Sunday, November 25, 2012

Fracking Bonanza

I went to that ever reliable new source CNN and for once saw myself in the spotlight and not in a story about homelessness.

The comments to that article are totally about the end of the world caused by hydro fracturing. Some predict it and some deny it and some wish it would happen and some don't care but will insult others just because they can. My current position is that we don't get to see enough of time to get outside our own self-consciousness. 80 years is pitiful compared to the 2 million of human history or the 4 billion of earth's history. Imagine that 100 million years after the creation of earth there was still 900 million more years before the earth was "only" 1 billion years old. Sort of makes going to the store to save $10 on a iPad kind of insignificant.

Ac-cen-tu-ate The Positive


A buddy wanted me to fix his guitar so he brings me a bone nut. The crappy laminate guitar is worth about $30 and the nut costs about $25 so I'm puzzled by his math. Now I have to shape the thing with none of the proper tools. I used the file that I normally clean out my wood stove with.

Friday, November 23, 2012

I'm Always Chasing Rainbows

One of the great pleasures of the last year or two has been performing at long term care facilities. Not only do I get a chance to play nice pianos for a captive audience but once in a while a resident will interrupt the final chorus of "Moon River" to request a song. At the Clipper Home a man as white as a bed sheet croaked up, "Do you know Honeysuckle Rose?" and I really had to work to sight read that one but on the third try I played a passable melody. Today the song was the obscure "I'm Always Chasing Rainbows" from 1918, revived by Andy Williams in 1965 and then forgotten...except by 90 year old Texas gentlemen.

Thursday, November 22, 2012

Thanksgiving

I'm spoiled and a brat and a hypocrite and I don't wash my clothes enough. I have psoriasis and arthritis and halitosis and psychosis. I get back spasms that awake me like a Medieval torture rack. I surpass the recommended daily limit of Ibuprofen before 5am. My mouth has wrinkles that look like an old woman so I'm doubly troubled because I'm too vain to ignore it and too old to do anything about it. I spent months and recent years without two nickles to spend basically surviving hand to mouth at homeless shelters and getting mishandled by the police state soldiers. The trouble was my crippled pride and also my basic math skills that determined a poorly paying job was actually worse than doing nothing at all. I was more broke struggling to keep a shitty job than just quitting the job and playing guitar. That's the state of the Economy as one thing the Right Wing Big Mouth Radio Pundits have correct is the welfare state that rewards poverty as long as you play by the rules of the loathsome impoverished and don't rock the boat or join any unions. The working resentful poor are so much more fucked than the lazy check cashing sloth because they are broke and the police know they are pissed off and near the breaking point in a cycle of decline. And because they have to take a cocaine piss test to work they must use only stolen prescription pain medication to get through the day.

Tuesday, November 20, 2012

Changing History

Young men make history, but old men write it down. Middle aged men invent history and then take unnecessary naps. Oggy has moved past the Bronze age of communication and has come upon something called a Laptop Internet Stick...that magically allows him to access and inflate his alternate ego from the comfort of his 1980s man cave. Keep in mind that this blog is for entertainment purposes and good entertainment is not a facebook status picture of false smiles and best behavior because entertainment titillates, disgusts, enrages and soothes. Maybe it amuses but it must be a roller coaster ride or else it is nothing but a diary written knowing ones mother spell checks it every evening.

