I went to a friend’s apartment in Lexington over the weekend, and a poster of a photograph called "Kiss" by Tonya Cha-something (feel free to help me out, poster-owners) was hanging above the toilet on the bathroom wall. I started to include it here, but didn't for fear of offending sensitive readers and convincing most of the rest I was some kind of pervert. It was a great party, and I loved getting to see a few old friends I hadn’t seen in a little while, but the moment I first took a leak may have been the highpoint of the evening. I've just realized I can link to the photo from where I was going to include it without actually forcing it on anyone. Here'a link if you feel intrepid. This is SFW but you might view alone anyway. http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/4535/255/1600/SM149.jpg

This is my uncle Jerry Pickett. He's the Teamster in the family. For this portrait, I cropped and stripped to grayscale, then switched back to RGB, then duplicated the layer and turned the bottom one into a strange hatched paint type layer using a filter I've never used before. Then I created a new layer in the middle and colored it bright red. I decreased it's opacity to about forty percent, then I decreased the top layer (the photographic layer) to about seventy percent. What I think I achieved is a pillow effect, similar to softening the light and using a very mild red filter. Let me know what YOU think.

I decided to go ahead and post another photograph of Ethan.

A ha, hush that fuss,
Everybody move to the back of the bus.

Rosa Parks is no more.

I feel compelled to point out that I am not in favor of gun control legislation restricting handgun ownership (thought I am in favor of waiting periods and criminal background checks and even mandatory trigger lock mechanisms (but not mandatory zero domestic violence orders, those are way too easy to get)). I just couldn't pass up the imagery and the phrase. I get so sick of that cold, dead hand rhetoric. This is America for goodness sake. Let' show some optimism. For instance, it would be much better if it was, "You can have my gun when my magazine is empty and I stick it up your cold, dead ass." Louis L'Amour would never have approved of Heston's pessimism.

A while back, when I was at Blue Licks State Resort Park, the governor came to the park and enjoyed a fine banquet much like the one he enjoyed here in Powell County last week. The group I was with, mostly emergency managers and public health workers, had contracted to eat meals at the buffet all week long. On the night that the governor was to arrive our dinner was served in the basement of the dining room. Now I admit, as basements go, this one wasn’t too shabby, because it had been designed as a conference room. I just found it interesting that we, many of whom find ourselves on the front lines during disasters in the Commonwealth, were forced to eat away from the rest of the crowd, not quite good enough to eat with the fine folks from Frankfort. Furthermore, I found it interesting that when a very few of us requested permission to sit in during the banquet upstairs, just to see the governor and his retinue and hear the governor talk, were instead offered seating in an adjacent room with speakers that would carry the governor’s voice. They didn’t want any of us to be in his line of sight. These offenses were not unexpected from someone as pompous and self-righteous as he is, but at the same time they were still irritating. I decided to just go to trivia, and pretend the governor was not going to be within a hundred yards or so of where I intended to sleep that night.

Apparently last week, on Friday, when the governor was here in Powell County, something similar happened. Sources tell me that four young women, well, girls, actually, sang for the governor and his retinue, and all the various other Republicans who had gathered there. I’m sure all was well and good, and they put on a fine show, and everyone enjoyed it. When it came time for dining though, the girls were rejected from the buffet line. As entertainers they had not paid admission, and thus were not in possession of the little blue ticket which would have allowed them to get food from the buffet like everyone else there. Singing for your supper is no longer a viable means of attaining it, I guess. Anyway, the night was saved, and hopefully a little piece of the girls’ dignity, when a member of the local media offered to step in and make sure that the little ladies did get to eat supper after all, by telling them to get in line and to invite anyone who tried to stop them to speak with the press. Maybe this was all just an innocent oversight, compounded by a rule-oriented server or hostess, but maybe it points out again what is so obvious about Republican government already: The little guys shouldn’t expect a place at the table. They can eat scraps in the basement.

Here's my gun control idea in rough draft form. I intend to shoot the picture myself, instead of just compositing it. This is real human blood by the way, but my hand and the Sig Sauer P228 were nowhere in the vicinity. I hope this is fairly shocking, because I want it to be really shocking when I turn it up a notch in the final version. The words will probably remain the same though.

