Thursday, August 31, 2006

a confession:

I like to drink
eat red meat
shoot guns
everyone calls me a hippy but I don’t believe them
I stand at my kitchen window at 3:23 in the morning eating little pig sausages, smoking grass and contemplating the myriad fallacies of capitalism, patriarchy and non-organic milk.

I plow through another four boxes of books, my bread and butter
I sell crazycrazy books on the internet about how to manufacture all sorts of drugs
books on how to kill people
books on how to import your Filipino mail-order bride
or how to hide your psychedelic mushroom garden in a tree…
I also sell mystery novels
books on tape
home canning books
the bible
harry fucking potter
as opposed to all the good kids books I also hock
clifford the big red commie

My hen lives directly above a family of weasels
I spill chainsaw oil all over my driveway and
litter the front lawn with BBs, birdshot and shotgun shells
we need more counterculture descriptive adjectives.
still, I get called a hippy.
the hippy here by Spencer Lake,
complete with pony tail.
If only they knew I was really a samurai
and that this was a top-notch.

See, I’m really a book slinging young radical father samurai with
way too much time on my hands
way too much beer in the fridge
and way too much silent space for my multiple personalities to incubate.
I try to take time to make time
and my cakes always rise.

I piss on my vegetable garden to reconstitute the vitamins most folks flush,
smoke American Spirits to avoid the arsenic and cyanide laced chemy ciggs,
clean my home using primarily good old-fashioned vinegar.

Today I listened to:
David Sedaris Nine Inch Nails Nina Simone NPR
The Traveling Willburies J.S. Bach Romanteek & Free (Pirate) Radio Olympia

I read or perused:
Country Living Is Risky Business
Charles Simic’s Poetry
You Are Going to Prison
The Joy of Cooking
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Tiny Giants
Wait Until Spring Bandini
Secrets of Methamphetamine Manufacture (hey, if you had it lying around you’d look at it too!)
Marianne Moore’s Poetry
& Beaver Comix – some strange pornographic Canadian smut from the 70s

not to mention:
The Olympian
The New York Times
Boing Boing
CommonDreams
Green Parenting
DaddyTypes
So Close
Technoccult
and 27 other assorted blogs and news feeds,
I aggregate therefore I am,
I clean my cast iron with salt and no water.

My red worms already finished off this morning’s waffles
while I watched P.K. Dick’s A Scanner Darkly at nap time,
folding clothes and layers of my being
buttonholes.
I put off weeding my garden until it’s too late.
I’m a fantastic lover until you get to know me.
I barely sleep at all.
I talk too much or not enough, never in-between.
My temper is buried deep but ugly.
I live for the local but stoop to drink Schmidt Ice

Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself, (I am large, I contain multitudes).

I fish and crab without a license
neglect my typewriter
and eat pasta and potatoes half the week.
I want certain women to really know me
but they never do.
I don’t like to wash my socks.
I need a live-in cook and a driver.

My two-thousand year old Kombucha chinese mushroom tea disc
needs me to feed it black tea and sugar
and I keep prolonging the process
because the tomatoes are thirsty.
I get up in the morning and make an enormous pot of baked beans with bacon
thinking about how maybe all I really need is a woman who can party for 36 hours straight and then sit through Akira Kurosawa’s Dreams without getting bored (there’s probably a few other graduating criteria).

I have an old printing press in my living room
and all I do is look at it guiltily.
All my friends are drunks.
My mailbox is a quarter mile away.
I can hear cars sometimes but I pretend they aren’t real.
Every now and then I leave my sweatpants on for days,
go for two week stints reading nothing but Bukowski and graphic novels.
I think that and the garlic keeps me young.
I dumpster dive food, shoplift from Fred Meyer and dump my garbage illegally.
I’m not sorry. It's what I do to survive and have a good time doing so.
I milk whole systems, pirate anything I can.
The world is my open-source oyster
and so I shuck it.
Jive until
I die.

4 comments:

quixoticmantis said...

This is great....

Anonymous said...

People call you a hippie because they are fucking shallow. Hey, I'm guilty of calling you this too.
Because you wear a full beard, scraggly hair, that patchwork hat, those "pants", and live in the woods people call you a hippie. They will easily ignore playing with firearms, eating red meat and illegal dumping because they don't see you do it all the time, unlike those "pants".

And by the way, your girls using possesive pronouns is pretty much universal with children their age. But what I have encountered most was the bratty "MINE!" (you can't imagine how obnoxious that is) for everything around them, be it a book on the table or the hair on your own head. The fact that Lyli and Scarlhet (sp?) don't shriek this on a regular basis tells me you are already doing something right. Your friend was right, they are learning their own distinction of themselves as seperate and unique from the rest of the world. They'll get over this and soon move into the "why?" phase when their vocab increases. TAKE ADVANTAGE OF THIS! You will get to teach your girls philosophy by age THREE! Enjoy! If I hear of you even once answering "because, that's why" I will reach up there and smack you!
...
hate the phrase "gender roles" because they are in fact, just that- roles we teach them to play from the time we don them the pink or blue blanket. This article, while attempting to help the reader sympathize for the parents and the boy who wants to be a girl, supposedly, but it only superficially licking at the surface, damn newspapers.
If a 5yr old boy likes pink and playing with dolls, and wants long hair does that make him any less a boy? No, but I've encountered young children who say they want to be the other gender because their young mind has identified that long hair= girl, short hair=boy, etc. You, pirate papa, I'm sure have excempted your children from this but I realize even in this "hip" town (becoming more fucking bourguousie and anal everyday) most of our fellow Americans still deeply sterotype gender very psychologically.

-Marlys

Sara said...

Thank you for painting this image of yourself. It adds quite a bit to my mental image of you.

I'll bet that the folks in my new town think 'hippy' when they see me. In my old town, that never would have happened. I didn't even begin to stand out there, though I've not changed.

You're right. New labels are in order. I used to call my mother a hippy until my Science teacher told me that she was too young to be one.

Anonymous said...

You all cut in front of me to say this is a good blog.

-Agile Invaders