The Paintjob

*

Sometimes technology brings about things that, for all their convenience and sophistication, create a completely new niche for enterprising lifeforms.

For example: toilets (or water closets as people so euphemistically termed them at one time) were big improvement on shitting in a pit or a bucket; and of course toilet paper was a big improvement on sharing a couple of grubby towels between a few people. I've heard that people used to use corn husks for that purpose, but it's the kind of detail that no one really talked about at the time, let alone wrote about, so it's mostly speculation as these trivial things get lost to history quickly.

It hasn't been until the late twentieth century that people discovered how to cook food without having to heat a whole oven up; the good thing about heating an oven to cook is that it naturally sterilizes itself with every use. Microwave ovens do not share this property.

*

In my early 20's I met a guy named Jean-Paul downtown at the popular cafe that was located out front of our rehearsal space. We hit it off and got to talking about this and that. Jean-Paul had just moved out from Montreal and was surfing a friend's sofa temporarily, but needed a place for him and his girlfriend Marie to stay for at least the summer. I said that one of my roommates was moving out so they could take the spare room. He was thrilled and we made arrangements for the next week after we'd cleaned up the room.

Well, Jean-Paul and Marie moved in, and I couldn't believe how much stuff they had, for people who were just 'out from Montreal for a while' in a VW van. They had a mountain of clothes that wouldn't fit in the bedroom so they made a pile in the basement about ten feet across and three feet high. Between the two of them they used more than a full roll of toilet paper every day. Before they moved in, it took the three roomies and all their guests and sleepovers a few days to kill a roll. It became apparent after a while that it was Marie who used a giant wad just to dab after a pee, and if she crapped, well, there goes two thirds of a roll. I got to plunge that old toilet clear about every third day. I guess some people just think that it's normal. I guess it is normal in the life of a renter when the real estate market forces people to live in semi-domestic commune, three or five to a house.

As a little digression here, I should explain why I was living like this:

The 'rock-n-roll' band I was involved with needed a space where we could rehearse in our typically boisterous way, and also a place to freely party after late night gigs. The four of us sort of split up from the house we had been renting together for almost three years and rendezvoused regularily at a communally acquired place downtown. The group of us managed to find a couple of good sized rooms on street level down on Hastings, only a block from the Hotel whose Beverage Room has sustained Vancouver's much coveted Beer Selling Record for over twenty years in a row. The rent was cheap, and the location was perfect.

When I moved out of the band house (what we called the 'Hefty House') I got myself a place that had more yin than yang: with two lovely females of the same species, three felines, and two canines, among the more reputable occupants. Things seemed good.

Our business collective also had to do commerce from somewhere other than the house we had been living in for the past two and a half years: J__, our drummer, had begun selling a gram or two of fine local herb to a few friends, and within a year, the few friends turned into a steady parade of people pulling up in front of the house in a quiet residential neighbourhood. The band was using the basement to jam, and we weren't exactly quiet. The neighbours had begun complaining, and a couple of incidents had brought the police to the house. The obvious solution was to invest the profits in a 'proper' place of business, right in the downtown core near Victory Square, and right beside Hemp BC, the activist centre.

The rooms, what we called 'The Joint', were behind a cafe, you got to it by walking down a 97 foot hallway that was full of obscene graffiti, ugly chicken scratches authored by uninspired mean people. My friend Milo was a commercial painter by trade and an enthusiastic graffiti artist by night. Over the years he had developed a huge collection of miscellaineous gallons of nicely coloured paint, and donated them to our cause. The idea was to paint the gawdawful intimidating hallway in such a way that it would appear shorter than it actually was, and brighten the ambience that seemed to encourage a lot of nasty behaviour by misguided people.

We proceeded to haul the fifty gallons of paint down there, along with all the gear to go with them: sprayers, rollers, brushes, buckets, rags, and a pile of other stuff that may or may not be of actual use. We put it all in milkcrates and stored it in the corner of the secondary room that was the main lounge and rehearsal den.

