Short

"Don't go around saying the world owes you a living. The world owes you nothing. It was here first."
-Mark Twain

"Don't worry about avoiding temptation. As you grow older, it will avoid you."
-Winston Churchill

Merry Christmas

Christmas is real close. A few days away. I'll drink more and more as the day approaches and on December 25th I will drink really sweet fancy things like brandy Alexanders and Hairy Navels and Egg Nog with Brandy. I am also going to cook a three rib prime roast, bake two sweet potatoes and put together a from scratch delectable Caesar Salad. I will make a couple of incredibly good desserts that my Mom used to make. Something she called a Matrimonial Cake that takes about 2 lbs. of dates, and Lemon squares that I consider a health dessert (Haha). I will set a beautiful table with a linen table cloth and napkins. I will light candles and open a good bottle of wine.This will be enough food to keep me nourished for about two weeks. This I will do all by myself. I do all this because I have to or else. I also do this because hope springs eternal and maybe someone will come to my house to share. Merry Christmas.

Short

"There is a theory which states that if ever anybody discovers exactly what the universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable. There is another theory which states that this has already happened."

Douglas Adams

Going Green

I was out feeding my horses the other day. In the interest of contributing to the greening of the planet I was wearing a coconut fibre shirt, soybean pants and a fashionable puce bamboo-based sweat shirt.

Surprize!!

The horses ate my clothes.

Short

"Go to heaven for the climate...hell for the company."


Mark Twain

Photographs of Me

I have photographs of me
And paragraphs in yellowed journals
Someone I thought I'd be
That's all that's left of me
The girlhood gonna be
A woman still surprized
Just to be alive

...the goose is getting fat

..please put a penny in the old man's hat.
Winter has struck the BItterroot Valley. Finally! We're having a real Montana winter. Maybe it will stay and we'll have a real spring and summer again. My lilacs will bloom again and there will be apples on my trees. There will be no forest fires ruining the summer with choking smoke and frayed nerves.
Tonight there is a blowing blizzard outside my warm little house. I have the lights on my Christmas tree and my kitties are safe inside with me.
Life is good for it's simple things.
Tomorrow morning I will be clearing my way throught the snowdrifts to my car..maybe. Maybe I'll just take the day off.

A bit of the short of it

The NRPS are playing at the GAMH tonight. It would be great fun to be there but the effort required to do that was just too much.
There's a fella boarding a couple of horses here. This is the first time I ever wintered horses here. Sandy used to graze her horses here during the summer but we always shut down the outside water for the winter and left the pasture empty. The man heat wrapped the water pipes but after the bad cold spell we've had for the past three days, no water is coming out of the spigot. I don't think the pipes are frozen, I think the spigot has broken!! I have the milk house heater going down in the well pump pit but I don't think that is the problem. The horse owner of course is gone for the weekend although the bad weather hit before he left and my opinion is that if you have animals that may need extra attention you don't go out of town for a freakin' party! The water is low in the stock tank and tomorrow (Thanksgiving Day) I may be hauling water from my house two gallons at a time as that is all I can carry with my bad arm.

Todays Opinions

Victoria's secret is that she is borderline anorexic.
Being married with children is not all it's cracked up to be...staying single is not promoted half enough.
Good wine is better than mediocre sex.
Cats are not smarter than dogs, they just don't care as much.
Dogs are not smarter than cats, they just care too much.
If you doubt that global warming is a fact, ask the polar bears.
And...as ever and always..QUESTION AUTHORITY!

It's Good to Feel Bad

Been hearing a lot about depression the past few years, since everybody and their brother is an amateur psychologist, thanks to the proliferation of self-help books. Meanwhile, health professionals and pharmaceutical companies are raking in the dough manufacturing and selling anti-depressants, some of which have actually made people seriously ill! Depression has become a big business. The line between actual debilitating suicidal depression and the good old-fashioned blues has become seriously blurred. No one wants to feel bad even for a few minutes.
If you never feel bad, how do you know when you feel good?

Short

"Generosity is a part of my character, and I therefore hasten to assure this government that I will never make an allegation of dishonesty against it where a simple explanation of stupidity will suffice."
Leslie Lever

Short

For my dear friend of many years, Dan-o who I know will never read this anyway but...

