July 2007
other words
so i’ll use the words of another - the latest mySpace blog poem by Handsome Duke Deal
Genocide Sutra
SIGN OF THE TIMES
Field in Lake District, Northern England
It’s gonna be hard to give up coffee because it’s such a pleasure, and then, there’s the energy.
‘Yeah, but it’s so labor intensive and expensive…’
That’s alright. You do all the work of making it.
‘No, you clean the pot.’
Yeah. In France, between each cup I had to take the pan out to the back yard and dispose of the grounds. I know; when we get rich I’ll hire poor people to do it for me. They’ll wait outside, I’ll ring a bell, they’ll come in, clean the pot, make the coffee, go back outside and wait.
Or, if I can’t see over something, I’ll ring the bell, they’ll come in, kneel on the ground, and I’ll climb up on their backs, look around, step down, and then they’ll go back outside.
If I have to change a light bulb, five or six of them will come in, kneel down, make a little step tiered platform. I’ll walk up ‘em. Change the light, step back down, send them back outside.
The steps fit my philosophy; I want to stop on the same people I step on on my way up, on my way back down. Plus, there’re a lot of poor people. There’s enough for everyone and there’s no union.
When I take a shit, I’ll ring the bell, and one will come in and wipe my ass.
‘You seem to have a thing about using other people.’
No, it’s just efficiency. Poor people need money. Plus, I’m getting tired of all this work. It’s need to need.
‘Has it occured to you that we’re more on the poor end of the scale?’
That’s why I can make fun of poor people. I can mock where I am or have been. Except for the rich. I ain’t been rich. But those bastards deserve mocking and flogging. In fact, they should be hunted, stuffed and mounted, and used for target practice.
‘Actually, the people I hate the most are the banks and the credit card companies.’
They’re the rich. I also despise their agents of theft: politicians, police, judges, the priests, the press. I can’t believe one of your readers defended Bill Gates.
‘Actually, the sign of our times is that we’ve internalized our oppression. People used to recognize wage slavery, social immobility for what it was — i.e., the mills — but now they think they deserve it.’
And the good the Bill Gates foundation does is way more negated by the foundation’s investing in the very agents of destruction that are destroying this planet. That asshole’s trying to have it both ways. He’s trying to revive the corpse he’s feeding off of.
‘Grownups don’t exist.’ Lewisham, London
water world
we’re both so weary we’re wordless.
these fotos have no flow, story, or logical relation - except - they were taken in the past 2 weeks in london and north england, have to do with water, and will be difficult to use metaphorically in blogs. our two weeks camping up in the lake district near the border of scotland became 14 days of mostly rain - we returned to london sunday to this headline: Two Months Of Rain In Just One Day. so you can see why i’ve water on the brain.
slug city snail heaven
the top foto is the slug who hid in my hat, rode me to the showers and back. slug fotos inside tent… snails enroute to showers.
how i met my ex
i’ve had a fore-taste of purgatory, and it’s called mcdonald’s. got up at 5 to take down the tent, pack, backpack a mile to bus stop, bus an hour to penrith. arrived at 9 a.m. for our 11:45 train to london. found the train station locked until 11:30 - it was cold and gray and wet, so we spent two and one half hours sitting in the mcdonald’s next door ordering bits and pieces here and there to pay for our stay. lady asked for hot chocolate, but their machine was down, so she ordered a bagel to be safe - took one bite, chewed, and spit it out. i took a nip and she’s right - cardboard’s better. she decided to make her own hot chocolate from her pack. asked for hot water, they said they couldn’t give it to her cuz she’d burn herself. she ordered tea, and they gave her her hot water with a side tea bag. didn’t charge her. lady had her hot chocolate.
reminded me of the jack nicholson scene in Five Easy Pieces where he tries to order toast. waitress says they don’t have toast on the menu, so jack orders a toasted BLT sandwhich and tells her to hold the bacon hold the lettuce hold the tomato and bring him his friggin toast. gorgeous scene - never did get the toast though.
our 13 nights camping turned into 14 - the bed&breakfast didn’t accept our reservation. no room at the inn, so we had to stay in our manger. to get warm and stay out of the rain, we bused to keswick and watched the new harry potter movie. it was incoherent. i’ve seen all 5 so far, and while none of them are very good, this is by far the worst. i do like the books though. never understood how books about magic can be turned into magic-less movies.
