Dating a Female Roller Derby Star
This is me from back during the revolution
I used to work at a hospital. I worked in dietary. I was one of the dishwashers. The women from local roller derby team came for physical therapy. I used to run into the women in the hallway.
They were good fun. This was back in the day. They were older women I was still in college. They liked to tease me when I’d walk by while I was doing my work.
Innocence wasn’t the way those women rolled. I’d grown up going to roller derby with the family. We’d go to theCowPalace. By this time the old stars were gone. These were the new stars. I had a lot of respect for their talents.
Takes courage to go out on a date with a woman as big and as strong as you are. I’d imagined it might get dicey if you said yes to a date and found yourself in some kind of corner where you might feel you have to say no. I know a lot of my friends thought I’d died and gone to heaven.
As folklore has it men don’t have any reason to ever say no. No, is a term men usually hear not a word they say.
I was in gymnastics at the time. I trained with both men and women. I asked one of my workout partners out on a date. She told me she couldn’t date a man she trained with. “You don’t want to go out with someone you’ve seen sweating,” she said, “it’s gross!”
I didn’t think I could tell these roller derby skaters that I couldn’t date them because of having seen them sweating
I agreed to a rendezvous with this one beauty from the team. She was broad shouldered, wide hipped, and had a thin waist. She was maybe an inch shorter than me. Not right to ask how much somebody weighs, but likely our weight was close to the same. Her manner was simple. There was a charm and grace to her. I don’t know how much we had in common.
I lost sleep and couldn’t eat. I had butterflies in my stomach. This date was ruining my life. I drove down toHayward. We were supposed to meet at this tavern. I couldn’t get over that she’d asked me out. Couldn’t believe it, my hands sweat, I was worried, scared out of my mind. I needed this thing to be over.
I didn’t see it coming. Best thing ever to happen to me. Got stood up… Finally, I went got a good meal and went home and went straight to bed.
Next time I saw her at the hospital she told me we’d have to try that again. I smiled, pretended. Some of the best affairs in my life turned out to be the ones that I never had.
Factual Straightjackets
Shifting Shapes
Do you shop at the local produce markets that pop up in your community? I do. I relate to the whole notion of how much it costs to transport food long distances.
I heard that because food from the southern hemisphere swirls in the opposite direction of food in the northern hemisphere that there is potentially a detrimental consequence to eating things swirled from the opposite hemisphere that you live in.
I generally try to keep my feet on the ground. I try not to get too pie in the sky or too sure of myself. I know with a great deal of certainty that what I know is more belief than fact. I’m factually certain that I live in a fantasy world!
I’ve been studying literary theory. Turns out we rely upon Marx and Engel. We’re stuck. For all the fulmination, all the storm and drudge, all the high minded models that have been tossed out to the world like a bone to a dog that there remains precious little changed. It is still the big boys against everybody else!
Marx is as relevant as Henry Ford. It means that the industrial revolution continues to require equitable distribution of profits between interested parties, blah, blah, blah.
I hobnob with the elite now and again. I’ll be inWashingtonD.C.this weekend. I will press the flesh. Try to move the needle. If you didn’t know it I am influential! What I have to say matters. I can move the world!
What pair of glasses do you pick up from the table of your life to see the world through? How much of what you look at is slanted to fit your beliefs and not facts? Do you know a fact when you see one? Do you understand how your sunglasses might well be mythical, magical, blinders to something you will not allow your soul to see?
Facts are stubborn things and beliefs are their straightjackets….
To Hell in a Handbasket By Do-Gooders
I hate it when life looks this good...
How mean and nasty are you? I’m well shy of criminal mean and nasty but then I’m not talking about crime, I mean more generally about disposition, the essential direction of your personality.
I’ve seen perfectly rational individuals once they are inside the construct of a relationship find that they have a pretty short fuse. Light that thing and they just blow right up like a stick of dynamite.
The fuse thing comes as a surprise. So long as they are not in a relationship there is no fuse. With a relationship they have one. Some folk figure the solution to the problem is not to have that problem to begin with. So for starters they stay way the hell clear of relationships.
Now these stay the hell clear types who after a spell of doing nothing go out dancing and drinking. So, they get dragged right back to the very place they had promised that they would not go back to ever again.
