My friend Nathan and I went to see Keller Williams at the Varsity last night. I like Keller’s music, but the main draw is that he always looks like the world’s happiest eleven-year-old. It’s worth the price of admission to see him take such joy in his craft. Thanks, man!
Image ganked from someplace
My next Untold Tale is “The Red Leech.” Cursory leech-research turned up this astonishing post: Leeches in Creation Mythology
One of the post’s citations is this:
“then did he become a leech-like clot; then did (Allah) make and fashion (him) in due proportion. And of him He made two sexes, male and female.” (Quran 75: 37-39)
We commit his body to the ground; earth to earth; leeches to leeches, clots to clots.
Right before the dot-com crash I cashed out all my stock and joined the Peace Corps. I didn’t see it coming; I was just seriously fed up with cubicles and Starbucks. They sent me to Calabar, in Nigeria, with a mandate to make sure pregnant women were getting plenty of folate. This wound up being a cruel joke: Women with any amount of money ate unbelievable (by American standards) quantities of greens. Women with no money basically ate starch and not enough of it. If I had been a bigger man I would have worked my ass off trying to get money together so poor women could afford to eat their greens, but instead I jacked around watching gangster videos and having Guinness Book amounts of sex.
Continue reading ‘Untold Tales: The Paradol Chamber’
Nobody else remembers this, but when I was a kid in Sacramento there used to be a weekly Saturday street fair in back of the Alpha Beta on El Camino. We lived on Franco, so I could just walk back there through the backyard and over the fence, and my best friend Amy used to ride her bike over to my house and come with me. This thing was probably a figment of the early 70’s. If it happened now it would be a regular farmer’s market with none of the good stuff, but in 1975 there were a few people from the neighborhood with eggplant and persimmons, and a bunch of regulars who drove or rode in from Davis or Folsom, and who sold stuff you could never get away with today.
Continue reading ‘Untold Tales: The Notorious Canary Trainer’
When my cousin Kenny dropped off the face of the earth, he landed in Bukittinggi. His mom (my dad’s sister Gloria) sent me to go retrieve him.
Continue reading ‘Untold Tales: The Giant Rat of Sumatra’
My wife and I have been taking Eudemox off-label as a mood synchronizer. Fortunately her moods seem to be dominant, otherwise I’d be dragging her down down down.
It’s a pretty electrifying exercise. Do you have somebody you’d trust with each other’s emotions?
Image CC-BY-NC-ND by peppysis
When I was out walking the dogs this morning they started tracking some barrow deer (which are burrowing deer we have around here). They got their name from the First People (who call themselves The People and not The First People, in the same way that we call it The United States and not The First United States because they did not (as we do not) wander around in a state of precognition that some bastards were going to blunder in from another dimension and kill most of us with alien diseases and guns and torture and shit, and when there’s just a heart-rending rump of us left give us a hearty kick in the nuts every time they even notice we still exist. Pretty much the correct response when you see one of the survivors of this morally-haywire ongoing genocide is to throw yourself prostrate, lay your wakizashi on the ground before you and just see what happens.)
Anyway barrow deer since the beginning of time will occasionally get into a burial ground and make a complete hash of it. The traditional solution to this was to keep a continuous fire of poison sumac going in the center of the burial ground. This took a great deal of courage and skill since inhaling the smoke from poison sumac inflames the lining of the lungs.
We live right next door to a cemetery. Story is that back in 1964 a whole herd of barrow deer got in there after hours one evening and by morning there was an unholy pile of Aaberg, Erickson, Askelund and Sonderby bones, after which the cemetery board approved an eight-foot above-ground, eight-foot below electrified fence with its own backup generator, which we can hear from our house whenever it fires up and it makes the dogs howl.
Barrow deer are gentle and no big deal (dead grandmas aside). What really bothers me is the big mothers they have in the swamps of northeastern Minnesota. The common name is the same but they’re actually a different species, Alces Tumulus. They have humongous antlers with their own moss (I’m tempted to say their own microclimate) and weigh up to 1800 pounds. When you feel the peat heaving under your boots, you run. They won’t hurt you on purpose but a one-ton barrow deer can do you a whole world of accidentally.
Anyway the dogs backed off on about my fifth whistle and we watched the dirt fly up out of the hole and the rain pounded it straight into mud.
Image CC-BY-SA by uberphot
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