The Senate eats their hat.

You have got to check out George Galloways Hearing in the Senate Homeland Security Ninnies Club. It is 45+ minutes of wonderful in thier face down dressing, with every thing but cussing. George Galloway is a member of the British House of Parliment who the Amerikan Senate has accused of dealing with bad people like the Saudi Crown Prince and the Arab Emirates Sheik.
BBC Video of entire Hearing

The Old Hound

I remember Otho Williams and his ranch across the street.
I remember the old hound dog we had to kill because he had an incredibly bad case of mange.
I remember the gun, a twenty-two long rifle and how the bullets shined as Otho loaded it.
I remember the cattle on Otho's ranch and his story about his favorite pet bull that one day played just a little too rough with him and gored him through the chest, it caused him to have a lengthy stay in the hospital. He said he still loved that animal.
I remember the summer rains in Tennessee, the smell of wet dirt just before a drenching.
I remember it rained that day.
I remember looking and looking to find the hound so we could shoot him.
I remember the feel of the rifle in my hands, just a cold piece of steel.
I remember not thinking much about the dog or the fun we had together playing, him nipping at my arm and yipping in mock ferocity.
I remember another dog, our old English sheep dog named Jude.
I remember how he bit me one morning as I walked into the house.
I remember he wasn’t there when I came home from school that afternoon.
I remember Otho holding the hound and gently stroking him and quietly telling me to aim carefully.
I remember when the rifle chuffed the dog leapt up and started howling a terrible cry.
I remember an "Oh shit" and feeling like a monster.
I remember spending the next hour and a half trying to find and catch the dog. We followed his pained howling through the fields.
I remember finding the dog and Otho pulling the trigger to silence the old hound.
I don't remember where Otho told me to aim.
I don't remember any tears.
I don't remember the dog’s eyes or his tail wagging.
It is almost as if the old hound, because I had betrayed him, refused to inhabit my memory.
I will always remember that hound was an animal that trusted me.


This was from an exercise in a creative writing class in 1995/96 called appropriatly the "I remember exercise." I nearly cried when I read it aloud to the class.

An ode to Jonnie

I can't tell Jonnie's story without skateboards. A skater's path, is one of hard unfeeling concrete that is full of potholes and traffic. As a philosophy Skating is a non-verbal protest against a far too conservative establishment. In action it is voicing that protest by performing upon it's yellow twisted gnarly spine a long, loud, and aggressive railslide. A skater's primary fuel, second to beer, is his anger, an inate hostility, a qualified hatred of all obstacles in his path. The only truth a skater really knows about is crisis on concrete, pulling a trick off perfectly, and party, party, party.
Jonnie was an agro skater; he would skate with his entire being; he would skate until somthing broke whether it be the skateboard, the pavement, or himself. Jonnie went through his life on a skateboard. Jonnie was also an artist, and Jonnie's skater's heart made all his art a mixture of brokenglass and vomit; it was angry, painful, but above all, it was true.
When looking through the odd peices of Jonnie's art that we all had brought to the party held in his memory, I was struck by the intensity of feeling I had experienced. Everyone of us had a piece of Jonnie's art work to bring, I brought my Colors, he did the crossed skateboard and hockey stick logo. I think the one piece of art that was the most revealing of Jonnie was his antithetical Wellspring Man. This picture was a small black and white sticker made to stick on skateboards and stop signs. The picture depicted a sitting man whose head was an open commode in the process of being flushed. The man's hands were tightly gripping the open rim of his skull and his facial expression was tortured. I think that in some ways Jonnie was the Wellspring Man. Looking at the original picture I could feel Jonnie's anger, through his art I could almost sense the skater's hate that it engedered in his soul.
Jonnie was never untrue to his friends; he told all of us to goto hell. But despite Jonnie's sandpaper personality, he was liked by all of us. Our respect for Jonnie was not built on any need that he fulfilled or any of the "gimmee gimmees." Jonnie was more an experience, never expected, never boring, and always full of life. And it was this I think that we respected most: He was a better "skater" than any of us; he skated from the depths of his soul.
I remember the afternoon my girlfriend came home and told me about Jonnie's death "Oh Damn" was all I said. Jonnie died trying to ride a great white horse and skate at the same time. Jonnie died a long way from home, up north chasing a piece of himself that he had lost or forgotten at one of his lifes too many parties.
As a skater, I play the game of life in my own way, I am a skating fundementalist, with stress on the fun and mental aspects of the game. I don't believe that Jonnie played the game so hard it broke him, I think Jonnie was just too damn heavy for the thin ice of this life. I know that Jonnie the skater, the artist, and rebel is now in Valhalla. He's up there making Old One Eye blink his single eye in suprise at the airs he's pulling off. In conclusion all that I can say is "See ya, Man."

A chaotic poem

An interesting approach to life
war
innocents
dreamers
and children
walk
in one door and
out the other end
come pretty little boxes draped with flags
or untidy little piles of dirt poor rags
if we were to count
the number of people
that have died
as combatants
and civilians
in the
wars of this world
which would have the highest talley
the number of those alive today
or times total calculated dead.

I think sometimes that broken images
can show more than a crystal clear
photo.
Pieces of a broken mirror give broken images
but each piece is perspective in and of itself.
the hardest part is context, a red cloth becomes a
pile of saffron or the blood on a bandage or a stain
from yesterdays cherry pie...
broken images reflected, lost, and then found again
does the eye see it
as many pieces of the world scattered
or as the world reflected in many windows shattered
many makeup mirrors held in many smooth soft hands
in a broken mirror's melted sands
what is art but the view from the artist's shard
harmonic reflections
disonant deflections
shadow deceptions
and piece, pieces?