Wednesday, February 29, 2012

1 Billion Cars

I've been reading Plan B 4.0 by Lester Brown and that's enough to make me lose sleep until the next leap year. Back in 2008 there were an estimated 910 million automobiles in the world. I don't think allowances were made for more fuel efficient cars or gas guzzling pigs like Oggy's 1969 Econoline Van. We probably aren't at 1 billion cars but there's no doubt we are approaching it and that raises the question of how these cars are going to run. Now, most of us are selfish thinkers with the foresight of a snub nosed monkey in heat so I'll relay some information on to you and you can discuss it amongst yourselves while Rush Limbaugh shuffles papers in the background of your blighted consciousness.

The simple answer to fuel problems is alternative fuels. Internal combustion engines, aside from making us absolute slaves to our vehicles, is polluting the ocean and skies. In Churchill Falls Labrador they have one of the biggest hydroelectric power plants in North America supplying much of eastern Canada and New York with energy using 1964 technology. Yet, as I walked around the mosquito swarming streets I didn't notice any electric vehicles. Even the tour guide truck was a fuel powered SUV. Inside the power plant everything was electric but only the houses used the power supplied a mile away by the 12 turbines. Maybe the cold weather had something to do with this since batteries tend to shut down in negative 40 degree temperatures. Who knows...but that's the situation.

Electricity, supplied by hydro electric plants, wind turbines and solar farms is a trend that has been developing for half a century and shows no signs of slowing down. Gas and oil are being used to facilitate the development of cleaner sources of energy. Or I should say that gas and oil are being used to transport useless web cams and anal beads around the world and a small minority are also using gas and oil to develop cleaner sources of energy.
The enemies of Ford and Chrysler conspire to attack corporate America

I'm sure back in 1870 train conductors who relied on steam created by burning wood in a double boiler thought it would never be cost effective to refine crude oil into flammable gasoline. The same thoughts now apply to switchgrass fuel, prairie grass and hemp gasoline. Yes, combustible hemp oil fueling cars. If it is possible then it will eventually be cost effective...or it will be cost effective for someone.

The conflict I want to bring up is something that is easily overlooked when the topic of ethanol comes up along with other plant based fuels. Corn takes land and unless we start to cultivate national park lands then that requires a sacrifice of agro land somewhere. And with nearly 1 billion cars out there owned by people making an average of $30,000 a year competing with, say, 3 billion poor people like Oggy who make less than $3,000 a year the market will side with the people who can afford to pay for the corn to be planted so it can be refined into fuel to burn in their cars so they can get to work making pharmaceuticals. 3 Billion poor people vs 1 Billion car owners. That leaves 3 billion people who have money but don't own a car and at least one hippie who owns a huge van but has no money...I don't know who that person will be but he's going to have to choose a side and there's a good chance he'll team up with the car owners.

I think this is where the paper theory of capitalism breaks down because if the market determines that corn should be used to fuel cars and 3 billion people are out of luck then that would be naively ignoring human nature because 3 billion people are not going to placidly watch their dinner be ignited so I don't have to walk to Walmart to get the chicken strip and mashed potato dinner. No, that's not going to happen. You push 3 billion people into a corner and all the camper conversion hippie vans in the world won't protect you from their wrath. Like Jim Morrison said, "They've got the guns but we've got the numbers."

Now, what I predict is exactly that scenario of more rainforest land being plowed under "Sold" by electro-prodded natives and then cultivated to grow corn to fuel distant "smart" vehicles. The natives themselves will be allowed to work in the iPod manufacturing factories and when they start to jump off the buildings they will get no sympathy because Americans aren't supposed to "inflict their morality on others" or whatever catch-phrase the conservative of the week will shill on his mouth breathing, knuckle dragging audience as they switch between Nascar and Kid Rock. No, it would be unforgivable to interfere with the natural holocausts we cause since speed junkie radio hosts must know what they are talking about. Better to sit on our thumbs jacking off while the dirty deeds are perpetrated in our honor on the natives, their land stolen and destroyed and then they are relocated to villages where they have to pay rent and the only means to money is working in the iPod factory. Yeah, that's a trail of blood only a goddamn television psychic could follow. You'd have to be a near genius to put all those pieces together and see the injustice. No, it's better to listen to Rush Limbaugh feed you baby pacifier information and slap another rainforest slab of chicken wings on the barbeque. Let bygones be bygones! Don't cry over spilled milk. Survival of the fittest! Yes, the dirty minds will survive as long as the clean ones allow it. Freedom isn't free but the cost isn't what the newspapers say it is because there was a discount in the price of Amazonian children flesh and a closeout sale on clean rainforest water. Fried Chinese slave girl fingers are buy one get one free with duck sauce! Mention this ad and Save! Buy now and buy in bulk so your fat ass can fit through the mcdonalds drive-thru. And when a future Oggy asks for mercy for the displaced and enslaved Kogi native you can claim ignorance and slap his wrist because it's none of our business and we're mere spectators in the whole affair and our paws never got wet in the fat fish bucket. I wish I could inflict that kind of ignorant arrogance on myself but I must be immune to conservative flim flam talk. Maybe I have my father to that for that but I also wish I could be as stupid as the rest of America so I could fit in better and put my Khazakstani Infant neck on the barbeque and crack another beer. But no, I have to side with Lester Brown, loathed and crucified on a cross made of pizza boxes and CD cases, the persecution of Oggy The Ignorant persists to drain the carbon emission of our morality into the sinkhole of Laissez-faire  indifference.

Tuesday, February 28, 2012

reMEMBer

THE WATER THAT PASSED BENEATH THIS BRIDGE WAS FILLED WITH THE BODIES OF THE ENEMIES WHO FOUGHT FOR THEIR CROOKED BELIEFS. THE VAN CROSSED ON RUSTED RADIUS AXLES AND FLATTENED TIRES AND BEARINGS THAT FELL BENEATH THE WHEELS. THOUGH THE CENTER SPAN OF OUR DEMISE STILL RAISES AND LOWERS WITHIN OUR ABSENTEE PARENTAL CUBBYHOLE THE DISTANT HORIZON SHALL NEVER BE WITHOUT THE SILHOUETTE OF RECOVERY. TWO LANDS CONNECTED FOR THE OGGY COTTAGE TO PASS, DESPISED BY THE LOCALS AND HARASSED BY THE POLICE...NO SAFE HARBOR WITH THE BORDERS OF THIS UNHOLY TERRITORY. A SOLITARY GULL LOOKS TO THE EAST WHERE HIS SALVATION RECEDES. OGGY TAKES FLIGHT AND IMAGINES HIS SAFE LANDING.