Look at that face, a man really not happy right now, beautiful
This is the mystical nature of the unavoidable and unintended consequences of stubbornness. The less open you are to a thing the more that thing will occupy your attention.
You have to learn how to grit your teeth, not blow your top, you fake it until you make it; if you make it at all because it is a long journey to the serenity you have witnessed with your own eyes but have never had a taste of in your own heart.
I watch bemused with the dispositions of people in such places asSouth Carolina. They seem to have worked themselves up. They seem to be steamed. Don’t like things the way they are and as best I can tell they have a notion to get this thing moving back in a direction more suited to their point of view.
I suspect we are all looking together at some mysterious force; something you just can’t pretend doesn’t exist. It’s got fire, spleen, gumption. People snarl and insult. They turn into all elbows and tart rejoinder. I look in the mirror and swear if things keep going the way things are going I could end up joining their club… I’ll need a few more affairs, leave another wife and be sure to not release my tax returns.
It is a thing of beauty. I’m proud of folk for thinking outside the box. South Carolinian’s understand that we are all foul and fake. We all have some little monster just beneath the surface. So since love can drive us out of our minds lets try this other route. Their might be goodness in virtue but there is true happiness in a good old fashioned temper tantrum, you know something that can really make your blood boil.
It is why misery loves company. It allows the whole lot of us to celebrate the least of what we are. I have wasted all these years trying to be just a little tiny bit better. Its time to reconsider how much more satisfying my life could be if I just stopped trying to fix things and stick with being what I really am: unhappy.
For the handsome price of $1.00 at Amazon and Barnes and Noble…… Really, why not, could be real fun…
The World Can Just Go to Hell, I’m Going to Nevada
Pretty as a Peach
Nevada is a great place for land speed record attempts. They have hot springs everywhere. Sagebrush loves it in Nevada. It is a magnet for a particular kind of person. Now every kind of person comes to Nevada. They all arrive differentiated. Each kind; there are men who come, and there are women.
I would suggest that there is some territorial intoxicant that suffuses a person’s entire being once they have lived inNevadafor a certain amount of time
Once you get the hang of it life takes on an ease and lack of concern for so many things that simply remain irrelevant to happiness. Take for example something as basic as pavement. You don’t need it here. A dirt track will do just fine thank you very much.
Another thing you don’t have to put up with is a neighbor. You can go live someplace where there are no neighbors. It will be just you… you andNevadaall to yourself.
I know a man who has a irrigation pivot and grows alfalfa. Lives alone, never married and worst part of his job is to have to come in from out where he grows his crop and talk to someone in town about selling his crop. It would be the perfect job if he could just get rid of that one pesky task. He has no use for words.
Looking at a slice of nowhere
Not so many people get out into the hinterlands and really give the solitude and space a good chance. It’s too damn quiet. Nothing much happens. Sun comes up. There’s the day. Sun goes down. Then there’s the night. Go to sleep get up and repeat the same thing again. If you didn’t mark your calendar, ‘why,’ eternity could slip right through your fingers.
You see maybe that’s just what happens to a soul out there. You kind of arrive all mixed up about what is and is not important. Then, the eternal forces start working you over pretty good. Next thing you know you develop a rural orientation. You start talking slow. Then you stop talking altogether and spend more time thinking things through.
You’ll find folk don’t use much reason inNevada. People in Nevada prefer to be unreasonable. You start feeling different and then start acting different. You get a little wild eyed. Laugh at things nobody else finds funny.
Nevada isn’t meant to be a place for every man. It is meant to be for people who don’t fit in elsewhere. Made a movie with the title, The Misfits…. Perfect.
You can get my novel right here for the handsome price of $1.00
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Bankrupt Heart casts a spell, it’s a rollercoaster romp of heartbreak and revelation, from a life shattering moment to gut wrenching laughter, from love to loss and back again…
Ryan Waters the top-rated radio personality in San Francisco, standing in front of his home on Telegraph Hill waving goodbye to his college-bound daughter, Sophia, has no inkling he is going to receive a telephone call and later have an unexpected meeting at the radio station. Both together blow apart everything he thought he knew about who he is. The mother of his daughter runs off to London for a tuba player! Ry ends up living in utter chaos aboard his best friend’s wooden sailboat. The derelict and broken souls in the boatyard take it on themselves to help Ry Waters fix the boat. His best friend Finn enjoys a new love affair. The two are perfect for one another. Her name is Kristine and like Finn she wants nothing to do with a relationship. There is Mort (Ry’s agent) who is desperate to find his top act another job. And finally there is Jackie; a watercolorist, yoga instructor and art teacher. She is a gifted, intuitive, uninhibited woman with a knack for shattering convention and sparking the unexpected. Jackie turns out to be the high octane catalyst for change that helps propel this story to its climactic ending.