The next afternoon when I got back down there to begin the paint job, I noticed that some of the stuff was missing(?!). A litre of paint thinner, a crappy brush, and a slot screwdriver had vanished in the twelve hours I was gone. The high caliber of customer that came through the place obviously perceived used painting supplies as a hot black market item, or a cool new addition to their hot-plate welfare special on the third floor of the Golden Crown Hotel. I had to hide the supplies under a tarp and pile a bunch of heavy things on top to keep the klepto-fingers out.

I tried painting during the day but stopped due to the incessant whining from the people using the washroom down the end of the hallway. So, I had to wait until after about eleven at night, when the place quieted down. I'd boot down on my motorcycle, park it on the sidewalk right in front of the glass doors, break out the paint etc, be at work by about midnight, and go until six in the morning. Every night I had to get rid of drunk people who were bored enough to want to help me, or guys who stood around babbling doped up nonsense, expecting some kind of mutual dialogue, until I made some impatient and irritated comment that sent them away. I noticed that the easiest way to double the length of time required to do something was to have a drunk person help.

The third night painting, my motorcycle got vandalized. This is a popular pastime for losers worldwide: take a fist-sized chunk of something stone-like and smash the exposed sparkplugs on a motorcycle engine. Apparently, a certain variety of greasy shitstain has some use for the little bits of porcelain that break off. Needless to say, the bike doesn't run too fucking well after that.

I was surprised that someone would do it while the bike was in plain view, I parked the thing right outside the glass doors to the hallway, risking a seventy five dollar ticket for driving on the sidewalk, just so I could see it. I guess someone waited for me to turn my back and then they started hammering away with a rock or brick.

In order to get home that morning, I had to remove the boots from the plug wires, and jam the wire over what was left of the copper conductor of the smashed plug. To keep it running I cranked the idle so the engine never dropped below 6000rpm, and just used the clutch or coasted. After that I started carrying spare sparkplugs.

On the fifth night I very nearly got into a fight with some big knucklehead who thought the colourful paintjob was 'gay'. Fortunately, some friends stepped in and there was no actual brawling. I've never been one for a casual brawl. By the time I'm angry enough to fight, I'm angry enough to kill. The vast majority of the fights I've been involved with, I was trying to save a friend from getting a nasty pummeling, and never really had to get angry, it was mostly yelling, pushing, and wrestling, then winding down for a couple of hours.

Many times I've been glad to live in Canada where there isn't a proliferation of cheap handguns, because if I carried one I would have used it on more than one occasion. Then I'd be writing this from prison, and I'm not, thankfully.

On the seventh night, my $350 (1991 Canadian dollars) lamb skin leather jacket got stolen by this dipshit named Yuri, who was one of the annoying people that stood around babbling nonsense at me, and was on the receiving end of a few irritated remarks. He's probably the same dicksore who liked to smash my plugs.

Fortunately, my 'business partners' let the jacket disappear right from under their noses, felt pretty bad about it and coughed up some money for a new one from their ready cash-flow. This time I got a really cool oilskin from Australia that worked even better on a motorcycle in the rain than the leather one.

On the tenth night I got a ticket for parking on the sidewalk, so on the eleventh night my bike got vandalized again because it wasn't parked it plain view. By now the cooling fins on both sides of the engine were chipped, thrashed, and bent from the weekly hammering, and even though the bike only used two sparkplugs, I bought them six at a time.

By now the basic paintjob was pretty much done: a sloping horizon starting near the ceiling at the doors and ending near the floor at the end of the 97 foot run. Below the horizon was a lovely aquamarine that gave the impression of water, and above it was all the colours of the sunrise and sky: white for the sun, yellow, orange, red, violet, deep purple, indigo. I painted rustic stone archways over all the doors, and called in Milo to do an exotic spraybomb piece near the entrance. That really got people whining, even at three in the morning with the doors wide open and fans blowing.

I stretched the finishing touches out over the next month because they all involved smelly spraybomb pieces and miserable remarks from unappreciative dwellers of the night.

The only thing I ever got paid was a small bag of herb once in a while, but the owner of the cafe gave me breakfast occasionally if I was still around long enough in the morning when the grill got going. People who liked art really liked the hallway.

