Hooh, Aaah, Hooh, Aaah. That’s the sound of the men, working on the chain gang.

With so much going on in the World, I am kind of sad to not be as on top of current events as I normally pride myself on being. Ten hour days doing farm work in the grueling sun is hard work that most of us never experience. The closest most Americans get to it (especially the ones here in South Orange County CA) is lugging around two or three kids through the supermarket while trying to hold down a cell phone conversation. I am not that type of person. I like a hard day of work. I like to sweat. I enjoy being so exhausted that getting up from a chair and ottoman hurts. I revel in the sleep that falls a hard, back breaking day of work. I am the type of person that will move a whole house of furniture by myself if there is no one to help. I have been spotted carrying three seat sleep sofas down staircases by myself because no one would assist. When I get angry I get stuff done. I can be the car lifting, baby saving, accident mom for more than eight hours straight.

When I get home from the thirteen hour struggle of punishment that I call my consequence, I am able to keep my eyes open long enough to catch a headline or two. While I am running around in the a.m., ala headless chicken, I hear a couple of news stories that whisper from the T.V. at 4:30. I never, ever, ever enjoyed getting my news from the television. I much prefer print and radio, but what’s a convict to do?

I know of the shuttle cock volley of peace and fire that continues between Hezbollah and Israel. I caught a tad of the Shepard Smith interview with Lebanese President Emile Jamil Lahoud. I dislike Shepard Smith very much. I think I dislike the evasiveness of Emile Jamil Lahoud even more so.

I licked my chops upon hearing of the Jon Bennet Ramsey killer, stalker, outside the family confession. But from the brief snippets that my ears briefly cradle, it is my understanding that know one really knows whether or not this guy’s confession is legit. Yet another volley.

Lots of good polls and surveys this week and Time is chock full of goodness. David Baker wrote a great piece in the Financial Times this weekend about noise pollution and the quest to find the silence, even if it is the sounds of silence.

I even caught the hubbub over Hemingway’s cats. His bust looks at me angrily as I even think about a misguided fate for his precious felines. My cat meows in anger that I am not writing more about it than this smidgen of brevity.

I spent the morning pulling prickers, thickets, and hay from the cuffs of my heavy denim work pants in preparation for the day that is sure to come, the day called Monday. I used to like Monday so much. It was my day off, my Sunday. I would sleep in the big empty bed after my Lady had departed for work. I would get up and have some coffee, check my email and read a bit of news. I would work on a piece, eat some lunch and embrace the lazy attitude of the day. Normally that laziness would involve a good documentary or two on the Sundance Channel, whether I agreed with what was being shown or not. Monday is when I get my copy of Time for the week.

Last Monday, while serving my ’time’, I was out in Modjeska Canyon chewing my own spit by noon as I was clearing hay and without water on my first sweat drenched day. I was singing songs in my head and thinking of the rancheros and the settlers and farmers that made California what it is today. I mostly dreamt about how much I wanted water. Colors and sparkles and flashes would pierce the spectrum of my vision. The thirst was unbearable. I thought heat stroke was inevitable. My mind bended and twisted beneath the flaming solar orb. I had become the fat cartoon character on the island with the thin one, both hallucinating each other as giant turkey legs and hams. Screw documentaries. Screw writing essays. Damn all of my laziness to hell. I wanted water. Buckets and buckets of water. At three o’clock I found myself at a new location with a water fountain, or bubbler as they are called back home in Boston, and I sucked on that wet nozzle for about twenty minutes straight. I had become a water whore. I had never been so intimate with a public device. Nirvana found in the simplest of things. H2O. Those three symbols brought me the simplest of joys and it made the day a success.

On Tuesday I brought water, a lot of water.

I have mastered the use of the pitchfork, the Kaiser blade, and the ‘Hula Ho’ (which is a garden hoe with the center of the face cut out - it is a one inch wide strip of metal bent in the outline of a regular hoe). Man, I can whack some weeds.

I have about a dozen calluses in waiting between both hands. I have a blister on my right heel the size of two half dollars that leaves my sock soaked in blood upon my day being done. My thighs are so chaffed that sitting down is comparable to the hemorrhoid commercial where the woman sits on a chair of stainless steel spikes.

Beyond all the pain and sweat, I am proud to come home. I feel good. It hurts. It hurts so good. I guess I am sadist, my Mother’s son.

