Death Or Glory

Every morning I basically run with the bulls at Pamplona. The truckers call Interstate 20 "The Highway of Death" and to get to that highway I have to dodge coyotes, trucks and roadrunners and raccoons while my man tits jiggle courtesy of the hormones injected into my fake pork sandwich at the truck stop where my meals are paid for by big oil.

The fire department was too busy with a major tanker truck accident a mere mile east from here to put this minor fire out.

 I was trying to find a job site and I called for help and these were the directions...

"You see the smoke?"
"Yeah."
"We're a mile east of there."
"Ok. Who died?"
"No one I know."

This Clash song isn't about the oil field, it's actually a clever song dedicated to youthful braggadocio.

I was stuck behind a funeral procession for a dead trucker and I was peeling out in the dirt looking for an alternative route..."Motherfucker had to get buried today?" I yelled unsympathetically. "Oil Never Sleeps" is my new motto.
I've seen the light of how ignorant and self centered the generic populace is to allow this exploitation to go on and then condemn men living in vans preaching simplicity. Finally, I'm selfish like the rest of America, eating half a sandwich and throwing it away because I'm full, since it's paid for by someone else it's like I can shrug off any responsibility. Handjob afternoons and kiss the wife goodnight. My principles are on sale in Aisle 3 with the bulk Chex mix. Like children we defend ourselves from our biggest fears with self deception and numb ourselves with calories and alcohol. A generation of Fox news pawns with augmented reality glasses to replace the real reality that includes how their sand castle virtues are being swept away with the latest celebrity cellulite story. It's laughable, but accepting the truth would cause chaos so the apathetic stupor of drugs is the best alternative we have. Generic zombies watching international news that looks more and more like "America's Funniest Home Videos" Energy is my goal and if the Super Bowl game uses more energy than Haiti then I guess that's why God chose America to embrace.


The Clash were working class rockers. They didn't hide their accents and never cleaned up their act. They died with needles in their arm.
I love The Clash because they never let success get in the way of their disdain for the world.

"Now every cheap hood strikes a bargain with the world,
Ends up making payments on a sofa or a girl.
Love 'n hate tattooed across the knuckles of his hands,
 Hands that slap his kids around, 'cause they don't understand how,
 Death or glory, becomes just another story.
Death or glory, becomes just another story. "

Another Day Another Brake Project

stubborn rusted bolts

all the brake line is rusted and Oggy is on his back again in the Texas dust trying to get rusted fittings off of 45 year old brake hubs. I did learn that the bleeder screw can be left in the wheel cylinder if it is too rusted to get out. Get a new wheel cylinder and leave the bleeder screw alone...and there is a pressure differential valve that has a warning light that might've told me I'd lost all the pressure in the rear brakes so when the front brakes failed I would have no brakes at all. But that warning system is long gone...so it was quite a surprise when I lost my brakes. In the past few years if I'd lost my brakes at one of several hundred dangerous locations Rocky Mountains, Sierra Nevadas, Mexican desert, Labrador forest...New York Parkway...I'd've died. But it happened on a flat road in Texas. I mean, the brakes were gone. I learned that the rear brake cylinders were barely working and the front lost all fluid, so I had nothing. The parking brake would've done nothing. I downshift and then bite the bullet and put it in park, maybe destroy the transmission trying to save my life.

Music 30 Years Ago

Gather 'round youngsters because Uncle Oggy wants to tell you about a time long long ago before the internet and basically before home computers when everything you learned about the world was either on the radio, TV or some Junior High School teacher would make you memorize the countries of Africa for no reason. That time was 1984, the year Orwell wrote about in a dystopian novel that basically came true but Orwell foolishly supposed people would give a fuck. The Summer Olympics were held in Los Angeles but most of Europe boycotted them because the U.S. had boycotted the 1980 Olympics in Moscow, which we feared then as "The Soviet Union" but now know was a total fraud, like our economy. Here we are 30 years later and the kings are still fucking around with the pawns and gay rights in Russia and our economy is still a fraud and we're talking about boycotting another Russian Olympics. Not much changes...except music. Because 1984 pop music could only exist in 1984.

Country Gospel

Beside The Still Waters
Music by Ted Silva

Religion or no Religion?

I was a little startled to read bout a group of marauding Buddhists...

"More than a dozen people may have been killed after a Buddhist group rampaged through a town in an isolated corner of Myanmar, hacking Muslim women and children with knives, a rights group reported Friday." 

I was reminded of the old argument against religion that wars are fought over religion and it causes so much grief. I probably ascribed to that naive and narrow minded conclusion at one point in my self education but now I see it as exactly the opposite: Religion had little to do with this and similar events. In fact, it's the absence of religion that led to this event. This is what happens when people are atheists but wear the clothes of a religious person. This is atheism at work, not religion. Myanmar is primarily "Muslim" but in this one small area the majority of "Buddhists" have congregated and they decided to try to violently evict the small minority of Muslims. Calling these people Buddhists is like calling me a Justin Bieber fan (Be-lieber) because I listen to the radio...and the radio also plays songs by Justin Bieber? I don't have an opinion of Justin Bieber. I know he exists and records music but I have pre-sorted his music to the skip section of my brain based on my strong suspicion that he has nothing to tell me that I'll be interested in. Although I can't forget the summer and fall of 2012 when I was forced to listen to this annoying song about 1000 times during my 5 hour commute to and from oil tank batterys.
I guess getting paid $37/hr to listen to crap dance music is the American Dream.


Christopher Hitchens made a career from misinterpreting religion and then debating priests. It must've been nice to grow up an affluent westerner who never got his hands dirty and then to cast judgement on the battle to survive for the other 99% of humanity, who occasionally need faith in something ethereal to support them...and to do all of this from the comfortable seat of flabby punditry. I wonder how many atheists are Guatemalan coffee pickers, sweating all day on a hill for $1 so Starbucks can package their latest sugar and caffeine cocktail for the cool hipsters coding HTML e-commerce sites all day long in San Mateo. It really must be awesome to have that kind of spare time that you can fly around and pick your nose in haughty arrogance and fling it at the sun-baked believers. His arguments were about as flimsy as the latest Malcolm Gladwell theory (in fact only a Christian minister would look dumb debating him) but they gave all the atheists a warm feeling to know they shared the same delusions as a depressed British drunk and it gave the devout a warm feeling to know they were going to heaven and Hitchens was going to hell.

I've been playing from my hymnal lately because the music is about at my level of ability on the piano and the melodies are soothing, they bring me peace in a troubled time. We're adrift in the universe on the brink of extinction and the presence of religion is a relief from the maw of oblivion. So tell me how religion caused men in Myanmar to hack women to death, show me the teachings of Allah and Buddha that led to such an outburst. Or is it the hijacking of religion for secular ends that is to blame, like aviation can not be to blame for planes being flown into buildings on purpose, or how football can not be to blame for football coaches molesting players. The news reports a religious massacre...it labels religions mainly because journalists make their living off low-lying fruit and their audience is dumb hairless apes who scratch their ass while watching football...but is this the root cause or merely the jerseys the opponents were wearing, the mascara of deluded beasts? Wasn't it the absence of devotion, the absence of religious fervor, the denial of Allah's and Buddha's words, that drove the men to abandon their practice and take up knives? Religious crusades are packaged like frosted flakes so people will approve of them, but it amounts to a religious vacuum, not a wellspring. Hitchens was a skeptic and so am I; I'm skeptical when someone writes about Buddhists wielding knives. I once went to a Buddhist church in Mountain View, California and the focus was on tea and soybean curd and candles. Like Malcolm X said, "You can put a shoe in an oven but that doesn't make it a biscuit."