Mixed Images

One more attempt with Flemish Coxcombing

The biologist tells me this is either a horned lizard or a very sick desert mouse.

More fossilized evidence of a shallow swamp in what is now a desert

Once underwater, now as dry as the Sahara

Storm and Rainbow

Boquillas Rainbow

The second storm front approaches

Park Misfit

Working off fat city

Freedom

If you can't get paid for doing what you love then do it for free

Desert Sky Makes Hobo Weep

New Horizons

Rio "not so" Grande

Ghost of NTB Tires

Not even 30 miles into my next adventure

fuck you NTB tires. these 30,000 mile tires gave me 8,000 because of your incompetence.

Too Tired For Words

8000 miles

Matrix

When Did I Become Old Fashioned?

I spent 5 minutes on Instagram, a single account, and now I feel so generic and conservative that my farts smell like Ronald Reagan's hair gel. When did I get so boring taking pictures of car brakes and singing Buddy Holly songs, plodding along as an Electrician? I can't even spell Coachella, let alone know what it is.

I feel that the decline started when I decided I should not habitually smoke pot. In California it was basically mandatory, legal, accepted and necessary to deal with the chronic crime and induced poverty of a welfare/police state where blacks and Latinos are raised like poisoned crops to feed crooked Lawyers and corrupt judges and also to ensure a demand for bigger prisons. The state looks at 3rd grade literacy reports to determine how many jail cells will be needed in 10 years. To be sober in that kind of environment would make my head explode. But smoking pot led to a steady decline in my grip on the reality I had manufactured out of jazz music and Hermann Hesse...everyone was high all the time and that kind of social climate made me question what sobriety is...if everyone is high...then isn't being high really sobriety? And being sober is actually the minority and it is more rebellious to stay sober, so sobriety is the new high. If you haven't gone to rehab then you really don't fit into the Hollywood climate of fake tits and cocaine. That kind of crazy thinking reminds me that if you live in Los Angeles long enough you will eventually think something like, "If I do only one interracial gang bang scene a month then I can afford that plastic surgery..."
And you either follow through or move back to Kansas.

So I'm sober but I know that sobriety stunts my disabled and slightly autistic mentality and I have to face unsolvable international problems with a clear mind and since I'm no John Kerry, that's asking a lot. I'm not fit for the world of drugs unless I'm also stoned and feeding my own artistic talents of swung quarter notes and creative writing.

I met a guy in Mexico who smoked pot habitually and was writing his great novel. I can say that this is what I was trying to do but loneliness and a broken heart distracted me...and also I wasn't smoking pot. Sure I did some cocaine but that was only to impress a pretty girl (who got annoyed and left when I was selfishly vacuuming the mirror with my nose).

I don't know what to do. It's fair to say I'm already chemically imbalanced and unfit for the world, so would it harm anyone if I was stoned and living in a Guatemalan mud hut writing pages that no one will ever read but that amuse me and the sleeping birds on my shoulder? If you had seen the clever and creative pictures I saw on instagram you would feel the same.

This is what I'm talking about...

Hunting 500 Million Year Old Lizards

I was trying to put everything I'm doing into perspective and concluded that I'm basically hunting 500 million year old lizards and plankton that have been compressed into oil. But that's not totally true. Lizards didn't live in the vast shallow ocean that became the Permian Oil Field...but bacteria did, in huge quantities, and when the bacteria died and was then covered up by silt and that silt either lifted out of the ocean due to continental drift or the ocean receded from the shore, then it became a flattened sandy hell hole known as Pecos where Oggy kneels in dusty misery with his sweating ass crack smiling at the burning sun. The Carboniferous Period was responsible for coal beds derived from pressed rainforests...and the Permian Period ended with the largest mass extinction ever but it happened 250 million years ago so CNN was not there to minimize it with horrible tabloid reporting. Do not confuse this with the meteor impact 66 million years ago that killed off T-Rex and his kin.
So, I'm hunting single cell bacteria clusters that died 500 million years ago and became a black stew that is flammable once refined.

Christians usually take this opportunity to tell me that if that sounds like a reasonable and noble justification for my existence then maybe I need help...and they have a book about a man that can help me. And how can one defend a life chasing 500 million year old algae? Is that a reason to get up in the morning? Is that even a good reason to have my lips burned like a summer sausage on a propane grill?

Here's a video of me searching for the elusive bacteria...

But we of the Cenozoic Era, living on a planet that was so hot when it was created that it's still cooling down 4.6 billions years later, amuse ourselves, plot our pathetic paths on paper maps, laugh at cat videos, strum instruments and make love to our own vanity. How old is our solar system? 10 Billion years? We were not created except in our own imagination because we're the next generation of multi-cell bacteria that will fuel alien spaceships on their brief trip through our solar system and since that's unpleasant to think about we cut ribbons out of our own insignificance and hang them on our necks. "1st Prize!"