(In Memory)

out & about

Flash Fiction: A Salute To Herbert per et fils

"....I think of Trish - 'not from Marin City,' fashion-before-function proselytizer Trish, gentile fine and pretty with shortish, chestnut red hair, who would shiver her nards off in the Olympia, Washington dusk. You see, it's, 'fashion before function,' not, 'style before function,' as that's not how the paradigm functions. Yet it does, and in a corollary of a sort, anything functional is inherently stylish (such is my belief system and never isn't, though those who would disabuse me live close among us.)

"Above, I intimated the reality of paradigms, gave an example of one, and implied a case for the distinction of a paradigm from a rule or an aphorism.... As well, distinguish a paradigm from a metaphor - the former is better. If only what is better than appropriate were universally applicable...."

"From Lecterns and Pulpits," Sister Gretchen Duenna Crowfeather of the Old Earth Bene Gesserit; acolyte instructor, docent and chaperone, Pueblo City, Wallach IX

Sister Gretchen looked from Steward Lucas Rice to Captain Leah Thomas, then back again. "I realize that there are restrictions due to fuel scarcity. I assure you, I weigh under. Yet my meager life savings are in a wrap, here."

Rice noted in the Ixian scanner where she pointed. Captain Thomas was quick: "I make no guarantees, but this life savings you mention could prove a boon. Parting with some now could purchase you short-term perks, and longer term honors should we achieve planetfall. It seems crass, such economic considerations in transit aboard a Guild lifeboat...."

 "All that matters are these girls' welfare, if course."

 "Of course!" replied both the Steward and the Captain.

 "Very well. The palladium and copper are yours. The gold, should you need it."

 Rice pondered this. "Unlikely we'll need the latter."

 "There's an Earth ounce of yttrium, as well."

 "We'll set that by, as it might come in handy," intoned Thomas. "We'd be pleased if you kept it on your person."

 "Such pleasure," muttered Gretchen, not without sympathetic bitterness and an air of Voice.

 "Mademoiselle," the Steward Rice inquired, "may I procure for you?"

 "Good! You may: a flute of prosecco for each of the survivors traveling with us, immediately!"

#DuneFanfic #FlashFiction #HerbertInspired

Shasta Carr Fire Makes Otherworldly Light In Colusa, Mendocino

Unretouched, raw from camera:

Sartorial Mayhem

It's June, so I'm a little late planning out one ensemble for Fall/Winter (I may be poor and mentally insufficient, but I try to do my best... Currently, I have a pair of Walmart George brand shorts with a coordinating Claiborne shirt in that particular sandy pink that I'm sure would make Anna Wintour scream love for 2018, but I digress...)

So I long for a taupe or charcoal jacket and slacks, to set off a silk turtleneck, and I love the way past acquisitions from Zara have fit, but I've heard tell that they mistreat garment workers in Turkey ... And now, this, which is old news yet fresh to me. (And the stripes had to be horizontal - couldn't they just have made Galliano a pair and been done with it?)

Ah well... No shame in buying H&M when it comes down to it...

!!!

And check out my new, three dot column/photo 📷 blog:

williamrobertway.blogspot.com

Interstate Meat Dist., Inc - MAJOR BREAK!

For quite a while I've been complaining about the Walmart meat from Interstate Meat Dist. in Clackamas, Oregon. Finally, from a comment on Facebook comes this:

"It actually is a filler...
My neighbor works there. He says they get fat-filler, from some other corporation.. To mix with the meat 🥩 (they won’t disclose where THAT comes from)...
they then mix the fat-filler with THEIR fat-filler... but they won’t say what’s in THAT..
So two fat fillers and mystery meat. "

So there!

Consumer Watch: Sell Your Gold

Sell Your Gold, though rated tops by NBC, turned out to be rather crooked. Mr. Levine - a Levine! Earnestly appalled, I am! - of Boca Raton, you should be ashamed... I got far less than I should have for some very fine gold in particular. I was perhaps supposed to haggle with them, and I should be grateful for the valuable lesson, but we are not in some dusty soukh, here...

Tearooming...

...Or, cottaging (remember the late George Michael's scandal?)

(Courtesy of Arnold Zwicky, about whose inclusion in my blogroll I've been terribly remiss...)

FYI

...My machine is http://208.184.161.143/...

...Just 'cos I've had weird issues with stalking and such; figure I may as well did myself (of course, I can only hope this post doesn't ruin my chances with that good-looking, creepy Marine I'm into...)

Formerly...

...Colusa Regional Medical Center.