"I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with pain."
James Baldwin

Short

"It would be nice if the poor were to get even half of the money that is spent on studying them."
Bill Vaughn

Drinkin' 'n' Smokin'

To hell with it. Thought I would ever stop? It's one in the morning on a Saturday, I worked all week cleaning and organizing the environs of a lazy rich woman and if anyone imagines that I would not stretch out tonight...well!
HOWEVER...these days I rest my ashtray on the center of a room air purifier 'cause I find the odour of cigarette smoke singularly offensive.
I should be in the Bay Area this weekend with David and Buddy and MARMADUKE!! The New Riders are riding together this weekend and I'm not there. (Ah well...they were mean to me anyway.)

Wildlife

The dogs treed a baby bear at The Hot Springs yesterday. Cute little guy, well not SO little, could chew your hand off at the wrist if you got close enough...nonethless, we've been seeing signs of him for a few weeks now but finally got a good look. He's kind of dark silver colored with black paws and head... I watched as he slid down the tree, hit the ground running and tailed it straight up the side of the canyon and handily eluded the dogs. They never had a chance.
Also had a mama racoon and two babies in my front yard last night. I love it here!!!

Short

"You can't keep blaming yourself. Just blame yourself once, then move on." Homer Simpson

Quotations

"If it's true that our species is alone in the universe, then I'd have to say that the universe aimed rather low and settled for very little." George Carlin

Poem 1968

Stumbling and lost in simple data
Embryonic soul awash with guilt
For countless uncommitted sins
A human being.

A Dead Memory 1971/72

Frankie was burned out on my jeans and T-Shirt habit. New Year's Eve at 6pm she was altering a gown of hers to fit me. It was a lovely pale aqua, cut on the bias with tiny covered buttons from cleavage to floor. To illustrate her determination, she moved every button and let out a half inch or so to make the gown fit. I have to say, it fit like the proverbially glove. She had a professional at the house to do our hair and make-up. Frankie took my glasses and I didn't see them again until the next morning. (Hell...without my glasses I didn't see much of anything until the next morning!) I had to admit that I probably looked pretty good by the way people were staring at me with mouths agape but I couldn't tell you who they were. This was the New Years at Winterland when some crazed Deadhead climbed through the skylight in the roof and was reelin' and a rockin' on the catwalk a hundred feet or so above the very center of the stage. Actually, had he fallen he would have pretty much wiped out Kreutzman's drum set. The audience went eerily quiet as they began to realize what was happening, every face an upturned moon watching the man on the catwalk. Backstage,I'm poking people beside me. "What's happening?! What's happening?!"
The band prudently vacated the stage as Bill Graham, in his inimitable fashion, talked the man down. They lowered this nutso on a rope to the stage where security could snatch him, remove him and the show went on.
Also, it's important to know that that night, no one was allowed onstage/backstage unless you let Rex drop you a dose. So, besides my standard myopia I was hallucinating like crazy.
I looked good though. Everyone said so. For the first and last time in my life I truly was a RAVING beauty!
The next morning we all ended up back at Weirs (including Graham), Frankie gave me back my blue jeans, my T-Shirt and my glasses and we all went to Muir beach to play volleyball until sunset.

The Fires Come

Fire has again encompassed a major portion of my beloved State of Montana. The heat has been unbearable and now we get the interminable smoke...day in and day out. I try to keep in mind that there are men and women out there on the firelines in intense heat and danger keeping the fires from the homes of the people who insist on building right on or in the edges of the National Forests.
Also have noticed that there is a dearth of fawns this year. I usually have at least 5 or 6 does with one or two fawns apiece cavorting around the apple and pear trees from June throughout the summer.
What global warming?

Oh Gawd! The heat! The heat!

Still labouring under this oppressive heat wave..(what global warming?) Montana is the new Arizona. I guess this could be yet another advance for population control. All the elderly who moved to Arizona for a "comfortable" climate will soon be dropping dead from the heat, leaving Arizona to become the new Sahara. Oh lighten up! Death happens. duh

