The Ocho

I have decided to share my cartoon world with the world that most of you live in.

On more than one occasion I have been accused of living in this cartoon world. These accusations are not completely baseless.

Todays shining shining, sharp sample:

While sitting in a dimly lit, windowless room, cousin Li rather calmly reveals his rather sadistic side:

I manual cut the faces into triangles.

It took me a little too long to regain context and was momentarily mortified then slightly amused by the prospect of this calm, quiet man cutting flesh triangles from the faces of incredulous investment bankers, making some sort of Darger inspired collage from them.
I do not think he appreciated the humor I found in it when I explained why I was chuckling.

Elder E knows how to make bread, and is a brilliantly violent, yet smooth dancer.

Pastor Bob makes good shelves and beans with rice, though I am not sure if he can do them concurrently (I suspect, yes), and he has a bike.

I am an extreme empathetic, and I like beards, and I like my kidneys just where they are, thank you all very much.

Sister Kiki (not to confuse Sister kiki with my sister kiki, as the two are distinct, irreproachable women) has green thumbs even when they are not, and her tomatoes are worth killing for, and I have, though it was only a bug, but I am willing to kill larger things for them, like snails or baby rats.

Sister Sammy likes unicorn play and knows many things about violent crime and she like very subtle jokes, including judiciary jokes, that often slip past me, being that I am an uncouth clot.

Deacon Stout renders solarly efficient, violent buildings and is a master of analogy, especially when referring to poison, and his shoes are well worn.

Youth Minister Deacon Clempant likes complex chord structures and once had really dirty hands and cream cheese on his shoes (or maybe it was just one shoe), and he likes violent songs.

Deaconess A. has fine taste in shoes and is a master of disguise and has rhythm and did I mention she has nice shoes, also her roundhouse kick is something worth paying to see.

Ho Hum

p.s., some of this information may not be completely accurate and may be used purely as propaganda.

My friend, let’s call her sammy, and I were discussing the difficulties of riding ones bike to work during bad weather or moderate heat. I of course have no compunction to look so, as my work is with computers and hardware, which induced the following conversation:
Sammy: “diodes don’t judge such beautiful beings”
Ulm.: “never hath truer words been spoke to me”
Sammy: “well… they do have On voltage requirements, but I suppose we all do too”
“but the capability of being modeled by an equation is that factor of elegance missing from humanoids, I suppose”

Any way, just though I would share the sentiment.

I often dream that I am the fraggle that eats the radish flavored Lincoln Block like towers. It is my duty, as there is no other that will attempt them more than once.

It is not much of a burden. Radishes are quite tasty.

Rain&sleet + 20 mph winds from the Atlantic ocean + bicycle + 4 beers + cars on wet road at 60 mph = wished I was not too cool to wear the helmet with the sun visor that keeps water out of my eyes, and a rain poncho.

The last three or four days have been beautiful and warm. Riding my bike the five miles to work and home is an enjoyable experience again (it doesn’t hurt that I took a wire brush and lubricant to the rust on my chain and cleaned the city off of the frame.) I noticed a bit of a spring in my step and a general good feeing in chest.

I know we are likely to experience at least one more cold spell, probably two or three, but it smells like spring. I cannot identify any particular smell. Maybe it is the moisture in the air, or the fact that it doesn’t hurt to breath, or that I am not wearing a jacket with a quilt sewn onto its innards. Regardless, the smell of the air, the feel of the city, hits me with a pleasant feeling, like a fond memory with with no regrets or pain or suffering attached to it, only a general pleasant feeling. Though, delve as I might, I cannot conjure any specific memory or time to which I might attach this feeling.

I started to wonder if the grand feeling that most of us have with the onset of spring is something we have learned, or if it is a deep seeded instinct. I suppose it doesn’t matter all that much. It feels good, and thats what I care about at the moment.

My older brother, Rambler, and I have a pact:

We are, at all costs, both to avoid being forcefully relocated to any correctional facility, holding tank, holding pen, paddy wagon, or back seat of the vehicle of any official government agent.

Even ten minutes in one of those tourist pens during the annual New Years celebration at time square, I think, would shatter the pack. I feel the anti-official detention pact quite strongly, and I suspect that he does as well. This pact is greater than a little extra reason to avoid such situation in a selfish manner. Neigh, it is the opposite. We do it to help each other.

You see, we are the only members of the family to not have spent some period of time in an officially sanctioned time out (save for my mother, who is above reproach, though I admit to being ignorant of his own mother’s history of incarceration). If one of us were to fall, then the other would be as the last leaf on a dying tree, braving the wind and rain and snow with no others to help hold back the forces of nature, which are ever pitted against it and it’s kin.

It is selfish in a sense. It is selfish, because I do not want to be that last one. If I were, might I do something, asinine, so I may too taste the families forbidden fruit? I would like to think not, but I prefer not to find out.

p.s., by the way, K, was Ralph Nader worth it?

I was disillusioned by America the week than Johny Cash died. He received some recognition, but it was another John’s death that captured the attention of America and the media here, John Ritter…There was an outcry of love and affection for a mediocre actor, and little enough reaction to the death of JC. It told me enough of the motives of the media and of the attitudes of the people, and I…

I don’t hate this country, but there is something wrong about it, and the focus on a mediocre actor’s death over that of a great songwriter and a man who’s voice moved many, even up until his death. See: HURT & Cut you Down. Maybe it is the same every where. Not to take anything from Mr. Ritter. Three’s company seems to have been enjoyed by folks for more than a year or two, but he was no king among men, and he was generally panned until his death.

