Fuck Mugabe.

I am no judge, jury, or executioner. I have no right to sit in judgement of anyone.
But I am a decent human being. That's right, I said something nice about myself. Don't get used to it.
Which is why I am totally shocked and appalled at the actions of one shit-for-brains asshat who goes by the name of Robert Mugabe.
I'm not getting political here, I'm just being human. And I feel kind of bad for saying this, but sometimes someone demonstrates time and time again that no matter what happens, they will never make sense, they will never see the err of their ways, and they will be evil until the day they die. It's like the song goes, "Some people should die. That's just unconscious knowledge."
The man rants and raves and blames the whole world, colonization, communism, democracy, whatever, for every ill that he himself has visited upon what he refers to as his people. With one hand he claims oppression and innocence, with the other he murders, rapes, and pillages to preserve his comfy little palace.
It's too bad he will never realize that he has no people, because to have people, one must be human.
Let's hope he disappears sometime soon.

Out and out nonsense on a work night

I woke all blurry and intensely aware of the fact that I was fucking up after a rough 25-minutes of alcoholic sleep before having to go to work and act normal-ish and do all I could do to not smell like a brewery. I noticed black marks up my right arm, woven in and around my tattoo like the path of a drunken infant on a hands-and-knees quest for a breast to suckle.
I used my “Drinky Royale Decoder Ring” to make sense of the scrawl:

“--[[And she had an unfortunate profile, like an unsynchronized set of speed bumps]]--”

I have a tendency to write notes on my arms (complete with punctuation used for form over function) as they are much more immediate than paper, and those scribbled down onto paper generally end up tucked away into the man-sack and forgotten, only to be unearthed at a later date. By that time the blur has spread like an oil slick in a flamingo sanctuary and I can rarely decipher the words or the meaning. When I tag my arm I am forced to reckon with it whilst the memories and contexts are as fresh as they can be considering.
So, She of the Speed Bumped Profile (maybe they were more like rumble strips…?): She was cute, but she smoked, and she was part of a world I didn’t need to visit regularly. It was a world of high-maintenance and grace. Whether she was legit or merely putting on airs is something that I would never have the energy or the opportunity to decipher. She was tall and classy, and out of my league, and even if I perceived her to be IN my league, she still wouldn’t qualify as she smoked and that is a deal breaker of extraordinary magnitude—right up there with any form of sports sandal and people who wear mostly black and listen to Nick Cave.
But I did notice her, primarily because it was unavoidable. She stood out like an awkwardly glamorous and perplexingly beautiful bird that was all legs and neck. And as I acquainted and talked and wrote of strangers and their unfortunate choices in footwear (that was written up my other arm, poorly with the handicapped right hand of a blessed left-hander), I couldn’t stop thinking about speed bumps and her. So I hung out with the ex and talked shit about other things. Beers disappeared and I tried to catch glances when I could. This was complicated by the fact that there was a 4x4 directly betwixt us that was doing a damned fine job of holding up the patio cover. Another problem was that her friend had some confounded radar that went off every cur’sed time I tried to study her drinking buddy’s profile. Whenever the radar dinged in friend’s head, she would look over at me precisely when I went in for a glance thereby causing me to have to look away. This was driving me insane.
