What will happen? It's hard to say. I can only report these old news clippings as they come to me from my secret European sources and I disavow any sentiment toward either side, other than to say it wouldn't bother me if someone shrunk Tin Tin's head.
That's Paul Simon talking, or I should say singing from a song called America. It's a pretty tune where Paul and "Kathy" are off in search of America and seem to get as far as Michigan or Pittsburgh on the strength of a pack of smokes and a couple of fruit pies before heading home to NYC. on a bus. They are smoking on the bus.
Oh oh! Its a Ghost! (silent 'T') Sure it's Casper The Friendly, but he's still a ghost and even though he is cartoonish with a bubblehead and expressive eyebrows he is destined to walk the earth in search of a friend before he can rest. Kind of begs the question of what happens to his friend?. I lived in a house with a ghost in it and the thing was not the least bit friendly. In fact, it would stomp around the halls and go dragging right by the bedroom where I slept causing me to flee in panic. The ghost never got me and I was damn glad to get out of that big scary old place. I wish I could have confronted the source of the sound because it was a real physical noise of someone dragging something and the father of the family who lived there before had died while out in the woods cutting a Christmas tree. Kind of get the impression I'd be seeing a rather confused looking semi transparent man with a tree. Trouble with that is it would open up a whole lot of theological and scientific seams plus throw the light of suspicion on my ability to tell the truth. In the long run it's a better ghost story than factual sighting. Still it gives one pause to wonder what happens if ones death is unexpected or particularly tragic and not totally resolved. I mean this guy with his tree would show up any time there was a big commotion at the house. His family had moved. Not far, but away and all the hoo ha of another big family moving in and raising hell seemed to excite the "spirit". Oh well, I only had a chance to solve the whole riddle of life and death and blew it cause I'm a chicken. That's the whole of it I guess.
That thing is called a P Trap. If you have a drain in your home you have one. If you kitchen sink is slow to drain there is likely an obstruction in the U shape part. In the old days before PVC a plunger tool might be a help, however if you have PVC (plastic) pipes coming out of your sink, a plunger is not a good idea and here's why. There will be a pipe coming out of your sink and another pipe will go between it and the part of the P trap thats sticking straight up in the air. OK? Fine. Now all that is holding that pipe to the bottom of your sink is a plastic washer that holds a plastic nut that screws onto one end of the connecting pipe and then the same thing happens at the bottom. Now everything gets right and tight but are no threads on the piece of pipe coming from the sink just the washer is holding it by compression. A good hefty plunge can pop that sucker lose and give you a sink full of water right underneath in the cabinet. Ugh. Speaking of sinks full, I should add that there is always water in the P trap because not only is it used for catching diamond rings and such, but it also serves to keep poisonous sewer gases from coming in through the pipes and killing you. I am telling you about the water because the very best way to clear up the drain situation is to simply take the P trap out and clean the junk out or it.
A very large warehouse. Somewhere in Oakland, CA. The warehouse was full of army men, the type that get blown up wholesale in a war movie that calls for a lot of dead soldiers. In other words, replacements. I don't remember very much about this warehouse other than it was huge and went on for ever in all directions, and there were little islands of bunk beds.
Who? Well the fat heads are the people whose overall mindset is what keeps
No, it won't and helps to see the point, if you have traveled around the world sort of quickly. Say from Panama to Japan to India to Europe and so on. Never stopping long; just moving at a pace where the sound of each day's subtle shifts in pitch don't come as a surprise. I mean the change of the rail road's sound at the grade crossing and the fire brigade's banshee moan suddenly becoming that "hee haw" two tone or do the cop cars sound like alarm clocks and do kids march to school? If you have traveled enough those simple sounds in the traffic of life can tell you where on earth you may have started the day. Of course jet planes and ocean ships are generic but so are the sky and sea to a land traveler. No the sun does not set on a traveler, it just passes over his way and comes back again to remind him to listen up for some symptom or look for a sign that he's someplace else where it may be time to mind his manners in a different mode than the day before. To travel about is to learn lots of customized style but rarely find any big answers. If you want to know where love goes, what blue sounds like or how to recognize Wednesday, well I don't think you will find the answers to those things anywhere outside of your own mind and that means you will have to brave the dark because the sun sets on your mind every night. Of course the more you travel, the less you notice the dark hours because you get good and tired! I have been meaning to hit the road so I don't think so much. Probably do me some good. I'll send you a card.
