Lawyers, Guns and Money

This post isn't really about that though.

I recently had a character in a story who listened to Joni Mitchell. I don't know a fucking thing about Joni Mitchell, so I had to learn a little. Turns out she's Canadian. So far, of the Canadian songwriters I know, I'd put her third behind Gordon Lightfoot and the Mckenzie brothers. All the great things I had planned to write tonight have drowned so I think I'll put up some music. You know, let these other creative folks get some credit. We'll go in order.



Okay, never mind. Someone needs to tell me how I got videos to play on here. It seems like I've done it before. Good night!

EDIT: And hey! Nobody guessed where I took those pictures! I could have been in space, and none of you would even know. Those could be the first ever Polaroids of Venus.

Kill him! Kill the Beast!

Well. I found out tonight that Raymond Oyler's jury has recommended the death penalty. I feel more insecure with this than I care to admit. I knew only one man who was killed in the Esperanza fire - I also know his wife, and have known both of them since I was a kid riding my bike over their drying fire hose many years ago. I know the impact that this tragedy had on my father, who wept his share and then some, and probably still does - we all know that it could have been him, just as easily. It is a job based on risk, as are few others. This is what I thought tonight as I read that the jury had chosen death for the man who started this fire.

I was conflicted. Would killing this guy make any difference? Would it bring anyone back? Would it undo a single goddamn thing? No.

Then I thought about driving home on highway 38. Mid-October. Warm, windy. Dry as a bleached bone in a cheap western film. And what comes flying out of the window in front of me? It was either a lit cigarette or a unicorn... you get three guesses which. It was stupid. Double stupid, in fact, since the offending scumbag was in a truck with a personalized license plate. It turns out that the truck belonged to one of the camps along highway 38 (I won't mention any names, but the license plate read UU CAMP). After about 15 seconds on the internet I had an email address, and I kindly reminded them to remind their employees that throwing a lit cigarette from a vehicle in the mountains during the height of fire season was reckless in the least. They took the whole thing in jest.

Then I thought about fire in southern California. It's terribly destructive. It takes a few lives every year, and devastates hundreds - sometimes thousands, sometimes tens of thousands. It's really a big damn problem in a place where people insist on living in remote, wooded places and expecting someone to save them and their shake-shingle cabins (or, in Big Bear Lake, their ridiculous mansions). But we all know this. Every year we see "Firewatch" on tv because A) there's a 10-acre fire near Santa Clarita or B) there's a 5,000 acre fire in the San Bernardino mountains. Obviously, these numbers are interchangeable and expandable - further bulletins as events warrant.

Then I thought about what it takes for a Californian to do something in our mountains that is likely to start a fire. These are the heinous things that come to mind.

1: Calling down lightning through Witchcraft
2: Dropping a nuclear bomb near City Creek
3: Destroying a third of the Earth with fire
4: Getting 70 suicide bombers with napalm strapped to their chests to walk (hike, roll, whatever) in different directions from the middle of the Arctic Circle (between Big Bear and Lake Arrowhead) for 25 minutes and then explode
5: Throwing a lit cigarette out the window
6: STARTING A FIRE ON PURPOSE

All of these actions have a similar possible outcome, and anyone who does one of these things knows it. Unless they're retarded - in which case I beg the courts to show mercy. All others die.

It's not hard. People have made the southern California mountains a potentially dangerous place to live. It will even itself out, eventually... nature always does. But humans do not have the right, or the obligation, to strive toward that balance by setting the fucking place on fire. Stupid or not, we all have the right to pursue our happiness here. We are doing a pretty good job of mitigating the dangers and, at the same time, preserving the natural order of the mountains (as much as that is possible. kind of). Anyone who thinks they need to start wildfires has no respect for other people, and as such, no respect as a human should be given to him. I hope that the jury has conferred an educated verdict, because if Raymond Oyler started this fire intentionally he should be burned - burned to the point where it takes him five days to die, like young Pablo, plus the hours of unimaginable pain endured by the other four. Have you ever burned yourself? What was it like? You grabbed a pan out of the oven but forgot the mitt... that's a second degree burn. You got drunk and held your forearm over a lighter for ten seconds? It's probably a third degree burn which left a scar that you will brag about for the next year and be ashamed about after that. It hurt like a bitch, eh? And that's, what, a thousandth of a percent of your body?

I haven't been angry about this in a while. I am sad every day, and I honestly, honestly hope that everyone in southern CA sees an Engine 57 sticker at least once and gives it the ol' Google. Let's cut the human-caused fires down to zero and let our firefighters deal with Nature. She's capable of quite the fight as it is.

If I'm ever going to learn to ski, I guess I should do it now

Today I blew my nose with a napkin from Weinerschnitzel that I had left in my desk. All I could smell the rest of the day was chili dogs. It was awesome.

