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In Conformity With the Severe Discipline of My Country

January 5, 2015 3 Comments

 

Within this recess was found a human skeleton, of which the hand still grasped a lance. Conjecture has imagined this the remains of a sentinel, who preferred dying at his post to quitting it for the more ignominious death, which, in conformity with the severe discipline of his country, would have awaited him. — Pompeiana, by Sir William Gell

When I was a kid, they built a concrete highway through the woods, from nowhere to noplace in particular. When I got older and went feral, we used to drag race on it in the evenings. We painted stripes on it and everything. Drag racing on a deserted highway was already twenty-five years out of date, but everything in my life was always that way. Life was a live baby born to a stillborn mother.

Eventually the highway was connected to other things, and things happened around it whether they should have or not. They should have called it the chicken and the egg highway. You could put a highway from Hell to Purgatory and people would move there from Paradise, because: Hey, highway!

The highway killed the other highway that had no business being there two generations before. The pizza place with the picnic tables still hung out the pennant flags to flap themselves to their component atoms, unseen, while the cars went kachunk-kachunk-kachunk over the new pavement, just out of reach forevermore.

There was a time in the fall, after the leaves had scurried to their winter homes on the ground, when you could see a ghostly billboard way out in the woods as you went by doing seventy, easy. RED COACH GRILL. It was made to tempt men in fedoras to peer out of their beater car windows and find a place to squat in an ersatz captain’s chair, eat pot pie, and wash the dust of their sales route out of their mouths with Seven and Sevens until the million knots in the pine swam before their eyes.

The sign stood in the woods like a sentry in Pompeii and told only the deer, in runes no one understood anymore, that they could have it all back.

I Set Up A Web Camera To Document The Building Of My Last End Table

January 3, 2015 5 Comments

Why yes, I do use a giant buzz saw with the blade installed backward in it. Why do you ask?

As you can see from the screen capture thumbnail, three of the fingers on my hands are webbed. Comes in handy when I’m trying to hold on to screws while using my cordless drill. It’s not supposed to be cordless, I just cut the cord off accidentally when I was using the chop saw; but those buggers are expensive, so I keep using it that way. Takes a long time to set a screw, but it sure gives me big wrist muscles. That’s why I’m able to carry an entire lift of  2x4s on my shoulder over to the table saw that I bought at Snidely Whiplash’s yard sale.

This, people, is why women want me, and men want to be me, and children are warned to stay away from me. 

The Most Subversive Band I Ever Heard

January 2, 2015 7 Comments

No God and no religion can survive ridicule. No political church, no nobility, no royalty or other fraud, can face ridicule in a fair field, and live.  Mark Twain

When you get right down to it, I’m kind of a little sh*t. A coward, too. But I’ve always been a brave sort of coward. I appreciate cowardly courage when I see it.

I’ve never been one for a full frontal assault on anything. I believe in going around to the side door, jiggling the knob, and trying the window. There’s always a pile of dead guys right in front of any machine gun nest. It’s smarter to go around back and put a skunk in the pillbox than to charge right at it.

The Turtles were the ultimate example of a skunk thrown at a pillbox. They don’t say they’re trying to do anything but participate. They have an obvious affection for the music they’re sorta kinda playing. Kinda. Sorta. They’re delivering a funhouse version of a familiar thing. Everything about them is normal, but wrong a little. Bent a bit. When Howard Kaylan smiles at the camera, there’s a pull my finger quality about it. He’s a Cheshire Polecat. It’s an in-joke that no one’s in on. It’s just as fun as the things they mimic, but it’s taken to another level. It’s the basement level, but still, it’s another level.

I used to play pop music covers for a semi-living. We mostly played dreck, because pop music is 99 percent dreck, and I’m not sure what the other 1 percent is because I turned the radio off before it really got going. But somehow I loved it. I didn’t care that it didn’t cure cancer. I didn’t care that it was stupid. People liked it, so I played it, and I pretended to like it so they could pretend to like me, too. But I can assure you that I liked every minute of playing Happy Together, and She’d Rather Be With Me, because it’s way past pop music. It’s both the carrot and the stick, ground up together and baked in a pie, served hot. 

Happy New Year From Sippican Cottage’s Spare Heir

January 1, 2015 2 Comments

My eleven-year-old son is the last person on the face of the Earth to produce animations in Microsoft Paint. He may also be the first, but there’s no way of knowing one way or the other. At any rate, Happy New Year to everyone. Hope it’s a good one for you and yours.

Month: January 2015

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sippicancottage

A Man Who Has Nothing In Particular To Recommend Him Discusses All Sorts of Subjects at Random as Though He Knew Everything.

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