The Delinquent issue #3 is publishing my true story How I Met My Ex. publication party is july 31st here in london. i’ve been in all three issues so far with 3 true stories and 1 poem.
i divorced my 1st wife in 1975, when my current wife (Lady K) was 3 years old.
How I Met My Ex
My best friend at the Naval Academy was a self-made degenerate who was dating a shelf-made Catholic. She’s the lady who was to blind-date me with my unfortunate future. After graduation they got married, and she constantly semi-quietly chaffed at his sins, especially his alcohol-filled friendship with drug-infested me.
One weekend while she was visiting her parents to celebrate her pregnancy, he went down to Baltimore’s infamous Block to see Blaze Starr strip. During her act, Blaze came up to him and had him powder her big bare breasts with two large powder puffs.
Afterward, he picked his wife up at the train station and on the long trip back to the naval base told her of the breasts and the powder puffs and she flipped - starts screaming the car is filled with powder unclean, to let her out. He does, calms her down, gets her back to base and treatment.
Over the next few weeks she sinks slowly into insanity. Refuses to eat anything because it is poisoned. Won’t clean because it’s filthy beyond soap and water. Eventually they lock her away awhile until her blooming pregnancy catches her attention enough to qualify her as sort of sane. He broke off our relationship because she believed I was the evil in his life, and he tried to spare her what he could. The last I heard, she was a careful and loving mother, but not much of a wife - and he was set in sadness.
This is the woman who decided my future ex and I were made for each other.
My wife to be was also unstable. Not really her fault, it ran in the family. Her sister was being treated for schizophrenia, and her father was a daughter molesting madman. Tried to smash my face in with his fists the night we told him we would marry. Her grandmother was a vicious sharp tongued backstabbing member of the once rich who kept forgetting the once, although she did still own a second home on the Cape next to the Kennedy’s. Her mother at least was a good person, though crippled with arthritis, disappointment and alcohol. Grandma had disinherited them all because her daughter had to marry a common farm boy - who in order to support his new family, had to shelve his dream of singing opera, and become instead a rather prosperous maker of partials, false teeth and bridges for others.
brief bit of blue
11 tent nights done. 3 tent nights to go in my current sentence before we bus to train town for 1 night B&B before training back to 5 weeks london.
night temps dropping to low low 40s. i wear stocking cap t-shirt sweater long john bottoms 2 pair of socks to bed - and even then we spoon snuggle cuddle for warmth.
i search the sky for brief bits of blue break in endless cloud for brief sun, hoping to thaw foot, finger, ear.
later.
not to be. the rains came down. technically day, though wet and gray. i sit in tent enwash in water reading The Drowned Earth - j. g. ballard’s 1962 sci fi novel. film buffs will recognize his name - cronenbergs filmed his 1973 Crash, and spielberg his 1984 Empire of the Sun.
bit sad. lady wants to strike our planned 6 months in new orleans and year in seattle. she’s tired and needs to settle down. i understand. this year of endless world travel is wearying, and we’ve still 2 months to go. we need a home base, and new orleans isn’t it due to hurricane season.
it hurts the poet and adventurer in me to lose new orleans. seattle i don’t mind - that was all intellectual anyway. but new orleans was dark magic - a multi-national multi-cultured old foreign city inside the u.s. - swamp voodoo, rhythm and blues, hanging moss, joyous jazz funeral marches, vampires in the dark. i find it’s still in my blood - as is wanting to go to greece - so we’ll do it later. another time.
but she#s right - we’re both weary of this ever constant moving on of ours. we need a large city for mass transportaion, and we need a cultural city for our artistic poetic souls. there’s only 3 in th eusa - new york city, los angeles, chicago - the first i’m not ready for, the second i’ve seen and it sucks. so it’s chicago.
