» God

Well here's one I can send up...
Honestly, I really despise people who take their faiths too seriously – and then somehow manage to not take them seriously enough. It’s as if they read all the wrong parts. I’ve read the Bible straight through many times, and it’s really painful to have to listen to idiots mangle the words or twist them to justify whatever inhuman or depraved act is on their mind. I’ve had a great deal of fun repeating parables to them that explain that they are no better than the Pharisees, and proving to them that Pilate would have rather not have killed Jesus, and that their religion is based on older information (Gilgamesh and the stories of Ishtar).
And it all started with Mormonism… When I was a boy, my mother got divorced from a very abusive and dangerous individual who happened to be Mormon. Imagine any aspect of abuse not murder, it happened; to my mom, me, and my brother. She divorced him, returned to her parents, and got married to another Mormon (she was alternatively Mormon and not-Mormon – and really quite stupid). This guy was all right, big fire-fighter type, into Black Sabbath and marijuana, and a big fan of Joseph Smith, too ( I didn’t say it wasn’t weird).
Well the new guy’s mother (also a long-time Mormon and in high social standing in the Church) didn’t think that it was right for her baby boy to be running around with a shameless divorcee, after all, Mormons don’t get divorced. So she cooked up a scam with her Mormon friends in the school district, the local Child Protective Services (CPS), and the heads of the local church. Allegations of abuse were fabricated by her, brought to the attention of her Mormon friends in the CPS, by the Mormon school principal and I was whisked away from my new family at the age of seven and incarcerated in a series of foster homes that had several previous complaints of abuse and then forced to wait out the rest of the illegal (2x as long as usual) waiting period in an adolescent juvenile hall. It could have been worse – I could have been killed.
My parents were told that the Church would see what strings it could pull to get me out – on the condition that if they were to obtain an annulment, they would both be reinstated as members of the Church in good standing and that I would be returned to my mother. They refused and were both ultimately excommunicated.
Or so I thought.
They couldn’t prove the religious connections, (that’s how Mormons work), so the dust from the litigation they pursued and ultimately won had settled for years before I found out the full story from my uncle, a nice drifty old dingbat who generally hates his family but was his mother’s confidant throughout this period of time. I had come to suspect as much. Turns out the Church lied about the excommunications, too – they were supposed to burn all records and expunge my parents from the rolls, never to return. But my dear old Dad started feeling his age and fearing the end – at fifty, the old coot! – checked up on it, and they were sealed in the Atlanta temple two years ago, some twenty years after the last court appearance in the lawsuit against the state we were living in at the time.
After years of therapy and institutionalization, I had normalized to the point where I wanted to find out why God had abandoned me. I read the Bible, made notes, and started reading the mythologies of other faiths as well. I decided to worship Zeus and Lucifer. That led me to worshipping Pan, and establishing a nodding acquaintance with Artemis, Urania, Hermes, and Poseidon. They actually seem to answer prayers with more regularity – I don’t know, maybe they try harder because they’re not #1?
I believe the Universe was created. I don’t believe in Creationism, no, it’s up to us to figure out how he/she/it/they did it. I believe science is the sincerest form of worship, and working to reverse-engineer the Universe is the greatest honor to our Creators. I believe that our faith and our deities can only do little things, like give us that little push over the top. The story of Hercules helping the one merchant who was trying to pull his stuck cart out and ignoring the one who stood on the side crying to him for aid stuck with me when I was twelve. I think that we can take these stories to heart and work to make this planet and this Universe the best it can be. Despite the shortcomings that we see, I have seen too much beauty and had too much pleasure to believe that there could be anything better than this. A world with beer, whiskey, snowy mountains, and humans in it is paradise enough. Oh, and steak. I forgot about the steak.
I don’t have anything against anyone else’s faith – I don’t want you following me, either. It’s mine, I made it, and I think it’s right, for me, and it doesn’t specifically exclude you from my Paradise, whether you’re a Muslim or a Pastafarian or an atheist.
(Sun 22nd Mar 2009, 22:30, More)