Here's mobility!

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Mobile Email from a Cingular Wireless Customer http://www.cingular.com

I forgot to mention. The shirts below are now officially on sale at $12.50 each.

I didn't win the Powerball jackpot, and neither did you. To illustrate how hard it is to win, imagine you are attending a Powell County High School basketball game in the Rodney T. Clark Memorial Gymnasium. It's a packed house. The lower decks are full and so are the upper decks. On the way in the door, everyone puts their name in a hat. Luckily somone draws out your name. Okay, now the very next night, you're in the same place, and unbelieveably, they draw your name again (wouldn't everyone just be sick of you by now?). The night after that, you and eleven other people, people who are just as incredibly, phenomenally lucky as you are, are each given a key, only one of which unlocks a safe with hundreds of millions of dollars in it, and you are the lucky guy. That's how lucky you have to be to win the Powerball. Yet another way to illustrate it is this. Imagine there is a football field sized piece of paper, and it's divided up into squares 7/32" on a side. A very tiny square, much smaller than the leavings of a hole punch. All these are thrown into a hat, and yours is chosen.

My daughter is already a philosopher. She told her grandmother that when she was a baby, she used to think that nothing was real, that perhaps even she was not real. Now that she's older, she's decided that she and the universe are real, or at least appear to be.

Here's what I will eventually have on the shirt if anyone wants to buy one. I think it makes an excellent graphic. I'm working on a gun control shirt that is unbelievable, even though that isn't a cause I'm really behind.

Between the hours of 5:35 and 5:40 yesterday, I was temporarily out of my mind. I was riding down the Mountain Parkway and just really wallowing in the misery of a miserable day. I was looking for a word to describe how I felt. One word came to my lips. “Mange.” That wasn’t really quite good enough to get behind as a mantra, so I added the definite article, “the.” For the next five minutes, as I wound my way toward a friend’s house, I just couldn’t stop repeating “The Mange!” to myself, and then laughing hysterically. Apparently it’s a generic word for several specific illnesses caused by parasitic mites and is characterized by skin lesions, itching, and loss of hair. That pretty well summarizes how I felt. I began the day with a headache. It wasn’t a stress headache, it wasn’t a sinus headache, and it didn’t feel like a blood pressure headache. It affected that part of my head that makes me think, “Hmm, brain tumor?” Things were not helped by the fact that there is apparently a phrenologic anomaly about that point on my skull. One that I had never noticed before now. In other words, I was sitting there with my head hurting and an unexplained knot to make me wonder. Headaches can be really bad. I know of nothing worse, because they’re right there where you think. I don’t about anyone else, but I identify with my eyes, and thus my head. The rest of my body is not much more than a vehicle with a nice set of tools. When something is wrong with the body, you don’t take it personally. When your hand gets cut, or you scrape your leg on a rock, sure it’s painful, but it’s an external kind of pain. It doesn’t threaten your existence the way a bad headache can. I had an uncle (actually it was my great-grandmother’s brother) who was in a car wreck (perhaps among the first serious vehicle accidents in this county) and injured his head. He was cursed with terrible headaches forever after. They were so bad that he would beg his mother, my great-great grandmother, to chop off his head with an axe to end his pain. When I get a bad headache, I can identify with him. With a really bad one, three more days of life to say my goodbyes would be just about enough of this world for me. This one wasn’t quite that bad. In the midst of it, however, I dealt with some issues that my more sensitive friends were concerned about. I’m not going to elaborate. After all that was finally resolved, and after three Excedrin had loosened the vise around the middle of my head, it was time to go to CPR class. CPR class has to be my favorite day of the year. There’s nothing like a man who is built like me trying to get down on his knees and lean forward until he can put his mouth on a plastic object six inches from the floor in front of him. Let’s just say that I am not cut out for CPR on the floor. I could sort of get the balance right, if I counter-weighted with one leg, assuming some kind of crippled-ballet shape, with all my weight supported on my left knee. My knee was less than grateful. Toward the end of class, I got a call delivering a double-dose of bad news. First of all my kids had not arrived on the school bus. Technically, the school bus itself hadn’t arrived either, but since that’s the last stop on that particular run, you just never know. I found out later that since my aunt had told them she would pick them up after school (at my mother’s) they had managed to convince each other not to ride the school bus because she would be there to pick them up any minute. In addition to that bit of distressing news, there was also a sighting of someone in my neighborhood I didn’t want to see, and the long and short of that was the drain to my finances of over three hundred dollars. I’m not going to elaborate on that either. During all that, my mom hinted that my children would not be staying with my aunt overnight, but that she was going to get them at some point. I ignored the implication that I should pick them up from her house a little bit after that. I had already committed myself to going to trivia. Tina has been on my case to spend more time with her, and if I had blown her off again, things would have been tragic indeed. I went on to trivia, and on the way, the stress overcame me. The Mange, what else can you say? The capper of the night was when our team, Wonder Juan and the Sodamigos starring in Court Day Love lost in sudden death quadruple overtime, to a team that couldn’t come up with a better name than B&M.

