Just a note

Just a note to decipher the subtext of the text...to reevaluate the coming of spring and the far from inevitable presence of tulips, to ruminate on the presence of golden-capped kinglets foraging among bits of straw and the smiles of a very small friend who kicks me in the stomach at night, loves Gravedigger, nestles gently into her mothers arms to stoner rock radio at night. A tail light is fixed, a baby is born, quiche is not made. Buttons are an anachronism. Dopamine is in short supply, for want of a beast to hunt or a damsel to save, but the sword is still sharp. Love remains. As does rain.

A Tale of Two Hot Dogs

A Tale of Two Hot Dog Stands

a Culinary Review by Psykko Butcher

There are those people in life who are so obsessed with the superficial images of things that they become enveloped in a mist of their own illusions.  These are the Sham Mirrors, to borrow from Arcturus, set up in the culinary landscape to sell a simulcrum of a thing.  They proliferate, in gentrified parts of town, and account for so many duplications of the primordial Irish Pub that I can scarcely look at a backlit plastic shamrock without retching

  Rockstar dogs, despite its wonderful location, and vintage edifice, bisected by decades past road expansion to mere sliverhood, is such a place.  the hot dogs are named after rock bands, yes, though nothing so adventurous as a plague bringer, or an anal cunt.  No matter, the staff is underpaid and consequently inefficient and unfriendly, and the dogs all taste the same.  True, the hot dog is a synthetic culinary life form known for its dubiousness.  Still, my Led Zepplein was the same crap I could get for much cheaper at a real fry pit llike Mr. G's, and be surrounded by actual grease, not kitsch grease.  The fries at Rockstar suck too.  Burned, from staff obliviousness, and probably supplied by the Aramark cesspool.

  I will gossip, dear reader, and mention that the owner, Dion Antic is a legendary charlatan, a kitschmaster par excellance, founder of such culinary dens of iniquity as Iggys and others too numerous to mention.  Iggys, in its day, was lovely though, for all the cocaine left over on the tables and the waitstaff, so buxxom and tatttooed as to ooze rockandroll.   there is no rock here, only crap food.  801 n Ashland and there is on on armitage, open late, but why go?

   By contrast, Hot Doug's is a shrine to the dark god of the Wiener.  Far off, in an unfashionable stretch of California, it draws culinary pilgrims from every distant planet.  the line is formidable here, my bandmates and I have never escaped waiting outside, often in the rain, for a hot dog.  But oh, what hot dogs.  Rabbit meat, Fois gras, Venison, authentic Cincinnati chili, Duck Fat Fries, and busy staff that somehow manage to be polite and funny.   They work in the halls of the gods, plain and simple.    3324 north california m-sa 10:30-4

The Nugget Grows

The nugget appears here decked out in her traffic cone dress.  Cutest cone on the lot, and able to comprehend a completely autonomous version of reality.  Last night, my birthday, her mom dressed her for Metal.  She loved the loud music and new faces.  Ruby, it is fun waking up near you, your optimism in the face of each new day is a lesson we will not forget.  

New vocalizations today, spent some time implementing surprised shouts, pique, infant pique.  So ephemerable, this person, who transfigures with each passing day, like a tulip, or a skunk cabbage, rising from black earth, much of its program preset by genes and previous development, but nothing in her biology prepares her for elevators, Blue Oyster Cult, the Green Line flowing over traffic.

Spring

Tidbit, mighty hunter, sits in the window, transfixed by the unattainable.  Dark-eyed juncos procrastinate lazily there, delaying their great northward march, and a pair of cardinals, happy from their experiences last year, has returned to taunt the mutant felid.  Oh, to be a creodont, huge jaws, slathering tongue, ferocious Oligocene hunter stalking the ancestral camel, the baby titanothere, fresh from its mothers massive teat.  And the youngster, asleep on the bed, sun playing over the blankets, dreams of mammae also.  Her expressions change like summer squalls rushing over a restless sea.  I feel like a gradeschooler, perfectly healthy, informing my mom of terrible illness, goldbricking my way through a lovely, quiet day.  The guilt is there, somehow, I should be at work finding caps for test tubes, or giving early exams for students who suddenly find the need to leave early on some spring break adventure.  Oh, lovely spring, you have waited so long to come and the impatient tulips press through the ground with measurable frustration at your tardiness.  Somewhere, in the briny deep, a deep salty current changes its course, fins flutter, and the descent of another ice age is determined.