The rather neat paintjob lasted for almost three years until we moved into a new and much bigger place across the street.

The Joint got taken over by violent goons. They painted the hallway a consistent dis-heartening black and kicked a young man to death after he attempted to spiff a patch of the wall with a nice airbrush piece. As far as I know the small work is still there, with a scrawled epithet underneath it: "In memory of M__ B__." I'm kind of sorry I never knew the kid.

*

Anyway, back to the misunderstood qualities of modern technology:

Jean-Paul and Marie brought this reasonably new-fashioned microwave oven with them: it had a very large, pasty white albino cockroach living inside the display panel. The creature was almost transparent from lack of light and constant irradiation. Sometimes (if you dared use it) you had to bang on the clear part to get it to move so you could read the timer. They rarely cleaned the thing, and I speculated daily about 'making it disappear', maybe hauling it down the lane and pitching it in one of the dumpsters when the two of them were out somewhere.

Now, throwing your room-mates appliances in the dumpster is most definately not the kind of behavior that improves a domestic situation, and things were a bit tense already, so I shrugged and hoped that the thing wouldn't infect the whole house with cockroaches or some nasty and chronic dysentery-like stomach ailment.

I had just gotten rid of one roomy that left food open on the counter all night, and then covered it up and put it in the fridge the next morning for unsuspecting hungry people to eat (and blow, about 8 or 12 hours later).

I never saw so many stomach complaints as when I lived with her. The only reason I even tolerated her for the six months she lived there was that I had been sort of infatuated with her feisty attitude, dark hair and lovely brown eyes for about three years. Now she was expecting a baby from a half-wit drummer named Burt who was in a rather unambitious grind-core band, so I think I was exercising some kind of paternal thing, maybe trying to teach her some kitchen etiquette also. She was a fairly inspired cook in a vegetarian kind of way in her better moments.

The microwave oven kept getting more and more foul. After they finally cleaned it, it still smelled like rotten chicken parts, and even Jean-Paul and Marie stopped using the thing, yet it still sat there spreading it's small lifeforms about the immediate environment. The odor was obviously coming from inside the workings of it, but even I wouldn't take the screws off the back to see what was in there. I started noticing 'roaches once in a while, and you know the saying about roaches: if you see one, there's a thousand, especially in those crappy old world war II houses. I tried talking to them about it on numerous occasions, but Marie had some sentimental fondness for her portable roach farm and Jean-Paul felt he had to indulge her little-girl whims in order to continue getting laid, so it sat there day after day.

I was using the basement to grow tall weedy herbs in a semi-legitimate business venture as part of my self-employment strategy and it precluded calling service personnel over to fix the furnace, or exterminate the roaches, or clean the chimney, without moving the whole operation out to the garage for a few days, significantly more difficult to do than to say, as anyone in the business can tell you.

Well, Jean-Paul and Marie moved out after a few months and went travelling through the interior. They ditched the microwave and one stack of their crap at another friends place, left a good pile of junk in the basement of my place, and spread the big albino roach's rotten-chicken-smelling offspring to another corner of the city. I stayed in that house for another year, eventually shut the grow op down, and left the roaches for the next tenants.

*

Woody Of The Week

This is a beauty.

Much better eye candy than my grandad.

This was my granddad.

It looks like he's about ready to thump the camera man. You can tell this guy was old-school by the butt hanging from his mouth. The striped socks are a nice touch. I think they were a gift from his mother, maybe a bribe to sit for a stupid photo shoot. Maybe he had to borrow the suit.

Check out the wickedly cool chair. There is absolutely no way you will get that from Ikea.

He worked the fishing boats off Newfoundland and Nova Scotia most of his life.

I never really knew him all that well as I grew up on the west coast in Vancouver, but I recall him as a stern but loving man. He taught me how to make a whistle from a 2 inch piece of branch. You had to suck on it until the bark slid off, then you whittled the wood a bit, slid the bark back on, and it was a really loud whistle. To this day I haven't found the right twig to do this. Maybe they only grow on the east coast. Maybe I just forgot. I was quite young when he taught me this. Here's a link to a page by someone who seems to have had a working recollection about the wood whistle.