From Emails I have written lately, strange sort of poem:
I wasn't being hateful. You just like to think I am, if I communicate much at all, it's usually frequently. I haven't figured out the whole thing yet about how wanting to bang someone keeps you from being their friend. I think I even replied, "Are you sure that's healthy?" Why are you so paranoid? I figured it out without looking at the answer, and I have to say that when I saw it I was unprepared. How would I be compensated? You really love to play the martyr. Someone, who is, shall we say, ineligible for pursuit - called the next day and apologized, said that someone from our group called and complained that she was charging her own drinks to their tickets. Caused some deep offense, said he was just like all the other Eppersons, just a drunk. Heighten the remorse, remorse for the entire situation. I went for a long drive, through some of the darkest stretches of road that I know, listening to John Prine, trying to flash some ass, most likely. It was quite a concoction. It contained both uppers and downers. That makes for weird dreams, a bit looney, though. It helps to understand things better going in. I have no idea what it could have been, certain character flaws that used to be worse but are now pretty well under control, or even apparently conquered, and I know that for the past few months I’ve sort of been absorbed in my own world, and my local friends have taken on a lot of importance for me. I’m going through some issues right now as well, but I think maybe I am more equipped to deal with them. Banadon deserves to be a real word, It's not especially coherent, and there's little to no dramatic tension, so next time you get ready to criticize me for only asking if something is okay with you, and instead of answering me you want to just complain that I even asked, I think it would be never anything that amounted to scandal to just go ahead.

I traveled to Cincinnati on Wednesday evening, to attend a friend’s debut as an actress in a short film. The trip was wonderful. I had never actually been to Cincinnati, other than to drive through it on my way to Dayton, or to King’s Island. The traffic and the urban density don’t seem to be very welcoming. I was pleasantly surprised when we left the interstate, because the traffic lightened up, and the downtown area was thoroughly enjoyable. We pretty much had to walk everywhere. If not, the parking eats you up. The walking was pleasant though, and we were only accosted by two homeless people, which is pretty good, considering how many of them there apparently were. I can’t imagine how those folks survive when the weather gets cold. We had a hard time Wednesday night finding a restaurant still serving food. Apparently most of the downtown eateries call it quits at around nine o’clock. We walked all over, finally settling for bar food and eating at Rockin’ Robin’s. It’s not a bad place, and while there we got to see what is apparently the most controversial swing and call in baseball in quite a while. I expect to go back soon, as the architecture is beautiful, and seems to be photographically neglected, except for the huge wide-angles of the whole city you see hanging on every gallery wall.

I was contemplating writing a letter to certain officials asking that my uncle's trouble with the law regarding a certain marijuana patch he is alleged to have cultivated continue to be treated as a misdemeanor rather than a felony, when a catch phrase ocurred to me that is so simple and yet so profound I simply can't believe that people aren't already hawking bumper stickers with this on it (by the way, consider this notice of copyright, but I promise to license for cheap):






For sale soon.

