My Godson Baby Ant

Well here he is and if I call him Adam Ant one more time his mother is going to feed me hemlock in my pasta. He is ETHAN ADAM and happy for all that. He's not mine but cute enough to be! The pix get way bigger if you click on them. Ta!

THE GIRL WHO LOOKED LIKE GOERING.

I had whiting for supper and my fingers smell like fish. Soon my keyboard will smell like fish and cats will come in the lick the keyboard and leave cat germs for me to touch. Than my fingers will turn into stumps and I will spend the rest of my days playing a guitar with clothesline rope for strings. Or I will wash my hands. Again.



Oh, she’s so nice! About five-ten and three hundred pounds and has that prominent jaw like Hermann Goering. Wearing her little white (BIG white) hemdbluse with little flowers embroidered around the cuffs and collar. Wanted to know if I would go to church with her and I told her my mother would never let me go to any church with a woman I didn’t know well. I would have asked for her phone number but I keep imagining how she appears with a turkey drumstick in each hand, grease stains on the blouse and a Bible in her lap. But, by God!, her teeth shine when she grins! Achtung!

The light at the end of the…

I took my depression to the doctor a couple weeks ago and got some new medication and I seem to see several things happening:

I no longer drop into r.e.m. sleep anywhere on demand; I do go to bed a certain time each night and wake up in the morning at about the same time each day without having the terrible compulsion to go right back to sleep until noon or 1pm; I am discovering energy to clean the house on a regular basis and even keep the clutter down; when I tell my friends I’m going to visit I show up instead of being sick or sleepy; I smoke less and enjoy it more; I manage to carry laundry up and down two flights of stairs a couple times a week instead of dreaming about doing it all week. I am not any richer and all the new girlfriends are totally loopy and simply not working out. But I have mucho more peacely in the mind-o and this is the biggest reward.

It looks like the USA is starting the process of getting back into some kind of relationship with Cuba. I do so applaud those efforts. I can remember when we shut things down just before the Missile Crisis (Google it, kids!). The Cubicks are no longer planning to blow us up and presumably neither are the Russians. For years America recognized only the countries that were willing to become ‘democratic’ and now we’re realizing that possibly we can all get together and do sugar and cigars and gross national product. Hell, we’ve been doing that with China for ages – our whole middle class economy is based on the Chinese manufactures at Wal-Mart. We are doing it with the Russians and Ukrainians as we speak.

Fidel Castro is, emphatically, one of my heroes. He turned a mafia businessland into a functioning economy, developed some of the highest standards in literacy and medical care in the hemisphere, and stuck to it even without the approval of the United States and other ‘democratic’ countries. Of course political prisoners there had a hard time. Have we forgotten Waterboarding?

And Venezuela’s probably up and coming too. Chavez didn’t like George Bush and George Bush hated everybody so that was a dance made in hell. Chavez is young, dynamic, has the support of at least 50% of his population though that changes day by day up and down, and doesn’t exhibit too much megalomania. Hope springs eternal!

Now I am going to go rub oil into an Australian goat leather tobacco pouch. For the vicarious thrill. Ta!

THE APRIL DEBIT CARD

In order to be ahead of debt, the economy and the vicarious thrill that comes with shopping with a credit card, I decided last week to get a prepaid debit card from my banking institution. That way I could put money in ahead of time and the only money I could spend was what was in the account. No debt. When I got the card in the mail yesterday I spent some time reading the Fine Print on the back. Because if banks and their cards were untrustworthy before, they are even more so now, begging for money as they are.

While reading through the Fine Print I became acquainted with the price of being debt free. Under fees I found out that there were several:

$1.50 each time I withdraw (my) money from an ATM;
$2.00 monthly maintenance fee (on the account with My Money in it);
50 cents every time I add (my) money to the account;
a declined transaction fee of 50 cents;
and an Inactivity Fee. If I haven’t spent any of (my) money for three months, it’s going to cost me $3.00 a month for each month thereafter until I spend money.

There are also fees for replacing a stolen card, and for the Neighbor’s Dog.

I am going to spend the money presently in the account pretty quickly, cut the card into little pieces and take it in person back to my banking institution and ask them why they let me get this card in the first place. Then I will apply for a regular credit card. Which has no fees until you really screw up. And not from the same bank.

Ta!

Victories and Vicissitudes

The flowering fleas are coming out this week in their whites and pinks between snow showers. Today was not flowering and I stayed in the house all day. I am going to write a four act play which I don’t know the name of yet. It will have Alice Fallis, Doctor Boctor, the Mad Gecko and Homer Trueheart in it and it will be about the government. I think I will call it Washing Machine D&C. Tee Hee!

The masses are either furious about the new tax on cigarettes or roll your own tobacco, or gloating and going Hoo! Hoo! It isn’t going to work in the end and we have not learned from the experience of Canada, among others. That northern neighbor in the early 90’s upped their federal tobacco tax over 50% and revenues began to decline because everybody began buying cigarettes off the back of trucks or otherwise on the black market. Five years later the Canadians lowered the tax 50%, legitimate smoking business became more healthy and revenues got healthy too. What will happen here when this Golden Egg is laid and after a brief rise in revenues and a minimal amount of people who quit smoking:

1. Tobacco companies will still make their money.
2. Smokers will continue to find money to smoke.
3. A tobacco black market will develop sucking revenues and causing a crime problem.

In the meantime smokers will be highly inconvenienced but not stopped. So much for the Great American Smokeout.

The doctor has given me some little pink pills for depression. Now that I have them I will be able to diet and lose weight, exercise, sing better, decline my cigarettes (decline…?) and brotherhood will burst out all over the world. This will be my cure for depression. Which we hope will work.

It was a fine week for groceries as I mostly needed red meat and coffee. The fine superstore I went to had specials and reductions on several coffees as well as whole pork loin and other bloody specimens. I have saved maximal hero money so that I can order pipes from Germany and China.



If you’ve lost face in the ‘hood or you think the President is going to ban guns, it’s ok to shoot somebody? In the past couple weeks we have had Alabama, California police x 2, a nursing home in North Carolina, Binghampton, New York and police officers in Pittsburgh. And all the kids in one family in Washington state. Because Mom was leaving Dad for another man. What is this stuff about multiple homicides? It is not nice and ‘multiple homicides’ is just a sad phrase for – a bunch of innocent people who were walking around a couple minutes ago are now dead with bloody holes, and their wives and husbands and kids and mothers and fathers are going to be missing them. There are banner headlines flying: “Are we becoming inured to mass killings?” Not me, it’s disgusting, wasteful and a tragedy. I think that Columbine, the original shocker, taught us that it could be done and all you have to do is pick an excuse and be willing to take the consequences. Maybe some of those idiots and crazies need some of those pink pills of mine. Ta!