Homeless Manifest Destiny

When Bella admitted that she was pregnant and that her hands cradled not only her belly but the future Oggy Jr. that was a small fetus at the time, harbored from motherly instinct, Oggy was flattened to the redwood duff and twigs of their forest homestead.
"I'll deliver your baby here in the woods and we'll eat the placenta with a raging fire of ferns and Quezatlcoatlus bones," said Oggy, sincerely expressing his devotion to the baby growing in Bella's womb.
"No, you're going to get a job," announced Bella. Her eyes focused on some distant object in the forest.
"I don't understand. We're going to build a house in the forest with the crank tweakers and we'll grow corn and beans in buckets that we raise to the sky. And out child will be strong."
Oggy reached out to Bella's snow white neck, the neck he dreamed of in its long sincerity and delicate formation. Bella recoiled and slapped at Oggy's neck.
"Don't touch me. You have to go to work to make money so we can feed the baby."
Oggy stumbled into an ancient Ohlone Indian shit pit and cried out as his ankle turned.
"I love you and I will always protect you and the baby."
"Then you'll work at the supermarket or at a warehouse."
"I don't understand what that means," said Oggy. "The baby needs a father."
Oggy reached again for Bella's neck and she clawed at him.
"Don't want you to touch me. My baby needs food and you should work for money. "
"That makes no sense. Money is a fabrication of the conservative media that is an illusion the republicans chain our mothers to and break our backs with idealistic routine and clock punching in a circular insane cycle to spiritually deplete us. We're free here!"
Oggy waved his hands in the general direction of the redwood trees and Ohlone Indian burial grounds. He grinned through his giant mossy beard and his stained teeth shone like polished river stones in the stream of despair.
"MAKE SOME MONEY YOU FREELOADING SON OF A BITCH!" cried Bella as she held her belly.
"My love, don't despair. I'll always provide for you. I've planted corn seeds and tomatoes. We'll have a garden of eden in the spring. We'll eat off the fat of the land. We'll thrive and grow and our child will understand his connection to nature."
A crank tweaker's howl punctuated Oggy's declaration and Thunder pissed on the triangular tree brace that held up their shack made of plastic mattress covers.
"There is no time to wait for corn to grow," growled Bella. "We need food now! Don't touch me!"
Oggy pulled his hand back when Bella tried to claw his fingers. He was so hurt by her lack of sympathy. He looked at her beautiful strawberry blond hair that formed a short rug on her shaved head. She was his lover and the mother of her future child. They would be starting a family in the woods by the railroad track near the golf course and he would have to start to plant more food to trade with the tweakers who inhabited the deep realm.
"I love you. That's enough!" shouted Oggy.
"If you love me then you'll get a job in town moving boxes."
Oggy's spirit broke from the tone of Bella's voice. She was immobile and demanding. He would work for one of the warehouses moving wine supplies or artichokes or boutique skateboard clothing. In fact, there was newspaper in their collection of tinder. "NOW HIRING" This was a sign to Oggy. He would work and make money. He would make money and feed his child and that would make Bella happy and that would make Oggy a man.
"Truck Driver School. Affordable Tuition. OTR drivers earn $50,000 avg. pay."
He read this as Bella rocked back and forth in the plastic forest castle they had assembled from trash from the dumpster behind the mattress store. Storm clouds gathered to the west and soon a drenching rain would cascade through the canopy, ignored by squirrels and other animals except Oggy. He could drive. Once upon a time he had owned a car and driven from one place to another before the awful consequences of piston propelled crankshafts compelled him to renounce internal combustion engines. He had planted trees in Kentucky and that required driving back and forth to the coal mines. Yes, white trees and berry bushes to attract seed birds, blue spruce, Colorado Spruce, Locust, Alder...
"Home weekly. Health, dental & vision" promised the ad. What was home? The child would be on the breast and Oggy would be driving through the asphalt acreage of the midwest, the west, the mountains, riding brakes and double shifting clutches and banging orders on the CB. Could he do that when men died in Iraq to secure oil for the opportunity to move freights of paper and baby products form one state. How many gallons of gas would be spent to move diapers? The amount of tire tread that would end up in the pacific ocean manifested itself to Oggy in the form of a great angel with chicken wings flapping its anger in Oggy's face. The punishment that Oggy would inflict on the chicken angel would be so great that the angel would die and Oggy would be responsible. Diapers crossing the country, trespassing on Cherokee land and Kickapoo land and the prairies of the Sioux and Cree. What horses would need hay for this boxes of rattles that Oggy would need to collect his money and feed his baby in the plastic fortress he had built in the state park land? HE couldn't afford the tuition and the impact was too great on the environment.
"My love, I can't drive trucks because..."
"I don't want to hear your excuses, you toad, get a job and get out of my face."
"I love you. I love you so much. I'll do anything."
Oggy reached out for a thread of Bella's worn sweater but she recoiled from him.
"I hate you and don't want you to touch me. Make me money for the baby. That's all you can do for me."
Oggy's head spun from his devotion to this vessel of purity. She was so wise and practical. She understood what was needed from this demanding world while he, Oggy, was adrift in the sea of uncertainty.
"Of course. I'll do anything for the woman I love and the child that is mine."
Oggy looked on. Automotive Technician. Janitorial. Internet Sales Manager.. Service Writer/Advisor. Swiss Screw machine Operator.
"I could operate a swiss screw machine, my love! I think..."
"Shut your mouth!"
The dog shit near a bay tree and pawed at the redwood duff until he had buried the small turds.
Oggy was desperate.
"Can I be a structural engineer? Designing structures with concrete and steel, with integrated process equipment...maybe I can. What do you think?
Oggy waited hopefully while Bella gathered her anger into a balled fist aimed for Oggy's already bruised bicep. She punched him and he yelled so loud the dog yipped in fear and revulsion.
"No, please. Don't hit me anymore!"
Oggy leaned into the walls of the plastic curtain separating them from the storm outside, the droplets of rain collecting on the walls and soaking into the forest where they belong and not in a storm drain like Oggy had protested against in the preceding months.
"Then don't be stupid!" shouted Bella. "Get a real job that you can do. Our baby will die if you don't feed it and it will be all your fault."
She lay down with her belly in cradled in her hands, the hands of womanhood, thought Oggy, the hands of all the mothers of the world, wise and compassionate and practical. Not foolish like the dull Oggy and his idealistic insanity that lead to the broken toaster dead ends of Santa Cruz, the dumpsters and the broken crutches that bend and warp under the weight of expectations.
"Purchase manager. I'll manage optimal inventory quantity, improve inventory purchasing practices, and locate new vendors. I can do that! I can locate new vendors. My love! I love you! I love you and our baby so much that I'll locate new vendors. Where is this located?
"Fashion Beauty Supply" read Oggy in the stained advertisement next to the inside sales and restaurant franchise boxes. Fashion beauty supply? Could he find new vendors for hair nets and fake mustaches and nylons and lip gloss and suspenders made by Chinese slaves in factories along ancient polluted rivers washing the detritus of the centuries to the ocean and all the acid leached gold mining sluice? He might have highly proficient computer skills...did he?...he but the ocean and rivers would call back to his primitive nature and demand explanation for his pollution and disregard.
"What if the beauty supply factory supply is on a river," asked Oggy and for that he received a kick to the tender ribs under his undefended arm, Bella's tender toes, perfect and not crippled by arthritis like Oggy's root-like toes finding his brittle ribs. He cries out but Bella cried louder as her toes caught under one of Oggy's fractured ribs and injured some ligament within her joints.
"Are you alright," asked Oggy with tears in his eyes and the help wanted paper flapping in the breeze that blew through the curtain of plastic they had enveloped themselves in to protect their dog and drowning lives from the climate. The storm clouds thundered in response and rain fell through the redwood canopy onto the mattress covers, the moat around the future goat pen filling with cloudy water, the small area with Oggy's Buddha statue and guitar stand, his Nat King Cole songbook and union organizing broadside singles drowning in the stream of rainfall destined for the crack streets near the hotels on 2nd street and the shelters on Highway 1.
"Don't talk to me. Find a job. Make us money to feed the baby!" Bella answered through untainted lips, rosy like virgin cherries. Oggy held his breath against the throbbing pain in his ribs and admired his lover, the vessel of his future child. He would do it. He would be a materials manager or a medical assistant or even a program analyst/PLC programmer, whatever it took to feed his progeny and the love of his life.
"I love you. I will come through for you," said Oggy as a redwood branch crashed through the plastic curtain that no longer protected them from the rain. His Nat King Cole songbook becoming unrecognizable trash in the forest. The puppy curling up to hide its nose under its tail and Bella's eyes becoming fire red in the thunderous rage of the storm, the squirrels asleep in the tree apartments and the hawks patiently waiting for the mouse to make a fatal mistake. Bella aimed for Oggy's throat with her fist but found his bruised shoulder. Her hateful accusation was drowned out by the desperate moan of Oggy as the rain canopy dumped on their prone bodies. Hours would pass before they could be dry again and light a fire using the last of the help wanted ads and toilet paper and the drenched moss that Oggy insisted would make the fire cleanse all the hate that he felt was poisoning their relationship. He made sure that Bella had all the warm clothing before he plunged into the tumult to repair the plastic apartment. As he worked he chanted, "Sorting and Grading Used Clothing. Understanding South American Styles. I can do that because I'm smart and clever. I can be a textile Recycler because it's good for the environment. I can be a winner."
While Bella seethed in tense rage Oggy resolved that in the morning he would apply to a crew that slapped joint compound to recently installed sheet rock. He would conform and his conformity would facilitate his child's initiation into the world as it stood and not the fantasy that Oggy's tomato trellis predicted. Breathing halitosis and frozen steam, Oggy accidentally stepped on the puppy's tail and the dog's bark woke up the napping hawks in their dry Ponderosa branch crotch nests. Would they eat or would they go hungry? The question was not answered by the wind but died in the purple clouds, sucked into obscurity by the vacuum of the climate machine.