Oh Texino! You shameful Mestizo! The police are you friends. Why would you damn them with your foul lingo? Well, I'll tell you why. The cops are not your friends. In fact, they believe that the world is split into two basic types of humans. Cops and other people. Now they have a lot of colorful names for the "other people" and if you are not cop you may not be bad enough to fall into one of those categories, however; make no mistake because you can easily move from "civilian" to "dirtbag" by crossing some line the police have arbitrarily set to judge your worth. I'm not fooling around here. I've taught courses at a police academy and there is a definite line drawn from day one that indoctrinates the students to this way of thought: The police are my friends and everyone else is out to prevent me from doing my job. Ergo, they are the enemy. 
Well now. Politics is afoot so someone toss some antifreeze on the Antichrist and let's get going. I may have or may not have said something akin to the following: "The Democrats can pretty much walk into the White House, so rather than picking a person who seems like a solid candidate, they field a woman whom no one seems to like and a Black guy." If I did not write that down, I was thinking it. Well that was then and although I still have a hard time believing that this, screwed up, me first, gimme some money, got no sense of what is real, country I live in can overlook skin tone, I am starting to think that Senator Obama might possibly have a shot at being president. To me, that's kind of exciting because the guy seems to have some charisma of the sort that gets the young people fired up, and the last time I saw that was with John F Kennedy which, by the way, happens to have been the last good time. That's right. Regardless of what the revisionists try to tell you. If you were there, you know that there was a national good feeling. A feeling we have been groping around for in the permanent twilight since cast by The Republicans as they moved around ripping things apart by rote. Well, they seem to have finished fucking up the country, so perhaps we can turn of the lights again. Perhaps we will see their wagons rumbling off with the ghosts of Nixon, Ford, Regan, an a couple of Bush's. Jesus Christ (or Anti) think about those years. Not that the Democrats were that great, but as soon as one tried to do something either the Republican controlled congress or their pit bulls would hit the populace with such a bunch of vitrol-Hell the entire Clinton Presidency was wasted with the Republican Party trying to pin infidelities on him. Eight fucking years! It is fairly obvious, even to the fool here that the GOP wanted something and now they either have it or have screwed it up so badly they seem content to leave the town and the candidacy in the hands of tired old war horse whose only appeal may be "The last grownup President" our generation will ever see. Personally, I believe Senator McCain is a good man but he has suffered greatly as a prisoner in a foolish war and may not be up for the strain of guiding the nation. Me, I can't help feeling a little twinge of the old excitement for Obama. A person with a vision. It might work. If the racists don't have him shot. You cant forget them. On the other hand, I don't think anyone wants to shoot Senator Clinton, BUT, if Senator McCain may be a little off from being a POW, how might Senator Clinton's head be, continuing a marriage to a guy who was president fairly recently and made her look foolish by having affairs in the White House itself. A whole lot of baggage on that one.
You know, I am really not that dumb. As dumb as I think that is. It's just an insecurity that was laid on me when I was a dreamy little kid. Hell, I was pretty much born knowing everything or at least with a good idea of how things worked and I maintained this knowledge on my very own until I got to first grade where, since I could already read, there wasn't much for me to do. In grade school, you were not allowed to just pull out a book , you had to wait on your class mates to "get it" and rather than getting down to "getting it" there was a lot of useless drawing and pasting and blunt scissor work. I hated that stuff; Had no background or talent for it. I had a library of music and books at the house and that was what I played with. I clearly remember working away at some boring project coloring bananas yellow at Table 2 in Miss Raines' First Grade class and some punk kid telling me I was no good because my colors went outside the lines. Oddly enough I believed him and from that time until I was tossed out of high school during my senior year, for having hair that was too long and then drafted into the army before I could get to a barber, I did not learn a damn thing in any class. I either learned it outside on my own or if it did not interest me, I didn't. Later on when I grew up, I would go to college, take courses and always get high marks, because I saw it as a job of work. You showed up, did the work and got payed after a fashion.