i’ve 3 magic images of chicago - frank sinatra’s version of Chicago ( i saw a man, he danced with his wife / they had the time, the time of their life in chicago - my kind of town) … an outstanding retrospective of my second favorite artist (edward kienholz - marcel duchamp’s still number 1) … artist / professor / friend melissa jay craig lives and teaches there.
so we trade warm new orleans winter for brutal cold chicago. i worry about our finances in such an expensivecity, but my whole life has been impromptu, and luck has always been there when i needed it. so we’ll wing it once again. what, me worry?
next day.
yesterday we walked to Castlerigg - a 5,000 year old neolithic 48 stone stone circle on top of a hill surrounded by mountains. it’s the oldest stone circle in europe - pre-dates Stonehenge. everyone says it’s a druid circle, yet it pre-dates the druids by thousands of years. lady believes it’s to worship the mountains. i feel it’s more cosmic sundial stone calander ceremonial meeting place.
camp owner asked if i thought it’d rain. i said no. 8 minutes later heavy rain came. rained for hours and hours. when it ceased, i walked down to the water point to fill our bottles. no water. tried every spigot on the property. no water. all the water you don’t want falling from the sky, and not a drop to drink.
slugocide vs slime slug hat ride
my first sex, the bed broke. my first motorcycle ride, i left the road flying upside down at 100 mph through the air. now, my first camping trip, the big bad weather wolf is huffing and puffing and trying to blow my tent down.
i figure lady k couldn’t break me any other way, so she decided to take me camping. it’s rained each night. rained some of each day we’ve been here. rained all day past three days. but last night was both rain and wind storm. lay in bed watching the tent jump about, waiting to be drenched after the gales blew our roof away.
in rare rain break, i ran outside to relieve myself. this morning we see a slime slug trail across our floor mat ending in a big slime splotch on the floor - same shape and size of my bare heel. would appear when dashed through the dark to honor my urination station, i inadvertantly committed slugocide.
hmmm…. give lady k 3 glasses of wine, and she turns into a love puppy. i’m in my 17th year of not drinking, but seeing the mona lisa smile on her face, i wish i could imbibe.
down at the watering hole, i saw a worm wigging in the bottom of the water tub. looked like it was trying to get out, but i wasn’t sure if maybe it belonged there. so i told it if it wanted me to take it out, to make a perfect circle. it immediately made a circle to the left with its tail, then again to its right - so i took it out. did i save an earth worm, or kill a water worm?
next day.
yesterday afternoon had sunshine for a change. dried out our wet clothes, wet shoes, wet tent, wet souls. this morning had sunshine again, so washed clothes and hung them on bushes to dry. then the rains came.
next next day.
and the deluge came down. our drying clothes atre wetter than when we washed. it’s hard to lie in bed with a full bladder listening to the rain water pound down on the tent while i wait for a rain break to urinate. dashed out, tipped over a bin of cherry tomatoes, crushed one with my slug killing heel. tomatoes leaves better looking corpses than slime slugs.
walking through the fields to the shower at dawn, i watched what looked like steam clouds rise from the trees and mountains, joining their big brother clouds in the sky. this is a cloud factory here. gorgeous.
lane foot farm is 440 years old. the houses, sheds, barns are all built of stone with slate roofs. old. peaceful. quiet. green. serene.
each day i wake more tired than the day before. no rest when my 1/2 of the air mattress is narrower than i am, and my 6 foot 3 is longer than the mattress.
we cut our internet prices - the library charges lady $4, and lets me on for free because i’m old, and the old get what they call ‘concessions’ here.
the slime slugs got me this morning for killing their brethern in the night. took off my hat after returning from my dawn shower and saw a slime trail across the entire top. followed the trail to the fold over the brim - lifted the overhang of the bill up and found a brown black slug. i’d worn the hat with slug down to the showers and back. i didn’t kill the slug - released it to the bushes so it could tell its tale of the day it rode the hat to hell and back. i have fotos of slime and slug on hat to post when we get back to london.
sometimes i think we should change the name of our blog to The Mis-Adventures of Smith & Lady.
lame foot farm
we’re camping at lane foot farm - way i’m limping it should be lame foot.
