fellas I have entered the building...finally!

k so I finally got me a darnd laptop and joined the rest of the world outside of kentucky...jk...but not really. So now, I will be online doing a LOT more writing, and more videos and the like...so stay tuned...for I am arrvied...

Samma Skit, Andra Dagen

Allting po mitt liv ar JAVLE skit, just nu. Jag har mitt alskling, och han ska flytta har till mig nesta vecka. Jag alskar han, men jag ar radd att han ska bli snell po forsta plats, da att senare, han ska bli precis som Daniel, eller andra manniskor jag vet forut. Jag ar jatte constigt po mitt insiden... Jag sackna Sverige, och Hasse, och min hela klan po Good Foundation. Du vet vad jag talar om, om du inte vet, kanske du behover inte.
NOTE: SKIT is pronounced, like "wheat" except you blow out air when you say it, like the French, grossly, "huit"

You Can't Take it Back

You know, more people should put a lot more thought into the things they say.  Someone once told me, 'Words are like bullets, once you let them out, you can't take them back,' and people, this is true.  I learned about diplomacy when I was 10 years old.  My father took me, my aunt Alice and her new grandson out to lunch one day.  Thing was, the baby wasn't her grand baby at all.  Her son's wife had cheated on him, and everyone in the family was talking about how the baby wasn't my cousin's biological child.  So when we sat down to lunch, my aunt held up the baby and said," Doesn't he look just like Ed?"  (Her son)  I huffed and said, "No, I think he looks like Chris Lavon," (the man her daughter-in-law cheated with) My aunt said nothing, but put the baby back in the car seat. After a few minutes of strained silence, she got up and left the restaurant.  My father said, " Erin, do you know what diplomacy means?"  I said no.  He explained, saying, " You know, you hurt your aunt Alice very much by what you just said.  You should always think before you speak, and if what you are thinking may be rude or hurtful, then it is not necessary to go on and say it,"  I hadn't actually thought before I spoke, and frankly, it had never occurred to me that my words could hurt someone.  When I look back on it now, I am horrified, and hope to God that my aunt doesn't remember what I said that day.  I learned that lesson very early in life, and make a daily, conscious effort to make sure I choose my words carefully, analyzing my words almost to death, and the impact they may have on the listener.  It is easy to do, and I find that I am the better person in many situations, even if I am the only one who knows it.  Sometimes I nearly have to bite my tongue completely off  to keep my words in, but in the end, I find that this effort is always worth it.  If you read this, take a moment think before you speak;  If it's not necessary or constructive, then for the love of God, don't say it!  I guarantee you, people around you, especially spouses or significant others will love you for it. 

The Nut Ward

Yes I called it that, and I have every right to, considering that I have been confined there more than once. The last time was 17 days of confusion, hilarity and damn good times on the Fourth Floor Psychiatric ward of Denver Health Medical Center. I met some kickass people there, like George Welch. An old Hell's Angel biker from Sacramento, he checked in after being cracked out and not sleeping for more than a week. He was short and thin, with long hair and a Fu Manchu mustache that only old bikers can pull off. He was a con, and would wrench open the newspaper machine and steal a paper each time we went outside to smoke. And my best friend there, Pretty Girl who had the impulse to draw her own blood and shoot it out into the toilet, than draw it again, shoot it again. Then there was Noelle, who thought the devil was trying to eat her, and she so fat that she couldn't run to get away from him, a man named, and I shit you not, Robert Robert Roberts, we all just called him Bob. Or Sarge, who was a lean hard Vietnam vet who barely spoke until I went up to him one day and said I was proud of him. I had a special spot in my heart for him cause he'd lost a wife and very young kids in a wreck and then he had nobody so he went to live in his truck. Or Darren, who to this day more than a year later, is still sitting outside the public library next to Centennial Park for want of a place to go.
Or the artist Troi, who drew a landscape of mountains and pine trees on my foot with a blue ink pen, complete with flowers on each of my toes....One day I'm gonna send out invites to all the crazies I met on the ward and we'll all just show up one day and check back in...and have the time of our lives, all over again.