AFAIK, there's still no radiology, ICU, or emergency...

Also, I don't see why it's nervy for a member of the Way family to be posting this - certain medical professionals made certain choices regarding my father, but we had no part in what happened to the previous administration and the health care center - there was no lawsuit, and we were never talked to by the CSMB...

(Back story: apparently, my father had been, like, the worst patient ever; in the Fall of 2015, a day before he was to be transferred to hospice care, he was subject to patient abandonment, left at the nearby casino's hotel...)

Avert

Among those who will not meet your gaze are two types: those who are trying to hide a lie (of course), and those who are trying to hide a love...

Mike

Miss u, m c t...

New Drag Name up for Grabs:

Try on Mystery Winchester! You could be three sheets and emcee... "Annie get your gun -- it's Mystery Winchester." "Lock and load, ladies and gentlemen, cos Mystery Winchester's up next!"

She could do "Janey's Got A Gun," or a really slow, creepy "Jeremy" (with a bloody lip sync a la Phatima...)

"If they run, they're Viet Cong; if they stand still, they're well trained Viet Cong"

Please bear with, as I figure out whether my current mental predicament is fueled mainly by my bipolar disorder, my recreational drug dabbling, or a furious sexual frustration - a n hysteria analog.

Once I've explained it, a more delightful state of being common grumbling about processing has it should ensue.

IN RE THE SKRIPAL CASE

A short, sweet primer for those of you just learning the importance of journalism and minding your civic duties (that is, knowing what the government is up to), or maybe just renewing your earnest concern after a spell of jadedness and cynicism (#TrumpLoeil, anyone?): Whenever you hear talk or read news (usually the latter) about diplomats being "expelled from the U.S." (almost always, a sitting president makes the announcement), it means that agencies such as the CIA (the "ma'ams" and "sirs" in suits as far as active duty personnel for example do jibber-jabber) have already flagged in a particular way key embassy personnel or persons of interest (foreign nationals, of course) associated with a given consulate, and want those people (seldom if ever mentioned by name, but mentioned as existing in the news - there are solid security reasons for this - trust and believe) removed from the U.S. ENTIRELY for their own physical safety*; these persons are often extremely valuable to the national security apparatus, among other more base concerns, and are often friends of the operatives whose day-to-day jobs include, let's face it, honestly making the world a better place.

So, the people being expelled aren't exactly being punished, nor is some pajandrum-lite, scolding statement being made by the POTUS. And for those of us used to how messy the ways our quotidian civilian existences run themselves, this is often a fine set-up for the men and women involved, most of whom believe in and strive for great things in this world, such as comity, fairness, and harmonious coexistence among the U.S. and other countries of the world!

(I do, above, put a high gloss on an actual world that is truly fraught sometimes, and there are bad hombres who can be rounded up and so "expelled" for our sake rather than theirs, but come on... Right? These are all pretty intelligent, professional, non-fruity people I'm writing about, so forget that  horrible LETHAL WEAPON II dude from the S. African embassy in Los Angeles... It's not that sort of Hollywood vibe, dig?)

*Yeah, I know, technically an embassy is foreign soil and these people have diplomatic immunity, but also (heh, Madamoiselle Thomas, when it comes to sad phrasing in colloquial English, but I digress...) the "better safe than sorry" rule so often employed by government doubtless will apply in these expulsion cases... Please bear with those who know us as their charges to keep on this tip, as they typically know their jobs and can be trusted, at the very least to be of the agencies employing them!

PS Yo, Leah, you're so fucking lame, you'd think it was called The Square, not THE PENTAGON! LOSER! (Whee! I could have picked on you in junior high! Think about all the trauma and process and therapy!)

The Deer Didn't Sign a Release, So They'll Threaten to Sue, I'm Sure...

Whom I Call By The Name "Arthur"

In 2009, I was in dire straights - homeless, and being mistreated by the unlikeliest (in terms of likelihood of existence) group of people. I was having a hard time at building 80 in General Hospital one appointment, and just then, I had a vision of one little man with a handheld machine that looked like a bullhorn; he was cavorting or tumbling, and then became three of himself...

In late Spring, early Summer last year, I saw the same man. I was looking out my kitchen window, and almost always, something catches my eye. Or somebody - drivers passing by, government-looking types raiding for boxes of paperwork, the lovely V. doing her weekly inspection, et alia. This was in May or June, perhaps, and I saw the juvenile delinquent/altar girl/Infanta Concepcion-get-a-mantilla-I-hear-voices-worse-than-Laura Branigan's Gloria... I remember, clear as day, she had a sullen little attitude and was driving their golf cart around; on the passenger side sat the little man: Caucasian (perhaps luso-brasiliano or Portuguese American by his aspect?), dark haired, afflicted with achondroplasia dwarfism... He seemed to be panicking, gesturing wildly. And surely, the ride looked perilous for him...