Monday, February 27, 2012

Prairie Solitude

Wolf wander Idaho for Elk shot by emigrants
the bald eagle soars in our imagination over desolate landscape
crooked river of betrayal weave through soggy marshland
overflowing wells of sorrow drown proto-chicken habitat as
trails to nowhere lead in circles of dusty deceit and cameras
take ego self portraits in the shadows of morning.
The Quetzalcoatlus awaits the dawning of a new
age of dinosaurs and methane rich atmosphere when
dragons flapped vinyl wings over lonely traitors.

Sunday, February 26, 2012

Stoned Local Man Declares Talking Heads "Best Group Ever"

After local man Darf Stueben smoked a huge joint and then listened to side A of the Talking Heads album "Speaking in Tongues" he immediately announced the genius of The Talking Heads and soon pronounced the band was "The Best Group Ever"
Side A of Speaking in Tongues by The Talking Heads
"Are you hearing what I'm hearing?"
"If you get ripped on some super sonic chronic from California," said Darf, "and play this album then you will agree [The Talking Heads] are unsurpassed in originality and talent. All you have to do is listen!"
Mr. Stueben then packed a water bong full of a variety of cannabis identified as "Purple Party Dream" and smoked some more.
"It's for my seasonal affective disorder," explained Darf. "It helps my neck pain too," he added.
 Mr. Stueben pointed out that enjoying the album is preferable to playing a CD or other digital media.
" Only vinyl captures the mood and attack of this music. And it forces you to listen to the music in the order it was intended to be listened to which is the exact order that it should be listened to and the order that the band chose for full effect, or whatever."


Darf, moments before being overcome by a fit of coughing
Mr. Stueben paused for a full five minutes, entranced by the sound vibrating from his vintage 1975 Magnavox turntable console. At times he appeared to stop breathing. Then he asked, "Is someone's phone ringing?"

Saturday, February 25, 2012

Rehearsal

I've wasted too much time renting space in resentment housing. The rent is low there but the neighbors never stop complaining about my midnight crying. I either have to grow up or get thicker walls and we all know I'm not going to grow up any time soon because that would put me in the company of some drawn out rat race hustlers who pimped themselves out to dreams their parents whispered to them while they slept. Not lies but propaganda and indoctrination like the Lorax shilling 3D film, chocolate chip pancakes and Mazda cars that get worse gas mileage than my 1974 Vespa Ciao. If Jesus could sell hamburgers he would be raised on the golden arches with ketchup coming out his nose.
Someone else may luck out on the $250 Sr-500 Bartolini pickup bass guitar I foolishly passed up back at the Hawk Shop by the bridge that crushed a truck but that can't prevent me from sharpening my rhythm guitar skills. Three and 4 note chords are all that are expected of the big band and or swing band rhythm guitarist. The grips are a few more than 20 and cover most scenarios that Bob Wills can throw at me. The new band will be called The Cow Punchers from Amarillo. We won't be from Amarillo and we won't punch cows but the important thing is to swing like a clock dangling from Nat King Cole's pompadour. Tickets go on sale February 30th.

Friday, February 24, 2012

Animal Caretaker WG-5048-05


**Amended Benifits Section Removed** About the position: This is a temporary position not to exceed one year. Number of Vacancies: We expect to fill 1 vacancy at this time. This announcement is open to all U.S. citizens - applicants outside the Federal government may apply along with current Federal
Agency: 
National Park Service
Location:  Maui Island,Hawaii (Haleakala National Park, HI) 
Salary: $19.89 to $23.20 / Per Hour
Open Period:  Friday, February 17, 2012 to Friday, March 02, 2012

Painting Walls


Harmonic Tan should go with everything except my golf shirt. I got tired of taping all the trim and then having the paint go under it anyway and I have to scrub it off and repaint all the areas that didn't get paint. So I cut in with a brush carefully to the beat of Radio Bop and the whining dog as it dies of thirst under the stairs. Then I get paint on my golf shirt and suck it off with my duck lips. Since we're all keeping track this is my community service sentence for pleading guilty to being a hobo of ill repute. I get paid in donuts and dog treats while I wait for my Guatemalan visa to be processed.

Thursday, February 23, 2012

Quetzalcoatlus: RIP

What does the Fox News audience care abut the Quetzalcoatlus? They watch their watered down Simpsons and listen to the news spin around like a broken washing machine in the rubbery jowls of pasty presenters while the furry Lorax is morally kidnapped to shill IHop chocolate chip pancakes, Mazda SUVs used by soccer moms burning Iranian children to get their own children to flute practice, and also, left wing political conspiracies. I'd love to be able to give you a picture of a living Quetzalcoatlus but that's impossible since they are now extinct and it's all because of the selfish proclivities of the Taco Bell generation who have dinner at the drive through and learn their economics from an Kebler elf chosen for her breast size. Let's all sleep soundly with our Ambien pills snoring through the whisper of wind on the Quetzalcoatlus' wings as he glides gently over the fern prairies, content with the world. These animals needed our protection and we shit on them just like we are attacking the Arctic Wolf on all sides. There is no mercy from the merciless and the spell check mentality that keeps us in our easy chairs while the magnificent Quetzalcoatlus rots in his desert grave. Go on and live with the blood of the Quetzalcoatlus on your hot sauce stained hands. Once monkeys roamed the parched desert and died in fierce anonymity and now our Cadillacs roll over the dusty remains of the Quetzalcoatlus, once man's friend and once the symbol of great majesty in this corrupt land, now a distant reminder of our senseless assault on the habitat of the impoverished Dixie werewolves.

Won't Learn My Lesson

4 am applying Joint Compound to damaged wall. Clueless.

