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.