The Sermon of the Storm

It is a drag not having any internet connection but it keeps me dealing with reality. And reality this last week was the storm of the decade. See, the ice storm of December '08 sounded horrible, but it wasn't a storm as much as a bad combination of weather events. This thing that rolled up the coast two days ago was a monster on wheels. Every tree that survived the '08 ice storm fell down the other night, including this fir tree that had been in my neighbor's front yard since I was a young pup playing whiffle ball. If anyone wants some free wood, bring a chain saw and have at it!




I drove home from Greenland and passed many trees on the ground. Power was out. For a moment I was living in my energy neutral utopia and then power came back on and the fry vats at McDonalds started to warm up. The oil sheiks in Saudi Arabia breathed a sigh of relief.
So I played some chess and got beaten badly until I pulled off this incredible come from behind victory. Observe I have two bishops and a queen and managed to check mate the computer with just the bishop and the queen. I was down to my very last move. It was a brief moment of vindication after getting beaten so many times.


When I sobered up enough to drive I went over to my buddy Nick's place and he insisted we drive down to Gloucester for a hamburger. I agreed and we ended up at 5 guys, a fast food style old school burger joint that gave free peanuts at the door and service with a smile. The burgers are all double patties unless you specifically ask for a junior burger. The fries are fresh cut and as big and plentiful as you would ever want. I stuffed my face with a double burger and grilled onions and tomato and fries and peanuts.
This is Nick's 2nd burger. Observe the double patties. He said, "I didn't drive all the way down here for one burger."
I could barely finish my meal.


Similarities abound to my favorite joint in L.A. In N Out Burger. The service and style were very similar. The Five Guys burger was more expensive at $5 compared to $2.49 and the fries were also about twice the price so I paid something like $10 for a burger and fries that was a round trip of about 100 miles from my house. Feel free to point out that this is insane.

Now for the real reason I'm writing today: A man sitting behind me at the burger place with his kid gave a lecture to her when she brushed all the peanut shells onto the ground. A few of my friends are parents now and what parent couldn't relate to this? I mean, even through peanut shells are meant to end up on the ground, it is still a bit of etiquette to get the majority of them to the trash. Most of my shells ended up stuck to my cashmere sweater. And the lesson here is the father was taking a moment to teach the kid to not leave trash all over the place. Anything wrong with that? This parallels with a lesson I was considering about parents trying to get their kids to eat all their food or be polite or not behave like barbarians. Well, I happen to agree with these lessons. But something has gone horribly horribly wrong in the transition from child to adult. See, America is 14 trillion dollars in debt. That's $14,000,000,000,000.
So, any wealth you think you see is like rouge on a transvestite hooker working the Tenderloin in S.F. You think you are going to get a budget hand job and all of a sudden you've got a man dick in your mouth.
My point is that America is worse than flat broke. The Man in the Van is flat broke. That's not unusual. No, America is $14 trillion in debt. It means we are paying for things like social security and schools with counterfeit money. I'm no economist, but anyone who tells you that being $14 trillion in debt is a natural and necessary means of civilized commerce IS A COMPLETE FUCKING ASSHOLE!
Furthermore, WHAT HAPPENED TO KEEPING THE PEANUT SHELLS OFF THE FLOOR?

See, the comparison I would like to make is for all those parents out there. You have a sit down dinner with salad and some bread rolls and spaghetti. Yum! Your ideal situation is for your son and daughter to eat with some kind of respect and dignity. Now please imagine this scenario: Your son kneels on the table and scrapes all the food off your daughter's plate WITH HIS PENIS. Then he eats it all AND KILLS YOUR DAUGHTER. He proceeds to walk over to your plate and throw everything OUT THE WINDOW. Then he goes to your husband's plate and PISSES AND SHITS ON THE FOOD. Then he goes into the kitchen where HE BLOWS THE REFRIGERATOR UP.

Amused? Proud? Loving?

Well, maybe I'm wrong, but this is basically how I see the collective global conduct of Americans. $14 trillion in debt, obese, the #1 polluter, waging wars overtly and covertly WITH MONEY THAT DOESN'T EXIST. I'm frankly horrified. Ideologically, America is a complete mess. I don't know if the genius industrialist is, as Ayn Rand claims, generously pulling the common man out of the ignorant mud or if gigantic corporations have such a brilliant propaganda strategy that they make slavery appear to be a privilege. Either way, I'm gravely concerned.

