Month: September 2023

So I’ve finished a couple days of work, haven’t really had to tutor much yet but I’m expecting my first victims to show up soon …

I’m tutoring and mentoring high school students, as prep for a career as a teacher.

Been thinking on the fictional writing project – “BIG FOOT WAR ONE” – and the first chapter that will likely be a back story, context, for all the grievances and issues, the moral justification for the war, and the initial plans. I can imagine the raccoon folk and crow/raven folk and the orca whales joining forces – the crow will be indifferent and cynical, as they enjoy the tossed out McDonald’s garbage that must invariably cease once the war begins.

My goal is to write one chapter a week – to attempt two “normal” sort of podcasts about “what’s up” and one podcast, or two, per week, on a chapter/serial basis. Sure, some might not get the idea of the Sasquatch, the forest people, the Yeti or Wookie, coming down from the slopes of the hills, filled with rage and glory, smelling of venison and pain … but some will get it, and if I can tell a good story, people will connect.

My boss and her husband have a property they manage for campers, “glampers”, and she offered to let my brother and I stay there – me in a camper, my brother in his truck but safer from boondocking and cheaper than the parks. It’s a real break from the running from one place to another, the frenzied search for SOMETHING LIKE what I left behind in Utah. But there is no replacing my friends Beth and Justin, there is no replacing their dogs, especially Boomer … I cry a little less now when I think about him, but I still cry.

So am I still circling about the drain? – sure.

Do I have some “solid plan”? – it would depend upon how you defined the word “solid”. I have a plan, I think I might want to teach. It would be great if I could make my podcast work, but maybe I suck, maybe I suck because I refuse to simply “entertain”. Maybe I’ll suck less if I tell mostly stories, because the reality of the situation is horrifying, best case, medium case, likely case. And, I know we’re being lied to on a historic scale, and the thing they are lying about is not good – that’s putting it in mild terms. But we keep going, we keep hoping, we keep dreaming, and we endure.

I could have avoided much of the “sturm und drang” of the last 6 weeks if I’d been able to simply pause, somewhere, for a few weeks … to take a sense of things. It’s a nice luxury for some that they can pause without falling off the social radar, without being cast, thrown, into the seemingly perpetual darkness that is STREET HOMELESSNESS … and the hatred directed at you because you simply made one too many mistakes … sucks to be you. If you HATE the homeless and you live in a city? – your rude awakening hasn’t arrived, but it’s coming. We could have made different choices, we could have CHOSEN NOT to treat housing or shelter like a financialized product – but our system tossed us a crooked bone, and so many, irrespective of political affiliation, picked up the bone. Should we be surprised that there is a boiling mass of human suffering below our feet? Rumbling, shifting, shaking the ground? – no, don’t be surprised when they show up at your door, and the cops show up to tag your bodies 5 hours later.

Yet – I have a camper, with a space heater …

I have the nature that surrounds me, and the bigfoot folk looking out for me or observing me … who knows what the forest people do.

I have food and water …

I have a radio and a Bible and Jesus looking out for me …

I have a lot to be grateful for, and I’m trying to remember that too.

I have a slice – not the whole pizza, a part of it, and for me it’s enough to keep going.

MIND JOURNEY: forgotten caverns of Nordstrom’s

1. cleavage hustlers slink their way to the underwear department.
2. bold pricks buy their briefs from Jerry.
3. skleb-trolls wander the dusty way, talking up purses and handbags and wallets and departed friends lost at the Rack …
4. Hoglon is leader of the retail death cult, he feeds on boob-cheese, he makes a bayonet wedding.
5. Stugger-mugger jerk squirrel meat being sold near the coffee mugs, not far from the jabbering fools of fossil …
6. PF CHANG’S is GONE …
7. Mustard dog deacon’s are moving the juice for the crowded revelers, Orange Julius is being sued for ecoli
8. Get your parrot suit on sale, and spy the next fall’s fashion – it’s grey and worn and red and deadly.