TANGIER 1967

Have just done some hashish. Feel very good. Just have time to have a little high and come down in time to get drunk enough to go to work for bread to buy more hashish and come down a bit. Swim in sea at 10:30 and sun-tanning in tangerine bikini then some kif to cool the hashish tingle and come down in time to go to work. Swallow eight amphetamines and start the vodka and orange juice fresh squeezed and play with Max...and Peter keep your hands off my legs. And then to sing rock-folk-blues finally groove. Anything goes. Scarlet, orange, pink and black jumpsuit no back in it sexy, oozy dig it! Take drummer's hands off back (tomorrow bongoes) Japanese organist really awful but I groove so much anything swings now, mind in a rocker with pendulum motion feel heartbeat, breathe, breathe. Sing deep go low, low, high is shrill go low groove, growl, scream low and purr the notes descending. Down, down punctuate with ascensions and you have the permission to sing she told her so sing. New note, new beat, new groove, real groove, honest work first time Tangier good head, work hard smile! Hard hearted Hannah and sing about butter melting in mouth and give little sister a set or two to sing. Can't stop free association, first time, very groove. Blind owls can only see in the dark. Vitamin sun and sandy hair, flowers, scent, donkey bray, braw, brawl. Storms. Losing altitude. More hashish to maintain level. Must close, mind degeneration, no more swings hear bells taste tin. Return home. Do not pass go. Do not collect 200 saints in the making.

Someone's Coming

Put me on a desert island
Leave me well supplied and go
If I should stay for 50 years
And never see a soul
I'd still live every day expecting someone

Paul Simon

I live in a fairly tech-free spot on the planet. I compute with dial-up, any local high speed companies do not service my area, cable does not reach this far out of town and I don't want to subscribe to a dish. I live high enough above the Bitterroot valley so that I receive over the air. ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox and two PBS channels. Plenty of television for me! And it's all free! As a result, I watch a lot of PBS and tonight was treated to a two hour special of Paul Simon receiving the newly formed Library of Congress George Gershwin Prize for Popular Song. The line-up of musical guests is WOW!!!! Show began with Stevie Wonder and Paul Simon and just went uphill. All you cable and satellite TV freaks, please try to not be distracted from PBS by all the other available "entertainments". Did you know that Roy Rogers and Dale Evans sang "Bridge Over Troubled Water". Not the best rendition but a part of music history nontheless. Mark Anthony blew me away with a rendition of "I'd Rather Be A Hammer Than A Nail". If there's a repeat airing of this show...DON'T MISS IT!!!

A Weather Change in Montana

The heat has finally blown away in front of a sweet cool breeze across the Bitterroots and I think I will cheer up. All year, small herds of deer pass through my property every evening.This time of year the herds separate and become one doe who exhibits the behaviour that shows she has a fawn hidden in my pasture. Any day now, she will allow the little thing to follow her and I will get to see sweet baby life in the summer in the mountains.

Things that happen to me

When he asked me to go to Morocco with him, I leapt at the chance. Flew on Lufthansa Airlines to Luxembourg; bussed to Paris where we spent a couple of days while J did some obscure drug business. While I was waiting in a little corner bistro where J had parked me with our luggage, I met Mississippi Slim who was playing at that very cafe!
We arrived in Tangier a couple of weeks later and I discovered that J had brought along an 8x10 sheet of blotting paper dosed with LSD. I subsequently discovered that you can only reach a good psychedelic peak every three days or it just turns into a racing speed trip. After a few weeks of three day increments, I reached my goal. I went psychotic and developed an LSD induced schizophrenia. More later...

The Blissful Idiot

The blissful idiot walks up (and down) the road
Two, three, sometimes four times a day.
It's all he knows to do.
Everyone thinks he doesn't matter,
'Cause we all think he doesn't care.
I think he must be lonely but I'm like everybody else.
Imagine if we open to him we'll discover he needs more
Than what we have to give
Just like all of us.
And just like all of us
He's so lonesome that
One soul responding to him
Would be owned forever

Things that happen to me

It was 1965. I met a crazy man in Toronto. He was incredibly dark handsome with black/brown burning eyes and a rapid mind. He had gone crazy in Turkey, was scooped off the streets in rags with no id, no money and put into a Turkish prison. His identity was finally established and his parents brought him back to Toronto where he was hospitalized, detoxed and ultimately released. I met him mere days later. I was fascinated by the thought of insanity. How far could you go "out of your mind" and still come back? Here was someone who had gone over to the other side of mental function and returned. I wanted to do that too. More to come...

Welcome to my World

We each perceive the whole in an entirely unique way. It's always been a wonder to me that any of us communicate at all. I have been labouring under the delusion that one day I would write a book about my travels, my experiences, my life. It's not easy and as it turns out, not all that important to anyone but myself and a "small circle of friends". Who first said that? Then here in the wonder world of Internet there comes to be a place where I can tell my story . If anyone hears (reads) it or not remains to be seen. This blogging thing is brand new to me so bear with me as I leap word first into the fray. Welcome to my world as I see it.