God gives all things to industry. I think of that saying and the LaChance family in Quebec who embodied it perfectly. They are original pilgrims, uninfluenced by politics or the tides of power and prejudice. But how many families like that are there in the world? The family did not leave crumbs on floor of their kitchen or on the floor of the earth. God is their anchor. I would argue that nothing less spiritually proven than God can withstand the conflicting tides that are pulling at public opinion right now. Only because the idea of God has been misused so often am I a hesitant convert. Truly, nothing is sacred. The only port in the storm is the one you manufacture with a cold, selfish heart. Like the storm that came to town a few days ago, the winds will knock down trees and burn houses and blocks. What remains after such violence? The church within your soul. Call it whatever name you want but build that sanctuary strong. It's your only protection and it's the only thing that will last after the Tea Parties and the Republican Parties and the politics have been forgotten.
Emerson started out as a minister, a Unitarian Minister. Maybe that's what I will end up being, not for selfish reasons, but because propaganda must reach the masses in digestible formats. I will start my ministerial project on my 39th birthday, which is tomorrow. I don't want to be a leader of people, I want people to lead themselves. I'd rather play guitar and video games. But this essential truth can't be ignored, that storms can be caused by man or God and to protect yourself you must have a pure shelter, built not from the mortal bricks of media pundits but from the immortal blocks of spirit. This is at the heart of my campaign against Hannah Montana and her morally bankrupt clan. I have been through the wilderness and my opinion is this: you must begin to weave the protective chain mail of a strong spirit, and you must begin today if you will survive the coming storms. The pine tree in my lawn is a mere symbol of what happens to the spiritually insecure man. Your roots must go deep and no one can tell you how they grow.

Dog proof locks?

It's official, these black antiqued door latches are not only functionally useless and ugly and presumptuous on a house with skylights, but they are completely dog friendly. It's like, the dog merely had to lick the latch and it opened a cornucopia of trash and tasty morsels I had thrown away.


And since she had filled her belly up prematurely she had to relieve herself on the carpet.
All this while I was downtown at the Press Room singing Tom Waits songs. I did a whole set on piano there since I had forgotten my guitar. I sang "Rosie" by Jackson Browne. "Hit The Road Jack" by Ray Charles (I'm learning his "Hallelujah, I love her so") and then this song by Tom Waits that I don't know the name of but it goes, "I had me a girl in L.A. I knew she couldn't stay", and so on through all the towns in America. Well, I'm no Romeo but I like the song and I sort of dedicate it to the women I've known in almost all the states and Canada and Mexico. And the chorus is nice, "The doctor said I'll be alright, but I'm feeling blue." I had the room going crazy as I improvised the entire thing. "I had me a girl in Texas...she had a nice ass." I meant to record it but It'll have to wait.







This is after Bonnie hit the water bong with me...


She does look terrified, but it's those gigantic eyes. She always looks observant and alarmed. We were at Rye Beach in the wind. I myself was a bit terrified and cold in the hostile environment. She is looking back at our car wondering when her real owners would return and end this horrible nightmare.

An expensive day

All the money I made yesterday was wasted today on a parking ticket in downtown Portsmouth. Just trying to buy some beads and hemp for necklaces and the damn ticket cops must've been prowling every two minutes because I didn't leave the car unattended for 300 seconds and I find it cost me $10 to park there. I didn't even see the meter because the spot in front of me didn't have one and the meter for my space was way behind me like in front of the car behind me. Damn them!

I sat in Labor Ready and watched Hot Shots I, the worst piece of crap spoof movie ever. Oh, I hated it. Never mind that Valeria Golino reminds me of a certain someone in Mexico.
And no tickets came in so we talked about monkfish some more.

Then downtown where everything was closed except the damn ticket cops.
Then a chat with the seacoast's finest premium ticket salesmen who were kind enough to buy me lunch while I cleaned their parking lot.
Then a chat with the folks at the Edgewood Nursing Home where I want to play 1940s swing piano for those still living. I believe all four of my grandparents spent some time there and three of them breathed their last breaths there. I'll bring Castalia too.
Speaking of the dog, I took her out to New Castle and could not find a single place to legally walk her. I didn't push my luck since the law was obviously not on my side today.

Here's a picture a buddy from Mexico sent me from my Ciao Molino days. This was the last performance.

Exhaustion...the alternative to pondering life's mysteries.

I wonder, is this how normal people feel at the end of the day? How do we go on? I don't know.
It's been a tornado of activity since I left that bleak mill town called Laconia.
I packed my gear and cleaned the room. I wonder, the room stank like musty old dirty boxer shorts for the three months I lived there. Guess what I found underneath the box spring?

Yes, a pair of boxer shorts, marine blue. OR aqua? gross! But there's no looking back. I split Laconia and made it to Portsmouth in time to pick up a buddy and his nuclear family at Logan airport and then...I went and picked up my new best friend...

