NO LONGER SHORT

 Nope! Thanks to modern medical science I am 2 mm taller, thanks to a plastic thingie they stuck in me. 

Oh, and it's held on with a metal plate and metal screws they screwed into my bare, bleeding vertebrae that they cut all the meat and skin and tendons and things loose from, and then they grabbed all the meat and skin and tendons together and looped it back with wires through my fat. Fact. There are surgical wire holes in my neck flub, which finally seems to have found a brief but important purpose to exist. Hooray neck flub! 

 But like even my carotid sinuses and other important shit in your neck. They flooped it over to one side in a bunch and sewed it to random places in my vital bodily flub so they could root around in my spine.

Oh and my trachea and esophogus too. Yup. Just schlorped it all over to the other side and wired it to my other neck flub that I have.

What I am trying to say is that I know nothing about what actually happened to me during surgery and I'm just going by what the aftermath feels like, because there  have been numerous sensations, and various holes. Oh and the entry scar, which they lovingly matched to one of my neck wrinkles.

Oh! When they woke me up, I remember that!

I had a tube in my neck. They didn't sew up the hole. It was just there, and the nurse was pointing it out to me in a mirror. 

Why were we standing in front of a mirror?

That was when she pulled the surgical drain tube out, which felt really really strange, like swallowing a big piece of celery, only on the wrong side of my neck. Plus it made a sound.

It went 'shliiippblip'. 

And a rather large vinyl hose full of really thick blood wandered past my field of vision, so, like, and it was MY really thick blood ooging around in that hose. Then OMGWTFBBQ here on the end of the hose came a rubber bladder full of all the gleeg that came out when they were using a literal surgical Dremel to go sticking foreign objects into my spinal canal. 

There was a lot. 

The nurse handed it to me for me to hold while she got the rest of the hose bunched together, and I stood there holding an intimately warm bag full of chunks and fluids. In my hand. It was mine.

She said 'Thanks' and gathered it and tossed it in the wastepaper basket. 

That made a sound too.

And I stood there and I had a big hole in my neck and it was possibly full of the same gak.  I was the only one who cared.  The nurse briskly stuck a cotton ball on it and gave it a strip of tape. 

Go home now!  Farewell! Go be in a car! Bye bye!

So I left.

_________________________________

I could barely get that ^^^ typed out! Not even for fun and games!  It took me about an  hour and a half. I felt weird the whole time. Like I was going to faint.  It was a novel sensation, and so I persisted, and there ^^^ you have the result.

___________________________________

I am phobic when it comes to medical shit, and I never know when I'm going to act it out or what I'll do.  I can go to fifty doctors appointments, get shots, do whatever, and have no problem. On visit fifty one, I'll be shaking and crying and gibbering, my legs will give out, I'll faint, or whatever stupid thing.  This is me! After therapy!  And I'm told I'll have to live with it.

Anyway, I'm glad the Biker was there to keep me on track; and because he was there, I didn't do anything extreme or embarrassing. 

That I know of. 

Does that bother anyone else?  I hate thinking about what kind of stupid thing I might do or say while under sedation - or what the staff is saying about me when I'm under - or the worst one, which is wondering 'Are they interrogating me for laughs?'  (Because that really happened to me up at OHSU in 1979.)

______________________________

So I am a couple of mm taller.  

My right leg no longer feels like it's being barbecued from the inside.

I can now use my left hand, which was impossible last week.

I can now sleep without using five pillows and an ice pack, which was impossible last week.

I can drive, which was impossible last week.

I can go up and down a flight of stairs. 

I no longer hold my right arm four inches higher than my left.

The left side of my face is no longer all schnurled up like Long John Silver.

I had no idea I was such a mess until I woke up from surgery and suddenly I was not anymore.  

I was becoming an elderly Frenchman.

And that's about all I have to say about that.

Charbonneau at Tanasbourne near Windemere by Salishan

 

So I sat down today and I thought to myself 'Self, you haven't read 'The Redstocking Manifesto' since you were 20.'  So I found a copy of that sapsucker online and I read it.  Know what?  I still agree with it.  Except for the part where everyone's problems have to be worked out as a community. Otherwise, we need that shit today and it needs to be shouted from the mountaintops.

.....from which vine I swing gracefully to the subject of Idaho.

Oh Idaho.

Today I was walking down to my favorite female owned and operated business, gonna git me some duck eggs, and at the crosswalk, as I politely waited at the corner, all four directions of traffic came to a halt, and I was waved on with many a big beardy smile and a-twiddling of 'g'head!' fingies on the wheel. And I do not have a problem with being allowed to cross at an intersection. Allah did not mean for people to do burnouts on me. No, I noticed because I was in a mood to notice shit like that, having just read 'The Redstocking Manifesto' again.

