My Robot Is Pregnant theme song!

Waiting my turn to the podium, back at the police hearing commission to officially change the business name from Rolston Hauls to Hauler!

I’d expect an increase in business now that people will be able to find me on yelp

Looking for tax form 1040HD – heavy drinker. All the money you make goes to bars and restaurants in the neighborhood anyway.

I woke up and thought, “I need to cut holes in my front door.”

It semi-defeats the purpose of a door. A door is meant to provide security and if the holes are small enough, no one can get through. Still, people can look in your house. Of course, windows allow that as well. Then there’s the problem with small animals – I don’t want raccoons in my kitchen. Perhaps plexi-glass over them?

The thing I love is revealing how much we rely on a closed door for a sense of security. Windows in a door wouldn’t defeat that.

A local cab in Seward Alaska.

The broom rack at the greyhound terminal, downtown SF.

It’s late. Let me get these shoes off. That’s better. Take a look at mathew up there. He wears the long hair of a rocker and has the delicate features of a woman, but he is a proud father to that pig in his arms.

I say that to highlight the ability of a father to love. I was once like that small ugly pig that gets into a lot of trouble, eating the garden by the roots, peeing in places I shouldn’t and screaming in a strange voice when I wasn’t fed on time.

Yet my father still held me and loved me.

Thanks.

Having a store turns out to be wonderful. You’re looking at the second piece of art I remember selling. $55 for a discount fortune sign. Painted it on an old board, the white was original, it was part of a door frame. That’s why it has those angled corners.

The idea was to take this crazy hat I’d found, and with a silver garden ball as my crystal ball, go to the flea market and give people a reading. Selling it for $55 shows how far from art and how deep into commerce I’ve come.

You can go down to the mission district of this city and see a hundred people with shops and they have them because they need a platform to showcase their artistic nature.

That’s the crossover. Art and economics. The selling of style. Marketing design. Revealing desire.
Like a woman who knows how to throw her hips so you become interested.

Desire is based in sexual attraction and the collection of material goods fills the space love takes or it’s the arsenal of the love hunter.

Either way we are all destined to collect. For sexual reasons. In the back of the mind. Nesting they call it in the women’s magazines. A nice place to fertilize an egg.

Jimbo took this week off and went north so I spent a lot of time in the shop. Tune in tomorrow and we’ll talk about differences of opinion.

We have our first stalker at Mixed Nuts. A young Asian girl, maybe 20. Slightly plump. Black glasses, long black hair. Wears shiny windbreakers, jeans and sneakers.

If you see her in the store, tell her to she aint allowed in and be ready to call the police.

I caught her stealing a piece of chalk and asked her to leave. She said, “I’m taking a break. It’s 6:55.”

It was 6:55. We stay open late to catch the dinner crowd. It was an interesting response. This girl lives in the neighborhood and has been in before. In fact, she was here twice already today before this last and final visit. She picks things up and puts them down elsewhere.

We keep a small notebook by the register to write down items folks are looking for. She signed three different names in it.

Max L. – UCSB
Nicole Quist
and the last, switching up from her crude block letters, in jumbled cursive,
Jaenno Leule Le…incomprehensible.

Last week she was in, and acted like she was stealing my business card. Took it and shoved it in a pocket really quickly with guilt.

I got a text that night at 12:30

“Hey. Good night.”

A number I didn’t recognize. But I have my suspicions. I didn’t reply.

She’ll be back and it’s gonna be hard to tell her she isn’t allowed in here, because she is crazy and defiant and young and again, unstable.

Wish me luck!

We bought granola bars at the Wal Mart in Anchorage. This whole trip makes me believe Alaska doesn’t exist. We toured around with an admitted homosexual studying interior design.

Then we got to Whittier. “Things are shittier in Whittier,” says Will. My old pal Will. That’s the Alaska I imagined. This little town of tin sheds, abandoned box cars and dry docks for a wintering fishing fleet.

Two bars in town and 80% of the population lives in one massive military era building. The ground floor houses a post office, a town hall, and a vending machine room, among other municipal necessities.

There is no bar in the main building so we walked in the constant misting drizzle to the Anchor Inn where I was taught Alaskan leg wrestling and competed against two women, both of whom beat me.

Alaskan leg wrestling involves laying on your back in the middle of the bar room floor. Your competitor does the same, facing the other direction – head to foot in other words. As you count “1 2 3″ you raise the leg that touches your competitor, who in synchronicity raises his or her leg as well.

On three you hook your leg around the challengers leg and attempt to lift their body off the ground.

I fought a native Alaskan woman who appeared to be in her fifties and was not more than 5 feet tall, 100 pounds. She did beat me, more because I didn’t know what I was doing and I had been drinking.

My host Will had recently been punched in the face by a woman at this bar, so I was not trying to prove anything tonite other than I was peaceful and non competitive.

Later, outside, I stood alone looking at the high mountains that came nearly to the water. In the springtime the snow is melting and you hear water rushing all around. The glaciers are calving and the snow is shifting, meltwater tumbles down the mountain side.

Nature was thick and closing in so I walked back to Will’s apartment and turned on the tv. He has cable. My cell phone worked. I watched a marathon of auction shows and wondered what wealth I could strip from nature.

The gold, the timber, the salmon were depleted and the rights bought up or protective legislation enacted -the men who pre-dated my arrival had been thorough.

There must be something in these woods I can take to San Francisco and turn to profit! Or not. What’s a junk man do stuck in nature? There is no garbage to sort, no junk to haul. My girl and I walked the edge of the cove, looking for Japanese tsunami wreckage. Some sense of treasure. She found an interesting rock and I put it in my pocket, unsure why. She held up interesting sticks but nothing that would sell. I waved her offerings away.

If only Whittier had a thrift store. Were it only Saturday and there were a yards or garages to have sales. There was only tidewater glaciers, hemlocks, sea otter and bald eagles. Some of us aren’t meant for Alaska. Not till it’s covered in garbage.