Ha'penny For Your Thoughts

 

 Yeah, Wow. Speaking of slaps in the face, I ran into an old friend whose daughter was setting the world on fire with her swimming ability. First smashing local school records then going all-state. Got a full-boat ride to UCLA. Two months into the program she calls home to tell her dad (my friend) that she was pregnant. Party over. She moved back to Redding, had the baby (a boy named C) and started drinking like a fish. Within 2 years she was a full-blown 300-pound vodka sponge, in jail. In and out of rehabs, on and on. My friend (G) took full custody of C (his grandson) and got the boy through his formative years. He called me once to ask if I had a wheel for C's MTB. Someone stole it from his bike while he was in class at Chico State. Last Spring, I saw G at the local Farmer's Market. I asked him how it was going. He told me he'd had a heart attack and was lucky to be alive. I asked about C, and he told me that he OD'd on street heroine. Party over.

 Wow, here we go again!

Fruits Of Labor

Truth Be Known...

Hey Y'alls, Long time no hear. I've been away from my desk muy mucho this Summer, researching my ancestral history as it were. It all started when I casually mentioned the fact that I was one-sixteenth Native American to a friend of mine. Dude! She said. You have native rights as such, you should look into it. Perhaps! I said, but that road was pretty much barricaded by my  father's maternal grandfather the staunch, WW1 Army Captain and American Federalist Party Member and primary father-figure to my dad, Roland Willis. You see, a million years ago, my Great-Grandfather Earl Gilbert Seely ran off at age 16 to join in the Klondike Gold Rush, from his home in Southern California. He and 100,000 other 'would be prospectors' of whom 30,000 arrived and 4,000 found gold, stampeded north in search of their fortunes. Old 'Dad' Seely never struck gold be he found himself a beautiful wife, my Great Grandmother Bessie Wyatt Seely. She was half French-Canadian and half Aleut Alaskan Native. Earl (great Grandpa) and Bessie (great grandma) moved back to So. Cal. in 1901 where they were pretty much ostracized by the Old World Seelys, but together they built a good long life, raising their twin children, the boy of whom was my dad's dad, Earl Jr.  Earl Jr. married the daughter of Capt. Roland Willis (Patty Willis/Seely) and together they failed at building a good long life together, divorcing when my dad was 11 or 12. Captain Roland Willis hoped to completely erase the memory of the Seely debacle (as did the other Seelys, they being my dad's Uncle and Aunt and Cousins) by pulling strings with his military connections to have all traces of Bessie Wyatt's birth records expunged, allegedly in the form of a single hand-written certificate in Dawson City AK that Roland used to light one of his ubiquitous stogies with. And the rest as they say, is history.

Rallying Cry Protest Protest, speakout, rail! Act!

Reject the cartridge! Poor quality blades, two dollars a piece. Reject canned goo! Unnatural smells, numbing agents. Scrape, scrape, scrape, scrape. A better shave with obsidian and fat. Reject burning faces, rashes, and blood on the collar. Reject the siren of marketing- five is not better than four, better than three, better than two. Countdown- five, four, three, two- one is the only one you need! One blade, machined with care, shiny, (razor) sharp. Treet, Tiger, Feather, Dura, One fifty for ten, not ten for five. Embrace the gestalt. First, hot water. Then, a brush, profuse with lather. Rose, lavender, citrus. Menthol. Soft. Soapy. Hot. Smooth! Upon your face, the brush and lather coaxing your beard to attention, The menthol a continuing cool upon your face, tickling your smell, making the cat sneeze. Grab your shaving instrument rescued from the scrap heap of Aunt Polly’s Interesting Junk shop, loaded with just ONE blade. Blue Tip, SuperShave, Merkur, Weishi. Glide. No pressure. No pain. Like shaving a peach. Like shaving a balloon. Shaving, not scraping. The sound of ice being scratched resonating along your jawline. With the grain, against the grain. Rinse blade. Lather. Repeat. The civilized man emerges. A bracing splash of Floid, Porasso, Tabac, or Anherb. No sissified, over-priced scent-of-the-month. Leave those to the metrosexuals. Join the underground. Transform the morning! Electric? Blasphemy!

Salmon On My Bagel...

...makes me happy. Pickle on the side, makes me high. I don't care who listens, I'm still kosher. Salmon in my life, gets me by.

