please stop tickling me

In which we laugh and laugh and laugh. And love. And drink.

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Location: Portland, Oregon

Otium cum Dignitatae

Sunday, January 07, 2007

A Golden Treasury of Timeless, Classic Hits

My ongoing battle with the software around here has long prevented me from diving back into the guts of the thing and (a) updating my blogroll, and (b) having a 'greatest hits' section.

Whaa? Oh, y'know, the posts that truly said what I wanted them to say, and did a not bad job of it. I still feel okay about reading most of them, even when tiredness/drunkenness/lack of true interest prevented me from Finishing The Way Every Man Must Finish (aaah. And we all know what that is, right, ladies?) .

I went back, for instance, on New Years' Day to the post from NYD, 2005. What's there is the usual buncha twaddle about how I'm going to be a better Bachelor, plus a picture of me wearing a cowboy hat, and smoking.
Just adjacent to this is this thing about Ronald Reagan's death that I kinda like. The right wing bloggers had been losing their shit, as had most of the news media they so claim to hate, about the recent death of that senile old bastard, and were seeking the views of others. Oh, I gave 'em some views, all right.

It sort of reminds me about the recent loss of Gerald Ford, in our long national sleepwalk. Pushing to one side my dark musing that apparently January is fatal to Republicans, the long-canned obits ranged from 'At Least He Wasn't As Bad As The Rest Of Them' to 'Best President Ever!'
I'm gonna say they missed the point. For one thing, this man was always a professional cleaner-up-of-messes, from The Warren Commission to Watergate. There are those that say the two events are more connected than they seem, by the way, and who better to preside over their orderly dismissal and ultimate forgetting than a bland, seemingly very nice man who strongly resembles...My father, actually.
I mean, was there actually anything Noble about stopping the Watergate hearings? 'The country would have been torn apart'-sorry: already happened. And the CIA in particular was starting to look very bad indeed in the ongoing investigation, so Ford appoints another bland man named George Herbert Walker Bush-an 'outsider', it was claimed-to clean it up.
Actually, lots of funny stuff happened during "The Accidental Presidency", and almost none of it was spoken of during the strange week that followed the man's death. Just lots of maundering about how 'decent' he was, and how we all trusted and liked him, even though he was incompetant. Between him and Harry Truman, I'm saying that the bland, likeable ones tend to be the real criminals.

And then, the whole chain letter thing happened. I had almost forgotten this one, even though it's one of the funnier stories outta last year. I haven't talked to Simone since. Sometimes the bad blood of efforts made in bad faith just goes too far. I don't know, though.

Recent good deeds include consoling a drunk lady who had found out that her daughter has advanced-stage breast cancer. I pointed out that my own mother had a five-pound tumor removed from her gut, and is still quite with us. Things that look utterly impossible sometimes aren't, and I reminded her of that, in lieu of just saying 'sorry' and buying her a beverage.
Also, The Tulsa Kid, Gringa Alta Prima and I rescued a dog off the street. He was an old dog named 'George' (according to his very old tags), very wet from hours in the rain, and nice as pie. Bleeding from his ass due to some bowel obstruction.
We at least got him to an animal hospital, after a night of caring for him ourselves (minus any attempts at surgery, you'll be happy to know). After they make him all better, they'll probably ship him to the county shelter, where I suspect that no one will adopt him, and he'll be put down. At least he won't die in agonizing pain on a wet sidewalk, but still, that one's fifty-fifty.

As we move into February (just like now! Hel-lo!), there was the whole filibustering Sufjan Stevens affair. Nice if you're into that sort of thing. It nearly took up the entire month, it-and the attendant commentary-is so lengthy and rife with links to the blogs of others.

Hm. Went down to one of the many places that can be described as Wine Country around here. Bought some pinot noir at the place I think makes the greatest pinot of them all: Firesteed Cellars.
(aaand back to "Teen Prostitute" names again: Steed Ramwood!)
Yeah, we're gonna not be able to help you pretty soon around here, as far as that grape goes. Too damn hot. Gonna need to grow that in the Puget Sound region, then the Okanogans, and ultimately, British Columbia leading thence to the Northwest Territories and Alaska...
Ah, don't feel so bad about it: in Assyria, they never had it this slow. All of a sudden, the cuneiform tablets start bawling about how even the earthworms were dead, and that was pretty much it. Took about fifteen years, folks estimate, for it to go from a relatively stable market economy/warring power to Place Where Shit Don't Grow. Please, no 'Ozymandias' quotes.
Firesteed is way off the path of the wine tourist: way down by Rickreall (always one of my favorite place names in Oregon), where you grow things. It was quiet, and I had one of those cinematic moments of watching a tiny figure in blue plod slowly, 'humbly'-I'd say if I was Kerouac or something, up a long dirt path in a field of green, on an adjacent hill. In the foreground, Bee walking Goofus and Gallant, careful to spread only the finest of urban dog poops to the gentle asphalt of the drive.

Wanna see me in my finest rhetorical fettle, though no doubt mad as hell and planning on failing to take it any more? Howzabout this here?
Yeah. abortion: Let's Talk About It. I had sort of planned to avoid certain things in this here public airing of what amounts to my diary, and abortion was in there. To be fair; so were breakups, so y'know...

The pavement opened up here in my neighborhood, on the 26th of December, and swallowed a city sanitation truck. It took the better part of seven hours to get the damn thing out of the hole, which no one has a decent explanation for. They dragged it ever so slowly out of its muddy, gassy hole with an enormous crane, surrounded by floodlights.
Walking that evening, a woman asked, "What are they filming over there?" I thought she was kidding. News crews were, indeed filming at that moment, which provided them with this absurd shot of a several ton truck dangling from a very long chain on a hook, while city workers lovingly sprayed it with hoses.
I tried to retrieve some of the truly awesome photos of this event (which took place about four blocks from my home, and right behind Gringa Alta Prima's apartment), but the news channel's websites have horrible-to-no archiving. Interesting though, to see what happens when you plug phrases like 'big truck in hole', and 'swallowed up by earth' into a search engine.

Goddamn it. I'd really like to post this picture I found of a screaming little boy being held by...something.
But my ongoing misunderstandings with Mr. and Mrs. Blogspot leave me without a clue as to how one puts a picture all the way down here. So, enjoy yer hyperlink, and don't ever call me again.
Naw: let's end this one by a sticky-eyed, first thing outta bed look back at the very first posting on PSTM, way back in 19-dickity-Two, I believe it was:
this is why we should have hid the whiskey
And don't say I ever did anything for you.

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