Alas, there was nothing I could do about it. My spotting expedition kept getting cock-blocked, if you will, so I gave up on it and just began calculating the time of night, how many beers I had consumed, guess-timating how many more were lined up for the night, how many waning hours until I had to be at work, and how long it was going to take me to get home.
Finally, after 3,000 PBRs I called it a night… well, technically the bartender did. I walked the ex home but on the way, for some unholy reason, we stopped by the brewery where she was on friendly terms with the Adonis-like sexpot who I insisted was gay, and she swore was not as it would crush her dreams. We walked, fell, stumbled into the empty space oblivious to the guy putting chairs up on tables. We sat at the bar and the Man of My Dreams saw Mary and smiled and informed us that it was too late, they had to close. I shook my fist and uttered a weak “Drats!” but Mary did some girl-magic thing and he gave us two pints for free under the condition that we didn’t dilly-dally. We thanked him, slammed the pints, and I escorted her home.
From the bar where She of the Speed Bumps was, I had traveled 5 blocks in the wrong direction, and at this hour every block counted. I bid the ex a fond farewell, did an about-face and headed home.
Seven blocks later my liver clued me in on something. We had been drinking PBR for about four hours. The effects were noticeable but not deleterious. The last pint we got, the gift pint, was a microbrew that was something like 6.5% alcohol. It literally slammed me in mid-stride and I almost toppled over the freeway overpass I was walking. Really, it was sudden and a bit nerve-wracking. It dawned on me that this was going to be a long 30-minute walk home. I also knew that I was fucked as far as work was concerned.
I started swerving, doing all I could to stay on the sidewalk. It must have been a pathetic sight to behold, but I fully understood Tom Waits’ quip about using parking meters as walking sticks.
I turned onto Interstate, too late for any bus or train to get me most of the way home in a safe and efficient manner. I just headed North and hoped to not get rolled by some random no-good-niks or run over by a car. At one point I half-considered just going to sleep in the park, but my common sense put in a brief appearance and put the kai-bosh on that plan.
A few blocks later I felt like I was wearing a patch on one eye for all the good my peripheral vision was doing me. I screeched to a halt at Interstate and Killingsworth as I noticed the light turn red, not that there were any cars out at this time of night, but I figured I’d err on the side of longevity considering the circumstances.
Something bothered my brain at the stop light next to me and I whipped my head around with such force that I am lucky I didn’t paralyze myself. Imagine my surprise to discover a lovely, lovely Tri-Met bus stopped right next to me, going my direction. I reached over and hit the door, probably a little too hard, and it opened. All I could say was, “Cou’ you get me ta’ Lombard? I’m broke.” Luck upon luck, the bus driver waved me on with a nod. I stumbled on and into a seat and barely noticed that there were two or three other disheveled looking folks on the bus as well. I was close to going down for the count so I had to concentrate. Damn this microbrew. It’s like carbonated, hoppy whiskey. Like some cur’sed moonshine bathtub brew.
Then I heard, “Here y’ar, pal. Have a good ‘un.”
“Thank you, and may God r’serve ya a place ‘n heav’n,” was what I shot back and off I went, 4 more blocks and into my house, onto my bed, and out.
Loop back to the beginning to see how it ends and begins. Repeat, ad nauseum.