Leadville

I lived in Leadville Colorado from July 9th 2006 until April 13th 2007. It sits 10,200 feet up in the mountains, officially the highest incorporated town on the face of the North American continent. It is a creepy place in a way, an old silver mining town that somehow never died. Two songs by slipknot take me back there like nothing else. "Circle" and "Vermillion Pt.2," I can taste the cheap coffee I would buy from the Kum and Go on 4th and Harrison. Every morning I would rise and walk for coffee, and watch the moon over the eastern mountains turn into the coming sun. I went overtop of Hagerman's Pass in a 1988 Honda Accord with a bent antenna, 13,000 feet; this with friend Jeff who lived in a school bus. I remember Rex, the drunk who also lived in a school bus with his Sharpei Pokey. Rex woke each morning to Red Bull, Squirt and vodka. He wore a blue cat collar around his ankle and had a leather harness with the words "Colorado Association For The Blind" that he would put on Pokey; he would wear dark glasses and pretend to be blind when he flew so Pokey could come on board for free. I remember the dark winter nights, sitting at my window in the Tabor Grand Hotel-turned-low-income-apartments, watching the snowflakes that were pat as pillows and thicker than clotted cream. I would hear the howling wind, shrieking and thought of how terrified the miners and prostitutes must have felt living only in their shanty shacks. I remember Jan, the purple nosed drunk fry cook at the Golden Burro, driving me over the bridge at Redcliff, I-24 West. My God, what a place, and what a motley group of hard ass people who lived there. It draws you in, and you get stuck there, and by the time that town is through with you, you are drained of every good feeling you ever had. I'll go back though, that I do know. Times I feel like I have to...

Bad Bad Luck

The summer of '06 was in ways the best and in ways the worst of my life. I had spent the first part in North Carolina, then came back home to Kentucky for a minute. I was hanging out with a girl named Heather who was a witch, always calling on Kali and raining down curses on people, poor girl didn't understand why her own life kept falling apart. She was dark and sad and lived in a big ass doublewide in the country. When I listen to "Winners and Losers," by Social Distortion, I always think of her and our fat friend Derek, who used to make a pasta dish with a couple pounds of cream cheese, and a couple pounds of cheddar, you get the picture. My birthday that year was one of the worst days of my life, just as the birthday one year later was the same. I left Kentucky four days after the Fourth of July and headed west to a little town in Colorado called Leadville. That place is another story, but the point is that after two straight horrible, shitty birthdays, I'm hoping to God that this year things will be at least marginally better. I am listening to "Bad Luck" by the same band, and man, I sure hope my bad luck's gone for at least a little while. Here's to hoping, anyway.

The Not-So-Lazy Poorfolk

I wonder why the poor in America are so often overlooked. Why we are sending billions of dollars in food and related aid overseas when our own citizens are going hungry is something I will never understand. It could be said that, "This is America, anyone who wants to work should never go hungry," Perhaps, if you live in the inner city where there is work. What people fail to understand is that when you are born and raised in the hills and hollers of the Appalachian South, there is no work, and no way to get where there is work. For example, you live fifty miles to the nearest town where you might find sustainable employment. If your family cannot afford to buy you a car to get to town to work, then you are completely and irreversibly fucked. One must have a job to get a car, and a car to get to the job. I have heard too many people condemn the people of Appalachia as being lazy and shiftless, without ambition. I am always told, "It's simple, you pack up and move somewhere else," And just how, pray tell? Suppose you hitchhike to a city, where will you live while you are saving money for an apartment? 99% of employers require an address to be hired on for work. How will you feed yourself for two weeks until you get your first paycheck? People in Appalachia will grow a garden, or stalk a deer or fish for hours to feed their families. If you have ever grown a garden and canned vegetables, let me assure you, this is NOT easy work. It is hot miserable backbreaking work to pull weeds and stand over boiling Mason jars for hours at a time in the middle of the damn summer, 95 degrees with equal humidity. This is not laziness, is it? So when you ain't got a pot to piss in or a window to throw it out of, how in the hell is moving to a city to live on the streets going to get you anywhere but screwed? Can anybody give me an answer to that?