Turkshead coxcombing that represents my internal logic system

Workaholics

I usually dump on bad pop art so I have to be fair and promote mass produced art that I enjoy. Portandia on IFC is one series I find amusing and the other one is Workaholics that is a jewel in Comedy Central's crown. I guess one has to be jaded for so long that the jaded-ness becomes a cliche in itself and then other jaded comedy writers start to sound funny. But if you are newly jaded then nothing is funny. If you have been jaded for a long time then let me recommend Portlandia and Workaholics. If they aren't funny then you should get some psychedelic mushrooms and eat them in the Santa Cruz forest. You won't stay jaded long and then you will stop your self abuse long enough to come down from your jaded monkey perch in wood smoke obscurity, fearful of your own shadow, crying about your sad affairs, hugging your dark secrets to sleep with hog hunters and storage wars to keep you company while the lesbian lawyers make sure you cut every blade of artificial grass on their lawn so you can stoop your fat belly fat over to pick up the check taped to the granite mailbox. No, better to champion your own fragile disappointments like a Rock-em Sock-em Resentment cage match....while the cuffs of reality close in. Wolves crawl around all our doors and I hear them sniffing me out. We're all asked to adopt alliances with our allies but our allies were taught by a drunken English teacher named Cal who wanted the summers off so he could golf so we must decide for ourselves what is a lie and what is truth and when you break your back for powder puff families who later prosecute you in court then it's a climate change of tears that will wash away the fire of your torment. Go ahead and break your arm patting yourself on the back as Critical Thinking is the class that was cancelled when your bad breath pulled the fire alarm at PHS. We're born again with no laws and no friends, the Kickapoo Indian's bones beneath the St. Louis Arch and the gateway to the West won by Apple and that is the latest in an attack on reality as the lie is much easier to propagate now. Turn your frown upside down as the colon cancer diagnosis on your transmission WILL NOT SILENCE THE GLADIATOR IN MY HEART. I Will walk on my arthritic toe into the wilderness of the Guatemalan rain forest, passing through the cartel ravaged Mexican drug land, gasoline burning in my wake because I need you all to point these things out to me. Yes, let's debate about Oggy's hypocrisy because he doesn't already have insomnia because his last employer thought he was stealing leather gloves from his truck when actually he was trying to save time by not returning to his own polluting disgusting pervert van that is parked outside the courthouse with smoke wafting from the stovepipe, and because in Oggy's haste he left his gloves and his keys in the van, locked himself out of it with the alarm on and so, in front of three sheriffs he would be breaking into his own van through the leaking escape hatch with the alarm going off in his Tinnitus ear while he hunts for the keys so he instead grabbed gloves from his employer's truck and then asked if he could borrow them and that sounded and was admittedly suspicious and led to his immediate dismissal and nearly a fist fight with a Kittery punk who called him a thief with ass crack snobbishness and chest pumping and all of this has now returned to haunt him and wail of his regret in the shadows of his Vespa. Sure, with the ghosts of Christmas past he'll never need to be reminded of the cause and effect of his van on the Kazakhstani children and Syrian infants. Oggy's real fucking slow and he needs everyone to be psychologists and interpret all his words. Let me save you time and say that I'll be dead and dust in a Tibetan Sky burial by the time you catch up on your slow footed Escalade Nike tongue-tied travesty and tell me what I'm thinking. Yes, I'm real obtuse, real hard to figure out that you need to hunt and peck like a fucking one eyed chicken for my weaknesses. Good times! Bravo! Let's all pretend there is no cause and effect and the clown next to the amusement park ride has a finger that's twenty feet high so no one gets to go on it and we can all watch it go in empty circles because I can type with ten mother fucking fingers and not make one fucking mistake and I'll do it all day long at 90 wpm but no one in their cardboard mansions will get rich off these fucking fingers if they want to ignore the clown next to the ride and the stale fried dough sold by the girl with acne and the stumbling Indian in alligator shoes and all the Italian scooters that will heal the Arctic Wolf. Conviction isn't sold at Walmart and Dignity isn't kept frozen with the ice cream where old crones gossip about broken heroes. Conformity, however, is mass produced in China for your convenient consumption and when faced with a free individual you will tear him down and produce the bones of Iraq prison guards as evidence that freedom isn't free because you can't be more cliche if you had Rush Limbaugh stick a hand up your ass and use you as a ventriloquist dummy while Kid Rock dances in the background with an American Flag condom on his syphilitic cock.

I did not intend to cross this gateway into Tiradlandia but my betrayal has been betrayed and my Jazz fakebook gets faker every day with the blood of a scorpion running across the treble staff. Let's all defend our misery because that's what we're good at. Bullies belong on fakebook because they can have the power to befriend and unfriend digitally and comment at will in circular jerkoff fashion. This never was a forum so I'm not going to pretend it is anymore. They have Elton John fuck fag forums somewhere on the internet and if you like glory hole anonymity to your words and cock then go there to yap your outdated gossip and idiotic ego pump. Or cry about it like a six year old in your basement because you get good at what you do. In the meantime watch some funny shows where people dance and distract as the Syrian/Chinese apocalypse is captured on facebook fraud accounts where classless cunts sign yearbooks repeatedly and click refresh on their own unlikeable comments and legless cowards stoke the fading flames of their own life lived for the dollar that is owed to someone else in China. That makes more sense. That's the answer because a golfer named Cal said it was.

Wednesday, February 22, 2012

Random Quotes of the Day

Oggy: What's the code for Romaine Lettuce?
Self checkout attendant: Look under Lettuce.
Oggy: (Was looking under Romaine)

Jose: I been in the area for 2 month looking for work. My uncle, he die in Mexico, cartel kill him. If you could give any money so I could send it to my sister.
Oggy: What state?
Jose: Durango
Oggy: I want to go to Vera Cruz.
Jose: If you could...
Oggy: Labor Ready is the only hope. I'm also broke. No job. I'll give you a ride back to Durango. Is it near Vera Cruz?
Jose: No. Very dangerous road.
Oggy: Well, I'm starving to death here. That's not safe either. You want a free pair of plaid pants?
Jose: No.


Oggy: So if I mix this joint compound with paint so it's thin enough to roll on with a one inch nap roller then I'll get a texture to match the wall that was destroyed by the leak?
Paint Store Cashier: I guess.

Nurse: The dog pissed all over the floor. Didn't you put a diaper on her?
Oggy: I did. But I gave her water. She filled the diaper up.
Nurse: Don't give her any water.
Oggy: She's dying for water. Look at her. She begs for water constantly because of her disease.
Nurse: She can't hold it. No water.
Oggy: So, we'll kill her from thirst but not put a bullet in her head?
Nurse: Just shut up.
Dog: Woof!


Text conversation:
Dustin: What U up 2?
Oggy: Painting walls.
Dustin: In the Army that means 'masturbating.'
Oggy: I'm doing that 2 but the color is all wrong 4 the furniture.

Oggy: Hi! A buddy in San Francisco found these cool plaid pants in a storage locker. They're too small for me. Are you interested in buying them? Excellent condition. Not a stain on 'em. Made in U.S.A.
Gay Vintage Clothes Store Cashier: (makes face like he ate a sour apple)
Oggy: No?
GVCSC: (Shakes head)
Oggy: Plaid isn't popular anymore?
GVCSC: (Makes face)
Oggy: Because everyone in San Francisco is wearing highwater plaid pants. They're hardly worn. $5 and they're yours.
GVCSC: (Shakes head)
Oggy: Ok. A buck. One dollar and it's a deal.
GVCSC (silence)
Oggy: Your loss. I guess I'll look around? You got any buttons?
GVCSC: (Nods toward a wall)
Oggy: 'cause I got a disco shirt that's missing a button. And a coat with lame buttons. Gotta hate lame buttons.
GVCSC: (forced smile)
Oggy: Hey, I'll trade you these pants for a few buttons.
GVCSC: (Shakes head)
Oggy: I'll trade you these pants for one button.
GVCSC: (Shakes head)
Oggy: One button? They aren't worth a button?
GVCSC: (shakes head)
Oggy: So, you'd throw them in the trash if I left them here? Vintage plaid pants from a dead man's hotel room in San Francisco? Where am I, J. fucking Crew?
GVCSC: (Nods)
Oggy: Maybe I'll take my business elsewhere.
[Oggy leaves]
GVCSC: Have a nice day!