Post Script: The next afternoon, after my 87th cup of coffee, it dawned on me that A) no bus runs down Interstate Ave, and B) even if one did, the bus lines had all been down for at least 2 hours before I jumped the one that got me home.
Did it really happen? Was it a phantom bus? Was the driver dressed like a driver or was he some wiley wino who stole a bus and took his fellow drunks on a joyride? I will never have a clear answer to this, and I’m OK with that. A little bit of mystery is good for the soul.

6844 N Interstate, Portland, OR

It's not eloquent, and it got buffed inside of a week, but I love it. And really, what else is one to do with derelict building? At least it's not some squiggly sloppy tag bullshit.

For the girl who hesitated to ask...

I'm a punctuation junky. I use it a lot for form over function as I like the way the marks spice up a page, whether used for frames or hieroglyphs or for their intended usage.
Anyhoo, this here is the interrobang, which was invented in 1962 by a one Martin K. Speckter in an attempt to polish off that annoying "?!" used when questions slam up against exclamations.
So, Mme., there you have it.
For a little more information, as well as a nod to the source where I boosted this image from, click HERE

(((Dreamscape #Q and a Half)))

Oprah is doing an episode on Ativan (aka Lorazepam for you anti-brand name Pill Monkeys out there) addicts. She has three guests that are cleaned up as much as addicts can get cleaned up. They are sitting around her coffee table on some couch that probably isn’t as comfortable as it looks—especially with these folks on it. Too much comfort and they would go on the nod in front of a live studio audience. If one of them did it, it would be great for the ratings, I’m sure, but if they all did it would make for some terrible interviews.
“Uh, hi, I’m Oprah and my guests are all asleep. Buy my shitty magazine.”
Anyhoo, the three guests are comprised of two white women and one Latino woman. All of them are roughly in their early 30’s, or in a rough early 30’s. From the neck down they could look their age, but their mouths, their teeth, the weird addict lip-wrinkling told a 50-year old story, and their eyes told yet another story from six-feet under a dumpster somewhere.
Oprah digs and wants to know what it is like to be hopped up on the At-Ats (a silly but potentially soon-to-be-adopted nickname used by people who don’t do drugs but are trying to sound hip). The three women demonstrate the same perplexing yet incredibly specific element to their habit, hinting that the drug, a sentient civilization with committees and consensus-style votes, takes hold and programs the addict to do what its species wants the addict to do. The women all shamefully pull small-to-not-so-small containers out of their purses. One of them pulls out one of those infernal campfire espresso pots that have done nothing but piss me off and waste coffee every time I have tried to use one.
It would appear that, like mescaline, not all of the drug is absorbed into the body on first pass, and in a repugnant act exclusive to Ativan junkies, they have found that if they save their spit after ingesting the drug they can catch a mild high by drinking it later, either as a buffer to prolong the feeling, or for when supplies get low. One of the women claimed to have had at one time roughly two pints of spit saved up in her closet during a time when she was particularly flush with supplies. In an unusually non-addict maneuver, she was saving for dry times (no pun intended) like a Y2K kook stockpiling food in a bomb shelter [as if my laptop crashing could start off a nuclear war… c’mon].
The lady with the coffee maker seems to have a good supply of spit saved up, and the one to her left only has a half-inch or so of spit swishing viscously around the bottom of an old Mountain Dew 2-liter bottle. You can see her eyeing the other lady’s supply.
Oprah, with a look of concern on her face, though the concern is for her ratings rather than the health and salvation of her guests, wants even more. She asks how bad things can get… how far they would go to stay high.
“Really, is there a limit, ladies? This monkey can’t be THAT strong, could it?” she asks in a thinly veiled dare for someone to trump the act of carting around bottles of drug infused spit.
The Coffee Pot Lady looks at Oprah, hating her possibly, but eager to earn her $100 appearance fee. She puts her purse aside, her coffee pot of spit on the table to her near right, leans over the knee-high coffee table, puts one finger to her left nostril and proceeds to exude a three-inch long rope of thick, yellowish-green snot from her right nostril. She does it expertly and lays it from her nose to the table, breaks its connection with her nose with the tip of her finger, and sits back. She leaves a perfect line of snot on the table, all shiny under the studio lights.
The audience is aghast in that Roman Coliseum-way. They gasp and screech in horror, but you know that they feel completely blessed by the God of Watching Others Fuck Up for Your Own Sick Amusement (St. Fox Television, I believe is his or her name).
Camera cuts to Oprah, to snot line, to Snot Blower, back to Oprah, who looks out to her adoring public with both hands out, mock pleading, mock-speechless.
Camera cuts back to a lingering shot of snot line and then a blur and a ruckus. The envious lady with the Mountain Dew spit had swooped in and re-snorted the line of snot.
The Coffee Pot Lady looks at her with a burning hatred in her eyes, jaw clenched, and jumps up. A string of expletives (in this case bleeps in the key of C#) erupts and fingers are wagged. Apparently Coffee Pot Lady was going to snort her own snot to give Oprah the horror show she wanted, but Mountain Dew Lady upset all At-At protocol and stole the line for herself.
Camera cuts back to a full shot of the guest couch and Oprah as Mountain Dew Lady starts to rise up into Coffee Pot Lady’s face, but before she can get fully erect, Coffee Pot flies into her, taking her down in a flurry of obscenities, fists, and security guards.
Out the corner of the camera you can see the third guest, who had remained reserved and quiet throughout, lean over and lick the space on the table when the snot line had been. She then grabbed the Coffee Pot Lady’s coffee pot and chugged the whole thing back in one giant swallow.
Cut to commercial.

-8 June, 2008