Weenie Bum

4 random events of this late spring that don't involve wolves...

1) Stuck at a stop for road construction I see three kids marching home from Jr. High School like quintessential 13 year old boys with blood on knees and elbows, the big one in front is singing about some one's mother being a whore and the two little ones behind him are swarming like parasite fish trying to get attention all buck toothed and smiling. The big one's shoes are untied. He turns and swings a ham hock at one of the little ones who puts his bony elbows up in defense and the big kid's fist punches the elbow that is as sharp as exposed rebar on a non-existent Nicaraguan third story. The two little ones laugh as the big one howls and hops around in pain and then he chases, lumbering with papa bear steps and pushes one of the little kids into a hedge. Books go flying and then they start laughing. the bulldozer passes and the cops wave us through so I move toward home.

2) Standing outside on the deck overlooking the street-lit neighborhood, I hear a girl's voice singing, "Ding dong, the witch is dead." She's probably 7 years old and her voice carries over the trees with the scent of bbq corn and hot dogs and pasta salad. "Lalalalal, " she vocalizes the words she doesn't remember but the melody is pretty close. I open the screen door and go inside.

3) Two kids around the age of 8 bicycle down the street with no training wheels. Helmets on. The little one follows a bigger one, perhaps his brother. "Weenie, bum weenie bum." they chant. "Weenie!" I'm in my van organizing my belongings in secrecy. "Weenie bum." Soon a half dozen 7-10 year old kids are on the curb behind my van. What the hell? There are no parents around. I'm trapped, so I listen.
The boy says, "He's a weenie."
A girl says, "I'm telling dad that you said that."
"What did I say?"
"Weenie."
"If you tell him then I'll tell him you said it too."
"But I didn't."
"Did too. Just now."
"That's not the same."
"Is too, weenie bum."

If I get out now I'll probably scare them all to death and encourage the pedophile patrol to descend on Elwyn and Lincoln. I stay put and escape when the ice cream truck appears.

4) The big kid from the first scene struts his lumbering strut near two girls about his age, half escorting them home. They are all in the middle of the Elwyn Ave. I can't hear what he's saying but he's making up some story about his father being a jet pilot or how he's going to be a Navy Seal when he grows up and loses 50 pounds. The girls scoff with their neat hair and decorated backpacks and nimble fingers texting while carrying on two conversations. To prove his mettle, the big kid kicks his right shoe off and like a soccer ball it flies high near my van and plops down near the tires of an oncoming car. The girls get out of the way as the boy rescues his shoe by shoving his foot into it and walking away with a hopping gait. The car slowly creeps by and the girls by way of a wave apologize for the delay. The boy grabs his crotch to show the nonplussed driver he'll do what he pleases. The girls make faces but laugh. The boy's shoes remain untied as he shuffles along as an escort.

I struggle to fit all of these vignettes into my "The world is ending" theory but fail so terribly that I almost feel a sprout of hope in my Grinch-inhabited heart. Is it possible that the Great Jigsaw Puzzle can not be solved since new pieces keep getting made that don't fit the puzzle you are working on? Eventually, you will get sandwiched between layers of new pieces in an attempt to finish a puzzle that no one will ever see.

What was I just doing?

I must be losing my touch. I ate a $12 lobster roll and didn't make a video review of it while there are half a dozen reviews of me eating crappy pizza and meatball subs. Not that the Sanders Fish market over by the mill pond needs any help getting New Castle homemakers with platinum cards to walk in their doors. Last time I was in that joint you had to bring your own newspaper and they would throw your fish at you and if you caught it then you took it home. Today it felt like I'd entered one of those boutique shops in Santa Monica that wouldn't let me use their bathroom. But Lobster Jr. gave me the local/hobo discount and even let me eat at the table with my fur face scaring respectable customers into the street when I leered at the pretty socialites planning their memorial day lawn brunch. Next time I'll do a proper taste review because that lobster roll was so good I almost forgot it used up my entire grocery budget for the week.

In other news, Mr. Chicken Farmer taxied me to and from the auto parts store for the final air filter I'll need to buy for my van before going to Labrador. We were supposed to go to the bank but we were so distracted by witnessing a car plow through the Fleet/Congress intersection that we were like, "Let's go to the bank and then...Look! That car just mashed that sign! So what should we do now? Let's get some chowder!"


My attention span is so short if I'm not actively typing then I have to remind myself what I'm doing.