I used to have a friend that I don’t have anymore. Sometimes friends fall out over one thing or another. Seems like almost all the ones I’ve lost were just from lack of staying in touch though. Even with the friends I’ve lost, it’s not been because I didn’t care. I’ve made attempts, albeit not earnest ones, to contact the four or five people I’ve been close to over the years that suddenly just vanished. At times, it just doesn’t work out. One of them lives not more than a few miles from me as the crow flies, but for various reasons we just don’t talk anymore. For one thing, I’ve managed to forget her last name. That happens with married women. For another thing, my wife doesn’t much approve of me talking to her. Such is life. There’s this one, though, that I stopped staying in touch with on purpose. Ever get the feeling that you’re just not as important to someone as they are to you? It’s a terrible feeling, especially when you figure out that they don’t really care if they ever speak to you again. The last conversation I had with her lasted for hours. We talked about the fear I was feeling in making the commitment to marry. We talked about the issues going on in her life, including trouble with romance, trouble with school, trouble with family, and also what was going well of course. To listen in on our conversation, one would think we were two of the oldest and best of friends. There was just the one thing, though. She never called me. She called me back, but she never actually initiated contact. I was much more reachable in those days. I only had a couple of different numbers to try. But she never, that I can remember, ever called me just out of the blue. Around this same time, a band named No Doubt, fronted by the beautiful Ms. Gwen Stefani, released a song called “Spiderwebs.” In case you’re not familiar with it, here are the lyrics:

You think that we connect
That the chemistry's correct
Your words walk right through my ears
Presuming I like what I hear

And now I'm stuck in the webYou're spinning
You've got me for your prey...

Chorus:
Sorry I'm not home right now
I'm walking into spiderwebs
So leave a messageAnd I'll call you back
A likely story, but leave a message
And I'll call you back

You take advantage of what's mine
You're taking up my time
Don't have the courage inside me
To tell you please just let me be

Communication, telephone invasion
I'm planning my escape...

CHORUS

And it's all your fault
I screen my phone calls
No matter who calls
I gotta screen my phone calls

Now it's gone too deep
You wake me in my sleep
My dreams become nightmares
'Cause you're ringing in my ears

CHORUS

You can probably see how a nice little ditty like that made me feel a little doubt about our relationship. The lines that really forced me to make a decision were, “Don’t have the courage inside me to tell you; please just let me be.” After this friend of mine failed to show up for my wedding, I decided that I would just wait until she called me first before I called her again, just to make sure she really wanted to be my friend, and wasn’t just caught in a spider web of my making. I figured it would be a matter of a couple weeks or so before she got around to calling me to congratulate me, or commiserate with me, or whatever. After a few months, I congratulated myself for being able to see through her shallowness. Of course, I felt a little stupid, since the words, “shallow” and “two-faced” had been used by practically everyone I knew to describe her in the first place. At least I finally figured it out. Still, every once in a long while, I was inclined to give her the benefit of the doubt. I occasionally thought of maybe calling her up, and seeing how she was doing. I resisted though, instead just checking on her through her family and a few mutual friends. I did tell her father once to tell her to call me, but regretted even asking that after the fact. I can finally say now, though, after all this time, I no longer have to worry about it. I rather had thought I was going to go to the grave, or she was, before I knew 100% for sure that she wanted nothing more to do with me (though it should have been obvious enough). Yesterday, we finally came face to face again for the first time in what must be approaching ten years. The age-old “She was walkin’ in and I was walkin’ out,” finally came to pass. I looked right at her, and she looked right at me. I couldn’t make myself do more than give her a nod. Still, it was obvious that I recognized her and was waiting for some kind of acknowledgment. It was an acknowledgement that never came. She showed not a glimmer of recognition, let alone friendship. I found it a little painful, but mostly just satisfying. I’m glad I never called her again, and I’m glad that I no longer know her. I think maybe my life is enriched by her absence.

Something I found beside my desk.

Warhol inspired, obviously. Make sure you clicik it. This is much better bigger.

There'a new update to poker notes. I finally recap the last month's wins and losses, and realize I'm up an incredible two dollars. No wonder I don't want to write about it. Looking back, I think that Royal Flush ruined me.