Monday, November 19, 2012

Snapshots of self-loathing

 I've been drinking heavily lately to medicate my own lack of redemption and silence the howling of the undefended wolf who haunts my van nightmares. My shirt doesn't fit because I bought it when I didn't have two pesos to rub together and I was a gaunt 120 pounds from eating the left overs at the Jack in the box dumpster and now I've grown too big for the shirt. The television shows me insane drug smuggling and slavery followed by beer ads and medicine to make my cock hard. I don't like or appreciate anything and the repulsive stank of fuckwads who berate me for not bending to the will of the world and then when I bend to the will of the world call me a hypocrite are lower than worm shit and I should know because I'm lower than worm shit and break my arm daily patting myself on the back because I can install solar panels for $8 million dollars and sniff a crumb off the table of the Halliburton. Oh, but get a stick up your ass because I'm wearing my elbows out at the local bar or fucking my landlord but TOTALLY IGNORE the hydrofracturing that is going on. That makes as much sense as anything our pitiful public schools teach as fact like Indians trading corn with Pilgrims for smallpox. Texans drink and eat like starving Somalians at a Hometown Buffet free for all and they play like hyperactive kids at Chuck E Cheese wack-a-mole festival. Don't hate me for trying to fit in.

Wednesday, November 14, 2012

Aching Bones and Changing Alliances

I wasn't built for this kind of labor. I'll be the first to admit it. The Bleacher Family are long in the bone and thin in the muscle. We were bred for politics and classrooms. Maybe even priesthood. Arduous labor was not to be my lot in life but I felt it was elitist and cowardly to eat the fish but not get my paws wet. We Bleachers loved to sympathize with the poor and the hungry over gigantic turkey dinners. And ethically to be ignorant of the oil industry is intolerable since in enabled most of my adventures in life. I don't understand the science behind the H2S separators and vents and why one vent will be on fire as a dragon breathing flames and another will leak deadly Hydrogen Sulfide right where I'm trying to dig a hole. Another mystery is sour oil and how it is separated in tanks that contain water and oil and then sent back to be separated again....never mind how humans accomplish something miles underground like drilling straight down and then forcing the pipe to bend at a 20 degree angle precisely into a pocket of oil and then inject water and sand into the crack. It's all bites of the apple of knowledge I wasn't really groomed to eat.

Tuesday, November 13, 2012

America

Happy Veterans Day to you all who served.

I don't have much to write about but I'm trying to put that whole misunderstanding about me and my landlord behind me so I'm going to post something that has irked me lately.

My crew are all good men. One is too young immature to put ego aside but no one is perfect. They are not Mexican because that would be like saying they are working with a green card and can't speak English and send money to Monterrey. None of that is true. One of them speaks less Spanish than I do but they often refer to themselves as Mexican and me as an "Anglo" or Gringo...which technically we all are. Maybe this is a cultural pride thing but they are Americans in my book. Of course they are more Mexican than I am but it's not a contest. Maybe they are 3rd generation American while I am 6th. does this matter?

One of them was telling a story of how his daughter in 1st grade was crying because a kid in her class asked, "Why do we have to go to school with a dirty Mexican?" and the kindergarten teacher allegedly answered, "I don't know."

And another said he fought his father in law at the hospital when his child was born with a purple hue because the father in law of the Anglo mother said, "Put the baby back in, he's still Mexican."

Imagine your father fighting your grandfather in the hospital on the day you are born. Obviously these are hurtful things to say but we are about 70 miles from the political boundary of Mexico and only a total idiot would think this area was always American. Culturally, it has about a 50/50 split between rodeos and mariachi bands. Quincineras and "mutton busting" are equally accepted coming of age honors. Most radio stations here are Spanish. The others play horrible anglo country songs that drive me insane with their lack of sophistication and bastardized ethics of beer and tight jeans. Awful!

I don't understand this prejudice but I do see where some of the animosity toward old Oggy comes from. I'm assumed to be prejudice. Slowly my personality has revealed that I am far from prejudiced against anything but ethical and geometric characteristics.
They ask, "Don't you think about pussy? When was the last time you got laid?"
And I say, "You know how that power strut piece we attach to the Number 1 oil tank has those wide holes...what if we...

and our arguments proceed in this manner.