Hi, I'm going to write about reefer. No, I'm not in a Reefer Club with a bunch of sexy dames. Kind of wish I were but tell the truth, I don't remember smoking pot leading to a whole raft of sex when I first started out, but as I got a little older and had some girl friends we did have sex quite a lot. I don't know, but those refer club women certainly do not seen too inhibited to me, so maybe pot is a sex drug after all and the thought it was my looks and personality was just the sin of pride.
Guess who has been at it again? Old Death; riding his horse or striding the earth in his 7 league boots, reaping the worn, surprising the ripe and even taking the occasional tender shoot just showing the first green of life. He doesn't mean anything really, he is just the inevitable result of a contract we agree to when we come alive. A contract quite similar to the sort we click right past each time we make a minor software adjustment to the computer. Really for all you know you may be assigning a couple of pints of the red stuff per month to Mr. Bill Gates of Microsoft Inc. of Redmond, WA. and his phlebotomy squads just haven't made it out your way yet. That being a possibility, agreeing to a death at the end of your life is not so bad.
You will find a vampire playing accordion. Have a gander at Antonio over there. Notice anything funny? Like his eyes are glowing red for instance?
Folks, just in case you had a small glittering thought slide past the bar-code reader in your head. An impulse of hope that had you think for the time it would take to burn toast that THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA was a not a place where every racist brick headed hate monger is comfortably ensconced in a sticky scum of like minded life support from the Good Old Boys. Well you can toss that dream out with whatever other comedy your mind dreamed up last night because Racism is OK plenty #1 fine right now and it will only get worse as we creep up to the elections of November. But wait! Racism is against the law and it ain't politically correct! Aren't we talking politics and law here? Well yes we are, but are also talking about a competition for the most powerful job on the planet and I fear that the people who have been so smug over the importance of being kind and understanding to all colors, genders and lifestyle choices are about to find out that their good works have only been tolerated in an master plan to set them up and knock them back a bit, about 100 years sounds right.
Hi there, Texino here. How do you suppose that lady got mired in that big beach of quick sand? I guess you would call that a beach, wouldn't you? That's what you call a place where you have sand, right? Either that or a desert. So what is quick sand anyway, and how come you have probably never fallen in to any? Well first off, quick sand is not the same as quick rice or quick lime or even quick lunch. Nope, the name comes from the old fashioned term "quick" as in alive you know "the quick and the dead" "quick silver." in the old days when people had to come up with Churchy sorts of names for things they called this unstable granular liquefied substance "Quick" or "living" sands. You might think of quicksand as being like one of those Slurpee drinks; you know slushy flavored ice? If you can vision that, then you can see that if you suddenly got very small and then fell into one of those machines you could probably float because quick sand is just a sand Slurpee and being more dense than water floating would be pretty easy. Cold, but easy. So if you find yourself suddenly caught in quick sand just lie on your back and you will come right out. Quick sand is not very deep either but if you found yourself waist deep in the stuff getting without lying down would be really hard without the fire department coming along and squirting a big hose down by you legs to break the suction. It would work too. So what's going to happen to Lupe Valdez in the picture? Don't know because I've not seen it, but I'd say she's had it. Now if it were Esther Williams, she'd have back stroked out of there right about when I said "quick" used to mean alive. I suppose it still does, so I'm putting it in the Texino arsenal of asinine antiquated responses along with "That's what's the matter" ; Dis corporate" and many other out of date words and phrases which can be used to confuse and confound the enemies of speech and those too lazy to use "ing" endings. So when people ask how I might be "doin?" I may answer "Oh quick, very quick, thank you." OK? Fine I hope that you have enjoyed my little lecture on a little subject I know very little about, but through what I like to think of as "The Big Blog Collective Brain Process" by this time tomorrow, we should have the whole quick sand situation well in hand from the four corners of the globe to the seven seas, and that's what's the matter for this evening.
