The Shopocaplypse is Near!

Whoa! I'd forgotten all about that one. Where does Mike find this crazy gibberish? He knows Jigglebox better than I do! In the words of Bill Murray playing Hunter Thompson in that evil 1980 film Where the Buffalo Roam that set the course for my adult life (and thus ruined it): "Did I say that? Shit. I must have meant it."

More and more of my words from the past seem written by someone else (and are thus impossible to edit, by me anyway). It's weird. Anyway, thanks for that additional link. I may have said this before but I'll say it again, in Fred's defense, that coast is insane, it's winds deeply unsettling.

Unless you're me, of course, to whom the whole of our Starfucks-Costco-Quiznos consumer-demented society is WAAAY MORE UNSETTLING. Driving through this suburban (and urban) gauntlet of uber-homogenized, aesthetically-appalling, clone consumer "outlets" is enough to make me want to vault my corpus dictum onto the outer perimeter razor wire of the nearest for-profit prison. (I say outlet, though what worldly frustrations could be "let out" by visits to such spiritually-draining environs is beyond me.) And if that sounds crazy, I wonder: how crazy is it to try and escape into prison when the whole ugly-ified civilized world has come to feel like a prison, of sorts? A prison of corporate logos. A prison for your eyes and ears, at the very least. Such environs make the winds and brutal blue sea of the Lost Coast seem all warm and fuzzy by comparison.

I say all this and yet I know what I really need these days, and it has more to do with love and family and friends and increased social contact, to be needed and useful and inside the world again. And I need off this little boat. This writer's life has cast me way too far adrift. I imagine that once safely back inside the world, I could better cope with the glut of Wal-Marts. Maybe even the Starfucks.


But I'd still have to attend regular services of The Church of Stopping. Because the Shopocalypse is near!

Reverend Billy always sings to the lowest prices of my macchiato soul. Never has anyone so boldly articulated my consumer angst. May the Good Lord bless and keep you, Billy.

Tis God's work you do, I say.

Amen.

Postscript: I was well pleased to discover, on punching macchiato into Google to check the spelling, that the word, bastardized by Starfucks, is actually Italian for "stained." Sweet irony! Oh, coffee, how Starfucks hath stained thy good name!

Come on in, the water's fine!

Greetings from northern California's Lost Coast!

As a bona fide recipient of a living-wage grant from the National Endowment for the Creation of Radical Oddities, or NECRO, your friend and author has taken up residence in a driftwood shelter on an austere 25-mile stretch of wind-whipped sand and rabid frothing ocean. Dispatches from my new outpost will likely be less frequent than ever given the sand in the keyboard, the mice gnawing on the modem, the bats, gnats, bears, and bloated sea lion carcasses perfuming the wind with that sickly sweet stench that the nose knows can only be one thing.

Made it out here just in time for the start of the Great Summer of Aught Eight, sure to be a great one if only by dint of human nature's need to put a more vigorous shine on things the worse they get. Give we sapient homos a really, really good crisis and watch us come alive. Forget moderation. Give us $10/gallon gasoline and a potential 100-year war and we'll show you who's boss.

Whatever. Here's wishing you all a wicked sweet summer.

Badger me and maybe I'll write.

Creatively, I mean.

On a wildly unrelated note, for those of you who've known me long and remember my confused young consumerist god-child Wal-Mart Boy, this video clip will resonate. My thought many years ago on the subject: it's only a matter of time. Thanks to Stricky for sending it my way.


And thank you, Mike Marcyes for the Lost Coast photos. It was a pleasure to guide Mike on his first camping trip since Boy Scouts, his first ever hiking trip. Mike held up amazingly well last weekend considering I took him to one of the most forbidding stretches of God-forsaken God's Country in the continental United States, and hiked us in 7 miles on the first day. It was only later that I realized that 7 miles was my first day on the Appalachian Trail, and a tough one at that. Hiking on sand is tougher. For more of taste of the Lost Coast world from long ago unpublished writings of mine, read this and then this.

Whipping therapy cures depression and suicide crises

Russian scientists from the city of Novosibirsk, Siberia, made a sensational report at the international conference devoted to new methods of treatment and rehabilitation in narcology. The report was called "Methods of painful impact to treat addictive behavior."

Siberian scientists believe that addiction to alcohol and narcotics, as well as depression, suicidal thoughts and psychosomatic diseases occur when an individual loses his or her interest in life. The absence of the will to live is caused with decreasing production of endorphins - the substance, which is known as the hormone of happiness. If a depressed individual receives a physical punishment, whipping that is, it will stir up endorphin receptors, activate the "production of happiness" and eventually remove depressive feelings.

Russian scientists recommend the following course of the whipping therapy: 30 sessions of 60 whips on the buttocks in every procedure. A group of drug addicts volunteered to test the new method of treatment: the results can be described as good and excellent.