I spent the last two weeks reading all the comments on Youtube about Fred. But now there are like ten thousand more and my eyes hurt so I'm going to stop. Judy is such a brat! Bye!

Overheard:
"Did those femurs get delivered yet?"
and
"Don't tell me, she asked for jelly donuts and a fuckin' whiskey."
One was at the warehouse next to me, that supplies orthopedics, and one was at a bar. This would be way more interesting if I had to tell you which was where.

I've been getting kind of ticked recently because I can't see the whole Office. I guess it's being broadcast in a widescreen ratio, because I can't see the sides of the picture. Did I bring this up already? I meant to. Anyway, my 20" tv that I bought about 9 years ago doesn't support this fancy fiber optic HD signal I'm getting, so I only see, like, the middle of The Office. And then, at work, I got a widescreen monitor for my computer (also bought about 9 years ago) that we used to use at trade shows, and now my display is stretched out like a used-up prostitute. If my television had a VGA input, and there was room on my desk, I could just switch the two and then everybody would be happy. Except the prostitute.

I took some pictures a couple of weeks ago. If I was smarter, I could put a link for you to see them full size so you could really get a good look. These are at about a third of the original size. With about a third of the original detail. Guess what they are.












Scroll down for the answer. But only one line, so it doesn't get annoying.

It's ice.

But guess where I took the pictures!

Ides of March (Das Boot)

I bet a lot of people will have that as their blog title today, so I gave mine a subtitle.


I used to love riding bikes down the hill at the end of our street, until one day when I crashed. I still like going down the hill, but my wheelchair isn’t nearly as fast as a bike – yet.

Every once in a while I like to put my old compact discs in new cases so they look new again. But sometimes the liners just don’t look new anymore, like the ones I wrote on by accident, and that one I used to stop the bleeding.

Once when I was little I accidentally shot a squirrel. I’m still not sure how I fit him into the barrel of that BB gun.

Have you ever twisted a packet of ketchup until it pops? I haven’t, but my mom keeps telling me I should try.

Sometimes my friend and I play air ping-pong, since we always have our paddles with us wherever we go but we don’t always have a ball. The other people at the auction obviously don’t know anything about air sports.

I rented a movie from the video store and when I was done, I left it at the halfway point so the next person could skip all the boring stuff and get straight to the good part. The video store charged me fifty cents for not rewinding it, but I’m pretty sure it should have only been a quarter.

Putting that lampshade on my head last night would have been really funny except for the venomous spider that was living in it. It was still pretty funny though.

Last week I went on a whale-watching trip, and I’m pretty sure the group of whales we were watching were on a people-watching trip. Nature has a way of keeping its balance. For instance, I was eating a whale sandwich during the trip, and then a whale jumped up and ate my friend. So I’m pretty sure that’s all evened out.

Friday Morning

I don't know yet what's going to happen in the afternoon, but it's shaping up to be pretty good.


So, I was sitting around cleaning my gun this afternoon, like I sometimes do on Fridays, and listening to Joni Mitchell, like I sometimes do every week or so. Joni seems like the kind of chick that would like to go out with you and blow the crap out of something with a shotgun and then not write a song about it.

I’m the guy who discovered time travel, but nobody knows it. Even I don’t know it. I mean, I don’t know how I did it, or how I am going to do it. But someday, I’m going to go back in time and get some wine from a winery that’s about to burn down. At least, I’m pretty sure I’m going to. I think I sent myself a message from the past, which actually came from the future, only I have to figure out how I did it so I can be sure to do it.

Matthew's Sunsplashed Goodtimes Orchestra (Of The Night)

It consists of nothing but tiny violins, playing emphatically for this guy:

Rapist would rather die than be raped

Hold on - let me dry my eyes.

Okay, all better.

Let's have a picture, then. How about trees in the fog? This is just outside of Angelus Oaks.



I like that image so much, I think I'll add a poem. I wrote it quite a few years ago but sometimes I remember it and have a chuckle.

Little Old Chinese Man and Puppy

Little puppy in the street
You better peel your eyes
If you get hit you’ll be a treat
For maggots ants and flies

You make me nervous, bite my nails
Darting out! And darting back
And then you dum-dum, chase your tail
And give me heart attack

There it goes! A bouncy-ball
And there you go, a yipping-yapping
The driver swerve to miss you all
And me in my pants crapping

You’re just a puppy, stupid pup
And me a grown up man
You go poop then eat it up
Watch out for that van!

Now you lay down on the road
And I run out like schmuck
You just watching horny toad
And I get hit by truck

Zorro was in the woods

Today, and also a couple of Sundays ago, I did a little shooting, nature walking and photographing. I'm not very good at any of them, but I still have fun.

I didn't take the time to adjust the images, so they'll show up pretty small.