Forces to Reckon With
The Ego's Cage
I think I am civilized. Finally I have crossed some threshold and arrived. I never much enjoyed being barbaric. My brutish phase has ended.
In my twenties I had a temper. I could get so excited I couldn’t remember what I had become so excited about. Regardless I could stay mad for hours even if I couldn’t really put my finger on what triggered the whole thing.
I look in at the gladiators now working inSouth Carolina and I am quite impressed. My worst days remain unremarkable. It would be hard to make them headline grabbing. I haven’t got any offshore accounts in the Caribbean, but to be honest I had a checking account inCanadafor a spell.
Hypocrisy is a mirror into the soul. It suggests all manner of convoluted exceptionalism. Where temperament truly glows is where one is absolved from the same requirements of another person. You happen to be so much better a person. That isn’t opinion it is an absolute truth. You don’t just take that to the bank you’ll find it at the scene of the crime and repeat it while undergoing an interrogation.
Following rules is for other suckers. You are obviously not an ‘other,’ you are you. You look in the mirror and there you are that complete obviously exceptional package. There is nothing wrong or you would have notice by now. You see a man free enough to be man enough to be leader enough of the free world.
You can’t be the leader of the free world and be expected to follow the same rules as everyone else. How would that look? Why in the world would you bother to even want that job? Truly exceptional men know this. You want to be free to be free to do as you damn well freely choose.
Approximate facsimile of what it looks like just before the end
The rain ends and the clouds part and the beams of light crack through this mist where revelation of these foundational principles fill the man with a confidence that doesn’t just intoxicate but ends in a roadside breath analyzer test. You are not just drunk with power it seems you are just drunk. Finally we have arrived. You are there. Please come with me!
Hey for the handsome price of $1.00 you can own your very own………..come on, you know you like a bargain
http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/bankrupt-heart-dana-smith/1108102873
Bury Financial Weapons of Mass Destruction at Yucca Mountain
The hills are aglow with the sound of bankers.......
I’ve been reading up on Caliente,Nevada. Sagebrush is located there. TheGreat Basin Highway runs through town. It seems to have some relationship with geothermal waters that are common to this region. There are ranches and mines in this area. It was downwind of the Atomic Test Site. If Yucca Mountain ever came to pass it would be downwind of this now scientifically confirmed bad idea.
It is a disheartening to read about the radiation their citizens absorbed back in the atmospheric testing days. I think I don’t like bad news. I think I knew all this. I think I’ve heard these things before.
We submitted our citizens in Nevada and Utah to lethal dosages of radiation in the name of hoping to gain some edge in our cold war weaponry. This is legacy. In the name of saving ourselves from the Russians we sacrificed a population of rural Americans.
These things happen while authorities approach a podium and in a matter of fact tone of voice explain the inconvenient facts in banal tonalities suggesting there is nothing to be alarmed about.
It is a constant feature of our culture now.Fukushima is a tragedy. Radiation from the Japanese nuclear disaster is measurable and present in Caliente! There is no allowably safe radiation exposure level. Nuclear power outside of a containment vessel is uncontained and our mortal enemy.
Try the “carried interest deduction” we’ve allowed to remain on our tax code. This artifact of finance razzle dazzle creates instability, debt, and tax dodgers. Yet perfectly sensible sounding very important people will come to the podium and insist that this scam is an indispensible feature of capitalism. I can promise you that it is not indispensible and in fact it has much to do with the financially engineered catastrophe we have been living through.
Now if you want to bury something in Yucca Mountain try burying the carried interest deduction there. We’ll make it a national monument. We will create a memorial to warn future generations that there is more than one way to blow up the world.
Bankrupt Heart is available at Amazon and Barnes and Noble…for yes the handsome price of $1.00
http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/bankrupt-heart-dana-smith/1108102873
Into the Belly of the Consumer Electronics Shows Beast
That's not a car, that's a rolling electronic platform of gadgetry....