I cannot shake the feeling that I changed after this. As if I had been through some horrid tragic mountain stranded, wintry hunger induced cannibalistic adventure. I am a worse person for having seen what is most important to the lot of you, though if you are reading this, then I can only assume you more lamented (or at least equally) the loss of a great songwriter and musician than the loss of a poor to fair thespian.

And again, we preach to the choir merely to sooth our own souls.

To continue with the river theme-

On the days I skip the bike ride and opt for the subway, I feel as if I am trapped in an unpredictable stream: sometimes, smooth and swift; sometimes a combination of rapids and dead swirly eddies, running from jerky, rough to dead still; other times it seems to push me down the srong side stream because I didn’t see fork in time (or at all); once in a great while, I let the current take me where it will.

On those days of ‘going with flow’ as it were, I feel as a leaf in a stream, or better yet as if I am on a leisurely canoe trip…pushed hear and there by the current…Queens is the base of a damn, a diverse pool, both wide and deep; Bay Ridge is that dead end pool, with only old dying trees, dipping their heads in the water to cool off; Park Slope is the gravel bar where I pull out of the river for some food and a beer, the place where I swim in the sun for too long and get that burn that I always seem to get during those excursions; Harlem is my take out point, where I wait for the ride back to my car in the dusty old reconstituted school bus come over-sized life vest/oar/cushion repository, hardly enough room to sit, leaving wet butt prints on the dusty green seats.

Yah…kinda like that. Back to the point at hand. Yesterday morning I saw a man who really was almost caught in the current of the Metro Transit river, but he fought it off.

As the train came by, speeding up as it entered the station, as if to fool everyone into thinking that it had been moving quickly all along (we all knew better, because we had been careening our necks out over the track watching it’s progress down the tunnel…this is why we do that, so the train cannot fool us by implying that it was hurrying to meet us.) A man passed by me in a bobble headed wobbly sort of way, and he and the train passed each other about five feet after that. Mr. Wobbles instantly became study and strong and surefooted, but his gait slowed as he leaned forward at an impossible angle. He struggled forward for a few steps until he was pushed back by the current…back and away from the train for two steps. Regaining his foothold on the bed, presumably against an invisible under water rock (which, incidentally, is what I would have done), he surged forward three or four steps. The push and pull of the current continued for minutes, and maybe hours. How he didn’t collapse from the effort, I do not know. As the train slowed to a stop, his forward angle increased from about thirty degrees to about eighty (from the imaginary line running from under his feet, straight out in front of him) inversely proportional to the acceleration of the train, which was negative that point. When it completely stopped he started forward suddenly for a step, then returned to his previously state, rather uncontrolled but free from any encumbrances real or imagined. Mr. Wobbles again.
The woman beside me laughed lightly to herself at the scene. I don’t think she saw what happened, or maybe she did and understood better than I. Of course, she started talking to herself, as the train was not our train.

“Where is the D train, I wonder?” “I need the D train.”

…

“Where is it at?” “I need the D train!”

I cannot decide if I should ride the train more or less often now.

I spent a pretty good portion of my youth fishing. I remember that the first time my awesome killing force descended onto a river, intending to exercise my power over other creatures, I caught a carp that was pushing 7 centimeters. I decided benevolence would be the order of the day. As fishy was a worthy adversary, having caught her only by the tail instead of the mouth, I returned her to her murky life.

My mercy was indeed beautiful and grand on that muddy little eddy in the shadow of a little twenty foot cliff. The cliff was an HO model railroad version of the grand canyon. Some years later, I had another fishing adventure under the HO grand canyon. Sam (my once friendly, now angry uncle) and my older brother johosephim took me out under the shadow to mitigate the perch population of that swirling pool. Ahh, the killing was great and unbiased…young, old, skinny, and fat. We must have taken over twenty lives that day. Legal limits be damned. I say we, but that is a bit of a misnomer. I was not fortunate enough to personally take a single soul. My hooks were as spoons to the fish. They were as pillows. The fish snuggled with my bait for hours. I felt them caressing my line- lovers on a warm summer day in the back forty, away from prying eyes. I knew what was happening down below, but I kept it a secret from my fellow would be murderers. I enjoyed sensing the presence of other creatures so close, but lacked to urge to kill them.

How weak they’d have thought me, though already they sensed it. I was not meant to kill fish. I suppose that I didn’t truly want to either (again the secret that I kept even from myself). The closest I came was to act as an accomplice to murder. I held my feet in the log, blocking the exit, so others could reach in a pull out the eighty pound catfish by their gills…ok, not their gills (catfish are gill deficient…poor things…other fish stare and sometimes snicker behind their dorsal fins), but you get the point. I would also hold them down, while grandpa dale shoved a small twig into their brains. Should god st. peter judge based on cowardice, I am screwed. Neither would I kill, nor would I stop the killing.

All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace
by Richard Brautigan

I’d like to think (and
the sooner the better!)
of a cybernetic meadow
where mammals and computers
live together in mutually
programming harmony
like pure water
touching clear sky.
I like to think
(right now, please!)
of a cybernetic forest
filled with pines and electronics
where deer stroll peacefully
past computers
as if they were flowers
with spinning blossoms.

I like to think
(it has to be!)
of a cybernetic ecology
where we are free of our labors
and joined back to nature,
returned to our mammal brothers and sisters,
and all watched over
by machines of loving grace

And to think, I’ve never fished for trout on the Niangua…Only in my waking dreams.