After all these years, are acts of male courtesy like that just a matter of 'Grown People Being Nice To Old People'?  Or is it 'The Same Old Shit Where We Pretend To Be Nice To Old Ladies So We Don't Get Arrested When What We Actually Want To Do Is To Burn Them All At The Stake Because They  Aren't Pretty Anymore Plus They Can Be Cranky'?

_________________________________

Which brings me to what's really bugging me:  I have to get an operation in four days.  They're going in through my throat to get to my cervical vertebrae, and then they're going to pry them apart and Dremel out the spinal canal for a few inches, suck out all the crud, and then release me back into the wild. 

Why the rush? Yes, I have spinal stenosis, like I mentioned awhile back - it's just that none of us realized how severe it was. And it's gnarly in there.  Cue the surgeon with the DremelRRRRRRIIINGDEDINGDINGDINGDINGrrrrrrrr *sound of chunks hitting the walls*

In another year, they'll be doing the same thing to my lower back. 

My, how I'm looking forward to that. I mean of course I am; I can barely walk some days, but still...it's surgery. In a hospital. 

God how I wish I'd never seen Hellraiser II.

______________________________________

Hell yeah, Rogers.

                                                             

No longer titty pink!

!!!HOORAY!!!!!

And some coleus that need to be potted up.

How guns are sold here. Just kind of stacked on grocery shelves, no clerk, little kids roaming around with boxes of ammo....

 

________________________________

Milton-Freewater After Dark

 This:

RANDOM SHOTS WHAT I SAVED

Seen here:

....better keep that problem weenis under control, ya perv

BEHOLD

the Jack Links Bigfoot.  A sexy beast indeed.

The full image of what is on my John Cleese T-Shirt. Men fear it, women swoon.

BEHOLD: The picture what I tooked offline showing the old Rancho FirstNations 4 feets underwater - circled by a circle up there on the center right.

OMGWTFBBQ.

ALSO NAKED vvv and including A POME

Motherfucker was crazy about guac, children.

If only Micky would find me some. 

Fuckin' rat.

BEHOLD:  Leonard Nimoy has recipes. 

_________________________________________

You'd think Spring would have sprung here. We've experienced warmer temperatures, things are budding and blooming and all that happy crap, but NO.  No, coming in about 45 minutes there will be a sudden 'freeze event' occurring - the temperature is going to plummet to 20f and stay that way until 9pm, and then an hour later it's going to do the same damn thing and last until 10am tomorrow morning.

WTF.

We've also experienced at least four 'downburst' events. One just happened a half-hour ago. The sky gets dark, the wind drops, and then suddenly the rain comes cannoning out of the sky, the thunder is non-stop, and cars have to pull over to the side of the road. This one, like all the rest, lasted about ten minutes, and then all of a sudden someone hit the switch and hey! No more rain! No more hail! The sun is shining!

I am trying to grow tomato plants in containers, and I had to go hustling outside and run the things in 
like a noodge, like I'm raising baby chickens or something, while the rain beat down. And now we're expecting not just one but TWO FREAK FREEZES and I am just done. 

Honestly what does the Universe expect of me. 

Shit. 

Please.

______________________________

OK it is forty minutes after I wrote the weather stuff up ^^^ there.  The Temperature is supposed to be dropping.  It is not. It has risen to 60f.

The sky is once again black.

The wind is howling (actual noise!) in from the West, straight down the street.

It blew my doormat away.

                                                   FUCK THIS DRAMA

I am going to go crack a beer.

You should too.

Westward Hoes

A few years back I mentioned that I had a John Cleese t-shirt - and y'all lost your shit! OO OO lets see the John Cleese t-shirt! 

So today, finally, in an act of shocking revelation, I will reveal a rumpled, poorly-taken photo of myself wearing that selfsame garment!

But first, a little backstory.

I really wanted a Cleese t-shirt. First I hit up Mr. Cleese.com, of course - only to find out that yes, Mr. Cleese sells swag, but Holy Fucking Shit it costs a fortune. 

Clearly he is not wealthy enough.  

I was a bit peeved by this. 

So what I did was, I searched Gleegle images until I found a picture of him that was super, extra cheesy. I saved it, and then I went to Walmart.com and had them make me a t-shirt. You just shoot them the image you've saved - any image you want! and the size you need, and they do the rest.

Except they got the size wrong. 

My John Cleese t-shirt is quadruple extra large.

As you can kind of see, it fits me like a deflated kiddie pool:

Mr. Cleese would be appalled. * Hee hee hee.   

_______________________

Holy SHIT I forgot Aretha Franklins' Birthday! GOD I SUCK

OO but look what we have here!  Vibrant and glorious, in splendor like the sun!  

There are safety gays and safety gals! 

Tight buttocks and big hair!

Extra Mod set - check!  

So here you go, my darlings:

Yeah you BETTER watch it.