Dear Ruby

Dear Ruby,
It will be a while before you are able to read this, but thank you for all the times you have stared into my eyes and, with all the meaningful gaze you could muster, stood on my chest and made conversation with me. I thought this would take years. No words, nonsyllbles in fact, but so much exchange of emotion. I was happy to enjoy the new Metallica album with you yesterday, and yes, those crunchy gallops were magnificent. Some of their best work, despite their age. Keep this in mind when you are playing as a teenager and I am an old man.
Love

The Flatlanders

I suppose I should start by mentioning that I am an unreliable narrator. This is either a story of doomed heroic exploits, a journey to the underworld, and a starship, or it is not. I may or may not be a human being. These captors of mine may or may not be doctors. It is no difficult task to imprison a man, but to imprison an ageless superbeing-that is another matter entirely.
How did I get to this place? I remember an ice field, the longship frozen in stasis, crippled in a drift of methane snow, leaking atomic power, its crew salvaging swords and skins for survival, set forth along the surface of the dark, lifeless planetoid. Lucidity comes to me gradually as I write this. The rocket was impaled by a meteorite. Its reactors spilling radioactive coolant into the void between its two hulls, it is amazing that the feeble humans at the helm were able to set it down in one place? piece. Yes, piece is the word. Tarterus is a dark world, adrift in the cosmos, ejected from a now-distant solar system by a planet intent upon devouring its siblings, like Saturn, devouring its children, its gaseous envelope thick and spinning with helium argon envelope, the methane frozen ing gossamer fields, as drifting snow. Here, ice is as permanent as stone and the wounded rocket, perilously balanced on its aft fins, sent up clouds of steamy gaseous mist. Elsewhere, there was quiet, and twenty nine men did trudge into the ether black plain with little but their courage. Little did they know the fate that awaited them. Elder beings, vastly more powerful, had designs of their own for the men and their crude machine.
"Mr. Anaeus?" It was a voice not unlike a carpet sample-bland and ordinary and promising huge amounts of the same. It was a beige voice full of beige overtones.
"Mr. Anaeus, have you been listening? It is important that you stick to your schedule o medication."
A sliver of terrestrial sunlight filters through the mostly-clothed miniblind. It is a grand sun, a G2 on the Hersprung-Russell scale, and the inhabitants of this globe are not worthy of it. Institutional walls, more beige, surround my corporeal form. Air ducts. These creatures breathe gaseous oxygen, suspended in a mixture of other gasses. I hate their sense organs, generally speaking, limited to three of the seven dimensions of spacetime Still, there is something to be said for the eyes of this tree-dwelling monkey. So many nuances of color, a narrow slice of the multitudinous radiation from its magnificent sun. I am restricted to an unlikely brane. They think the world they see is all there is. They are like flatlanders.
"I am a prisoner here, and the medication you speak of is engineered to prevent my eventual escape. It immobilizes my limbic system, obstructs the puny cerebral hemispheres of this monkey brain from higher function, and prevents me from psychotemporal projection into the othe dimensions. This mind here..." I say, pointing a blunt digit at the shelly test beneath my furry covering, a cranium, "It is a tendril, an extensionn of a far greater being, imprisoned on a world so vastly different than your own that you cannot comprehend the smallest particle. You, sir, are a blocked exit, and these alkaloids you prescribe are no medicine."
The creature adjusts the crude, wire-rimmed lenses in front of his eyes. He is aging. These bodies wear out so tragically. Free of predators, because generations ago their ancestors killed mighty sabre-toothed beasts with stone-hafted spears, their ancestors are free to grow old and weak, surrounded by notebooks an sterile walls.

nugget vid