Also, it turns out that the pics I upload go to the top, so instead of seeing the "Z" that was just a stick when you clicked on my blog, you saw a picture of Rocky Mountain Oysters. It's sort of funnier that way so I'm going to leave it. And I realize it's going to take a lot of work to finish this post. So, here we go!

This is some type of burrow or den. I don't know what kind of animal it belongs to because I'm not the outdoorsman I fancy myself to be. Also I didn't feel like sticking my hand in to find out. The entrance is the black spot at bottom left center.


"Feed me, Seymour, I want some blood!" I took three barbs from this cactus to my hand while taking the picture. Audrey got some blood. Those fuckers hurt when you pull them out.


These are called mortars. They were used by early Irish settlers in the mountains of California. On Saturday afternoon (or morning), a man would buy three of his closest friends a pint of beer. This pint was a type of downpayment called a "drowsy" (not to be confused with the costly and foreign tradition of a "dowry" which is the money, land and goods given to a man to take an undesirable woman as his wife: see bribe). The "drowsy" ensured that if you passed out, your three friends would drag you to the rock and each would pour a third of a pint of beer into a hole in the rock. Upon waking, you would have beer within easy reach to quench your thirst and refresh your spirits, enabling you to stand up and get back to business. The holes in the rock were usually round; thus, buying a drowsy was often referred to as buying a "round."


This is another critter condo. I really ought to find out what makes these. They're all over the place right now. I'm thinking Body Snatchers.


So now that you've seen my photographic genius at work, I was going to start a story about Friday afternoon. But I think that not all of you have read about Thursday Afternoon, so I'm going to post that and make this one of the longest blogs ever. I know, you might not like reading a whole story on the computer screen... I don't either. I was going to put a link to Word file so you could just print it out and read at your leisure, but Putfile is stupid and I don't have any other ideas of where to put it at the moment. So copy and paste if you like - it's pretty short.

Thursday Afternoon

I’ve got it this time, boy. I really have. This is the one I’ve been waiting for.

I was sitting around in my underwear this afternoon, like I sometimes do on Thursdays, and thinking about what I would do if I could time travel, like I sometimes do on most days. It makes perfect sense that they’re going to have time travel one of these times, you know, because they pretty much have come up with everything that’s ever been in a movie or one of those old-timey books, like rockets and fake legs and quantum physics. They have all those things now, but a long time ago you never would have guessed it, unless you were the guy writing all the crazy books about rockets, I guess. So I was reading the newspaper this afternoon and there was a story about expensive booze, like whiskeys and rums and wine that was a hundred dollars or more for a bottle. Like this one bottle of wine that was from a winery that burned down about 50 years ago because the guy’s brother who owned the winery was mad at him for stealing his recipe, and they were always at each other like most brothers are and so he set the brother’s winery on fire. Anyway, it all burned up, or burned down maybe, and only 6 bottles of wine survived the fire way down in the cellar and one of them was for sale for about a hundred thousand dollars. I was wondering how often people sell their bottles of wine and booze that cost that much, like if you had a cocktail party, you know, and tons of other rich people came and you were showing off your hundred-thousand-dollar bottle of wine and somebody said “Oh, that old thing, I had that five years ago. I sold it for fifty grand to some sucker in Florida. When did you get it?” and then the rest of your party would be a real drag.

After I thought about all that stuff I’m back to thinking about time travel, and how if I could time travel I could go back to right before the fire and steal a few bottles of that wine. Maybe steal a whole case, and then sneak in after the fire and break any that were left so that I’d have all the surviving bottles. I could sell one right away, you know, and say it was the only bottle that survived and make quite a bit of money even though it was fifty years ago. But I don’t know if I would be able to take money or anything with me – in some of the movies you have to time travel naked because nothing inorganic can time travel. So I might have to hide it somewhere so I could get it later. Let’s see, if I was going to hide something fifty years ago where it would stay there until now, where would I put it? I started looking around my apartment. I saw a movie once where someone in the past stuck something under a floorboard so the person in the future could find it, like it’d just been sitting there all along even though it just happened. Sort of. So I looked around but I didn’t really have floorboards. I was unscrewing the air conditioning vent when I realized that my apartment just got built like three years before I moved in. I knew it was three years because I asked the manager when they were going to put water in the pool, and he said it takes five years to get the permit, and that it had only been three so I should wait two more. What a rip-off. They used to always keep the cover on the pool and the gate was locked with a sign that said the pool was closed for repairs. Well one night, a week after I moved in, this kid climbed the fence and did a cannonball into the pool, right through the cover, and smashed on the cement about ten feet down. So then they had to leave the cover off and paint the edge yellow, and also put razor wire on top of the pool fence so that nobody would really want to go in there even if they put water in it. That was when we all found out that the picture in the brochure was actually of a pool at another place across town. It was a nice-looking pool.