Doctor of Biological Sciences, Sergei Speransky, is a very well known figure in Novosibirsk. The doctor became one of the authors of the shocking whipping therapy. The professor used the self-flagellation method to cure his own depression; he also recovered from two heart attacks with the help of physical tortures too.

"The whipping therapy becomes much more efficient when a patients receives the punishment from a person of the opposite sex. The effect is astounding: the patient starts seeing only bright colors in the surrounding world, the heartache disappears, although it will take a certain time for the buttocks to heal, of course," Sergei Speransky told the Izvestia newspaper.

The whipping therapy has not become a new discovery in the history of medicine. Tibetan monks widely used it for medical purposes too. Soviet specialists used a special method of torturing therapy at mental hospitals. They made injections of brimstone and peach oil mixture to inspire mentally unbalanced patience with a will to live. A patient would suffer from horrible pain in the body after such an injection, but he or she would change their attitude to life for the better afterwards.

"People might probably think of me as a masochist," Dr. Speransky said. "But I can assure you that I am not a classic masochist at all," he added.

The revolutionary method may take the Russian healthcare to a whole new level. The method is cheap and highly efficient, as its authors assure. Why not using something more efficient, a rack, for example?

MAY DAY! '08

There once was an old lady who swallowed a fly. She swallowed a spider to catch the fly. She swallowed a bird to catch the spider that wriggled and jiggled inside her. Yes. That old song from younger days took on new meaning for me this year. I awoke New Year's Day with the realization that the fly that I taken-to years ago to eradicate from my body the shit of depression, had multiplied. And that's not all. Somewhere along the road from my troubled Saturn Return (if only I could destroy planets with my mind, I'd blow that fucker right outa the sky!), the flies had become those nasty horseflies and their sting required treatment. Some doctor prescribed spiders to eat the flies. I dutifully swallowed spider after Klonipin-spider. When the spiders began to bite, well, the good doctors had something for that, too. Birds. If you're following this progression, you'll have guessed that our birds became, in time, a veritable flock of seagulls.

Now, I'd been drinking socially since age 16, sometimes to excess. We'll call booze the cat. Unlike all the other creatures, the "cat count" in my blood remained, interestingly enough, static and even decreased at times. But to untrained observers versed in the symptoms of only most obvious social drug, the cat took all the blame. Bad kitty! In my growing remorse for all my pets, I hiked my ankles into oblivion on a few thousand miles of American soil, rowed the Mississippi River until I shredded my untrained shoulder muscles, and sailed the San Francisco Bay so hungry for the life that had long ago been denied me by chronic depression that, in my desperation, I hurled myself from the deck of my sailboat four feet down to the cabin companionway T-boning my lower back so bad that I've spent the entire winter as a hunchback. Woo-hoo, as my friend Frank would say. Woo-fuckin-hoo!

So, on the first day of this glorious upchuck-colored year of our Lord, 2008, I quit everything. I mean EVERYTHING! Booze, Prozac, Valium, Codeine, and just to rub salt in the wound, coffee, too. And by shear force of will, I succeeded. Don't tell my mother, but my vigilance nearly cost me my life a few times. NEVER cold turkey Klonipin! It is death in a bottle. Were I of a litigious mind, I would launch a lawsuit so noxious it would poison the very fabric of our pharmacopious society. But I'm not. So I won't.  Anyway, I quit. And four months later, to the day (that's TODAY), I popped out of a nightmare I have been walking around in for dark endless weeks and poof! I realized that if I didn't go back on meds, I was going to die. It was that simple. And that clear.

Friends can attest to my out-of-character teetotaler abstinence from alcohol (not a drop for four months). I exercised regularly, put myself out there to be with friends and be social. I went without all the pharmaceuticals, without beer, without caffeine of any kind for FOUR MONTHS. Oh, clarity was grand, let me tell you! I was the most uptight insane nefarious creepy unstable bug-eyed childish scared and stupid human being you'd ever not wanna know for the duration. Especially in recent weeks. Then today, utterly at wits end after countless bad-sleep nights and morning terrors and queasy uneasy daydream days, I packed a day bag, let a close friend know where I was headed, and set out on foot for the local ER, where I knew I would then be transported to the county psych ward and who-knows-where from there. I was gonzo in the worst definition of the word. Worse, I had that eerie instinctual sense that if I didn't surrender to the medicos I would soon be dead. I walked a couple of miles to the hospital, paced outside the ER, and, being a smart cookie, fast-forwarded in my mind through the whole awful demeaning 5150 process I would be put through, the whole mental instability meat grinder. When I popped out the other side and returned to the present, I turned on my heel and walked away. I couldn't do it. I can't do it. If I lose it, they're gonna have to talk me off the railing of the Golden Gate or peel me off the front of an Amtrak train, because I just can't self-admit any more. I returned home to my sailboat and knew what I must do. I took my medicine. And though one med takes two weeks to kick in, the other is practically instantaneous. I felt better in a matter of minutes. And for the first time in four months, I sat down at my computer NOT to fumble incoherently with email and infinitely confounding web, but TO WRITE! And to post to my website for the first time in who knows how long.