There is this fellow who posts to the same internet list about Bluegrass music that I post to as well. Why do I post to such a list? Well I used to make music my profession while enjoying hobbies such as short order cook, painter, deckhand, tree inspector, truck driver and other things during the daylight hours and like a lot of musicians, I made those hobbies pay for themselves with a bit left over for things like food and rent. Well meanwhile back on the list this guy whom we will call Mr. C. likes to write about the part of Bluegrass that deals with that Old Time Religion. I'll tell you right off that religious or not, if you play BG, you are going to be exposed to some gospel singing. It just goes with the territory. Also, if you do festivals and don't do a bit of the Sunday morning show, your stock with the promoter can fall and with that your fee. Anyway, the sacred music is by and large pleasant to hear and the message is one that makes sense on the surface. Not only that, but singing gospel music is lots of fun. what with lots of clever harmonies and all and not too many hot licks, so if your a drunk or dope addict and have spent Saturday night plying your craft, you can get through a gospel sing OK so long as it doesn't require complex musicianship from your hungover hands. See, Old Texino tells it like it is. Lets get back to Mr. C. Now like I said, this fellow is religion personified. If there is a BG (stands for Blue Grass) group known for their religiosity playing anywhere within 100 miles of this man's homestead, he will be beating the drum to let you know about it. Here is how it goes. "On Saturday at 7pm so and so and his somebodies will be playing at someones Baptist Church in the middle of nowhere come one come all admission is free a "Love Offering" will be taken. OK? Now I know what a "Love Offering" means. It's the same thing as "A collection will be taken" like they do in regular church. Well it's not actually the same you see because it's really a way that them phony TV preachers cooked up to ask for money using a code "Love Offering" because it could mean something else, like a prayer. It means money though and the fact that they won't come out and say so in a church is bothering me. I mean church gets money from it's parishioners or whomever. It's not like God and Jesus are real people who have a terrestrial payroll. By the look of some churches around these parts they don't need on either since they build like there is no tomorrow, which is a point of interest when you think about some of the preaching context. Oh well, remember Mr. C? Sure you do, the love light of bluegrass Music in totality. Well, somehow Texino got on Mr. C's personal mailing list and Jemima slap my behind if that man is not one of the most hateful creatures cruising the keys of cyber space. I tell you if there is a vicious lie running loose out there about, say Senator Obama from Illinois or Sen. Clinton from N.Y. or any other piece a non-truth crafted to spur hate against anyone who is not a white person with the log headed assumption that the original Jesus Christ looked like a cross up of Sigfried, Roy and a Lion (but not gay and with no tail) well Mr. C. will be sending it out to his Big List of Like Minds + Texino and one other guy who's there by mistake too. Now Mr. C. has not learned the value of the bcc option in his email, so I have access to his Like Mind List and in my wisdom, I have decided that these folks could use a "Love Offering " of some sort. You know, some times you have to get someones attention in order to correct a bad behavior pattern. Or it used to be so. Things may well have changed since I was last a disciplinarian. Still, you got to go with what you know. You remember I was saying how I fooled around making my hobbies pay while I was really a musician? Well I'm not certain I listed all my hobbies like forklift driver and internet technician, one or two more escape me. I'll have to make a list one day.
I'm back. It is kind of Mr. Marley to show his deep concern over the possibility of Monkey Bears getting me, however; Sam may have overlooked the fact that I am in the company of the extreme guard dog axillary poodle who, in fact, is part bear . He is ever so different than my dog, but he needs care and love too and I'm quite certain he would bite if we agreed on a person's Mal intent. 