» Siblings

My Half-Brother
My half-brother was the nicest kid in the world. I was three years older than he was, and he was everything I wasn’t. I was loud, obnoxious, rambunctious, fighty, prone to flinging rocks and bullying the crap out of people. A series of events in my early childhood had forced me to grow up real fast, so I took no crap.
It broke my heart to see him or my later sister cry, so I would hunt down and kick the crap out of the kids who had hurt him. Word gets around, but my parents moved around a bit, so about once every two years or so I’d have to hoist some arrogant little fucker in the air by his collarbones and slam the back of his head into a wall, because he had punched my brother or something similar.
My sister could handle herself, for she was usually smart enough to recognize and avoid bad situations. My brother assumed everyone was a wonderful person, and I assumed every situation was bad. I still watched over them both, though, and helped them with homework and answered their questions about life in general.
I had no idea that roughly half the beatings I received from my parents were because he had done something and blamed it on me. I just assumed they were hateful and malicious and crazed and thoroughly stressed out. I would tell them I didn’t know who had broken/damaged/stolen x, and they would beat the y out of me. Anyway, I had no idea.
I even involved my bro in my musical pursuits, and he studied with such diligence that he soon became one of the best drummers I had ever heard. He could reproduce, note for note, the extended version of “Moby Dick” from Led Zeppelin’s “The Song Remains the Same.”, and just about anything from just about any professional drummer. As a guitarist, I turned out to be a pretty good bassist, guitar necks being too narrow for my fingers to pick the strings out properly – so we just rocked, for years.
Both he and my sister seemed totally in control of their lives, which was all I could have hoped for. Due to my own ignorance, college was not an option at the time. Instead of living another year with my crazed family, I told my brother and sister to watch out for each other, as I was going to join the military. They swore they would, and I left them in each other’s capable hands, so I thought…
Except my brother, in my absence, had become even more brutal and violent than I had ever thought myself capable of. He was kicked out of the martial arts school our family attended for violence, had assaulted his girlfriend with sticks and threatened to stab her on more than one occasion, stopped drumming and took up alcohol. He managed to keep his grades good enough to win a scholarship to an arts college, and failed out his first semester because he didn’t “feel that the non-musical classes were necessary”.
The college administration finally contacted my parents, and told them that he could start again the next year with a new scholarship, as they still felt that he was brilliant. My parents found that he had knocked up some fat nasty skank, had gotten married, and was living under a van in front of his new wife’s parents’ house. Tears and tribulations ensue, and cut scene.
My father felt at the time that I was responsible somehow for this mess, and tried on a few occasions to hit me up for money to support my waste of genetic material brother and his chavvy slapper of a wife. I laughed at him many times for that – I was stationed 3000 miles from them and in no mood to be charitable to a fuckwit that had thrown his future away, and told him so. My mom told me that my brother used to call me “the bourgeois fascist” during this time, so I had no inclination to give a shit, especially as I had letters from my sister, herself now in college, which delineated the crazy shit that he had perpetrated – the violence, the sabotage, the theft and appropriation of items, and how my father was about to give my brother his prized vehicle - a mint 79 Ford LTD– “cause my new grandkids need a safe ride.”
My sister strongly protested this, and after a long phone call, in which my sister and I sat down and put all the pieces of the story together, both her and I laid out all the stuff we knew and had heard, and sent it to my Mom, who immediately freaked and threw my brother and his bitch wife out on the street. It seemed that my brother had been getting very friendly with my mother’s ex-husband; a person that my brother mistakenly thought was his real father. He had been feeding him information for a little while – including my whereabouts.

It was at this point that I made it very clear to my brother that I would in fact kill him and his so-called father if I ever heard from either of them.

That was eight years ago, and I haven’t heard from him since. My sister moves out to join me and my friends and family out in the Wild West in a few months. She turned out just fine, and I survived, but as far as either of us is concerned, we each only have one sibling. Once she is out here, I am perfectly fine with watching the hurricanes line up to have a go at a long-neglected section of the Eastern Seaboard. Some simultaneous earthquakes wouldn’t be unwelcome there, either – just sayin’.

Family is who you make it – and I hope you spent Christmas like I did; in the company of people that are actually worth a damn. If not, why not? Trust me, it’s a lot more pleasant.


Apologies for length, girth, smell, etc.
(Sat 27th Dec 2008, 10:51, More)

» DIY disasters

Me vs. Trees = uneasy truce
I'm a pretty good mechanic, plumber, carpenter, etc. I don't fool with electronics (yet) and I don't mess with anything structural beyond my ability (that is to say, everything). But for some reason I have been surrounded my entire life by individuals who are convinced that me being a great hand at gardening and carpentry = apprentice lumberjack.

I have a few disasters to relate, and they involve trees.

My father got me and a couple of his friends out to his back yard to down a rather majestic pine tree say about 10-12m high. My father and his friends were firemen, so they reasoned, if it's easy enough to use tools of destruction to save lives, it should be even easier to cut a tree down where they wanted it to go. Is my father a lumberjack? No. Are any of his friends lumberjacks? No. Am I a lumberjack? No. In my defense I can say that free beer was involved, very involved by the end of it.
My Dad and his friends reason that they can tie off and pull tension on a rope, wrapped and knotted well around the tree, and, using another tree as a pulley, they should be able to hold the rope while one of them cuts the tree. I asked at this time, "Dad that tree weighs a ton easy - we don't weigh enough to hold it or move it." He advised me at this time to shut up and help hold the rope. The rope in question was a length of life-saving rope, which has a core of spun rubber interlaced with nylon fibers...this is fantastic stuff for hauling people up out of burning buildings and stuff. It has a relatively high melting/burning point, has tremendous tensile strength...but also has a small amount of give.

