Wagon Hill

If you go to Wagon Hill there down by the water is now a granite bench that commemorates a community movement in 1974 to stop an oil refinery from being built there. The lesson is that sometimes you make a stand. I wonder exactly at what point we have to reach before only action is required. New Hampshire is represented by granite and wood wagons and now we all want to be foreign currency traders. Rock Bottom is close at hand.

Oh No

This is tops on my list of favorite Lionel Richie songs. When I try to write a song about love it sounds like a car commercial but Lionel makes it look easy like Sunday morning.

Calm Before The Storm

Here's the incinerator for my resentments.

 The cold weather has arrived and I keep the fires burning nightly in my van. Even though the resentments are fuel enough for my cold heart.

Azek is some kind of PVC material that was molded into a board and is supposedly indestructible. That would include the snowflake fine dust particles that filled the air and our lungs around the playset. But I guess wood is also a cause of lung problems so who knows? My conclusion was that if there were a way to make living in a van seem luxury then rich people would buy it and brag about it at their holiday cocktail parties.
"What brand of van do you live in?"
"Ford. 1969."
Sips glass of whiskey.
"Really?"
"Yes."
"What kind of gas mileage does that get?"
Pops shrimp cocktail in mouth.
"None. It is on blocks made of indestructible plastic that I bought for $11,000 at an exclusive Home Depot Outlet sale. Typically it cost $30,000, but I know a guy." Wink wink.
"Wow. Honey, we should live in a van as soon as the kids are in college."

A guy lives in a plastic and aluminum single-wide trailer in Strafford and he's some kind of junkie/lowlife but when the wine and cheese set spend 4X the price of a piece of wood to put plastic on the side of their house behind the police station then they are suddenly trendy fuckheads.

Here's an interior shot of the van at dinner time. Lentil soup and hot dogs have been a staple lately. Last night, I stuffed the stove full of trash I found on the ground and when it finally combusted flames shot out the top high enough to make me quickly rehearse grabbing the fire extinguisher. It was about 20 degrees and the freezing rain pelted the fiberglass roof but I was warm enough to sew patches on all my worn knee pants. If anyone has wood let me know.

 Here are the new rotor and brake pads installed on the Grand Marquis. That bracket gave me some problems but it was only because I forgot I had an 18mm socket hiding in the bottom of my tool bag. And there was no room to leverage the torque wrench. I'm mailing the old rotors to the junk dealer in S.F. so he can sell them at the flea market. The roof leaks on the Grand Marquis of course and a puddle forms in the backseat. Totally false prestige that personifies the inauthentic paradigm of wealth equating status.

 When I wasn't looking, Elmer Fudd stole my moped.

The story behind the Fred F. juice bottle and the orange capped madman is too strange. I will say that I took a sip of the 38 year old Flintstone juice and hallucinated for 40 hours. No wonder the country is so fucked up.

Speaking of things that make me lose sleep, I fully intended to spray some wd40 on these rusty outlet screws but I forgot because we had to rush rush rush like ants moving grains of sand. Now I'm going to have to sneak over there in the middle of the night and spray them so the rust will not inhibit the flow of electrons. Also, I'm pretty sure I reversed the white and the black wires when I put it back together.

Blurry Vision

I can't see well enough to drive but I will try to type a Rain Man summation of my recent two days. 18 mm socket, specialty for use in removing the caliper bracket to expose the rotor to remove the rotor on the grand marquis...also, turn the steering wheel to allow for maximum leverage with torque bar. Finishing rotors moments before driving to Delaware to get closer to Cuban utopia village farm....
lost in Seacaucus, NJ.
"I'm asking for direction."
"No. Just go straight. I can see the Meadowlands."
"Excuse me, which way to 95? Back the other direction? I thought so."
"He doesn't know what he's talking about. EVERYONE LIES!"
"This is a dead end? Really? Thanks. I'm turning around."
"I'll pick this truck up and carry it across the meadow. Let me out. I'll walk home."

Hooters waitress paying for college with cleavage credits. I drink silently as Ultimate Fighters Pound each other into submissive headlocks and knees to the nose. I yawn as the violence is boring and eat a depressing pumpkin donut that bounces my glucose level off the ceiling so that it falls like a Lionel Richie melody onto the pits of my diabetes basement. I fall asleep watching TruTV Stupidest Criminals hit their nutsacks on railings. America is abomidable. I'm not proud of anything. Hunter Thompson is turning over in his grave.

"Riders Start your engine!"
The Star Spangled Banner ends in a roar of 2 stroke engines and a cloud of suffocating fumes. One rider makes it half way up the first hill and breaks his chain in half, stalls, falls down the hill, is disqualified after 80 yards. Oggy doesn't care until he stumbles down a steep trail and a tree branch as sharp as a nail punctures his shoe, his sock and the bottom of his foot and soaks his foot with blood. He goes back to find the stump and saws it off underground with his teeth. He's like the Honey Badger and falls asleep in the truck after waiting for 50 minutes to see someone he recognizes. Goes back to the truck and sees the human lawnmower limping home after crushing a tree with his ribs. Tree collisions are a theme as another rider was impaled by a tree branch through his boot to a depth of two inches. He saved the bloody stump for his 40 something war stories told through a gray beard.