Come Wednesday, I found myself at the old Irvine Ranch which is now a dilapidated nightmare found within the cerebral cortex of a dead man known as John Steinbeck. The old bunkhouse shacks that housed the Joads are boarded up now and rather frightening, standing there with there ominous secrets of the blood, sweat and tears that held their roofs up high through the nights of heat licking the cooling grove breezes that too could power a saxophone melody. Riding the tailgate of the truck through the long forgotten wedge of history that is nestled between the mall and the suburban sprawl, I thought of the faux communities set up in New Mexico for nuclear testing. I imagined that if I peeled away the burka-like boards from the longhouse windows I would see half melted mannequins sitting in rocking chairs and playing with dollhouses just before the atomic influx.

That night was a night of decompression. I felt at ease with my walk, my diet that wantonly nagged for protein, the rough sculpting of my digits as they hung weary from my palms. I actually had begun to enjoy my injured hobble and attempted to stand tall and strut my wear as if it were a badge of honor. I would not be throwing my medal over the White House fence. I would feel it every time I moved.

For some reason I had energy enough to watch a bit of television that night and found, to my cathode ray tube splendor, that the film “Mule Skinner Blues” was being aired on Sundance (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0290010/), (http://www.reel.com/movie.asp?MID=135107&buy=closed&Tab=reviews&CID=13).

This documentary is really a slice right out of the middle of our great American soup kitchen pie. On many different levels it reaches right out of the screen and tears off your goggles and makes you ogle, oogle, and google. Take a good look at this film and find out what the rest of America is doing or has done. Find the battles we all face but sometimes are too proud to admit to. There are writers who clean medical facilities, dancing madmen obsessed with video cameras, women who keep there dead pitt bulls in their freezers, drunk musicians that hope their break will happen before they are sixty, and of course the ultra fabulous Miss Jeannie.

Miss Jeannie was a cool old bird who quenched her yodeling vocal chords with a bit of schnapps from time to time as she embraced her creative community that just never made it out of the trailer park. At the time of the film she was in her seventies. She has passed away since but we at least have her spunky character, her Floridian charm, and her debut country music video that is featured at the conclusion of this documentary. Her song was “DUI Blues”. I can not find a copy of it anywhere but the melody is fresh in my head and will be, I am assuming, for a very long time. I might even be humming it’s chorus as they nail the pine around me. If you are familiar with the Grateful Dead song “Going Down the Road Feelin’ Bad” then you will know the generic country melody of the easy going regret of which I speak. One of Miss Jeannie’s choruses is “If the Lord is willing, and the creeks run dry, I won’t get another DUI”. Bless that woman’s soul. I am sure she is yodeling her way through some country fandango right now in God’s own living room, right next to the purple divan.

When Thursday’s labor ass whipped me into gear, I had traded in hymns like “Swing Low” and “Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen” for Miss Jeannie’s anthem of ‘never again‘. All day long the weeds and leaves and pine needles danced beneath my rake tines as I hummed out belting choruses of this, my new theme. I don’t know if the palms could hear me way up above my head. I am not sure if the avocados and oranges knew they were twig snap plummeting to the mulched Earth’s floor in rhythm. I don’t know if my co-convict Pedro thought I was insane. I know the day passed by faster than I ever could have paid it to. I know I got more work done than half a dozen roadside pumpkins with a shotgun sheriff breathing down their necks. I know Miss Jeannie took time away from a yodel and a tune to smile down at me and offer me some peace. Thank you, thank you very much.

Friday was a Friday. The pedestrian blisters had become such an impediment to my movement that my Lady, with all of Mother Theresa’s compassion, gave me a ride to the chain gang in the wee hours of the day. The day flew by as I anticipated the return to my piano refinishing profession come Saturday and the hopes of being able to write this piece. My hard work all week was rewarded in the afternoon with the very slick and easy duty of pitchfork holding piles of debris in the bucket of a tractor as scoop after scoop was loaded up and dumped into a bin. As the end of the day found the van driving back down through the middle of the old El Toro Marine base towards the weeks completion, I actually longed to be at my ‘regular’ job. I eagerly anticipated the drops of sweat that I would shed sanding away lacquer and mixing up chemicals for the spray gun. I could not wait to face the challenges found within the tasks of polyester finish repair that I knew awaited me at my place of currency generation. I knew a few good handshakes and hugs awaited me upon my return to work and I knew that Layton would be able to catch me up on the news that I had missed. He grew up on a farm in Missouri, so I knew my pitchfork stories and blisters would give us more than idle chatter and banter to play catch with. I really do love my job. I really do love writing these essays.