Oggy: One dark chocolate shake with peanut butter cups. The fresh ones. None of those nasty ones you got laying on the floor like last time. Ya hear me?
Speaker: [static static] ...at the window


Oggy: Where are your needlepoint supplies?
Goodwill Cashier: Needlepoint?
Oggy: Embroidery. Coxcombing. Whatever you call it.
GC: All our arty stuff is here.
Oggy: Nice. I'm making a punch pin patch that says "Econoline". I need weaver's cloth.
GC: Anything else I can help you with?
Oggy: In fact, there is. How much does this Beach Boys record cost?
GC: One dollar.
Oggy: Whoa! They're retired, you know. They don't need the money anymore for hookers and drugs.
GC: Today's fifteen percent off bric a brac.
Oggy: So it's eighty five cents?
GC: Before tax.
Oggy: Still pretty high. It's got scratches like Run DMC practiced sample hooks on it.
GC: Is there...?
Oggy: Check it out. Pretty nice jeans I found over there. Vintage Levis 684 elephant bell bottoms. Classic "Dad" wash. Hardly worn. They don't fit but I can take in the waist. I always say, 'You can't have a bad day in bellbottom jeans'.
GC: Let me know when you want to check out.
Oggy: ...and these awesome plaid pants. Two bucks! I bet that gay vintage clothes shop down the street will pay ten bucks for these. I'll make a bit of hustle money. But no needlepoint?
GC: Ok?
Oggy: I guess I'll just buy the jeans and the plaid pants. And this Beach Boys record.
GC: And the shirt?
Oggy: Well, what do you think? I'm undecided. It's a white Givenchy disco shirt. Givenchy For Chesa. It is pretty awesome. But it's missing a button. Does it fit alright? What do you think?
GC: Fits ok.
Oggy: Any discounts for military personnel?
GC: Not today.
Oggy: Because I was in the Boy Scouts.
GC: Are you ready to check out?
Oggy: Ok, you twisted my arm, add this groovy Daniel Cremieux paisley pullover golf shirt and we're all set. No more! My mom lets me shop for myself and see what happens? haha. What's the damage?
GC: $8.
Oggy: Whole wheat Jesus! How can a poor man face such times and live?
GC: Excuse me?
Oggy: Hey, what's this?
GC: Ironing board elastics.
Oggy: Cool. I bet I could use those to keep the stovepipe in my van stable. The thing rattles like hell when I cross train tracks. How much?
GC: Fifty Cents.
Oggy: Come on. A quarter and you got a deal.
GC: Fifty cents.
Oggy: You drive a hard bargain. No needlepoint stuff you're hiding back there behind the desk? You're sure? If I don't finish my Econoline punch pin patch I lose my license to be hip.
Givenchy for Chesa disco shirt and Levis 684 Bellbottom Jeans. This outfit sells for $400 on eBay and I already ruined it with joint compound.

Blues For Dixie

Warning: Do not watch this under the influence of LSD or other hallucinogenic drugs.
I'm practicing my western swing songs for my next career as a swing band leader in a Texas honky tonk.

This is "Blues for Dixie" by Bob Wills except with me as a werewolf and a vocal effect of an old black sharecropper. So, an enslaved, cotton picking werewolf who also sang the blues because he was beholden to the man. It's a full moon and NOW we're finally getting crazy.



I heard a few people upload videos of them playing this song like a ragtime, nostalgic, happy song. It's called Blues for Dixie. You don't know shit about the blues until you've been a black werewolf sharecropper with a busted guitar.

Tuesday, February 21, 2012

Snub nosed Monkey

I want my estate to be donated to PBS because they produced a nature documentary about the Himalayan mountains that included several animals I want to share with you. The snub nosed monkey is a creature after our own hearts. The documentary was highlighting the effects of climate change but it's hard to be effective when such a thing happens so slowly and Fox News fills the airways with cats caught in trees and car accidents in Iowa. The snub nosed monkey has many perils, the least of which is climate change. It's one of the creatures I would use as an example that iPods and colon cleanse treatments are totally unrelated to contentment and survival. Like fashion, humans have invented pestilence (out of date jeans) and then invented the cure (slave-made skinny jeans)...all at the cost of Snub Nosed Monkey habitat. The monkey, on the other hand, lets his balls hang out and eats shrubs. We so clever we race Russians to reach orbit and celebrate as monkeys are eaten alive. Monkey eats moss, swings in trees, placidly surviving the centuries without warfare or polio as we train yaks to eat our garbage. So clever!

Speaking of yaks, there is also something called a Takin that lives in Tibet area. Its golden fleece is a real prize for oil baron rugs in opulent Yemen mansions...because we're so clever and smart.

The last animal is the banded goose
This is the highest flying bird in the world. Only the clever and smart homo Sapien flies higher with his aluminum tubes. The bird flies from one side of the Himalayas to the other for climate reasons and favorable breeding ground. Mankind flies because we want to deliver tainted baby food and drop bombs on other countries. So clever! How does the bar headed goose survive without iPods and airplanes?

Thank you PBS

In Other News

This probably won't raise an eyebrow on the parents of the world but Alabama goes through 5 diapers a day as her Cushing's disease makes her incontinent and insane. She craves water all the time but immediately pisses on the floor. And her chest tumor is growing larger every day. How's your day going?

Monday, February 20, 2012

Hardly Handy Man

Improperly covered gable vent
The reasons I'm not ready to live in a house become more obvious every time I enter a house. I burn everything I cook because for the first time in months I can walk away from the kitchen. Also, I still piss in empty milk jugs out of habit and empty them on the lawn. But most importantly I am making real progress with the details of my van. It's a closed system, you see, and it's actually possible to know everything about it and carry the tools to fix what breaks or at least understand why it broke. The van is my shepherd and teacher; every day in the van leads to self discovery and the expansion of my world view.

Houses, on the other hand, as simple as a 1.5 story brick house with 80 year old effects and a forced hot air heating system and not much else, totally confound me. It's like starting from scratch. And I only learn by doing something wrong and then fixing it but with houses that can take forever and cost thousands of dollars. So I read and read on the internet but if you don't know what to look for then you can easily read the wrong thing. A few home inspection sites gave me some good tips. For instance, what is a soffit vent? Or a gable vent? or a ridge vent? Why are they important? How do you lay fiberglass insulation? What kind of fiberglass insulation? The questions go on and on and lead to still more questions. The easy answer is ask a professional. Well, from the reading I've done the ratio of professional to fraud posing as a professional is about 50:50. A guy could come along and say, "I'm going to save you hundreds of dollars by installing vinyl siding over your out dated gable vents. It will keep you warmer and save you money. Sign here, I've been doing this for 25 years....blah blah." Well, that person will be a fraud and will cost you thousands in the initial useless procedure and then when your attic becomes filled with black mold it will cost you thousands in repairs. And it probably won't help your heating bill. That's not a hypothetical story but something that happens every day. The stories I have read are basically of people as ignorant as I am but with more ambition going around pretending to be handymen and doing HORRIBLE THINGS TO HOUSES that later cause terrible problems. They aren't bad people but they are broke and they know just enough to totally destroy your house...not on purpose but because they have no idea what the consequences will be when they cover the gable vents with vinyl siding. So, in another light, I guess they are talented at putting up vinyl siding but don't know where to put it. And to quote myself when I was building pcb boards in Los Angeles, "It takes as much work to do it wrong as it does to do it right." But what is right?