Ground Control To Major Tom

Take your protein pills and put your helmet on. That is all.

Disneyland

Disneyland House Captain · Anaheim, California I am chief bean-counter and administer of unfair punishments. Finding my missing manuscript Dec 13, 1975 to present Yes indeed! I grew up in Eagle Rock (born in Glendale.) In 1969 my folks moved us up to Red Bluff where I attended 8th grade at Reed's Creek elementary, then High School at R.B.U.H.S. Class of '74. Then, thanks to my mom's father, I moved to the Shasta College Dorms where I lived (and partied) for 2 years (Art Major.) Failing to complete my A.A. during this time and in perhaps one of the most ill-conceived, over-priced endeavors of all time, Grandpa decided I should move back to L.A. and enroll at Oxy for the Fall semester of 1976. And so it was, with an enormous bag o' weed and 100 hits of purple micro dot, I moved back to Eagle Rock and jumped into the (then robust) ceramics and glass studios at Oxy, with a heady connection/reference from good old Cliff Sowder and Max Penington. The whole gig ended in disgrace around Christmas Time 1976, when one of the many lavish partys I hosted at Grandpa's mansion ended in a raid (Symbionese Liberation Army connection) and with me fleeing back to Dairyville. I never went back. Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory Meanwhile, back at the chocolate factory, the oppression persists. As the only "straight" Oompa-Loompa in the joint, I am often the "whipping Boy" to Charlie's manic rage against the state of the economy and his business affairs. It's an extremely difficult life here in what looked, at least on paper, to be a veritable cake-walk of a job and a wonderful opportunity to advance myself in life. Now... well, there are times so dark I just feel like diving into that river of chocolate and sinking away to that eternal obscurity. College In a Goddah-da-vida Baby! In a Goddah-da-vida Baby!

The Search For Slavko

When I was a young lad, I had a friend named Slavko Limonczenko. We lived on the same street in Los Angeles back in the 1960's. We dreamed of the many things we would together, when we were grown up. One of the things we put at the top of the list of things to do was to attend a World's Fair. The ruins, depicted here, are still standing in Flushing Meadows in New York, from the 1964 World's Fair. I am still interested in visiting the site, all these years later. I also hope to someday visit Chernobyl in the Ukraine, where Slavko's family immigrated from.

The_Flight_of_the_Phoenix_-_1965

With no functioning radio to call for help, the survivors wait to be rescued, but the storm blew them too far off-course to be found. Although they have a large quantity of dates for food, they calculate their water will only last for 10 to 15 days provided they avoid physical exertion. Seely and Blevins attempt to walk to an oasis. Blevins leaves his monkey behind with the men. Seely and Blevins refuse to let Natch Biz go along due to his increasing mental instability, but he defiantly follows and dies. Days later, Blevly, a sort of amalgamation of the two men (Seely-Blevins) a twisted and grotesque abomination, returns to the crash site alone and barely alive.

Clockwork Angels

I have been asked by the "Boys" to mention very especial pair of young men, they are of course Dr. Heckle and Mister Jive. Born in a time, here in America, when men were men and beer was a cool, refreshing beverage, not a loaded gun on a nursery school playground, rocket ships were sending huge payloads off to space at hypersonic velocities, cartoons were rife with senseless violence and God had his hand firmly on the dome of of the White House like a fragile egg safely nestled in a cocoon of Tempur-pedic foam. No one really knows what happened to these lads, but their work in the mid-to-late 70's can still be felt today, especially in the world of journalism. Poets these chaps were, and poetry, as the the old saying goes, "Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotion know what it means to want to escape from these things."* We attribute much the those slayers of great dragons, those players-with-words, those Kings-of-things-that-always-brings-us-back-to-where-a-robin-sings-and-when-we-find-these-pretty-things-we-tend-to-cease-destructive-flings. Say good night Ed. *T. S. Eliot (1888-1965) American-English poet and playwright.

Foucault's Pendulum

The plot of Foucault's Pendulum revolves around three friends, as relevant to the rule of three, named Belbo, Diotallevi and Casaubon, who work for a vanity publisher in Milan. After reading one too many manuscripts about occult conspiracy theories, they decide they can do better, and set out to invent their own conspiracy for fun. They call this satirical intellectual game "The Plan". As Belbo, Diotallevi and Casaubon become increasingly obsessed with The Plan, they sometimes forget that it's just a game. Worse still, when adherents of other conspiracy theories learn about The Plan, they take it seriously. Belbo finds himself the target of a very real secret society that believes he possesses the key to the lost treasure of the Knights Templar. It's a tough read with numerous plots twists and endless references to societies that I must separately research. Oh, and then there's the translating from Italian.