She's has the greatest peripheral vision possible. 360 degrees

Bonnie is what they call her but since she is deaf and temporarily mine I will call her Castalia, after the fabled civilization in The Glass Bead Game. She gets me up EARLY. And we walk the cold streets. I say, "If you don't shit soon, I'm gonna take a dump behind that car." She ignores me because she can not hear.

I find it hard to believe dog owners do this routinely in the winter, but it must be so. Of course, I live on the third floor and must walk on these outside stairs and Castalia REFUSES to walk up or down these stairs. So guess who's an elevator to a struggling King Charles Spaniel? Oggy!
I carry her up and I carry her down. Now, that is unusual. She dislikes it to the point where there are claw scratches on the wood deck from when I drag her over the precipice.

And then, since I was up at an ungodly hour of 7 am I decided to head on down to my local day labor hall since they treated me so good a few months ago and sent me to rebuild Poco Diablos. Remember that? What would they have me do today? Break more rock?

No, I went to a moving/storage facility, a "Cross Dock" as they call it in the industry of shipping and commerce. It's where those fancy cabinets you ordered from Lowes arrive with hundreds of other cabinets. And we separate them out for the individual cargo shippers (truckers) who will get it to the specific spot, even a private home (UPS). So these container trucks full of boxes arrive, we unload and sort them, scan them, and they return into another container and are shipped out. All day, every day, thousands and thousands of boxes. I worked with a commercial fisherman named Jeff who was just saving money to take the bus to Jersey to do what he really does which is catch monkfish.
"You hit 'em with a hammer when they come out of the net. Big old ugly bottom feeder. Delicacy in Korea."
"A fucking hammer? They bite?"
"They got hundreds of teeth. You hit 'em with a 15 pound mallet. We let one grab a line and hung it up for twenty minutes before it let go. I found one with a license plate inside it. That's creatures of the deep type shit."
He showed me chewed hands like claws of a wolverine. Here's a pic of a monkfish...I wonder if they do tours where you go out with them and then do battle with the monkfish using a mallet? Something like this really should be left alone at the bottom of the ocean. Leave it in peace. No good can come from disturbing this creature.

His ex-"old lady" had taken the truck and his heart and the gossip is she's quite the booze hound. So he's got nothing left here.
"8 Years. That's enough."
And we milked that work ticket for $50+ and then I sped home and dropped Jeff off at the tavern for a drink while I went back to get Castalia out of the house before she pissed on the carpet. That didn't happen but she did tear up something that I didn't inspect. Then I gave her a free ride down five flights of stairs and off the to dog park!
Then a tour of the town.
"What a pretty dog. What's her name?"
"Castalia. I named her after the utopia in the Glass Bead Game. Where they refine the spirit and not the heavy metals. See, Steve Jobs is a gargoyle and..."

Then back home where the day caught up with me. I don't sleep until normally 4 am. Last night I was in bed around midnight and this morning it was no earlier than 7 when I was dressed and active. I just made it to the library to change my address and email a guy selling a cherry barn find CB 550, my dream bike. I told him I'd do anything for it but I'm making $50 a day so, come on. Give a guy a break!

I do want to recommend my new favorite sub shop. Suds and Soda, an old school deli with pickles and chips kind of place in Greenland. I've lived here many years and don't remember eating a sub there. I think I considered Greenland subs beneath me in 1988. I was so bourgeois. Today, I walked into a dusty time warp when I went there on my 15 minute break from lugging boxes of freight.
"What you want, honey?"
"You got meatball subs?"
"Showah. Whatevah ya want." (They had fresh lasagna in a pan)
"I want one with the cheese."
"Ok, hon."

She gave me a sausage and pepper and onion sub instead that was delicious. (I should've been suspicious when she asked if I wanted mustard.) I'm definitely going back for the meatball sub.

A big guy walked in and bought a salad and some scratch tickets.
"What ya doin', Teddy, watchin' ya figuah?"
They all laughed.
I thought, here, I'm almost a contributing member of society. I'm telling you, dear reader, I almost got tears in my eyes because I was working again, moving cabinets and shelves and mattresses and buying (could afford) a sub sandwich in Greenland, NH with money I was making and a dog was waiting for me at home and if I wanted a bag of chips then, by god, I could buy any bag I wanted! Even the biggest bag they had. And a can of iced tea! And I threw that empty can in the garbage boxes we made that literally were so plentiful that they would fill numerous gigantic shipping containers. I mean, these boxes of trash were twenty feet high. We needed pallet jacks to move them. And me and Jack worked those hand trucks and tossed shit around, "Where this one going?"
"Is it an A?"
"Naw, a B"
"Row 10."
"10's full."
"Then stack 'em against the wall."
And off I'd go with food in my belly, breaking a sweat, my back aching, a paper cut bleeding on my finger.
And Jeff was on his cigarette break and two guys were driving forklifts around expertly turning backwards and around obstacles, swearing, "Aw go to hell!"