we’re in the mountains in north england near the scottish border. this area called lake district, has a population of 42,000, yet 12 million people visit every year.
food stores seem unnatural to us here in england. in morocco, fruits and vegetables and most everything else were piled in carts or blankets on the street. here, everything is packed with 4 million variations on each item, and the fruits and veggies are no where near as good as in morocco.
small supermarket here has 5 aisles with 10 rows - 1 entire row is booze, a second soda sugar pop, a 3rd sygar soaked breakfast cereals. have half a row for fruit and vegetables.
word of advic - if your lady love says on no i don’t want anything, i’m not hungry - better order more than you plan on eating because she’s going to eat part of what you order for yourself… and she’ll be happy because since she didn’t order anything, the calories don’t count for her.
sitting in this 2 room tent brings back childhood memories of hanging a blanket over a couple chairs and crawling inside to the darkness of your secret place.
unfortunately our blanket has 4 leaks - been raining 2 days now straight with no sign of dry sky. guess $100 tents aren’t what they used to be. fortunately it’s just in our sitting room - bedroom’s still dry. scottish lady said last month it rained 10 days straight - says in 20 years of camping that’s never occured before. taxi driver said he’s never seen such strange weather. welcome to global warming - even though war profiteer vice-dick cheney and his global worm georgie bush deny it’s happening.
we ate wild raspberries from roadside and pathside bushes these past three days. taste better when free, or stolen. yesterday walked a path through the mountains, stopped for tea and scones at an art gallery. art there had incredible skill and technique, but it was all countryside water colors and animal scuptures with no soul, no spark, no magic - rather like elevator music for the tourists and the those who buy art to match couch color.
the mountain rain makes everything cold, damp, clammy. can ring water out of my socks. my shoes are two liquid pools of unpleasant cold. 8 more nights here. camping in cold wet mountain rain is like living 3 months in a city i want out of.
i’m larger than lady - yet she takes 5/9s of the air mattress and leaves me 4/9s.
found slugs in our bag of carrots - ummmm, slug slime and carrots.
picked up lady’s used menstral pad and said i could sell this on ebay - call it lady’s raspberry crunchy snatch snack.
walking to town we saw a chicken cross the road, almost get hit by a car. i went up to it and asked it why it crossed the road. it didn’t answer, but lady said “to make a chicken pot pie hole.”
i apologize for not answering anyone - internet connections are a 90 minute walk away, cost $6 an hour, and are over before they begin. catch up on everybody and everything in 9 days when we hit london. all my typos, lack of cohesive flow, and lack of fotos are due to having to write these blogs fast in real time.
seize you on the downsize.
putting up our tent, i touched a plant that gave my skin blisters. been pissing on it 4-5 times a day ever since.
wooly mammaries
after carrying heavy backpack 20 minutes through south london, 3 subway cars, 4 hour train to north england lake district, hiking a couple miles uphill to campsite with packs, a very cold night in a too small tent on very hard ground, 6 mile wandering walk through mountains to town to buy bigger tent camping stove camp chairs ground mat air mattress foot pump food and carrying it all back on back three miles to camp, and a second night on the ground in the cold, i walk like i’ve 2 badly designed wooden legs that don’t work right.
lady’s making dinner - vegetable tikki masala - on our 1 butane burner camping stove with our 1 pan we bought in morocco and carried here to the mountains. she’s cooking inside our new 2 room tent because the wind’s so high it blows the flame out. our cold water spicket is a 3 minute walk down the grass meadow. the toilet and showers are another 2 minutes past that past the burbling brook and baa-ing sheep. hot water another minute further on.
this tent design blows me away. we snapped pre-strung bars together into 3 bendable rods, pushed it through nothes on the nylon, pegged them into the ground and - voila - we have a tent. we hang the inner two rooms inside that so we’ve inner and outer walls with air flow thru which solves the breatrh condensation problem and insulates us from the worst of the sun. we sit in our camp chairs in our outer room, drink coffee while looking out at the mountains which surround us. our original hal person tent is now our storage tool tent.
our camping purchases yesterday came to $280. toss in the $56 we spent originally for small tent 2 sleeping bags and mats and the $155 to train up here and the $20 a night it costs to sleep here on the ground and it comes to $775 for 2 weeks camping. we chose this because it’d save us money, yet it’s costing us $56 a night to sleep in the dirt.
and guess what - it’s worth it. we’re in the mountains surrounded by more mountains and the incessant sounds of sheep, goats, cows, chickens, horses, birds, and wind. my life’s about refining my thinking analyzing judgment process, which is why i frequently say Why Not to something new - and camping is adding new joys and tools to my data system.
