Blog-o-Latone

I am firing this mofo back up. My friend Jolliffe said I had to. I think that's what he said. Hard to tell when you're talking in text. So I challenge all youse who have let your blog go flacid: Start Blogging!!!

Blogger: Dashboard

 

Blogger: Dashboard

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Stuff I Saw Today

1. A red headed kid w/ a mohawk showing me the found jawbone of a gopher.
2. Two boxes of competing brands of cinnamon toast crunch cereal.
3. Cops on Washington Avenue pulling people over left and right.
4. A maple muffin that I had to eat.
5. A new oak tree planted to honor the memory of a blue-eyed Ukester boy who died a few days after Thanksgiving. There is a boy made of Legos on Pier 39 in the San Francisco assembly at Legoland that is modeled after him. He is wearing a black and yellow hat. If you see him, say "Hi Jared!". He would like that.
6. A dozen multiplication problems written in pencil by a nine year old hand.
7. Six burritos and six chicken tacos in a cardboard carrying case.

What I Saw Today

1. A man at the top of the mountain carrying an iguana on his arm as he strode down the road.

2. A peregrine falcon riding the updraft on the east side of the mount. The bird hovered in one place for about 5 minutes. Then off in search of the plump lizard.

3. Two old cigarette butts tossed on a mountain that erupts into flames just for laffs.

4. Two bottles of neat beer that disappeared as if by magic or alien abduction.

5. The back of my son as he walked down the driveway and left with old friends in a dirty white car headed for Humboldt.

6. Rachel Maddow's high school picture.

Things I Saw Today Deux

1. A brownie with walnuts on a clear plate.

2. Three gulf fratilleries liteing on and off on the jasmine outside my window.

3. A photo of a man who had been hit by a rocket in Afghanistan while driving a tanker of fuel to a northern town. One arm was gone and the right index finger on the remaining arm was frozen in a position as though he was constantly pointing.

4. 23 bags of red t-shirts sitting on a table in a kitchen.

5. A horse that I once thought was dead standing in a corral on the corner of Krameria and Dauchy.

6. A flu shot schedule.

7. A cheap silver skull ring that a punk kid was wearing on his pinky finger.

8. A portly lady with a car jammed full with kids getting a ticket for parking in a loading zone for at least a half hour.

9. Six crows acting like crazy people on the wind.

10. A black and white picture of a lonesome cowpoke sitting with his horse on a bluff that overlooked the world.

Elder Care

My mother, who passed away in June, was a member of the nomadic tribe of unfortunate people who spend their last days on earth being bounced around assisted living facilities. She spent the last few years moving from one place to another and hating them all. We hated them too. Except for the last one, which was great. But by then it was too late.

My friend Ben Wah recently found it necessary to put his mother in an assisted living place, a fancy one by assisted living standards. Respectable.

But he told me a story the other evening. Seems his mother had a large chunk of money stolen from her whilst in her residence. Well, Ben and his brothers were a little pissed about this. So they placed a camera in his mother's room, and as Ben put it: "We caught the bitch!" The Bitch being one of the in-house staff. On film. With Mrs. Wah's $. Interestingly, the same "helper" worked for a time at one of the places my mother was living.

So, if you have a relative in elder care, advocate hugely for your loved one, be a high profile visitor that asks questions, makes yourself known, wants to see the med log and taste the food. And believe everything your loved one says, even if you don't believe it.

And get a camera before things begin to disappear.

Things I Saw Today

Good way to jumpstart this mofo ala Bro Atom Bomb:

+ A coyote that had lost the war with the sedan.

+ Cans of debris from the house on Brockton of an old man who died. He used to sell rebuilt bikes from the parkway. The bikes were chained to a hitching post.

+ A message on my phone from Zoto saying she had reached her new job safely by taking the Rio Nada Rapid Transit System.

+ An entire box of brand new Prang Crayons broken into pieces and scattered beneath the desk of the child to whom they belonged.

+ The scars on a child's head where they drilled to relieve pressure from his skull after he was shaken vigorously as an infant.

+ Zoto riding behind me on her bicycle.

+ A Stop sign that someone had sawed off and left in the road.