"Oggy, the world isn't perfect."
"But don't you see we have the chance to make this part of the world perfect."
"You're taking too long."
"Because no one has figured out the order of operations. In the long run we're wasting time doing it your way. We need to just think about this. Did you even read the instruction manual that came with those connectors?"
"Manual?
"Look. Start from the beginning..."
"Come on, I want to get drunk."
"Now if I cut off the end of the u-bolt at exactly 10 threads then that will allow me to..."

It's pretty amusing since I am not in charge of anything or anybody.
That's all for now.

Sunday, November 11, 2012

Formative Albums

Formative Albums I’ll start at the beginning: Albums didn’t exist in the modern sense until the early 1960s. Before that a Single would be released and then another and another. Then a Compilation Album. In 1963 The Beatles came along and they had the idea to release all of their songs at once…and even write specifically for a collection of songs. Yellow Submarine, Let it Be, The White Album and my favorite….

Abbey Road. A track by track essay would take forever so I’ll leave that for my afterlife career in writer’s purgatory. For now, the highlight is the first track, “Come Together”. The octave sliding bass line played by Sir Paul McCartney is priceless and locks you into the music. The Lennon-sung lyrics are proto-rap and risqué for the time. “I know you, you know me, one thing I can tell you is you got to be free.” This was the basic advice the Fab Four had at the end of the 1960s. Somehow the Oceanic gap between London and New York had preserved the group’s originality and soul. They were not folk and they were not rock and they weren’t the dominant rockabilly and blues that had inspired them to pick up instruments in the first place. They were inspired and impossible to imitate (even they couldn’t imitate themselves) and their music totally transcended the time. I was introduced to the Beatles first by my father’s Greatest Hits record and later by the ultimate enthusiast Robert G. in Yosemite. Robert schooled me in The Beatles and also in another album that should make this list but doesn’t because I don’t want two albums by the same artist.

Wednesday, November 7, 2012

Dry Season


I want to demonstrate the oblivious nature of the nation without revealing my own oblivious nature so it's difficult. Basically, it amounts to this: a dry riverbed in Texas must mean that everywhere is dry. And a clear sky over my head means that there is no storm anywhere. And since birds and bees don't elect presidents then I pay no attention to anything of that nature. If I want to embrace the true oil field mentality then it would be to ignore anything of any importance that happens outside of my own crew digging trenches through rocky Kaliche in the dusty mesquite while the gas flares bellow flames as metal dragons in an uncaged domain. Isn't that something everyone can relate to? And if your world involves something like lack of power or lack of a house then it isn't my concern. But that's not really embracing the mentality because it recognizes your existence. Actually, most of my compadres have no comment on the east coast storm of the century because it did not involve them. One person said, "What storm?" That's the kind of oblivion that is cultivated out here and I've fallen prey to it without time to digest awful social media and flagrant gossip on the interweb.

Tuesday, November 6, 2012

Fort Inge


Let's not forget that Oggy is trying to learn about and understand his world. So this quest to Historic Fort Inge was a deviation from his sexual perversions and environmental rape. Climbing to the top of this bump of coarse red rock was no small task since there is no trail (Texans don't aspire to climb nameless hills) and the rattlesnakes guard every step and Oggy's feet are worn from 72 hours of abuse in the oil field.

Thursday, November 1, 2012

Identify This Spider

Wolf Spider Found in Texas...About 2 inches long

I can laugh about it now but this spider came from the dense webs behind the crumbling microwave over stand. It looks completely deadly to me but I was able to set it free in the wilderness. It must be native to the desert in this part of Texas and that marking on his back will make it easy to ID.

In fact, it only took 30 seconds for me to figure out that it is a Wolf Spider

It's poisonous, like mainstream media, but not fatal. Considering my relationship with the Wolf, this is yet another strange coincidence that makes me believe I was fated to live at this house and have raunchy gay sex with an 82 year old queer. Again, the Lord Jesus Christ works in mysterious ways and this must be His hand guiding mine under the withered scrotum of my landlord as I fellate his throbbing member.
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Man in the Van by Oggy Bleacher is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License.