Anyway, I am a third category who doesn't know what to do and won't charge anyone to do anything but who will try to follow my instincts which have been sharpened in a 1969 Econoline van. I am starting from scratch when it comes to home maintenance and I'd be better off if I forgot everything I know and paid Tom Villa to teach me the difference between recessed lighting and a joist. I am curious about home maintenance only because I'm in a house that needs a bit of maintenance. Shelter is one of the basic necessities of life and this house is shelter but the Amish philosophy of living within your knowledge is something that Thoreau adopted with his "Deliberate Living". Self sufficiency is impossible with computers because the raw materials come from Zambia. The Amish aren't Luddites, they don't disdain technology but they know it's beyond their ability to maintain it on a farm in Pennsylvania. And dependence on Steve Jobs or a Tantalum warlord in Africa is against their ethics...so they simplify. They are masters of their domain because their domains include water wheels made from fence posts and windmills that pump water from wells. They don't use power tools. They pull their tractors with horses. I don't think they are purists because you don't see many Amish steel refineries but they are practical and live within their means and understanding. That appeals to me but with computers and houses and basically the modern world...it's not possible and is driving me slowly insane trying to understand a world that is steadily growing more complicated.

So my inclination is to refrain from going further down that path. To empower myself to my own satisfaction in the realm of home ownership would take decades of practice at the cost of guitar practice. I don't learn very well reading about concrete aspects of homes or cars but if I get my hands dirty then I'll remember forever. But getting your hands dirty with a motorcycle is totally different from getting your hands dirty in a house. My whole van cost $1200 and that would cover the cost of 6 windows in a house which translates to $2400 after I destroy the first 6 attempting to put them in. See the problem? Hands on learning in a house is too expensive so it pays to hire someone who knows what they are doing. But that means knowing someone who knows what they are doing and there's a 50% chance you'll get someone who is good at pretending to know what they are doing. And it also means not knowing what to ask for and getting fucked over as often as not.
I go to a great forum
http://www.diychatroom.com/
 where both the people like me who don't know shit and the 30 year pros will discuss a variety of projects. The casual user can determine quickly who knows what they are talking about. And there is also a consensus reached by forum users that will narrow down the best procedure. But even there you will find disagreement. Basically, cookie cutter contractors can not afford to do a good job because A) it's not their house and B) their overhead makes such a tight margin of profit that all corners must be cut or else they paid more money than they made. So they will do the absolute minimum and hopefully it will be more or less correct. But chances are that after they are done and you have written a check for $3000 a specialist will look at it and say, "That's done all wrong."
This aggravates me because I am obsessive and after this much time with houses we still have not reached a conclusion that everyone can agree to proceed with or else get out of the way. No, there are still flim flam contractors and fly by night Mexican roofing crews who work fast and get the job done and are later responsible for a complete rebuild and head scratching mistakes that baffle every inspector. You do get what you paid for but good work costs so much that you have to be a defense lawyer to afford it. But you are better off not bothering to hire a Mexican crew to reroof your house because they'll do a shitty but cheap job.

$175 for caulking because Oggy doesn't know what to look for
Right now we're paying $175 to fix a terrible roofing job. The shingles don't go to the side of the roof and no caulking or flashing was used so the water leaked into the brick walls and ruined the plaster inside the house. I opted out of attempting a repair because we have no ladder and even if we had a ladder I don't know what to look for. A roofer come over and said he would caulk the whole area that is missing shingles. That's the simple fix. The DIY forum all said it should be completely torn apart and reshingled and new flashing etc. But that's because they are being picky/thorough loudmouths and also they aren't writing the check. So, this repair will be tested by the wet midwest winters and rainy summers with tornadoes. Will it last?*

Homes have many systems and taken one at a time you could conceivably understand them all and how to repair them. That's all I could expect of any home owner but I don't think it's in the cards for me. I only learn by doing and unless I build my own house then I won't live long enough to work on every system of a house and make enough mistakes to learn the right way to do it.

For instance, I went up into the attic and saw two big windows open to the outside. What? The house is freezing. I'll close them off. Then I read that these "windows"  are called gable vents and should never be closed off. The problem isn't the gable vents but the lack of insulation on the floor, the uninsulated window fan area and the uninsulated attic hatch letting hot air escape into the attic. The vents had nothing to do with it. Brick houses are poorly insulated, the windows leak etc. etc. Coal was cheap when it came off the river three blocks away. They kept it nice and toasty in 1940 using coal but natural gas sucks money out the windows. So my instinct cost me money to insulate the gable vents and then tear it down when I realized that was wrong. If I had left it up that could've caused real problems. So we spent $300 to add insulation in the attic and I'm hunting for something called a soffit vent because you aren't supposed to block them. Well, there are no soffit vents in this house. There are only 4 gable vents.
And that's only one tiny portion of a simple house that has me running in circles and looking like an idiot on my DIY forum.

No, if I want to play jazz guitar like Jim Hall and piano like Ray Bryant in addition to keeping my antique van running I will have to sacrifice a steady 9-5 grind job and working knowledge of a house. And since I don't believe in being dependent on the suspect knowledge of someone else for my shelter I don't belong in a house.
Maybe I'll build a yurt.

 Here are some comments from my DIY forum friends when they saw the repair picture:
*"The 1st. pic shows it was never flashed. It's still not fixed. That's also obvious by the lack of any flashing work by the door, to that chimney. More water is coming in from the valley than the gutter anyway. A crew of slobs did that make-believe roof."
"OMG! I am a painter, not a roofer, but I gotta say that's the worst repair job I have ever seen! That slopped on caulking will last maybe til the end of summer. WOW! I am speechless."

Sunday, February 19, 2012

Pete Johnson - Car Wash Blues

Jim Croce wrote a song called "Working at the Car Wash Blues" about a guy who feels it is beneath him to be washing fenders with rags. "Steadily depressing, low down mind messing"
 Croce continues,

"Well all I can do is to shake my head
you might not believe that it's true
For working at this end of Niagara Falls
is an undiscovered Howard Hughes"

That's not only some nice songwriting and phrasing but he manages to use a metaphoric location and a totally absurd personal comparison. Howard Hughes? The overachieving genius? It's great songwriting but I'm pretty sure it's conjecture because Jim Croce didn't wash trucks though he did drive trucks while his talent matured.

The person who truly was an undiscovered Howard Hughes washing trucks was a pianist named Pete Johnson. I only learned about Pete lately because I was listening to Ray Bryant's Somewhere in France album and he says he's going to play a Boogie Woogie tune and someone in the audience calls something out. I listened a few times and the person says, "Pete's Blues"
Ray Bryant said he didn't know that (probably being humble) but that he had played piano with Pete Johnson, the writer of the song Pete's Blues. Well, anyone who has performed with Ray Bryant must be good so I hunted down Pete Johnson and indeed he's a fine piano player mostly famous for his relentless boogie woogie blues. This is post stride piano and is basically a solo piano dance genre of the late '20s -1930s where the notes pour out from the right hand while the left hand pounds a repeating bassline over a blues progression. It's not my favorite style to listen to but it's in fact the only thing I can improvise on when playing piano.