I was reading today that demolition has begun on part of Lexington Mall. The part that once housed the Dillard's Home Store is being torn down, so that a new road may run through the property. The implication is that, eventually, the entire mall could be signifcantly renovated or replaced by something better. Its last tenant has exited the property. It's hard to imagine being inside that empty building with no stores open and no people walking about. It saddens me just a little, when I remember the time that I spent there in 1994 and 1995. The theatre there was quite small by today's standards. We only had two screens. There were nights when no one came in for a showing. There were a few nights when only one or two couples came in for the last showing and the bulbs rather conveniently burned out, or the sound wouldn't work. I wonder what happend to all those people who worked with me. I wonder what happened to Tom Kidwell, the man responsible for those broken lamps and power outages, and Kiddis Duguma, the single-most-attractive black girl I have ever met, and Kelly, the girl who once told me she liked to bleed small animals into an open pit, and then fornicate in it. I even wonder what happened to the manager, whom I am pretty sure did not like me, and whom I've paid back by completely forgetting her name. I wonder what happened to the Russian student whose name I've also forgotten. She was pretty, except for that hair under her arms that I finally got to see when I gave her a ride to Wal-Mart one night and she wore a sleeveless shirt. I was only there a short time, but that place touched me. Very soon now, it will be no more.

I rarely have nightmares. I remember being terrified occasionally as a child by the things that chased me in my dreams: vampires, dragons, barking dogs, strange mutations in crazy orange colored vehicles, and other things that have grown too dim for me to name. As I got older, nightmares became very infrequent. For a period of years from about 1985 until about 1997 I don’t remember ever having had a nightmare at all. Of course this changed when I had children. What parent hasn’t occasionally dreamed of finding his child in some terrible state, and awakened and found them safe and just held them and practically wept with relief? I know I have. One particular incident formed my most frequent nightmare subject, however. It was the winter of 1996-1997. I was going to work. When I stepped outside there was a light rain, and the temperature was in the upper thirties. At the time, that was not unpleasant, as it had recently been much colder. As I walked down the steps, I noticed they were a little bit slippery. I attributed this to whatever algae or fungus was growing there. I climbed into the police cruiser that I had driven while on duty with the Sheriff’s Office the night before. This morning I was headed to dispatch, to be there at six am. As I started down the road, I grew very comfortable, because the road seemed to be in fine shape. I was still careful with that big, heavy, rear-wheel-drive car in the rain, but I let it get up to about forty-five. Then, as I neared Bowen Elementary, the back end of the car decided it didn’t want to cooperate in the curve, and reacted by changing places with the front. I was a little taken aback. I came to rest in the middle of the road, with a deep ditch on one side and a sharp drop-off to a field on the other side. Much more cautious of the slick spots on the road, I turned back around and headed on down the road at a much slower thirty, slowing down to about twenty-five before each curve. About three sharp curves later the entire vehicle suddenly became disconnected. I had incredibly little control. Even at twenty-five miles per hour, I was in a serious skid. I used everything I knew about driving on ice to coax the car around the bend. I was almost to the other side of the curve when the front right wheel caught on the inside on some grass. Since this was the only point of real traction, it acted as a pivot point for the rest of the car. Suddenly I was going backward again, practically still just creeping along, down the edge of the road, which was reduced to a river of ice. I could not see where I was going, but I knew by that point that the car was way beyond my control. As I felt the rear of the car dip down into the inevitable ditch that awaited me, I just relaxed and went along for the ride. The impact was a lot more than I hoped for. I was just lucky enough to slam into a medium sized oak. The weight of the car was enough to bend the back bumper halfway around the tree, and the weight of me was enough to break the felon-proof screen away from half its anchor points. I was a little bruised, and a little scratched but otherwise not too bad off. Forever since then, in ninety percent of my nightmares, I am in a vehicle, trying to guide it and not finding purchase. It always ends with me slipping slowly off the side of a mountain, and accelerating rapidly toward my death.

To smokers and non-smokers alike, you should go to Fill Zone in Stanton and acquire yourself one of the best lighters ever made. I once looked into becoming a distributor of these, because I know of few other products which meet this level of quality. Now they're available right here in Stanton, straight off the boat from France. Yes, this product photo is by yours truly. I thought about going through the trouble of building a real light-box, but I decided I could live with a few reflections.

I betrayed you to her, and you convinced her I was lying, but I don't blame you, and I deserve it.