Five degrees this morning; makes the snow stingy, tight little balled up fists instead of fat flaky cotton candy snow. It’s going to get colder. Road wise I’m glad to be a Michigander among Michiganders. In Portland if there is a rumor of an inch of snow the schools close down. Even in dry clear weather Oregon roads host the most marginal drivers. To be fair Oregon has hills and twisty roads and, mostly, mid Michigan is flat and the roads are broad. However, Oreegon does also have mountains and you’d think as a mean average some Oregonians would be familiar with driving in the snow.
Yeah, I know, gross generalizations, but you drive in Portland with snow on the ground and you tell me you trust the other motorists on the road. If you make eye contact most of them look like they just topped the hill of a roller coaster; the ones who don’t are probably having a stroke. Of course Seattle is much worse. I’ve never driven in Seattle without seeing at least two a day of what I like to call the Five-Lane-Drift. It’s a sort of oblivious and indiscrete drifting while braking as often as not from the slow lane to the passing lane and, as often as not, and even slower, brakier, more random drifting back. I’ve been in traffic jams in both cities where when you get to the choke point you find no discernable reason whatsoever for the jam.
Just sayin’, albeit with Asperger’s like kvetching off topic, that I had fun slip sliding along the roads last night. I had very important business; first there was the one special lightbulb that’s needed replacing since June and fifty percent off GingerBread Twix bars (What? You say. They make those? Oh, hell yes they do, and I don’t care if you dined on the Rivera on Truffle torte, a gingerbread Twik is damn fine eating food) and Secondly to see my girlfriend and her dog who thinks he’s my dog. Boy, you sit down once with a male shepherd and say “Chicks, whoa” and you’ve bonded for life. Of course dogs say “bitches” more often than rappers, but, you know, every son of a bitch IS a son of a bitch. You do not want to tell a dog “bitchs be tripping” though.
So I absolutely had to go out on the skating rink that is the local road systems. Seriously, Gingerbread Twix fifty percent off. Look it up. If they aren’t in Wikipedia I will write the damn entry my damn self.
So, a brief Howel Michigan tale (the town of John Birch Society gentry and vacation homes). We went to the local rural party store to pick up water because the grocery store was ten miles over dirt back roads. The building looked like it was a frontier church some century or two ago and they pretty much mainly carried deer pellets, water and high end liquor. The most pedestrian vodka was Grey Goose and the lowest end whiskey was Jameson. Weird. Apparently one neither shoots deer or lynchs outsiders on cheap stuff there in Howell. Although it wasn’t really Howell. Ok, so that’s not really a tale but it’s weird.
Several thousand years ago I was hitchhiking through Manitoba and in the middle of rural Canada I stopped at this little roadside diner. There was a jukebox and stoic local farmers eating hardy meals. The Jukebox had to be the hippest Jukebox in the world, it was the Mid Seventies and there was live jams from Santana, Hendrix, Traffic and non-air-play MC5, Doors, Country Joe and the Fish, bootleg Dead, Early Pink Floyd (like several-small-animals-gathered-in-a-cave-grooving-on-a-pict — I think that’s the right name of the song). I plugged my quarter in for Low Spark of High Heeled boys, The soft Parade and The Hendrix Star Spadangled Banana. The Calloused handed Canadian Gothic farm folk tapped their feet along to the songs and carried on with their stoic tales of feed and silo winterizing.
Alright, the point of this entry was to write something because the anarchist wrote a letter to this historic farm built on a paleo indian burial site and said that we were doing an art project and listed me as a visiting poet, and so I thought I might need to get back into bullshit form or at least flex my fingers to see if I’m still literate or close enough for Jazz and/or Guvmint work.
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