So take 1)three drunken idiots hauling on a length of dangerous rope 2) another drunken idiot with a chain saw 3)a tree easily twenty years younger than the one being cut down "acting as a pulley or a guide" and put them in a back yard with a chicken coop, water tank, bonfire hearth, and a stout heavy picnic table.
This is in fact a recipe for disaster. Away goes the tree...my father shouts "Timber!" for effect, as he has cut the tree at a singular angle that he feels will guide the tree away from the house.

Well. Yon tree has ideas of its own, and tilts exactly towards the house. It had slipped from the very steep cut he had made and was now arcing so very slowly and silently at the back of the house. I dropped the rope as soon as I felt it begin to pull and bounce in my hands, as did one of my Dad's friends. The other did not let go quite so quickly and was jerked very nearly out of his boots towards the "pulley" tree. I was standing next to the picnic table and looked up to see the tree aiming at me, and with an amount of deftness that I was not consciously aware of, literally flung myself out of the way. The picnic table? Matchsticks. I again asked my Dad about the "simple matter of weight ratios" and he said, "Nah, we just used the wrong rope - it was springy"

From that time to last Sunday, I have avoided the always regrettable but sometimes necessary task of tree-cutting or pruning.

But I have a friend, and he has a house. And that house has a tree, and on that tree grew - nothing. It had eight primary limbs, six of which were dead, and were standing wood. This spring, the limbs remained dead, but new branches and leaves are sprouting like some kind of new infection all over the trunk. New saplings are rising from the exposed roots. I cannot identify for the life of me what tree it is or what it is useful for - the folks at the nursery insist it is a mulberry - except that I know what a mulberry looks like and it's not even in the same family as a mulberry.

Anyway, it's largely dead, and we have no power tools. My friend actually was a lumberjack in his youth, no fooling, so he had a pretty good idea on how to take the dead wood down with a couple of hand saws. The last one is the hardest, and we had to fell it in such a way as to keep it from taking out our neighbor's goldfish pond and our mailboxes. How do we do this? By bringing it gently down with our hands.

Another thing about this kind of tree is that it sticks little twigs and branches in every available space. They can be very pleasant to look at, but dump sticks on his front yard every fall and winter.

So: A very twiggy and heavy branch, cut off and held at the base by us two yahoos, swiveling this way and that while we manuver it away from the house and into the street. It ends up on my shoulders while he rolls it up and over me. Fine so far, except that as it rolls, a hanging branch swivels up and snags the inside of my thigh - my unprotected, shorts-wearing, sunburned thigh. It travels the length down my thigh and ends right below the knee. At first, I do not register anything but the fact that, hey, the tree hit me. The pain was so great that I was afraid to look, and it was throbbing in such a way that I had to have him look at it to make sure it hadn't gashed my femoral artery. Blood was puddling where I stood in agony.

I now have a 16 inch long gash in my right leg, suitable for framing. It is accompanied by a huge bruise that also runs the length of the cut. I have made a decision that I will harm no further trees, and will allow gravity, the elements and time to fell dead wood.




Length? Three inches higher and there wouldn't be any to speak of.
(Thu 10th Apr 2008, 1:22, More)

» Tightwads

Where to start...
I am guilty of many offenses, both by practice and association:

"Sharecroppers"
1) Living with my Mom and going round to neighbor's gardens with her to "help them harvest" - she was divorced, at the time, having not yet met Mr. Chicken, and we lived in the Rust Belt in the late 70s to early 80s. A majority of our vegetables were obtained this way.
2) Pillaging gardens and fields as an early teen for all matter of crops - corn, watermelons, greens, peaches, etc.,
3) My Dad hanging around the hunting shops and buying the meat from tourist hunters who were only after trophies and not interested in the meat. We had a freezer full of boar and deer once the season ended. And do you know how you can stretch meat out for weeks? I do. It's called stir fry.

We weren't poor. We weren't loaded with money, but we had a house, and land, and cars.