The Potential Well

Zero-point energy is fundamentally related to the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. Roughly speaking, the uncertainty principle states that complementary variables (such as a particle's position and momentum, or a field's value and derivative at a point in space) cannot simultaneously be defined precisely by any given quantum state. In particular, there cannot be a state in which the system sits motionless at the bottom of its potential well, for then its position and momentum would both be completely determined to arbitrarily great precision. Therefore, the lowest-energy state (the ground state) of the system must have a distribution in position and momentum that satisfies the uncertainty principle, which implies its energy must be greater than the minimum of the potential well.

Is The Caller There?

As a young boy, I always thought that Wilbur, the man from the hit T.V. Show Mr. Ed, had it made. I loved that his place had a stable (where Ed lived) that had a phone and a desk and fridge... I always thought that was so cool. I used to think that if I were Wibur, I would just move my bed out there too and my clothes and everything and just let Carol (his wife) live in the house. Carol (and my mom for that matter) only seemed to make Wilbur (and my dad) nervous and upset, whereas Mr. Ed was obviously a guy and I thought guyfriends were better than women friends. We have a lot of fun and it's just a lot of fun. Say good night Ed.

Tee Polyphosphate Ef

Six o'clock - TV hour. Don't get caught in foreign tower. Slash and burn, return, listen to yourself churn. Lock him in uniform and book burning, blood letting. Every motive escalate. Automotive incinerate. Light a candle, light a motive. Step down, step down. Watch a heel crush, crush. Uh oh, this means no fear - cavalier. Renegade and steer clear! A tournament, a tournament, a tournament of lies. Offer me solutions, offer me alternatives and I decline. The other night I tripped a nice continental drift divide. Mount St. Edelite. Leonard Bernstein. Leonid Breshnev, Lenny Bruce and Lester Bangs. Birthday party, cheesecake, jelly bean, boom! You symbiotic, patriotic, slam, but neck, right? Right.

Living Hell!

Here is a picture of the man who has made my life a living Hell, here at the Chocolate Factory. Little Charlie is all grown up now and runs the place like some kind of concentration camp. Oh, how I miss Willy Wonka. Why, sometimes, I get so down-hearten I just want to climb into the taffy puller and turn the machine on. Really what I'd like to do is shave that bastard's smug mustache off and sprinkle it in the candy. That would shut this place down real quick. Oh, I'm going to Hell. In a handbag y'all.

It Ain't Over

Meanwhile, back at the chocolate factory, the oppression persists. As the only "straight" Oompa-Loompa in the joint, I am often the "whipping Boy" to Charlie's manic rage against the state of the economy and his business affairs. It's an extremely difficult life here in what looked, at least on paper, to be a veritable cake-walk of a job and a wonderful opportunity to advance myself in life. Now... well, there are times so dark I just feel like diving into that river of chocolate and sinking away to that eternal obscurity.

My Memorial For The Next Reunion

Seely, an inveterate avant-garde in the field of Mind expansion through Native American ceremonies and arm chair anthropologist, was last seen in the Sonoran Desert near Maricopa, Arizona on December 20, 2012. He is presumed dead.

Onward from vast uncharted spaces, Forward through timeless voids, Into all of us surges and races The measureless might of the wind. [...] In the steep silence of thin blue air High on a lonely cliff-ledge, Where the air has a clear, clean rarity, I give to the wind...my pledge: ”By the strength of my arm, by the sight of my eyes, By the skill of my fingers, I swear, As long as life dwells in me, never will I Follow any way but the sweeping way of the wind.” __________ (published in On Desert Trails with Everett Ruess, with introduction by Hugh Lacy and foreword by Randall Henderson, Desert Magazine Press, Palm Desert, California, 1950.)

He is a monster He is a monster Was he really born this way? He is a monster He is a monster He is always there when you turn the page. No Restraining He's retaining Everything he sees While the world shook He's eating another book I hope he shares some with me He is a monster He is a monster Was he really born this way? He is a monster He is a monster He is always there when you turn the page. SFC