lines and meet deadlines and feel guilty if we aren’t producing results.

As someone raised in a Christian environment, who later came to see the uncanny similarities of religions previous and prior to Christ, it leads me to believe humans are easily led. Those who see the matrix may have knowledge, but they are without power, and so they sort scrap metal in the morning hours to collect small dollars for bread. Apparently so alien reptiles can power their stargates.

Here is the human reptile combination waving to the flying saucer overlord. People use this ancient Babylonion image (pre-Christ as we know) to show the Pope has merely taken over the role of slave master for the hyper reptilians and is facilitating the production of gold.

Whatever you want to believe is fine by me, just understand that humans are still mining the earth for metals. Some of us, in San Francisco, 150 years after the last Rush, skim deposits off street corners and glean the corners of garages for the ferrous treasures and non-ferrous pay dirt.

Doug is keeping in shape down in LA with a little help from a legend who hasn’t needed to update his wardrobe since the mid seventies – Sir Richard Simmons.

12 dollars a person, first come first serve aerobics. Who hates LA?

You’re on a lot of people’s iPhones, Tony told me. Because I like to party. Parties need leaders. Someone people can cheer. I take the role seriously.

Some of these iPhone photos show me smoking. I began smoking 2 weeks ago. A simple coping mechanism I picked up when puberty presented me with challenges. I quit and started many times since then.

Smoking is the perfect illustration of the mind body split. My mind loves it and my body hates it. The smoke break is a simple way to check out for a moment. Your mind wants to watch smoke drift by like clouds and reflect on your life, which you’re destroying.