F.I.U.Y.
Fark it up yourself:

I had an earlier post about tree cutting disasters, I won't burden you here with it.
There are others, though...
1) The Great Chicken Keeping Extravaganza:
The price of a dozen eggs at the beginning of this - $1.00 US. Weekly consumption of eggs at the Chicken household: about a dozen, we were big bakers and believers in egg breakfasts. Cost of materials for chicken coop: 60 feet of fencing at $1.75 a foot, 8 stakes, $3.00 each. Four laying hens, and one rooster, $60.00 at a discount deal. Medicine for one sick hen, that died 3 months after we bought them, $80.00. 3 new hens, $15.00 each. Inoculations for seven hens plus one rooster - 210 dollars a year. Average daily yield - 3 eggs. Oh and feed! 50 lb. bag of cracked corn, every three weeks, 19.00. Crumbled oyster shells, 20 lbs., 12.00 every six weeks.
Number of hens slaughtered and eaten in the five years I had left to live with them - three. Hours of mindless chicken observation: priceless. Actual savings: I can't be buggered. It's in the high negatives. Cost in injuries inflicted by said chickens: Annoyingly high.

2) The Fire Chief's car (aka the Geekmobile)
My Dad was chief of the local fire brigade. He got it in his head, like you do, that as chief, he needed his own mobile command vehicle. He had been a firefighter for many years at this point, and had seen the benefits of such a vehicle. He put it to the town to maybe lease him a vehicle along with the police cars next time they came around for chief's duties. They turned him down out of hand. Not to be deterred, he scrounged an old fire truck light bar - the flashing lights and siren on the top of a fire truck - that was salvaged from the wreck of an old firetruck from a neighboring jurisdiction. He then bolted this to his own car; a 1972 Plymouth Fury Gran Sedan.
www.fuselage.de/ply72/1.html
that he had up to that point been restoring.
I love my parents; but I died a little inside whenever my Dad would pick us up from school.
With standing permission from the police department, his vehicle was almost always first on the scene, with that 1960s siren screaming on top of this Detroit monstrosity belching sulfur-rich fumes into the country air. He had a CB, police band, multi-channel command radio set and carried extra tools, traffic control devices, truck parts, emergency medical supplies and SCBA bottles in the roomy trunk. As a result of him using his own vehicle for official business, he: never got pulled over when he ran his lights, and; never paid for his own fuel again.
He later ripped the guts out of a US Mail Jeep and put all of his command equipment in there, so "it would be easier to get to", right-hand drive and all.
I wish I still had that Fury.

For my part, I can tell you that it is not cheaper to install your own dishwasher - especially when you have a hose that leaks, and turns your $100.00 installation fee savings into $3000.00 of water damage - that I can't be buggered to do more than clean up and hope to hell I get a windfall to fix it before I try to dump this money pit for a deluxe apartment in the sky. I mean, the damage is cosmetic, but I have to replace all of it before I try to sell.

It is also not a good idea to attempt to restore furniture found on the side of the road. Use it for parts, yes, but chances are it was thrown out for a reason. Trust me on this. I once furnished an apartment in Early Dumpster, and while it was appropriate to the company we kept at the time, I will now only use discarded furniture for parts, as unexpected stains and smells on your latest find generally do not make themselves known until safely indoors again.

So - guilty of all charges, me.
(Fri 24th Oct 2008, 19:50, More)

» My most treasured possession

I have a whiskey tin...
That a friend brought me from Ireland. We finished the bottle in a sitting two weeks before he and I parted ways. I used to think that goodbyes were too painful - you know, take only memories, leave only footprints? So when I left that place I said goodbye to one person (an ex with whom I parted on good terms)and left almost everything behind, parceled out to friends and neighbors "nah, I'm gettin' new stuff." The box I kept, because I was looking for a place to keep some memorabilia that packed easily. In it: Coins from many nations, some of which I have been to, including antiques and some defunct money systems (Irish punts, Italian Lire, Korean Won and so forth), a pack of matches, a gymbal, a bearing, a birth certificate with my adopted father's name on it instead of my mother's first husband, unit patches and stickers, a stone bear, a picture of me and my sibs when I was 12, a picture of my wife as a teenager, a vial of turquoise from Phoenix, A very heavy silver necklace I bought in Texas, a dragon pendant I found in a public pool in South Carolina, a four-leaf clover I found in New Mexico, and an antique-finish pinky ring my grandmother gave to me at my grandfather's funeral that used to be his. It's a strange piece, definitely belongs to the Jet Age cocktail hour bachelor lifestyle that my grandfather was known for, even after he married my grandmother. It is just understated enough to not be tacky.
I take this box out every once in a while when I want to remember the people I met and left behind, and wonder if they remember me. The rest of my crap can burn, but the box goes with me. Ecch, that's maudlin.

Sorry.

I wouldn't take the cats - but the wife would probably ask me to go back and get them...and I would, because deep down, where it really, really counts, I am an utter idiot.
(Sat 10th May 2008, 6:47, More)