If anyone wants to help scrape and paint the fire escape to my apartment I'll buy the beer.

P.S. Memorial Day is the day we recognize the deceased soldiers. I've seen bumper stickers that say "If you love your freedom, thank a soldier." Even though I don't know what America stands for anymore, I can't be a thankless hippie. Any other country would've silenced me long ago. God Bless America!

Oggy Revisits Old Haunts

Caught between a rock and a hard place. Fort Stark almost had another shipwreck to add to their exhibit.


This little guy needs a drink.


Stairway to Heaven


The Little Goose store became an architect's workshop. They got tired of the greasy spoon next door and hit the road. Maybe Oggy will open it back up as a nostalgia museum where people will come in and he will expound on life growing up as a young man on the Seacoast. "Blah blah blah, in 1985, blah blah blah..."

Someone said, "Hey look. Osama Bin Laden is playing tennis and his serve sucks!"

All Systems Go

The saga of the 1969 E-200 Econoline camper conversion van has the latest chapter to fill in. Let me say that a more user friendly van has not been manufactured in 30 years. Either that or I have bonded with this van in an uncommon and unnatural fashion that leads me to believe we were twins separated at birth 40 years ago, perhaps in the mineral deposits of New Mexico that aided my gestation and enabled the refineries to forge from steel a chassis of strength and spine of relative weakness, the van receiving the abundance of benefit from the earth and Oggy receiving a bastardly, niggardly share of heavenly porridge leading to his limping gait and ragged dragon breath. (that was my weak attempt to write like Herman Melville.)

So, the van was buried beneath 7 feet of snow this winter for 5 months, from December to the great thaw and beyond. My goal, as you may have read, is to take this van to the end of the earth in Labrador and from there steal or con someone into taking me the rest of the 3000 miles to Ellesmere Island where I will gather information on the imperiled Arctic Wolf. The Arctic, if you've been paying attention, is melting faster than a peanut butter paradise ice cream from a Somersworth ice cream stand on a humid day in the Granite State. The window dressing I have chosen to disguise my adventure involves my being sent back in time to warn people of the drastic consequences to their heedless resource consumption. I don't even need to do this since the future has happened in Missouri and Tenn. these past weeks. To this point, my strategy has only alienated everyone I've met, gotten me kicked out of Canada and failed to interest several charities and project promoters. If I insist I am from the future then I will be alone in my endeavors. I GET IT! I could no sooner convince my host in St. Louis to recycle box board than I could get Al Gore to give me a piggy back ride to the North Pole. Waaah! No one RSVP'd to my pity party.

So, I'll give up and get a job at WalMart, right? HA! No, I will take my bag of tools to Stratham and dive into my van like a man possessed. Hasn't been started in 5 months. Two dead batteries. Flat tires. Rusting spark plugs. Oil like axle grease. No Problem! This van speaks to me as to a long lost brother. What ails you?

I inspected the plugs, the wires, the points, sprayed the carb, took the air filter off, primed the intake manifold with tender kisses of my silky mustache. There was no point in trying to start it alone as the lights flickered weakly and my brother had already given it a shot back in February to avail. So, even though the rain fell in buckets on my head and shoulders and the lightning struck the trees and fields nearby with regular violence as from the ghost of Ben Franklin calling out to us from the grave that we have awoken a demon with our ape-like tinkerings with electricity and other magics better left to Zeus and Poseidon. I drove the car to my van and hooked up the $2 jumper cables I bought in a flea market in Mexico. I tried the ignition and heard a clicking like cicadas in the Ozark hills. So, I knew that this meant a connection had not been made...and I went back out into the rain and readjusted the jumper cables receiving shocks and threat of death from lightning strikes.

"God damn ye, devils from heaven!" I cried though no one could hear as my brother would apparently melt if hit by water and all of New England has become sissy with fear of weather touching their furless members.

But the readjustment finally worked and the engine roared like a dragon, my brother, my steed, my faithful chariot! Then it died with a cough and cry like a meek child in the oncology ICU.
But I shocked it to life again and gunned the engine because this van would arrive one day in Labrador and bring me that much closer to my wolf cousins.

It idled and I disconnected the cables, receiving another shock from the 12 Strong Men that Thomas Edison unleashed on simple Oggy apes.