Things aren’t so bad. I am getting thinner. I am purging my old rusty system. All of the reflections going on in my skull give way to many a short story. There are other details that I am leaving out of this rundown as not to get myself in trouble as you never know who actually reads these things. I will get into the politics of it all once my 290 hours are complete, finito, done. I have fifty beneath the belt and look down the barrel of the remaining 240.

I purchased some Gold Bond powder for those fat chaffed thighs of mine. Zinc Oxide is a miracle just watch the Kentucky Fried Movie and see. The hand blisters are well on their way down the line to being calluses and my heel did not blood stick to the bed sheets last night so I hope I will be a well formed soldier by dawn’s early light.

Don’t drink and drive and if you do keep your hands in your pockets when you walk the line.

Work hard when you own up to your mistakes. Always own up to your mistakes or they will work you hard.

These weekend posts and updates may be too long for the attention span of the commercial generation but I must have the hope that someone will read them all the way through, for if I don’t have that faith, I may never get published and write more books that Cliff Notes can guide people through catchy catch can conversations with.

I am going to go eat some Hummus now, no, not Hammas.

Tonight I will dream of Uncle Remus and hope that I do not wake up every half hour to check the time and reassure myself that I will not be late to my duties.

Someone pray for me, as I pray for many, and hope that the day will always come like the sun of a Hemingway title.

Godspeed …

I tend to think as Dylan said,

“Oh, what'll you do now, my blue-eyed son?

Oh, what'll you do now, my darling young one?

I'm a-goin' back out 'fore the rain starts a-fallin',

I'll walk to the depths of the deepest black forest,

Where the people are many and their hands are all empty,

Where the pellets of poison are flooding their waters,

Where the home in the valley meets the damp dirty prison,

Where the executioner's face is always well hidden,

Where hunger is ugly, where souls are forgotten,

Where black is the color, where none is the number,

And I'll tell it and think it and speak it and breathe it,

And reflect it from the mountain so all souls can see it,

Then I'll stand on the ocean until I start sinkin',

But I'll know my song well before I start singin',

And it's a hard, it's a hard, it's a hard, it's a hard,

It's a hard rain's a-gonna fall”

Although all the lyrics I could find flip the eleventh line of this phrase. All of them switch the order of speak and think. Eleven is the magic number and I am virtually ‘free’ from a system that I never want a speck to do with. I much rather shave a monkey’s nuts than live through what I did last night.

In what I have just written, I belittle anyone who has taken on the sentence of a non-violent crime or served time for a misdemeanor. For this I am truly sorry.

“He asked me for mercy, He gave me gun”

I found after a mere four hours, of what is referred to as the ‘loop‘, that I was not made for prison, or jail, life unless I was looking for a career or lifestyle change. Three Correction Officers (known as C.O.’s) as well as a group of twenty-five Hispanic gang members who tried to rape me agreed with me. I was not meant to be there beyond their entertainment and orifice excitement.

I am going to delve deeper into my ‘incarceration’ in future updates but I prefer to state them as cryptic hints now as I still have ‘time’ to do. God forbid one of those ‘fab’ individuals read this and should take me back into their arms. My Dad warned me of this. He may be a paranoid old man but I will hug him any day over any day with those fucks.

I was given what is called “CWP’ which is Community Works Projects. I have to work ten hours a day in order to accumulate 290 hours of service to pay off my debt to society. In order to do so I must walk four miles to and from my work assignment. I am viewing this as forced fat camp.

The lead into this was the Lieutenant Sheriff pulling me out of the group and explaining he was going to get me out and save my life. I will elaborate on this in future posts.

For now I am free and have relished in sleeping in my own bedding last night, next to my lady.

Being almost raped and being threatened and assaulted by men with guns is just a smidgen frightening. You would have thought me to be in a State Pen or in a much higher security jail than what I thought I was attending.

I know I did something wrong. I am not trying to back out of what I have done but I am no killer.

Something has to change.

Someone help, as I write these words and look forward to the sun …

Twenty, twenty, twenty-four hours to go, I want to be sedated. In this case, however, I am actually going somewhere.

As of 7 p.m. P.S.T. tomorrow, August 11^th 2006, I will be in the custody of the county of Orange, here in California.