I don't know why I mention it. For years I've been treated less than understandably often times when I hear voices, react to people who aren't there, et cetera... I've faced hostility, anger, judgement, cruelty, intimidation from those who more or less would protest they themselves ARE there... But anyway...

I've always wanted to find this little man, because no matter how much of a scalliwag some might think him, I know I'd just want to eat him up like he was a candy bar, EL-OH-EL, as it were...

Whatever, I'm funny in lots of ways: the Sal Mineo/my-house-is-backwards-on-bottoms-land-and-I-wear-hankies-out-my-left-back-pocket funny, as well as odd...

Power Lines

Taken with Amazon Kindle Fire, edited in same suite....

Does The Left Hand Know...?

Left Hand, March 2018

2.39 MB .JPG, taken with Kodak PIXPRO FZ43

こんにちは!

ハッピー・フライデー！

Personal Venting Rant About a Personal Issue

Right now, I'm caught in how some people will get all twisted up in their priorities and focus, and take one with them. I have a bit of a problem with myself in that, of course. As it stands, I did some work for someone who turned out not to be able to pay me yet; I know she's good for it, and will come through eventually, but... I'm kicking myself, because that's about 8 hours worth of labor, and by agreeing to do it on promise of pay (and this person has an issue with timeliness), I'm doing a disservice not only to myself, but to everyone who does labor for money in the community here - I become part of the problem with the person who more or less welches on pay.

Also, some people seem so intent on getting one "in the flock," as it were, but do not do the thing they need to do to get it done: namely, respecting certain secular things that maybe I take too seriously, as well as knowing that the - exclusively Christian? - Golden Rule is often always at play throughout the living, human world, this "vale of tears"...

Dunno, maybe I have "I don't respect myself enough," written all over me, and attract too much of the attentions of well meaning, deceptively malicious or deceptively gormless folk... (/RANT OVER.)

And now, for some pretty, random pictures of Northern California...

Dear Miss Fenty...

...My name is Tigger Niglet, and I live down the road from Christopher "31 Flavors" Baskin-Robin in Storybrook, California, near the Mendocino Mountains (Surely you know of local archvillainess Clara Bell, often joked about stupidly by your fellow New Yorker Kristen Wiig? But I digress...)

I beg for things as cleverly as possible, and always have paper towels in hand with my glass cleaning spray whenever I occasion to jump on a motherfucker's windshield, but I've never been successful enough to afford your shoes -- not even in jest!

But if I could, I'd like to ask you for a pair of size 8 1/2 men's hightops, in red vermillion lacquer (maybe bits of black showing through, Japanese-style?); with Imperial Yellow soles, laces and inners? I would rock them at least twice a week for years!

***

I think about Mikey a lot. I think about... What if he was horribly disfigured by burn scars, like the Marine mechanics who survived that serious accidental ordnance explosion or whatever on the tarmac at Travis a few months ago? I know I'd still want him, no matter what (yes, physically...) 

707 USMC Mikey, where art thou??? Waaah...

***

[DECISIVELY]: "Get Jason Bourne -- at once!"

ANALYST [INSTANTLY CRINGING]: "Um, ma'am, then maybe you shouldn't have initiated exclusionary protocols... Are you really sure you want to go crawling on your hands and knees to Mr. Bourne now? After all that?"

(Honestly, Leah, Jo, et alia: what the fuck do those movies *do* with Joan Allen, anyway?)

***

San Franciscans and guests of San Francisco who will be in the City: several tours seem to be scheduled for visitors to tour Salesforce Tower. This one is sold out (still points to a waiting list), but check around for others, or make your own not-exactly-#disrupty attempts at meandering through it. At 326 meters tall, it's a pretty notable new landmark, and who knows? In any sort of collapse event, it might be one of America's new Towers of David! Exciting, to muse on the post-apocalyptic, n'est pas?

(photo by William R. Way, on an LG flip phone, end of September, 2017)

***

"I SWEAR BY THE [UNINTELLIGIBLE] -- SWEAR [GRUMBLE]" Hey, it ain't Richard III. Try doing Charles II instead - but you better hurry, before he goes out the window!

