no one home

Check out CSC for late-breaking agita.

what are They doing to my place?

summertime

azu, open

the shattered image

hiding out

not legal

tightrope walker

i will never b done in time

Two weeks today. My back hurts, my knees hurt, I am covered with white paint and I have only kind of finished two bedrooms. Well, OK, one bath also. And the floor of the other bath. One of the other baths. And there are a LOT of leaks. And no floor downstairs. And no heating system. And no C of O. And a lot of site work to do. And zero help. And rain predicted for the next week. And tenants arriving in two months.
Should I have a beer or just kill myself?

how true, how true

surfin' seagulls

They're catching the wave, and I'm not.
(click pic to enlarge)

living in one room

Why I can't stop: I have to hide out in the only warm space until it stops snowing.

high tide

It washed across the road on either side of my house—and it's comin' around again.

the morning before

The only trace of jet lag I have is that I want to eat dinner at breakfast time. Today I had steak for breakfast.
Why I can't stop jonesing: It's Sunday, so no beer with breakfast.

my new best friend

Harley Motorcycle Mama Betsy
Why I can't stop: She's headed up to Everest with Biff!

farewell party

When you have the kind of party where everyone winds up sleeping over—someone on the couch, on the areobed, in the guest room and even in my bed—you know it's not really the time for moderation.
Why I can't stop: It's almost always that kind of party

happy pagan fertility holiday

it's after 5:00 somewhere

And it's almost midnight in Kathmandu. . .

the schedule

Mammogram, gyn exam, dentist. I know, more than you need to know. But isn't it enough to drive one to some form of substance abuse? Especially with jet lag?

top o' the world to ye

I went, I saw, I upped, I downed.

not to mention the wheel

Shouldn't there have been a better evolutionary model than the knee?

to abuse or not to abuse

I'm actually not sure whether this photograph supports why I can't stop or why I MUST stop.

drive-thru daiqueris

New Orleans is not really a town for anyone with a jones for anything.

dinner for three

One described the other, memorably if inelegantly, as behaving like "a motheaten elk in rut." Oh brother. Pass me another Molsen. It's cold up here in single moose country.

a toast to pepito

"He was the last of the old timers," said Jimmy, when he called to tell me.
Pepito taught Jimmy, and all the other kids in Makaweli Valley how to hunt. They would saddle up their horses and mules (with plenty of Budweiser in the saddlebags), pick up their rifles and skinning knives, whistle to the two-score pig dogs, the trackers and the grabbers, and hele off "up the volcano, into the interior." There they would track the feral pigs and goats, packing out the meat several days later to smoke and eat and make luau. It was not an easy matter to kill an angry boar. One door of Pepito's shack has boar jaws nailed all over it, the tusks long and sharp.
Pepito lived in a shack in the middle of taro fields. You had to cross the Waimea River to get there, thread the dirt paths and make it through the pack of snarling, mangy, dogs and flies. "Get back here," Pepito would shout. "Cut that out." His shack was small, without electricity or running water, and it squatted over thousands of Louis L'Amour and other paperback westerns and war stories. Pepito sat in a lawn chair in the open, a cooler or three filled with ice and meat and beer nearby. He was a wild man in his youth, who once rode his mule into the local bar and ordered him a beer. By the time I was working in the bar, in the 70s, he had been barred.
But he settled down as the years passed. He graciously took me, my husband and in-laws on a pig hunt for Life magazine, mounting us and guiding us and instructing us for free. By the time I saw him for what I suspected would be the last time, three years ago, he had reluctantly given up the cigarettes and beer and was not hunting regularly any more. He tended the irrigation ditches in the taro fields, fed his bored hunting dogs, read his novels and entertained his frequent visitors with tolerance and grace.
Pepito was an ali'i, a chief, and a wise man. Mahalo for your counsel, Pepito. And much aloha for the aloha you shared with us.
Why I can't stop: I have to drink a Bud for Pepite.

first comes love, then comes

marriage. . .
and then you REALLY need substance abuse

problem of the day

Last night I dreamt that I was smoking. Cigarettes. Which I actually haven't in like a year and a half. Except in my dreams. So this morning when I woke up, I felt like having a martini. Or a sixer. Or smoking a pack of cigarettes. Or something. The sleet and hail and other forms of hard snow, driven by 30 mph winds, were rattling the windows. I rolled over and closed my eyes again so I could listen to it better. And when I finally got up, I settled for coffee.
Why I can't stop: The yen never goes away.

warning

This page to be reactivated soon. Or else possibly whatismyfuckingproblem. Frankly, I'm tiring of the PG thing. Life is way more interesting than that.