I will be at the Theo Lacey Sr. Correction Facility for 29 days due to a D.U.I. that I perpetrated on September 18^th 2005.

The jail was named after an Orange County Sheriff who presided from 1891 - 1895 and then again from 1899 to 1911. I am sure he was a dutiful Sheriff, as well as a real swell guy.

We ALL make mistakes in life and we ALL make poor choices from time to time. Mine are providing me with a little time.

This is not something that I am proud of but have owned up to. In the end I will be a better person for the incident, the sobering up, the incarceration, and the lengthy maze of classes, fines, and reflection.

There has been so much going on in the World and across our Country this past week and especially today. I would much rather be writing about some of those events but stress and the over all apprehension of the unknown that is about to unfold before me. I am scared and frightened. The anxiety has been boiling over. Writing has unfortunately been low on the priority list as I have been preparing for my temporary relinquishment of freedom.

I am sure there are people who will read this and laugh at the fact that another Republican is going to jail for D.U.I They are thinking that my points are now less valid. That I am more of a kook or on the fringe. Mistakes cross all party lines and political compasses do not hold strict bearing for mistakes, problems and the consequences of them. Scandal is not a stranger in politics, or in this case the discussing of them.

I will be getting out on September 10^th. I am already looking forward to it. I can’t wait to be writing my essays again, every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday.

More than anything, I will miss my Lady and my Daughter.

Last Saturday I found a bust of Ernest Hemingway in the trash behind work. I retrieved it and cleaned it up, applying a coat of lacquer to it so it would shine almost like new. It sits next to my phone and helps me to read the caller I.D.

I know that the hollowed out eye sockets see all.

Things could be worse. I could be going to a cabin in Idaho.

Wish me luck in the shower, I hear staying clean in the hoosegow is a must…

The monkeys harangue about and toss their shit towards the patrons. Hear the shrill shrieks of proud territory and the deep jungle bellows of sexual prowess?

No this is not a piece on Jane Goodall. This is our country.

Step back, the shit will soon hit the glass.

Today I learned of what could have been a dream organization and their website. However, I came home and went to their web page and found it only to be partially gratifying. Another lesson in ‘no two people think the same’.

I have to admit that I get very wound up and excited when people start professing Federalism. Any banter about reducing the Federal Government is just about the sweetest conversation I can think of when it comes to politics.

As I reflect on this ‘grass roots’ website, I crank up the tunes and flick on the light switch. I wonder if people below my open window think I am nuts. I knew there was a reason that the window stays closed 99% of the time. Close window, close.

Downsize D.C. is a website dedicated to getting rid of Big Government (http://www.downsizedc.org/). In the same hue, shade, and tone of Limbaugh, I don’t see a need to get rid of or regulate the asshole out of ‘BIG’ anything with the exception of ‘Big Government’. This website seemed like a bastion of sanity amongst the drowning waves of repetitive nausea that could coin the Federal Government a new name badge.

I was excited. I was giddy. Oh, joy be had and plundered about with grins and giggles as the children play in a perpetual state of glee.

I love glee.

I am going to reprint their mission statement as it is my experience that no one actually goes to the links I recommend or cite as source. This post could get long which will kill the other half of the readers who really only read and enjoy succinct little bytes wrapped up in a paragraph or two (these are the people that do not utilize the media as they do not make it past the header, or leader, and more often than not do not question what they read and normally don’t make it past the headline). I hope the two people that actually read this get something from it.

I know only two people will read this because I am not ‘pimping my tits’ or looking to ‘get funky’ with anyone’s bad self beyond my self.

Here it is:

"Our Mission:

We believe the federal government has grown too large, too intrusive, and too expensive. We believe in constitutional limits, small government, civil liberties, federalism, and low taxes.

We want to end laws and programs that don't work, cause harm, and violate the Constitution. We want to restore the full force of the 9th and 10th amendments, which reserve most social functions to the people and the states.

Our goal is to reduce the federal government to a tiny fraction of its current size, decentralize power, end deficits, federal borrowing, and monetary inflation, and eliminate most federal taxation and the IRS.

We intend to achieve these ambitious goals by petitioning Congress and the President to vote against or veto bad laws and programs, and to repeal old bad laws and programs.

We intend to make this petitioning effective by recruiting every American who believes in small, Constitutional government, decentralized power, civil liberties, and low taxes.