1st night here lady sadly says ‘this isn’t working out for you is it?’ i say too early to tell - give me a good night’s sleep and some food fuel and we’ll see. no good night sleep yet, but it’s definitely working out.
plus for a guy it’s paradise because every tree and bush is a urination station.
we’re leaving all our camping gear here cuz too heavy to carry and it’d cost us more to fly it to france and then the u.s. thanb it’s worth - plus we can’t carry it all. rule number one - you gotta really want something to carry it on your back wherever you go.
so far our 11.5 month travel around the world has averaged $75 a day. way more than we expected. but besides being ripped off for rich tourist rents here and there and being naive, most of the cost comes from constantly moving. train plane bus taxi subway tickets cost as well as the cost inherent in each new place while you learn the ropes. essarouira was supposed to cost us $200 a month rent - it was $500 due to their annual music festival, etc. we’ve moved 36 times so far in 13 months. it adds up.
but what fun and adventure we’ve had. we’ve written tosands of pages of blogs, 10 short stories, poems, fotos, filled our memory banks for later creative withdrawals, have 250 pages done on my bad boy memoir titled CRIMINAL - this is our work we’re doing, this traveling around. we’re betting all we have on what we will be.
last night lady started undressing for bed and as soon as her breast was bare my hand was on it - she said what’s this, are your hands nipple magnets? this morning as she put a wool sweater over her breasts i grabbed them and said ohhh, wool boobies. she said no, wooly mammaries. she wins that round.
saw a drinker’s t-shirt in town - it said The Liver Is Evil And Must Be Punished.
are we having fun yet?
got to camping field. gorgeous place - mountains all around, innumeral shades of green, blue sky, sheep, bird calls, and clouds never ending.
went to sleep in 2 person tent - 2 person that is if you’re 3 foot 4 inches tall. being 6 foot 3, my head pushed out one end, my feet the other, while my sleeping wife pushed me thru the side. being a camping neophyte, i didn’t know exhaled breath collects as condensed water on inside tent walls, so my head, feet and sides kept getting cold, wet. no room for me in the in.
my previous camping experience - when i was 7 to 10 years old, my folks would set up my big brass bed outside in the fields in the summer and i’d run like a mad happy banshee through the moonlight. only other experience is our 2nd night in england last august when we tried camping with the rainbow gathering people on their yearly gathering in grassington england. rainbow did not bring the tent and sleeping bags they’d promised us, so lady and i froze to death in the middle of sheep shit in a sheep field. i became hypothermic, started shaking uncontrollably. not a good start to our 12 months of traveling.
we walked to nearest town this morning. was told it was 2 miles, which should have taken no more than 30-45 minutes at our pace. took 2 hours 45 minutes. we’re going to buy a 3 person tent, let our backpacks stay in the 2-tent.
this is awkward - i’m used to writing my blogs on my own computer over a several hour period, then revamping before downloading on my dip stick and posting. for next two weeks, the rare times i get to post are real time at $6 an hour. so no cool prose and wicked wit. just me.
finally found a book to exciye me - pure genius - paul bowles’ The Sheltering Sky. takes place in morocco where we just were. glad we’re not there anymore, grateful we went. on the roof of our top floor apartment there we saw a big bird flying toward us - big got bigger got huge. it was an african stork. they stand 5.5 feet tall, with wingspans of 8.5 feet. blew my mind.
and so i’m off - gotta walk back with a new tent, ground mat, sleeping mat, two camp chairs, and some food. if i don’t make it, it’s been fun.
see you days or weeks from now.