This is life, I thought, yes, it's insane that the world would ever need this many pressboard kitchen cabinets but this is the real world of meatball subs and cheese and dogs walking and errands and scratch tickets and picking up friends at the airport with baby car seats and stuffed birds and diapers. Ah, this is madness but it IS overwhelming. My whole invulnerable philosophy is defeated by a simple sausage sandwich at Suds and Soda. I was humbled and exhausted today. My body merely survived the effort and tomorrow I get to do it again. There were flags all over the place, waving in my face, reminding me of my birth. I heard on the radio a story on nanotechnology, carbon charged fabrics, that will be the future battery. We will solve the energy crisis and it will be too late for some wolves but it will not be too late for some humans. We will have our cake and eat it too, it seems. OR some of us will. Not the Vietnamese or Mexicans or Indians or Chinese. No, they will never survive the resource shortage, but many many Americans will live and watch movies like Rush Hour 2 (it was on at the Labor Hall this morning) on energy neutral televisions. This is a guarantee.
And thus I see the finish line. I have found my formative dichotomy, the dichotomy that all writers must have if they are to write works of substance. It is this: The refinement of the spirit or the refinement of the environment. Hesse, had his spirit/flesh dichotomy that is the essence of his work, the fulcrum his characters balanced on. Now I have mine. Because though I believe the future holds a way to reclaim the energy now lost in mountains of trash, I must recognize that there is more to life than energy, to resources. There is soul or something intangible in the sausage sub with provolone cheese at Suds and Soda in Greenland. I will investigate and develop this theory over many subs, for therein lies the answer.

Kicking a Technogenetic Stud Horse

I know I said I would leave Steve Jobs alone but I just can't do it. SOMEONE HAS TO STAND UP TO THIS MONSTER!
He basically sees the world as incomplete without his devices. What kind of insane arrogance is that? Like all this mercury and gold WAS JUST WAITING for him to come along and refine it. Am I the only one who reads "The Glass Bead Game" and notices the absence of high tech devices? Castalia is like the opposite of Apple Corp. Castalia refines the man...always the man and the mind. Never the mercury. Fuck the mercury! I'll examine nothing before I examine myself. That's their motto. And it turns out that examining yourself, your worldview, your philosophy is enough for one life. There's no time for micro engineering. The violin, meditation, universal themes. The Apple approach to living is so completely backwards I can't believe it. I'm certain it represents a gross absence of spiritual reflection in our culture that we would find comfort and completion in highly refined electronics. I KNOW these are related. It's a surrogate spirituality and, as I've said before, Jobs is Guru. If only there were another planet to plunder! If only more than 20% of the earth was habitable! If only Jobs had a trace amount of self reflection!
Man, the chain of events to allow this catastrophe to happen is really incredible. I almost think someone planned it. Having Fox news, FOX NEWS, try to inform people??? Having a brand new nation be controlled by slave owning business owners from day 1 AND have access to almost all valuable natural resources. The only living model of sustainable living, a diverse, continent wide civilization, IS MASSACRED in less than 100 years from the country's birth AND ALL TRACE IS EXPUNGED FROM HISTORY! Did I mention FOX NEWS is a source of information?? I would trust Joseph Goebbels before I trusted Fox News. And yet, there they are running press releases for Apple Corp. Is this real? Is this some kind of dream? Is Fox News sponsored by Apple Corp? Only by a complete suppression of truth would Apple be allowed to operate. That's my role here. I have to get the truth out about what they are doing. Because it is one thing to just not tell the truth, but Fox News is actually promoting lies and disinformation and just useless gossip. That's their role. Someone probably mapped it out in a board room.

"Ok, Fox News will be the disinformation and propaganda specialists. We want lots and lots of celebrity gossip, lottery winners, lost cats, sports and commercials for our sponsors. CNN will pose as the in depth journalists but really they should just do product safety tests and exposes on teen prostitution. Better yet, lets get teen prostitutes to be anchor women. What? Is that too much?"

Oh, please let me be wrong about all this. I'd be glad if there were any evidence I'm wrong. How can I describe it? If Karl Rove can be so smart as to package a president out of a sub literate stock boy then you have to believe there are smart people out there doing things behind your back. There are pickpockets who steal your wallet and then there are the big thieves who steal cultures. The good ones do it without anyone noticing. You see...oh, wait, gotta go, The Simpsons are on!