The van would soon die again but I was satisfied with my daily allowance of volts so I went home after searching fruitlessly for a journal entry in one of 40 chicken scratch journals I wrote in the summer of 1997 or 1998. 13 years ago? I did laugh as I came across several letters I had written to a former girlfriend while she was in jail. They were all marked "Return to sender" hahahaha...and I read the start of one, "Dear XXXX, I love you so much...." ahahahahahah (crying on the inside). broken hearted and she preferred to turn tricks under the roller coaster for small candy colored rocks of crack and threw Oggy out with the trash. Dozens of returned letters stained with codependent tears.

So, I gave up on finding the poem lest I awaken other ghosts of my past and returned the next day in another torrential downpour worse than the day before. Another lunch of 12 volts and I had the van under my thumb again with a belly full of the go juice squeezed from the blood orange knows as a Kazakh child's heart and away we went, unregistered, uninspected, leering like Aqualung in his tattered overcoat at pretty panties and dead squirrels and rodents in the wet street. Police too fearful of his hulking highway leviathan to pull him over though no decent society would allow him free travel. Oggy, the wanderer, was back on the road, free of nagging and judgmental Suburb Borgs who would speak to him AS THOUGH HE WERE AN EMPLOYEE IN THE JOB CALLED THEIR LIFE. No, that will never do. Oggy does not obey laws written by Indian killers.
The plan was to have the van inspected, change the greasy oil, pack the arctic weather gear, play some tennis and leave for Labrador. This time I will not tarry.

So, the inspection shop took in the van with a bus escape hatch and small wood stove with stainless steel chimney. In preparation, I even fixed the broken horn and checked all the lights...as if that would make a difference in a van with a wood stove in it.

Then I took my bicycle out of the van in preparation for a bicycle tour of the seacoast and was almost immediately run over by the chicken farmer's infamous lesbian truck.
I actually recognized the truck with the KTM enduro in the back and started to strain my arthritic knees to catch up when another car, IGNORANT BLIND FUCKING CAGE DRIVER cut me off and forced me into the dirt even though I was already in the bicycle lane.

I calmed down long enough to plan a day of work and reward with the chicken farmer.

The van passed inspection despite having cracked brake pads and not being registered and having a wood stove in the cabin next to a bed and huge wood chopping axe. Safety is not a word used in conjunction with this van. The workers stood around and smiled at the dinosaur. I gave tours and people took their pictures.

"Labrador?" they asked? "Where is that?"

"Well, it's north of Quebec. Then I'm going to visit the wolves in the Arctic because they are all dying as their habitat melts."

"No shit?"

"Yes, see, the atmosphere can only accommodate 350 PPM of CO2..."

Back to Portsmouth and to the city hall where an old lady who disapproved of my furry face immediately decided to flex her bureaucratic muscles.

"You can't have a vehicle registered here and not have a license from here," she said as she looked at my California license from ten years ago.

"But, what can you tell me about the status of this registration?"

"Nothing, until you bring me blah blah blah blah."

I snatched my paperwork back from her before she could confiscate them like a home room teacher taking my star wars photo cards away and telling me, "Oggy, you can pick them up at the end of the day."

Soon, I had my 1974 vespa ciao moped out of the dusty basement and she was firing on her one cylinder> I would take the Vespa to Labrador if I have to because the wolves are that important. The chicken farmer returned with eggs and a mission to the farm.

Off we went to chickenland to retrieve mislaid helmets, then back to Rye where snooty snobs shuffle service workers around like chickens laying screened porch eggs. Tradesmen who can not afford to live in Rye must commute to Rye to dig up hedges and install pompous stone walls in a reminder of what I saw in Santa Monica where proud Mexicans living 5 to a room in The Valley took the bus 2 hours to cut lawns near beach-side swimming pools where frail pharmaceutical widows drool on their false teeth and plastic tits. Now a carpenter has to be thankful to build some fucking addition to a house 50 miles away? You want this room a different color? How about I piss on the wall? Would that work for you? What shade of piss yellow do you prefer?

So, an hour of work accomplished by 4 PM, we fled the snob village, passing sweating and grunting laborers WHO ACTUALLY DO WORK FOR Financial SYSTEMS ANALYSTS who can't spell work. (God, PLEASE LET THE WRATH OF THE Abenaki Indian tribe wreck havoc upon these cowardly charlatan pencil pushing calculator lovers in their false stone mansions! What sacrifice do I have to make to you so a plague of hurricanes will wipe from the earth the political boundaries that enable such unjust defacto slavery?)