My wife thinks I take after him quite a bit.

Piano Tuner by Ignacio Noe E201

Episode 2 of The Piano Tuner, by Ignacio Noe.
This does not belong to me, but it needs to be shared.
Enjoy. Try to find his other stuff. His art is amazing.

Piano Tuner by Ignacio Noe E202

Piano Tuner by Ignacio Noe E203

Piano Tuner by Ignacio Noe E204

Piano Tuner by Ignacio Noe E205

Piano Tuner by Ignacio Noe E206

Piano Tuner by Ignacio Noe E207

Piano Tuner by Ignacio Noe E208

Another Stupid Work Dream

I drove for hours to some big commercial site, new construction, trucks and gear all over the place, techs and loud machinery crawling everywhere. I didn't have any parts so I was waiting for Jas, he had them.

I decided to scope out the job. It was a zoo. You couldn't move anywhere without tripping over air-hoses and extension cords, bonking your head on projecting crap, and mostly staying out of the way of busy workers and moving equipment. The whole job was problematic, 1 inch holes needed to be blasted through concrete, everything needed masonry anchors, the ducting guys were using every available inch of plenum space, and cops were giving out parking tickets to anyone they felt like, for no particular reason.

Finally I got a hold of the girls in the office and they told me Jas was sick. No parts. I did all this for nothing.

I found my way back out of the dungeon to find that my truck (and tools) had been towed away.

It's the only time I ever cried in a dream.

Work Dream

I woke up this morning at 4:30am after a long and arduous work dream. These suck. It's like I never get a break from work even when I'm home.

I didn't have to get to the site until 8, so Megan and I snuggled for an extra hour. She made my lunch while I had a good lingering crap doing a crossword. Thanks again Megan.

I made my big cup of dark roast, kissed her, we told each other to be careful. I said "See you this afternoon", and left.

The van was doing fine so I headed off to #3-8257 121A St. I was a few minutes early as usual so I did a drive-by then drove around the block for the hell of it, parked, finished my smoke, then bounced over the speed bumps and parked in front of their garage.

I was in a town-house park, 2 storey mirror image dwellings called Kennedy Glade. These were older places, at least 20 years, so it was not what I was expecting, especially from the retarded misinformation on the work order.

Woody of the Week

Jully Black. What a babe.

Yum.
Here's a link to a nice vid.

Jewel

That's Jewel. Looks like she having a good time.

Not a Woody of the Week, but just a nice pic.

Woody of the Week

That's Melissa McClelland and Luke Doucet. She's a babe with a beautiful clear voice.

Rihanna Punch&Fuck Doll©®(tm)

Is it just me or does she annoy you too?

Remember those old inflatable punch bags? They looked like bozo the clown or whatever. They had sand in the bottom, you'd punch them and they'd bounce around and stand back up.

How about one of those made with Rihanna's face? You could pose it and knock it down. It's got a fuck-hole in front and back, plus an extra one up high where her mouth is.

Betcha that'd be popular.

My Brother's IPod

My brother got an IPod for christmas. Neat-o. It has a radio tuner and made music right off the cuff. Cool.

I plugged it into a computer and it showed up as a flash drive. Cool.

I stuffed it full of music and... nothing. It doesn't actually play mp3s.

I did some research on the net and found out that you need to sync it to ITunes and shit like that. I run linux, so I spent some time grepping around only to find out that it really isn't an mp3 player.

So I boot into XP and download ITunes. 90 megs. I run the bloated executable. It takes 10 minutes just to pop up a fucking window. Then it takes 3 fucking hours to install! I can install a real fancy operating system in 45 minutes. WTF? At this point I know I'm getting into a world of shit here.

Finally the install of ITunes is done, so I realize the stupid dongle is stuffed full and moved all the mp3s off to make some room, all 1710 of them. That takes a while. Now it's empty. I run ITunes and it takes me straight to a page where I have to enter a valid credit card number to initialize the IPod.

Well, let me tell you. I have been into computers since 1983 and I HAVE NEVER PUT MY CREDIT CARD ON THE INTERNET. There is no choice to pass at this point. I minimize the stupid window and try to just get the 1710 mp3s on it. no go. By this time I've spent about 8 hours fucking around with this idiotic thing. IPods are stupid.