So I did a little research on Pete Johnson and here's what I learned. [The wikipedia article is hardly the whole truth. A bit more accurate story is here.] He did not have a blessed career to say the least. Poor midwest kid who probably didn't get a proper music lesson in his life but knew he could play so he would do anything to get his hands on a piano. So on top of an 8 hour day hauling brick and concrete while building a church he would use his rest breaks to go inside and play on the piano. The few chances he had to play was at the cost of food and money. I watch some rare footage of him playing in his prime and believe he didn't know where he was going to sleep when the recording was over. It was the depression and no one had any money for musicians so he would play in bootleg joints for tips but this was also during prohibition 1920-1933 so he was playing illegally most of the time...which wasn't hardly enough. It sounds like he barely had a regular playing gig which reminds me of Nat King Cole's early days in Long Beach and Los Angeles where it's baffling to learn he had to hustle for work and drive ridiculous distances to play for a few dollars. Nat King Cole? Singing to a small audience of traveling salesmen who quietly tolerate his old fashioned songs? So, Pete Johnson was one of the three greatest Boogie Woogie Pianists ever and this is part of his reward in 1951 at the age of 47 and after a decade of sporadic performing, "Previous to the Piano Parade Pete took a job in a Super-Market. He was given the title of "Receiving Clerk", a position that covered a lot of back-breaking jobs: porter work, hanging and taking down huge sides of beef in refrigerators, driving truck, etc. He not only got $40.00 a week, but also arthritis and pneumonia."

But not much later, when he could still play better piano than most people he ended up at an ice cream company washing trucks from 3-11. Still later he did, "general porter work at a Mortuary. Washing cars, hearses and doing yard work."

I'm not talking about some bum here. I'm talking about Pete Johnson who played piano with Ray Bryant. And Pete ends up doing yard work for $25 a week. I would suspect he basically memorized every song and didn't read or write music or else he would have taught some students to make money. It has me scratching my head that as good as Pete was he still was destitute and forgotten when he died in 1967.

There is some lesson here that will kick me in the ass when I'm on my death bed with arthritic hands but for now can we all take a moment to appreciate the music of a gone era played by a man who scratched and clawed his way to a piano through buckets of rags and caskets and broken lawnmowers.

They say if it comes too easy it's not worth shit and some modern performers who shall remain nameless prove that point. If you are fat and content with your tofu burger and quinoa salad and hairdressers flock to your eyebrows when they get damp and your makeup takes 2 hours to perfectly expose your cleavage and your requests for the dressing room include taking all the yellow M&Ms out of the bowl then the chances are you will not be offering the public any more than lip service to artistic expression, which given the transparency of the modern public usually is enough. But if you still have grass stains on your knees from working at a mortuary clipping hedges around gravestones for 8 hours and your socks are still wet from washing ice cream trucks so your shoes squeak when they hit the sustain pedal, and your little finger is half gone from an incident with a tow rope, and you have arthritis and pneumonia and back pain and heart disease and diabetes, then you will have pondered life and will have something you have to say to the world. Either fuck you or I love you but it will be honest because men in wet shoes and sweaty ass cracks and unshaven face generally can be trusted to tell the truth on the piano. Lies and pretension were dissolved in the soap at the ice cream factory.
Rest in peace Pete Johnson. No more washing cars for you.

Saturday, February 18, 2012

Turn Signal Cam


This was a project three years in the making. Mostly I wasn't sure if it ever had a turn signal cancel cam until recently. Then I hunted down the part and took the steering wheel off and replaced the cam. IT didn't go smoothly and you'll have to go to my econoline forum for the details.
 But it works, which is more than I can say for my horn. I don't care about what it looks like but it's important that things work...and in the process of keeping them working or fixing what is broken I learn some procedures.

Speaking of procedures, there is a way to wrap poles, bannisters and such with hemp but I don't think I did it right. Firstly, I read that you are supposed to wet the hemp so it will shrink when it dries. Oops. I don't think synthetic line needs to be wet. Secondly, this is merely a spiral wrap and not a knot. I wanted it to be flat without any ridges and I also didn't want to spend days wrapping the wheel.
This hemp wrap effect has stayed with me since the days on the offshore oil supply vessels in Galveston. The bannisters leading to the wheel house were often wrapped with jute twine. It would've been nice if I had remembered the word that describes the effect I was going for. It's not a word that you would use in day to day conversation since it's a novelty except among sailors. Does anyone know that word? That's your vocabulary test for the day and maybe it will make you wiser than I. I'll post the answer here in a day or two. It took a while for me to find the word and examples and tutorials. It's a good project for an unemployed freeloader like myself.

Friday, February 17, 2012

Saab 9-3 Headliner Project/Failure

This material never saw the sunlight yet it has disintegrated. What the fuck is it made out of? Soybeans?
I want to punch myself in the face right now for trying to tackle this stupid project. If you own a Saab 9-3 then you are a pretentious asshole first of all and second of all you will be living in the Nineties, specifically 1995, when these crappy, over-engineered (i.e. torx screws for everything) plastic fucking cars were cool. Yeah, fast forward to 2012 and these cars aren't so cool anymore. Someone picked this up at an auction for $200 because it was a Mexican drug running car, rode hard put away wet when the cops finally caught up to them. 95K miles of awful clutch riding. So the car broker thinks he'll net a few hundred dollars pawning this off as "his grandmother's" old car. Sure. Asshole, you belong with this Saab. Then my friend crashes her car and is in a pinch to buy something that was cool in 1995 but is now a big pile of shit. It's not worth the parts because every part will snap like brittle old turkey wings when you try to dismantle it.
At this point you think you can do it.

Keep going asshole. It will never work.

The headliners for these are classic european design because they are assembled of the most delicate crap that only could be reassembled in a factory but they are also built so poorly that they will fail most certainly before 100K miles. This means high costs of repair and guaranteed problems. Way to go Saab!

This headliner was sagging like a Cleveland stripper's ego. We used staples, glue, hot glue, prayer, duct tape and nothing worked. It sagged and sagged until finally I read up on it and decided I would have to replace it myself. Big mistake.

I just found one thread and this is one asshole Saab owner's detailed advice...

"Remove all the trim pieces, take the headliner inside, pull off the old carpet, wire brush off ALL of the foam, lay out about 2 yards of a stretchable fabric, glue down with headliner adhesive (from the autoparts store) and trim excess. Pretty easy really, shouldn't take more than a few hours."


What a pretentious and trite asshole. Typical Saab owner. This is a 17 year old beater car and everything on it is brittle plastic and every brittle plastic retainer will snap in half and none of the interior trim will stay put because the brittle retainers are all broken. Even if I spent $100 and had new brittle retainers the biggest problem is that the fucking headliner backer board is not cardboard like a normal car. No. That would make too much sense to the Swedish fucks who designed this. Instead, they used some kind of polymer glue and fiber that is molded into the shape they want. Pretty clever? NO, it's stupid. The fibrous board has a rigidity factor like an old man's cock...which translates into more over engineering. Back at the factory in Stockholm the only way they could make the fibrous board stay against the roof was with 5 horizontal strips that are glued to the board and then glued to the roof. I should mention that the glue on these black strips probably failed a few weeks into 1996 but the problem gets your attention when the fabric of the headliner starts to peel away from the foam backing (which is glued to the fibrous board so well Oggy has to scrape it off with paint scraper wearing a dust mask) So, they used material that was weaker than the glue. Assholes!

Now, the fibrous board is hanging down to start with and then the material starts to hang down lower and neither one can be reattached to the roof of the car so I took the whole thing out with so much cursing and sweating and breaking every plastic retainer in the whole interior and I scrape the foam off and clean the fibrous board. Already I could tell this would never stay up and that I'm going to have to be upside down in the car trying to glue the board back to the horizontal strips that are still glued to the roof. I know that will never work.

Furthermore, the fabric is $20 and the spray headliner glue is another $20. That's $40 in materials alone for a car that I wouldn't take for free. Bullshit.