***

Today is Sunday, and I may yet prevail upon my soon-to-be-dearly-departed-so-I-had-better-spoil-her mother to lend me the car that I may attend (Methodist? I think so...) services at the local community church -- just to be a sport, ya dig?

(Please join me in gassho, and... Namo Amida Butsu!)

My Next Three Subjects to Photograph

新年快樂 - Winter Freebies

Click on the thumbnail (it *should* work. If not, email me at the address at right... I'll endeavor to email back every request... UPDATE: Nah, if you want one, email me for raw docs sent as attachments, which you can then relay to your favorite printer - mopria, shutterfly, Walmart, fractureme, et alia...) to download large files fit to print 20' X 30' or more...

Chinese Pistachio

Silk Tree

Raywood Ash

Flowering Plum

Black Olive

(As always, donations accepted at the gofundme, paypal and venmo links to the right, in the sidebar under my name...)

Last Stretch, I Think, of This Thing That Universally Wants Correction

Hope I, as so many haven't, survive through that happy segue to the following ever after...

Still very anthropocentric, and my concerns are with the uneasy dead, the challenged and challenging living (among them loved ones and contemporaneous public figures), and those permitted to look back upon us. The tone is often one of heartsickness or hilarity, but these can get seem unclean times - and the common arenas (television, the Internet, radio... Or not, in that last... and our often unquiet minds) are still teeming with faces and voices (notably not participating terribly much: those whose driving desire is to join with either what is lost or what will be new and as yet unknown.)

Last night flashed with watershed realization for me, and I look forward to the lunar new year through a scanner, darkly, and from behind brittleness. But we are not dead yet.

Personal LULZ: I cannot get emails to come through to william.robert.way@gmail.com or to williamrobertway@gmail.com, and am still leery of ATT's network (though my only access is landline and G3; but once bitten... Many instances...)

"Slapdash" Proposal Contest...?

Be your thing collapse contingencies, what you plan to do as the world as it will be (is) in Revelation gets weirder and weirder, or just all things space travel and exploration and colonization, I doubt the general public has had much time to ponder what has undoubtedly already been put to the usual suspects by the military-industrial complex: What would yours look like -- hasty, self-sufficient spore/seed colonies for Homo sapiens sapiens?

Using OTS tech and emerging launch platforms (I'd say Reaction Engines, Limited's Skylon could count), who wants to design an orbital or outer space colony that once completed is sustainable without further imports from Earth's surface?

UPDATE: I am planning out this coming year, coordinating my med and psych appointments, trying to grow veggies, maybe get more work, and continuing my education, but on the side, I'll try to gin up my own slapdash, self-sustaining extraterrestrial colony proposal...

Clackamas, Oregon

So Walmart continues to sell this meat out of their Interstate Meat Distributors, Inc., in Clackamas, Oregon... Once again, I highly recommend people NOT buy this meat!

Quick Spring

I long and yearn, and am too eager to offer this night, under stars and lights...

"I Love 'Gloria Patri'!"

Hey, dead lady: so long since we've been to black mass. We should, like, totally go! Alone! Together! Without each other! Air kisses!

 "It's FAAAAAHN!!!" She sneers...

More From My New 16 Megapixel Kodak...

...Look how huge these shots are! Perfect for printing at your favorite digital photo printer... Have at!

And as always, if you're feeling generou$$, paypal.me, venmo.com, and gofundme.com links to the right, in the sidebar under my name (Thanks again to the two people who together have raised $10 for our gofundme campaign! Yay!)

Something Serious @ Local Law Enforcement

Officer: talk to me, your favorite #badgebunny...

...Was that apparent adult Caucasian woman, dark blonde in the white, four-door sedan (parked without emergency lights on, perilously close to the white line on the East side of Ladoga Stonyford Road 1 mile South of town) a - GULP - corpse??!!

It's not terribly good of anyone to leave it to the voices in *my* head to bestow peace of mind to me - a conscientious citizen who has nothing but Facebook to report the incident, thanks to some self-important so-and-so's delusional priorities, which are given enough sway roundabout these parts...

"The heart-hurt gleam in a too-bare eye..."

 The following, taken with my new Kodak 16 Megapixel camera (a gift from my brother, who probably should have been consulted before I embarrassed myself with my ignant post today... I'm sure there's something herein one can smirk and clear one's throat at...)

+++

Still on the make like a confused tomcat, or a buck in estrus lol... Maybe what stymies me besides myself can be addressed with that by which I stymie myself, and me and some dude or dude can finally, scandalously get laid.

Martin Luther King Jr Day Photoblogging