Then WAWA milkshakes and Hot Dogs and french fries fuel his diabetic coma and he slurs words and nods off for 7 hours as he drives halfway across Pennsylvania before he realizes his mistake. Luckily, the chicken farmer is passed out in a Percocet Dream with demerol nymphs flying him to a land of luxury so he never notices (though he suspects) the mistake.

Irresponsible actions breed pain babies too numerous for nurseries. My ego is a charity case and my foot has a chunk of wood in the soft bottom and my shoes have no sole. Land of the Fee, Home of the Naive.

Officer Tompkins Put Me To Work

Resenments harboured toward wolf killers kept me up as the rain pelted the van and air crafts jammed their air brakes down my throat. The night was alive with ghosts haunting my fearful sweats. These are trying times as I learned that Marajuana helps us forget...and since I stopped smoking marajuana as part of my boycott of the Mexican Drug War I have basically remembered every conversation and crooked smile and darting eyes and the countless shirts I see pulled down to hide love handles of women drinking jugs of dunkin donuts coffee. And these images do not ever diminish or intesify but they gather like screaming Labrador flies over my head in the van and are countless like demon sheep jumping skeleton fences. I can confirm that a flawless memory is not such a good thing. Oh, I'll forget leaving my registration to my van back at my van requiring a trip past the pizza place with no sign and the midday joggers huffing to their tunes as I retrieved it, but I won't forget the trip to get it and the laugh of the DMV lady, "I love it when a plan comes together," and I'm wondering if she'll ask why I left with no nose ring and returned with a lip ring, but she says nothing and I am pushed along as A22.
"Forgetting well is as important as remembering well," said author Michael Pollan and I seem to be unable to either.

So, these images haunt me nightly among other regrets, though I can say the window doesn't leak so I finally don't have to worry about my Xanadu album getting wet along with my other precious LPs.And it was hours and hours of compulsive obsessive resurrection of my family of dead dreams until I wore my brain into exhaustion around 6am, like my timex automatic (self-winding) watch that only stops if you don't wear it for two days, my brain finally ran out of energy after gnawing on the petty complaints salt lick for 4 hours and I drifted into a tormented sleep...only to have the awful sound of a police baton on my van awake me from some fantasy of nymphs and labrador caribou.
"Blah blah blah....Oggy....Officer Tompkin.....Open Up!"
Even in my feverish sleep I realized I'd been sleeping through at least two minutes of pounding on my van. I could hear a police radio dispatcher calling out my license plate number.
"Eh?" I called out as I untangled my neck from my filthy fleece blanket.
"I want to talk to you, Mr. Bleacher."
I almost said, "About what? Am I double parked?" but I said instead..."Alright. Hold on," as I climbed out of my sweaty sleeping bag to piss in a nearby milk jug. This was automatic. I tried to remember where I had parked the night before but when you move and move for three straight years you tend to forget. If I looked out and saw the gulf of Mexico I would not be surprised. Or the court house, or an iceberg or the Rocky Mountains. It could be anywhere. I wake up and start my day as I can. I figure out where I am and then move on from there.
I muttered, "Jesus christ. Can't get a full night's sleep to save my life." as I hunted for my underoos. I couldn't find them and put pants on with my balls swinging around the ragged pockets. Couldn't find my socks either so I figured, "Fuck whoever books me into police custody. They'll get an eye full of my halitosis and tonail fungus."
Did I say this out loud? I've been talking to myself lately and having good conversations.
I found my shoes and was prepared to say, "Can't a guy take a nap in the middle of the day?" and I chuckled as the background of this statement would be a wood stove, a disco record and an unfinished bowl of macaroni and cheese perched atop a pile of dirty laundry and a moped. I opened the door thinking at least my DMV license would give them a laugh. But I couldn't find my wallet. Oh, christ, this would be an interesting conversation with the police. Where's my camera?

I opened the van door up and nearly hit the side of the Chicken man's resurrected lesbo truck. He was having a good laugh, assuming I had opened my curtain to see who was pounding on my van at 8:30 AM. But I hadn't and believed I was confronting Portsmouth's finest in a showdown like Dillinger outside the Biograph Theater.
Thus began my day that produced a self-explanatory poem:
"I ate a fiberglass sandwich for breakfast,
A sheetrock calzone for lunch,
A broken glass pizza for dunner
and a kick in the ass for brunch."

I should be an expert on busting up tile but nothing about demolition is easy. If someone before you did their job right then their work will not collapse under a sledge hammer or a nasty look. You will have to burn your fingers on glowing hot sawzall blades and chew your nails as the toilets overflow onto your shoes. But it will fight you with every slotted screw they jammed home back in 1991. But I'm not picky and I have to respect that my buddy was trying to save me from myself by keeping me busy and maybe buy me a few hours of distraction from my own worst intentions. So I will take a sledge hammer to a toilet or a claw hammer to a bath tub because I have painted myself into a corner of despair with long drying laquer that will take weeks to dry and every step I take leads to another corner and I dream of playing piano until my resentments turn into lyrics that lonely poets kill themselves while singing and dreamers etch on subway walls. Until then I will live in a self absorbed bubble of egoism, digitally kicking tires of motorcycles I can't afford.