The other day he spent the whole evening wearing a ludicrous cardboard crown like the kind the kids get at a Burger King. I hope I'm doing stuff like that when I'm 85.

R


ory bought a car the other day, a big pea-green mid-70s American car for $500. He's already had an accident, running into a pole in a parking lot. His history with cars is not good, especially given that he's taken to the uniquely American passtime of drunk driving like a dog to a litter box. My own recent experience with drunk driving has proved more expensive than was initially apparent. I've noticed since Sunday that everytime I drive in reverse, the car starts swaying back and forth like it's about to do the Macarena (anybody remember the Macarena?). As I set out for Staunton this morning, this sort of behaviour, along with a number of worrying noises, led me to inspect the situation. It turns out that my right back rim had, on Saturday night, smacked into enough curb to be distorted somewhat into the shape of a potato chip. A woman even ran up and told me about it when I was waiting at a stop light. I took the car back home, jacked it up, and put on a spare. Minga, the crazy old man who lives across the street, helped out a bit, loaning me a lug wrench when the only one I had dated back to the un-American metric days of the Punch Buggy Green. Minga sure is a nice guy. But he's a strange one. The other day he spent the whole evening wearing a ludicrous cardboard crown like the kind the kids get at a Burger King. I hope I'm doing stuff like that when I'm 85.

But the wheel still seemed to be making noises, and I feared I'd bent the axle. I had Matthew and Shonan look at it while I drove it up and down Observatory, and none of us could see any wobble, so I decided to risk it and go home anyway. The spare was a little bigger than the wheel it was replacing, perhaps that was causing some sort of misbehaviour.

E


vidently dealing with selfish wanna-be thugs has made me into a better citizen. I came upon a very wrinkled old woman hitch hiking south on US 11 and I drove her well out of my way to a truck stop so she could catch a ride home to Harrisonburg. She'd been visiting her fiancé, she said. I asked if hitch hiking was easy, and she said "oh yeah." I can't imagine a less threatening person. She wasn't exactly a cutie, but hey, she's got more of a love life than I do.

Uncle Bob is, along with such luminaries as Adolf Hitler and Harry S. Truman, one of the people responsible for my coming into being.

I napped in the Shaque as usual. My mother, Hoagie, was watching Matlock on the Shaque teevee (it's a little 3 inch B&W, but it's the only teevee on the farm). Tomorrow she's taking a train to Chicago to attend my uncle Bob's big retirement bash. Uncle Bob is, along with such luminaries as Adolf Hitler and Harry S. Truman, one of the people responsible for my coming into being. You see, Uncle Bob introduced his sister (my mother) to my father when the two men were professors at the University of Chicago in the early 60s. But well before that, Hitler got my Dad off the farm and over to Europe, where he could clearly see that there was more to life than working the night shift in a paper mill. And Truman's GI Bill converted my blue-collar proto-father into the cranky old intellectual he is today.

Of course, I archived my entire website on the Mac in the Shaque, and that's only one of several places I have archives stored. If anyone thinks my musings are fragile or infirm, they'd be mistaken. A war against information in the information age is like a war against space itself; it's more than futile, it's cause for laughter.

My Dad is battling raccoons in his corn patch. He sleeps in the bed of his pickup, which he parks near the garden.

My Dad cooked up some fish for dinner. Home cooking is part the bargain when I go visit the parents. So is raiding the house for food stuffs and, on this particular trip, measures for my personal self defense. When you live in the land of the irrational human beast, anything less is folly.

What's up with my parents these days? Let's see, my mother went on and on as usual about how the value of her investments had increased and about her initiative to start an artists' cooperative in the cultural morass of Staunton. My Dad is battling raccoons in his corn patch. He sleeps in the bed of his pickup, which he parks near the garden.

When I was a kid, he used to pay me to sleep in a tent on August nights. Human proximity is the only way to keep the 'coons out of the corn.
I have fond memories of being alone in a tent with a twittery AM radio, listening to talk shows, communist propaganda and Christian evangelists as they drifted in and out.
That was back before the Berlin Wall came down, when AM radio was full of east-west culture clash.

Also, punks seem to have fewer gender-role hangups and accept women as equals, something I just don't see among the skinheads.

O


n the way back to Charlottesville, I compared and contrasted a number of youth movments, based on my experiences so far. In so doing, I figured out a massive fundamental difference between the skinheads (and their wanna-bes: racist, homophobic, or not as the case may be) and the punk rockers. The skinheads are very group-oriented. They have acknowledged leadership and a readily apparent hierarchy. It's not anarchic, and it's not about individuality. Conforming to the skinhead standard (being tough, wearing certain clothes, shaving your head, picking on the people in "the bad group" -whomever they may be- and using the word faggot a lot) are extremely important. Punk rockers tend to be fairly conformist about the music they like (the more obscure, the more abrasive, the better), but there's no apparent hierarchy, and conformity, occasionally even to norms set by peers, runs counter to their do-it-yourself (DIY) ethic. Also, punks seem to have fewer gender-role hangups and accept women as equals, something I just don't see among the skinheads. When brutality is the measure of a person, obviously women won't measure up. All this is, of course, just the sense I get from the outside. Unlike in the cases of hippie, goth, punk, fratboy and even redneck culture, I've never had a desire to infiltrate the skinhead world.

He fixed himself a drink he called a "Kentucky Sunrise" consisting of, you guessed it, orange juice and bourbon.

a stop action animation made tonight with Jessika's "Matthew Hart Doll."

As a belated house warming gift, my mother had given me a half gallon of Kentucky Bourbon. Matthew Hart doesn't particularly like bourbon, but since that was what was available, he fixed himself a drink he called a "Kentucky Sunrise" consisting of, you guessed it, orange juice and bourbon. Deya had one too, but I abstained. I had to go to work, don't you know. Magnum Force was on the teevee.

The experience of having to replace my car's wheel, along with some concerned email, has been enough to make me reassess my casual attitude towards my own drunk driving. I've decided that I will no longer drive while under the influence of hard liquor. Driving while being drunk on wine or beer is still cool though. It's only a small step, I know, but it's a long time in coming.

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