____________________________________________

It may or may not come as a surprise that The Biker and I spend about $20.00 a month on incense. We do. Really.  

I was going somewhere with this information, but I forgot where.

______________________________________

I can saunter down the street in my lounge pants, Crocs, and Star Fleet Academy t-shirt, and purchase duck eggs. I can. At the same place you can get goose eggs and free-range chicken eggs too - and those chickens are really free range; you can drive past the lady's house and see them out running around.  The same place sells local honey, local sourdough bread, cupcakes, pastries, and local cheese. 

What is this wonderful place?  An antique store - and a good one, too. They make a fair bit of money off us.

_______________________________________

...except for when it comes to bread. Oh no  no no no no.

I still make all our bread every three or four days:

I make almond biscotti too.

Yeah that's right.  

________________

*

This is definitely the image I'll be wearing on the next Cleese T-shirt I get.

 

Nero on fiddle, me on bass

I've been battling depression lately.  It's been pretty bad. That's where I've been.

Every single time I've gone to post these past weeks my country - well, Trump - has committed another atrocity. I do a lot of trivial shit here at Steve. Nothing kills the inspiration to revel in trivial shit like global atrocities. I mean, I already had climate anxiety and now this constant barrage of....yeah, well.

I made the mistake of trying to divert myself by lurking on Reddit. THIS WAS A BAD IDEA. I'm going to go as far as to say that if you are prone to depression, avoid Reddit like the very plague. Not because of the site content so much as how Reddit operates; which is, like the actual fucking Borg. I have a lot to say about that, but for now I'll just say that it made my depression far worse, very quickly.

I'm on a news fast now, and I'm feeling better for it. 

              If the world goes to shit, I'll find out when the mushroom cloud rises over the horizon. 

 

   

It gets dark. But not quite as dark as originally written, so that's ku.

I am a genius and if you've ever doubted that stop it this instant. I just figured out how to cure fungus gnats in houseplants without resorting to chemical means or using a vaccuum cleaner. How did I achieve this miracle?

I found some little house spiders - the kind that make the tiny little webs along the baseboards and in corners? - and re-homed them to my plants.  Two days later the Biker and I are noticing a distinct lack of gnats flapping around. A week later and I found two little spider middens in my plant tower, full of little gnatty corpses.

Am I worried that the spiders will get fat and huge and start preying on dogs?  No. We don't have a dog.

_________________________

Where have I been.

I have been to St. Lukes Imaging Center, where I was stuffed into an MRI machine. This made me feel kind of like a sausage. They were terribly concerned with my head for some reason (I went in for spinal problems) and so they out my head into a plastic cage - thingie, which was not as unpleasant as it sounds. I had a mirror contraption so I could see the in and out of the MRI chamber and be reassured that I was not being digested by modern science, and that was nice. I also had a little breeze blowing in there, which I found odd but not at all unpleasant.  The scanner-bed slid me back and forth like a pizza at unannounced intervals, which made me yip. At one point I felt as though I was slowly being brought up to the boiling point, and I almost bailed.  Apparently the MRI waves heat up the iron in your blood.

No shit. That's what they told me. It did not make me feel better. It made me feel like I'd pissed off Magneto.

Turns out I have spinal stenosis.  Whaddya gonna do.

___________________________

I wrote some other stuff here about the Epstein Files and me wanting to go live in a fucking barrel, like Diogenes, only without Diogenes hope in finding an honest man. Wow, look at me all referring to Diogenes and shit!  But I decided not to put that vibe out there. I will, however, reiterate my closing declaration:

It's time we fucking RISE.

Shirtless, Shoeless, No Propeller

A wonderful thing just happened here at the El Apartmento!

BEHOLD:

I got it halfway out of the package and I was giggling!

The Biker came over to see and his eyes lit up!  I told him "I want you to be the first to go through this" because I love him 'n shit. And I handed it over.

 Then I hung over him and was a nuisance until he read it.

 

If you are not a fan of Tony Bourdain, you won't like this. It is pretty Bourdain (tm). 

If you are a fan of Bourdain, get this book IMMEDIATELY. It is pretty Bourdain(tm).

 

I read this book in one sitting and loved it. But honestly, I won't be cooking out of it right away.  

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Dear Mme. Arcati:

Elizabeth Davids' A Book of Mediterranean Food has just arrived yesterday and I cannot put it down!

I made her Pate of Chicken Livers this morning, and it is ASTOUNDING.  The only thing I did differently was to use a Glad Reuseable 

container instead of a small earthenware crock because I am plumb out of small earthenware crocks. 

Note that I could not wait to try out these recipes.  What a stellar  recommenation this was! 

Thank you!!!

____________________________________________

Ashley Gavin. Because lesbians make everything better!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yId_uC-Iaw8

https://x.com/AshGavs/status/1252638120182456324