Our goal is to have millions of Americans emailing, writing, and calling their elected representatives to oppose bad laws, and to support laws that shrink the size, scope, intrusiveness, and cost of the federal government.

We will recruit these millions of Americans through the Internet, advertising, media interviews, and direct mail.

We will mobilize, direct, and express the will of the people to force the government to respond, through the sheer weight of our numbers. The success of our mission depends on you. We need you to . . .

Participate in our petitioning campaigns

Help us recruit more supporters by spreading word of our petitions to everyone you know

Contribute money so we can advertise our efforts, and thereby recruit as many supporters as fast as possible

Our approach is simple and direct.

You will be notified by email of new laws that should be either supported or opposed.

Our website will enable you to simply and quickly send a message to your elected representatives.

We will then give you a second email message to forward to people you know, asking them to email their representatives. This will cause our petitioning effort to grow.

We will use your financial contributions to recruit still more people through advertising, direct mail, and media interviews. Every new person we recruit will increase the power of your voice by increasing the pressure on our elected representatives to Downsize DC.

You will receive regular reports of our progress. We expect this progress to be steady and unstoppable.

If it were possible to create a huge army of people to pressure the politicians to Downsize DC, would you want that?

If it were possible to restore small, constitutionally limited government, decentralized power, fiscal responsibility, and low taxes, would you want that?

If it were possible that our approach was the right way to achieve these goals, would you want to contribute some of your time and money to that end?

If your answer to these questions is yes, then click here to make a contribution to our efforts. We look forward to your participation."

Ok.

If you have made it this far then you are an intelligent reader and actually looking to learn and not just gossip through a ‘poor me’ session over a ten dollar mocha-frappa-vanilla-late-expresso-light-grande with only soy, no sugar unless it is raw - just like the conversation.

Here come the real benefits: the knowledge of why I bring up this site and what it could and may mean to you.

This organization piqued my interest as I heard their president’s rap on the John and Ken Show Saturday edition. The bill at hand, the mission to be quested, the crème de la crème is the “Read The Bill Act”. The RTBA is definitely, without a doubt, a necessity when revising or twelve stepping our Federal Government.

Most Senators, Representatives, Presidents, Vice-Presidents, Aides, and Assistants ( both aides and assistants; read = lawyers) do not read the legislation that they sign. Throw that into the mix of Congressmen having an impossible 98% re-election ratio and you begin to see that infamous ice cube on top of the iceberg.

Do we really want men and women representing us via our votes to run around all helter-skelter, nillie-willie, and non-chalant scribing their nome de plumes down on the parchment that effects our everyday? Is this the power that we have carved out from the steak for them to digest? For them to get fat from? For them to smile at us about when it comes to baby kissing time, when they are shaking hands acting like they did not know any better like little school children who have broken the water fountain, or bubbler as I knew it as, all while denying they have know idea why their shirt and shorts are wet?

NO!

Ok, so they sign, sign, sign away and that is what it is. It IS time to change it. Even if I do not agree with all of what Downsize D.C. is fighting against, it is quite the noble cause.

The math doesn’t make any sense when it comes down to these midnight votes of bills that have been amended and anointed as the best thing since sliced bread. Each Congressmen would have to spend more time than what is possible to read all of this legislation that they sign up for. It is impossible. Even with a full staff of readers and interpreters they would still not grasp enough of each signatures repercussions if they were just simply briefed.

Do I give a flying fuck about Mahmood’s rights to not be wiretapped when he is using Western Union to wire tens of thousands of dollars back to an Arabian country of Islamic fervor? No.

Do I care about the cherry growers being dicked around by the government when it comes to press releases and studies of how cherries are better than some meds when used to treat certain ailments? Yes.

The monkeys blindly sign and we are left to blindly abide what their signatures prescribe.

Everything is a slippery slope. Everyone wants a perfect world. I know my daughter does. I want that world for her.

I know that the perfect world is as tangible a Valhalla and Asgard.

A road laid with tar and filled in with tacks.

Watch where you step.

Make sure you read what you sign.

It will be easier for most legislators when it is all in Spanish.

The jazz will still play but you can bet that T.V. and News will be a smidge different as the Congressmen bathe in their lack of accountability, as they do now.

Bask, bathe, boil.

Roll around in it you fat ass pigs, the pork will soon be fried.

I love bacon and so do the monkeys …