Speed Kills Blue Mountains, Eastern Oregon 2001 (I heard this story from a big gentle guy who had the Harley bar and shield tattooed across his entire back and had a bible close at hand. He told the tale while we were cutting firewood, after we'd known each other for a year. Will died ten years ago of Hep C complications.) Before Jesus stepped in, I considered myself to be one big bad outlaw. I know now that I was nothing more than an addict, a thief, an armed robber, liar, fornicator, and money-hungry drug dealer. I broke all the Commandments but one. I never killed anyone.......... but I tried. Speed does kill. Everybody I used to know is dead now, killed by crystal meth and crosstops and booze and stupidity and greed. My little brother got me started on speed on the streets of Seattle when he was twelve and I was fourteen. We were walking down along Pike Street and he went...
Posts
Showing posts from January, 2025
- Get link
- X
- Other Apps
TICK, TICK, TICK OK, you just spent the afternoon adding to your guess-what-bird-I-saw-today list by walking a mile though the brush along the river. It was a hot day, so you are changing out of your sweaty duds and admiring your image in a mirror when notice a new mole just below your belly button. You move a little closer to the mirror, stand on your tippytoes, and realize that the mole has a silver-brown sheen and, aw Jeez, legs. The temple of your body has been invaded by a parasite and it is dining on your vital fluids. Tick alert! Quick, get the critter off your skin, but how? First, a bit of soft science. There are roughly eight hundred types of ticks on this planet. A hundred of these can carry disease to warm-blooded critters, including humans. Not every tick carries a disease. Of the hundred types, five species will be found in the Pacific Northwest. These are the Rocky Mountain Tick, the American Dog Tic...
- Get link
- X
- Other Apps
The Reintroduction of Kate Wolf Marin County, California Five years before Kate Wolf died of leukemia, I was forty years old, living in a hired man's shack with an open fifth of Jim Beam and a Martin guitar that I could not really play. Across the hills of Marin County, big productive Holstein cows were being branded on their faces and sold for slaughter. The USDA had determined that there was a surplus of milk on this planet. I was wearing out my boots walking around pool tables. I believed that old drunks spoke the truth. One Sunday morning came down awfully hard. I awoke with a flash of energy as the last of the double shots and slow dances with a woman who had a Jackson Pollack painting tattooed on her left breast blew through my nerve endings. Five minutes later, the goddess of excess smote me behind the right ear and I crawled back into the bunkhouse flannel with the Sunday edition of the San Francisco Chronicle. ...