But I'm committed because I'm an asshole so I glue the new headliner to the board. Then I install it into the car and it's a train wreck from start to finish. The interior trim is what holds the board in place but the retainers all broke so nothing stays in place. I basically flood the top of the board with glue, spray glue on the strips glued to the roof, reach around to move the cable harness (it laughs at me) on top of the board and then use my back to hold the board in place by standing on the back seat doing a half squat for twenty agonizing minutes. If the board was cardboard or had any rigid qualities the ceiling mounted handles and sun visors would hold the thing in place. But no, it droops like a wet noodle because the Saab assholes decided to make it flimsy (lightweight) faux board made of glue and paper. It's lightweight but it is still affected by gravity and unless I can glue it to the ceiling then it will always fall down.

This is a horrible job and it would cost hundreds for a shop to do it. ($380 is a loose estimate) And only a shop could do it because they have all the retainers ready for when they break. Saab was really using their heads for that. In fact, some of the retainers are a one time use item that is designed to break when you remove the trim. You push the broken tab into the metal and then insert a new one. They can't be removed without breaking them. And the contact cement they must use on the ceiling is the only thing that will work. It's one thing to glue the headliner to the board but you must also glue the board to the ceiling and that is not the case with most headliners since most headliners are rigid and hold their shape and will stay up when the sun visors are installed.
Speaking of sun visors, these are so brittle on your 1995 Saab 9-3 that they will literally break in half when you remove them. The brackets will also break. And the interior ceiling lights will only fit inside these fragile aluminum frames that can never be installed correctly without a machine press because the fibrous board will tear when they are taken off. Another award for the Saab assholes.
broken sun visor on shitty saab 9-3


From what I have read there are vehicles that this job will go off without too much problems. It will be difficult but the interior was made to disassemble. Saabs are not one of those vehicles. 1995 Saabs are definitely not. These are shitty cars with bad designs from overpaid engineers. They are not practical. This Saab I'm working on runs worse than my 1969 Econoline. Because Saab engineers never heard of snow and ice this thing has rusted out, the shock mounts are gone and I actually used one of the struts to hammer the interior trim back in place since the strut pushed through into the trunk and I took it off. The brakes suck. The engine components are plastic crap and nothing can be replaced. The parts that fail the most often will be the hardest to reach and the easy to reach parts will all break when you move them to get to the hard to reach parts. The rotor was baked onto the distributor shaft when I replaced it last year. It shattered. And every screw will cost $29 to replace.
new headliner with broken trim
If you need to ask how to repair the Saab headliner then you should not replace the Saab headliner. I say that because it's designed badly and your attempt to fix it will definitely lead to more repairs and probably won't fix the sagging headliner. Furthermore, the cheapest fix is too much money for this piece of shit car and the most expensive fix would buy you another piece of shit Saab without a sagging headliner.
This is as good as it gets.

There are two alternatives I want to talk about. Upholstery screws are these corkscrew type things for couches and if your headliner is sagging because the fabric is falling away from the foam then these screws will be a good temporary fix for $5. They will lift the fabric off your head and back onto the foam and outlast your shitty engine with ridiculous Air mass meters that are heat sensitive so the engineers placed them next to the exhaust and the engine will randomly cut off dead with no warning.
Bullshit interior. Headliner is attached to fiber board but fiber board isn't glued to roof.
However, if you own a shitty Saab and the whole fibrous backing board has come loose from the roof then you are in trouble. There is no way to get up there to glue it back up without taking it down. You could cut a window open in the middle of the fabric and board and then spray and push the board up and then glue the window closed. Who cares what it looks like? Your Saab is a piece of shit beater car. It would be better off recycled into a Kia or Ford Focus. Believe me, any vehicle with a throttle body as fuel delivery system is not worth fixing. Take it to the scrap yard where it belongs.

Another solution I just thought of and should patent is a miniature cup that you push through a hole in the backer board and fabric. You glue the cup directly to the roof using contact cement and then you have this fixture that you can use to either affix some kind of cheap Chinese star shape that snaps into the fitting and holds the headliner board against the roof or else you could have long slats that connect to another glued on fixture and the horizontal slat would hold the headliner up. You only need a few months until the transmission fails on your shitty Saab 9-3. Or buy some wood trim and cut it into strips and wedge it into the side trim and then the other side trim so the torsion will push up. I'll try that tomorrow because I know it won't stay up long. And then a trip to the junk yard for a sun visor.

Under no circumstances should you attempt to replace the headliner itself. The last option would be to simply tear the headliner and board off, glue the lights to the roof and drive around with no headliner. Who cares what it looks like? You will be the last owner before it is scraped and made into new Volvos so ignore it.

Note: About 5 months after this project the headliner collapsed again. About 1 year after this headliner project this Saab clutch failed. The car couldn't move...the shocks were ruined, whole rear end was rusted out. the foolish waste of money and time all came to a head and it was sold for scrap. My feeling was confirmed that this headliner was pointless....pearls on a pig. My advice is to tear the headliner out and throw it away. Your Saab will soon be scrap.

Four year old Girl forced to...

I've found myself gratuitously reading the news on CNN even though it's never informative and almost always upsetting in an irrelevant way. George Clooney is open to marriage? Who gives a fuck? Amanda Knox gets $4 million to write a book? So what? Whitney Houston dies? Boo hoo. It's all stupid and pointless. The experience is probably not much different than reading my blog...ha ha ha.

But seriously, someone asked me if I have a fairy godmother. I said no, but I have an uncle I'm keeping a close eye on. ha ha ha.

I'm here all week...try the veal.

Tip the bartender, he touches your drinks.

(I've been listening to Frank Sinatra and Sammy Davis jr. performances from 1954. Those are the kind of jokes they tell while singing "Lady is a Tramp".)

The subject of news is a constant source of displeasure to me. I understand that no one can report on the millions off 4 year old girls who wake up and go about their culturally accepted day without incident. That's what blogs and facebook is for. So the news can only mention 4 year old girls who stray into the abnormal and freakish. And that includes girls who can sing like the dead Whitney Houston and girls who are chained to a water heater and forced to fellate their brother so the father can sell the footage to voyeurs in Russia. CNN reports on both of that class regularly and the Onion has a laugh at their expense. The only sensible thing to do when confronted with a headline "Girl forced to..." or "Girlfriend Found in...." or "Cow Gives Birth To..." or "Woman's husband used broomstick to..."* is move on. Don't read the story. Ted Turner is a manipulative motherfucker when it comes to news. CNN website is a masterpiece of the pseudo experience. He and Murdoch must give each other handjobs at night because they shill the worst kind of puerile crap and make millions. Don't feed his ego.
Better yet, read the comments only. Here are a few from a story that I don't have the heart to explain to you....

FetusAborter** - where do you come up with "Christian Americans should be ashamed that they are practically condoning this type of behavior?" What does that have to do with the price of tea in China? There was no mention of religion in the article. 

How about we just put them all in a cell together and throw away the key. She'll be screwed up for life

  • This is just sick.  The father, the brother and the step-mother, and not one of them was normal?  Twisted.

JohnnyNoname
I think some cattle prod treatment is in order before tying the anchor. 
Calling these people "crazy" is an insult to those of us who live every day with mental illness and do not commit criminal acts. As a person who lives everyday with Bipolar Disorder and manages to do so without breaking the law or harming others... these people are straight up evil.  
A history of Oggy's Madness
You can just imagine what they are commenting on. It's like "Texas Chainsaw Massacre" reenacted every day somewhere in Arkansas. I'm going to write a song using these comments as lyrics then go get drunk. Tip the bartender.

* Let's have a contest for who can write the most disturbing lead that doesn't actually say anything but implies the worst. It also has to be so alluring that you want to read the rest even though you know it will not edify you at all. Here's my submission: "Murder weapon was gift from..."

**Yes, this person's CNN username is Fetusaborter. Don't you love America?
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Man in the Van by Oggy Bleacher is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License.