After I thought about the pool, I started thinking about other places besides my apartment where I could hide a lot of money. Or, even better, cash all the money in for gold and just hide a pile of gold so it wouldn’t get all wrecked by getting wet or anything. Also if it was thousands of dollars, the gold would be easier to hide in a small box or something. So I went online and found out that fifty years ago gold cost about forty dollars an ounce, but today it’s almost nine hundred! This is the part that just about made me shit myself. If I sold one bottle of that wine in the fifties for even a thousand bucks I could buy 25 ounces of gold and hide it. Today that would be worth over twenty grand. So then I go back in time again to the early seventies where it was still only about fifty dollars an ounce and say “hey, remember that winery that burned down twenty years ago? My grandfather left me five bottles of that wine in his will and I don’t drink wine! Who wants it?” and then I sell them for at least five grand apiece and buy 500 more ounces of gold to hide. And then I come to today and that gold is worth about half a million bucks! Plus I could have hidden the rest of the wine, and I could sell another bottle for another hundred grand, and then, shit, I could invite some friends over to drink a bottle from the case I’d still have, and it would be really old and really expensive and we could take a picture of ourselves drinking it and send it to those rappers who think they’re real hot shit because they drink a thousand-dollar bottle of champagne when they’re getting crunked at the club. And then we could take a picture of me spitting the wine out on one of their cds and laughing! And then if I wrecked my cd I could just buy a new one because I’d be pretty rich.

After I thought about spitting all that wine I went outside to look for a good hiding place for five hundred ounces of gold and a case of old wine. It was all apartments though so I went downtown and a lot of the buildings were older than fifty years, but I couldn’t think of one good place in any of them that only I would be able to get to in all that time. Where else could I hide it? It would probably have to be out in the desert or something, like those guys from the Twilight Zone who stole a lot of gold bars and then put themselves into a coma for a hundred years so they could wake up and spend it without anyone remembering it was them who robbed the bank. There wasn’t a desert very close so I was about to drive to the mountains about an hour out of town and I was thinking about how one guy died in the coma because a rock fell on his little glass coma-coffin and let all the gas out that was keeping him alive. Then the other three guys fought each other for the gold and when the last one finally died it turned out that gold wasn’t even worth anything in the future. I thought about all the things that could happen in the mountains in fifty years, like earthquakes and rockslides and fires – it would be pretty risky. What about stocks, though? What if I bought stocks instead of gold? Then I could just have an account with all my dividends being reinvested for fifty years in companies that I knew would make a killing. That way, I could just go start pulling money out right now. But how would I tell myself where to get it? It started to get pretty confusing so I decided to stick with the gold plan. Just then I remembered that my friend lived in a house that was built in the 1920s, I remembered because one time we found this really old photograph of a woman with her shirt off stuck behind a beam in the basement. I asked him who used to live here and he said his grandfather and great-grandfather had built it in the 1920s and their family had lived there ever since. He said maybe the picture was his grandpa’s, and I said maybe the girl in the picture was his grandma and he hauled off and slugged me right in the face, even though he said he meant to hit me in the shoulder.

After I thought about getting slugged in the face, I went over to my friend’s house to see what he was doing. I pretended to go to the bathroom but I was actually looking around for somewhere that I could hide gold and wine. It might be hard to sneak into his house fifty years ago when I didn’t really know his family yet, so I went outside and started nosing around the backyard. I was lifting up the doghouse when my friend came out and asked what the hell I was doing. Now that he was all suspicious of me it was going to be hard to look around for where I might have buried the stuff, so I told him my plan. I figured I could cut him in for a little bit, I would just have to remember to bury part of the gold in one place along with a map that only I could read to show me where the rest was. I was looking at the fence along the back yard, wondering how old it was, and my friend was just standing there staring at me. “What about right here?” I yelled to him. “I bet this funny design on the board was here fifty years ago. Or what about over there by the door to the cellar? That’s cement, it’s been there forever and it would be easy to find. Or what about right in front of this tree? I bet it was a lot smaller fifty years ago, but it would be a good landmark.” But my friend had already turned to go back in the house. He was shaking his head and mumbling a little bit, and I think I heard the word “crazy.” Then out of the corner of my eye I noticed the whole tree that I was standing by move about half an inch to the left. The whole tree! It was really something else, not something you see very often. So I got down and started digging around the roots right in front. At first I was using my hands, but I figured I would have buried it deeper so nobody found it on accident, so I started using this old shovel which was leaning against the fence behind the tree. I wasn’t finding anything and I could see my friend’s mom watching me through the kitchen window. I was just thinking I should pick a different spot, maybe along the side of the house where the old cars were sitting when I hit something hard. I got down and pulled out this old, dirty box. I wiped it off a little and opened it up. There was a single piece of paper in there, so I turned it over and read “Make up your damn mind already.”