I boot back into linux and drop the issue. About 4 in the morning I wake up with fresh inspiration and compile gtkpod. After some dependency issues I get it going. YEAH! It puts music on the stupid dongle but somehow cannot update the database files. Now I'm 12 hours into the IPod fiasco and it still doesn't play mp3s.

Fuck it. I take it back to my brother and tell him, "This is the first and last IPod I will ever have anything to do with. You wanna fuck with it, go ahead. But I recommend you take it back and buy a real mp3 player."

I saw a nice 16G Philips Muse for only $90.

Fuck Apple and the horse they rode in on.

Panda the autistic cat

A while back we had a cat we called Panda. He was an energetic little thing, mostly white with black patches. We got him from my friend Bill who has cats but they all get inbred because he doesn't get them fixed.

Panda was amazing. He was a hunter. No way around it. He would hunt anything that moved. He caught giant earthworms, mice, rats, bugs, birds, snakes, squirrels, you name it, he caught it.

I once heard an old chinese myth about the ridges on the top of a cat's mouth. The more ridges they have the better hunter they'll be. The cat I had before Panda, I called Tyrone, and I had him for 15 years. He was a great hunter. He had 11 ridges on his upper palate. Our other cat we still have, Tasha, is a shitty hunter. She has 0 ridges on her palate. She doesn't hunt at all.

On a couple occasions I tried to count the ridges on Panda's palate. I got to 13 before he'd squirm and squawk so much I'd lose count. It's kinda hard to count the ridges on the top of a cat's mouth, especialy if it's a crazy little thing like him.

He was autistic. If it involved hunting, he was a brilliant genius. But he couldn't figure out how to push the bathroom door open enough to get through. He'd sit there thinking "That's too small a space to get through, I'm not even going to try." Tasha just puts her shoulder into it and shoves it open. She even pulls doors open by grabbing them with her claws and pulling.

Well, back to Panda's hunting fetish.

One Sunday morning I was laying in bed with Megan. She was still snoozing, and I was just loafing, thinking about making tea, but more thinking about having a nice morning shag with her. The covers were half off me and my dick started to sprout. My eyes were mostly closed, thinking about erotic things to get the blood going the right direction.

In my reverie I hadn't noticed Panda sitting by the side of the bed, but he had noticed me. Or at least my dick. To him it must have looked like some crazy giant worm climbing out of my crotch. He pounced and scored. He caught my cock in his talons and WOKE _ME_ RIGHT UP!

When I screamed and bolted upright with arms aflailing I guess he realized this wasn't just some ordinary garden critter and let go, thank God.

He glanced at my face briefly, before backing away from my firmly clasped package before I realized what had just happened. He got the hell out of the room before I even had the proper consciousness to throw him out.

Woody Of The Week

Check out this hottie. Her name is Jolene "Little Miss" Higgins and she's a fantastic musician and singer.

Her info is at http://www.littlemisshiggins.com/bio.htm. There's a great video at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zKIVRxULqHw. Watch how the trumpet player (Chris Whiteley) keeps looking at her with nothing but adoration (and what appears to be a significant sparkle of lust) in his eyes.

Yum.

I checked Concerts on Demand on cbc.ca and I found out through an askance comment of hers that she's a grandmother. Who woulda thought a hot blooded brunette firecracker like that could get so much action :) Whadya think she is? Mid-late thirties? Bet her kid's even hotter. Hard to find much info though. I didn't even know her name was Jolene until CoD.

I heard Kate Moss said "Nothing tastes as good as skinny feels." She's a clueless no-talent skank. My policy ( and I'm sure a lot of men will second this) is "Nothing looks and feels as good as a properly fed woman". Ergo this blog. I'd publish pictures of my own beautiful properly fed wife, but I like anonymity.

Here's an excellent take of her Dirty Ol' Tractor Song. Feed that url to mplayer and you can hear it through your speakers. Might even work in wmp. Never tried. It came from from this concert.

Enjoy.