Not long after that we passed the menagerie of lawn ornaments on our way to a hot dog BBQ in a mosquito swamp near Berwick.

Most of the time was spent searching the dirt for a missing seat mount bolt but I was glad that not too much had changed because it was already a little shock to have a day with the chicken farmer that didn't involve a toxic scorpion bowl at Kim Lai. If there hadn't been some unexpected crisis the whole friendship would've probably collapsed because I need fully functioning friends like I need a perforated heart. Although this friend, who also took these pictures, bought me soda and pizza and cooked me hot dogs and then I let him buy his own ice cream as he drove me home. He should've dropped me off in Rochester and let me walk 30 miles home with a "cheapskate" sign on my gullet. Next time, ice cream is my treat!

Then I return home to hunt for my DMV paperwork and finally find the stickers with my poverty-ridden IRS paperwork. This completes the saga. The van is registered. Inspected. Insured. Tucked in and tuned up. The wolves are literally hanging on for their lives in the Arctic and I feel a responsibility to address their concerns even if it means defending their dens with my beard and bad breath.

Orchard Thieves

Just to keep the record straight, here's an example of a gigantic book with some attempt to entertain the reader. Moby Dick is peppered with entertaining passages but a stand-up-and-applaud one can be found merely 4 pages into Ishmael's justification of his desire to go to sea as a paid sailor instead of a paying passenger:

"The act of paying is perhaps the most uncomfortable infliction that the two orchard thieves entailed upon us."

This guy slings his pen like a lion tamer. Calling Adam and Eve orchard thieves in a tossed off, pretty much expendable line is ballsy. If I wrote that line I'd be calling all my friends to brag about it, but old Herman Melville is just getting warmed up for 550 more pages. This is some gifted writing because the humor is focused on you getting the joke on your own rather than a big dance to get you to laugh or no laugh at all.

Ex:

"And, doubtless, my going on this whaling voyage, formed part of the grand programme of Providence that was drawn up a long time ago. It came in as a sort of brief interlude and solo between more extensive performances. I take it that this part of the bill must have run something like this:

'Grand Contested Election for the Presidency of the United States

WHALING VOYAGE BY ONE ISHMAEL

BLOODY BATTLE IN AFGHANISTAN'

Though I cannot tell why it was exactly that those stage managers, the Fates, put me down for this shabby part of a whaling voyage, when others were set down for magnificent parts in high tragedies, and short and easy parts in genteel comedies, and jolly parts in farces--though I cannot tell why this was exactly; yet, now that I recall all the circumstances, I think I can see a little into the springs and motives which being cunningly presented to me under various disguises, induced me to set about performing the part I did, besides cajoling me into the delusion that it was a choice resulting from my own unbiased freewill and discriminating judgment."

How is that for a long sentence? Go ahead and read it twice. I read it three times before I figured out what the hell he was saying and it's really a funny way of saying, "I wanted to believe I am the master of my own destiny but that's all bullshit."

And the list of grand design that Melville intentionally set in smaller type point. It's a joke that he's telling on himself in such a subtle way that I can already tell, 5 pages into it, that he's at the peak of his powers.

I like to talk about timing when it comes to writing. A book like this, 540 pages long, was written in less than one year in 1850. Written by hand on a farm in western Mass. In a situation like that he's got to be in The Zone when he puts pen to paper. I should point out that there's evidence that Melville met H. D. Thoreau via joint friend Nathaniel Hawthorne while in Concord. I see similarities in Melville and Emerson and Thoreau. The word "Providence" was used more by these three writers than anyone in history. If you can use the word "Providence" even once in every day conversation then you are guaranteed to impress people. They all must've been touched a little because no amount of editing or education would produce this kind of writing. It's pure personality shining through in every word.

I've been talking about writing my Santa Cruz book for a few years now. But there's a fluidity to my prose that I haven't mastered. Personal essays and political rants are easy but I want to combine that with a third person narrator who exchanges some of his bitterness for some of my wit. 500 pages get written fast when you write obtuse sentences as long as most paragraphs. When it goes on as smoothly as this then you don't have to go back and retouch it. Of course there is the awful possibility that lightweight first person humor writers like me have no business writing serious third person novels but I choose to ignore that until it has been proven.

If I'm stating the obvious that Moby Dick is well written then I apologize. I bow before his talent.