Now I know it wasn't the booze or the drugs, though certainly a return to careful moderation is in order. It was me. It was my body chemistry, my lifestyle perhaps, my DNA. It was me. And it was how my fragile eggshell mind interacts with the reality of our bomb-crazy, human-torturing, war-money-loving, daughter in the basement raping and imprisoning, pregnant marine killing and body-burning, multi-trillion dollar debt crashing country and world and human race. And there's no judgment left in me for me. I just am. And in the meds or death ultimatum, I'll take meds and life. And that's ranting for you. - RSM

Dig the Vacuum

I'm right there with you, girl.

Feelin' it!

- RSM

Davey Jones Come Unlocked Last Night

Had a bit of a blow here in the San Francisco Bay Area last night. Here's a peak at my writings from today which, naturally, veered into the telling of the tale of my night in the storm. (This is just a snippet. Included are two shots taken out my forward hatch, one off the bow, the other to port and doctored a bit to capture the mood. Click images to see them full size.)

As the storm gained power through the night, my finely tuned rocking chair morphed into a theme park bumper car ride with no one at the wheel. I was jolted awake at some bewitched hour by Jeliza thrashing about in her slack tethers. With a "Snap!" the ship would reach the end of her aft lines. Then, usually after a good 30-second pause, "Thwack!" she would come full forward in the slip.

To add the excitement and punctuate the aforementioned jolts, a wave would slap against the port hull once every few minutes. How could this be? I wondered. I'm protected on two sides by docks. As my mind cleared a bit, I realized what must be happening. Could the wake in the estuary be so great as to be hurling waves over the end dock and into the side of my boat? It was the only explanation.


(Note swell nearly cresting the dock well after storm's peak)

I leaped up in the dark and grabbed my VHF radio. Immediately, I heard the obvious reported back to me in the robotic tones of the national weather service's tireless voice simulated reporter (now male, now female, just to break the monotony). But there was scarcely anything monotonous about tonight's reports. Swell in the bay's deep channel reaching upward of 12 feet. Winds a constant 25-30 knots with gusts upward of 60. One storm front overlapping another in tumultuous succession. Possibility of hurricane force gusts of over 100 mph on land in areas over 1000 feet in elevation.

Jesus, I thought. If it's this bad in the Oakland estuary, the storm must be trashing all to Hell the more exposed ports like Berkeley and Pier 39. Having no desire to go out in the storm and sensing my lines would hold despite the no-longer enjoyable rocking and jolts, I turned off the radio and drifted, over time, back into a wary half-sleep.

For the better part of the pre-dawn hours, I slept at an angle as the powerful offshore wind tipped my boat and held it there, a giant fist holding the mast at an almost constant 20 degree heel to starboard. I awoke again at first light with a headache from the slapping of sheets (ropes) against the hollow mast, donned full rain gear and clambered out into the wind to quell the cacophony and stave off what I could of the storm's relentless assault.

And I hear it ain't over yet.
(Satellite image provided by the Natl. Hurricane Center)



Looks like we're in for another wild night.

-RSM

007 is Dead!

And there was much rejoicing.


Dazzling fireworks over London reminiscent of V for Vendetta!

I myself entered the new year rather subdued by a head cold. I didn't go anywhere grand nor see anything fantasmagorical. I had no New Year's kiss. No fireworks. No romance. Oh, dear. Pity me.

I don't care. I'm a cool cat, a suave ship's captain, a self-actualized writer who dreamed a dream and when it failed to come true of its own accord, beat it into submission I did. And if it wasn't self-published and utterly lacking in publicity, it would be a best-seller. No question in my mind. Who out there among you knows the agent or publicist or publisher to carry this book that is sooooo beloved to those who've read it, who among you can help get it out there to the masses? Anyone?

This year you'll see the rebirth of this author. Getting off all the drugs, God willing. And I ain't talking street drugs. I'm talking all the pharma-crapical shit I've been scripted for and been leaning on for years. Gonna get clean, we are. If it kills us. Had enough of their drugs.

What will take the place of all those groovy little pills that have constituted my life support system of an entire decade? Dunno yet. Working on that one.

If I'm absolutely going bonkers in another month or so (I've been off the anti-deps for over 100 days now), I've promised myself to follow my own advice as writ in "Dead Men Hike No Trails" and drag my blues-broken bones out to Georgia and that's right - hike the damn AT again if I have to. If I can hold out til mid-April, maybe I'll be hiking the PCT.

I wish you all health and happiness in the new year, and good fortune. We're gonna need the latter. I prescribe plenty of humor to get us through what - to this writer, appear to be the darkest times of my adult life. But then my vision is a little skewed.

Will Ferrell. He's a funny man. Keep your eyes on Will Ferrell, and my apologies for the lack of substance in this blog these days. I'm saving myself, as it were, for the next book.

Semper fi,
RSM