Here is the cauldron of capitalism. Here are the electronic innovators shining shrine to invention on a hill. In this case it is a convention center imagined as the biggest, most stupendous, most colossal sized exhibit hall man can imagine.
Before you get excited be prepared to become exhausted. There are thousands upon thousands of devices that deserve your undivided attention and how in the name of gizmo fun can you give your pixilated and digitized mind-numbing-Smartphone- enhanced consciousness the focus these devices deserve.
For heavens sake we have to tweet, blog, text, and take and send calls to every corner of the globe in one last desperate attempt to sustain our intergalactic connectivity.
In some sense this lens into the machinations of commerce does not prepare the impartial observer with the white hot life and death marketing conflagration that is being waged at this gargantuan show. Big shots like Sony, Samsung, and Microsoft put on a vast feast of new technology to wet the appetites of geeks in their search to be first to play with the new gadgets and gizmo’s.
Things crash and freeze up when I’m trying to efficiently flow and go. The promise of all these flashy new time saving devices is to conspire to drain my best energies when something unexpectedly locks up and forces me into endless hours of troubleshooting that turns out to be way too much trouble and way too many of the bullets disguised as solutions under or overshooting their targets.
No, not this guy... and not this product...
A young up and comer was standing in jaw dropping awe as some legendary business executive was debuting one of his lab’s latest wonders, and they were wonderful wonders but surprise… that wasn’t the best part of this moment. I was captivated by the young up and comer. I kept looking at the gleam in his eye, the envy, the respect, the fierce fire inside his soul that craved to stand where the legend stood and to be cast in that role. I could see his hearts desire. His product would be revolutionary. It would be groundbreaking, earth shattering, historic; a breakthrough that would change everything.
The desire we have to be, to become, to make our mark, and finally have our day in the sun drives the world. Capitalism depends upon the animal spirits. Markets depend upon these unseen ghosts. I spotted one. I saw it in his eyes. He had it bad. He was smitten with the thing. He turned out to be my pick for best of show.
BANKRUPT HEART THE SECOND NOVEL
YES, IT IS AT AMAZON AND BARNES AND NOBLE
FOR THE HANDSOME PRICE OF $1.00
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Award Winning Award Ribbons
Building a Better World One Award at a Time
Jane Cottonwood started lifting spirits as a coffee shop waitress in Beatty, Nevada. While attending horse shows with her little barrel racing daughters Jane came to find out there was a real shortage of award ribbons for those little winners she was raising.
‘Janey’ came to know how the world worked by living on Highway 95. North of town was the brothel, west the ghost town Rhyolite, and just south and east the atomic test site.
Atomic tests always went off at 7 in the morning before school. Shook the town to kingdom come, but nobody complained much. People who lived here owed their living to the atomic bomb experiments being undertaken in the name of defending our country from the communists.
Brothels and Beatty are practically synonymous. Friends worked there and most of the best gossip in town is about the married men who ought not to be purchasing services there. Still it’s Nevada and expectations of what any man may or may not be at his core has been revised considerably to fit this particular place on earth.
Jane gave the world her all. When I met her she’d already had six decades to practice this artful gift of giving. We met at the Rocky Mountain Fairs Association meetings. I’d sit with her at lunch, or we’d drink whiskey in the hospitality suite in the evening while we whittled away time smooth talking clients.
Rodeo's, Crafts fairs, Swimming Meets, State Fairs...awards, awards, awards...
I think some women are made to give young men a nurturing maternal kind of loving. Jane was such a person in my life. Told me I had to stop if I ever passed through Beatty. Put another notch in our friendship when I did.
Her business had grown to employ 90 workers. Award ribbons it turns out are made by hand. The workers do utilize machines in the process, but most of how a ribbon is manufactured comes from the labor a person puts into the thing. You stencil, you stapled, you cut, you sew. All those first place ribbons have to detail whether you won an award for a rabbit or a horse, for the Oregon State Fair or the Modoc County Fair. There was first place to third place. A big fair can require a whole truckload of ribbons.
The Late Great Jane Cottonwood
Jane died of congestive heart failure. She died back in 2001. Her two daughters have kept the business going. Her husband is still alive. When Jane sat down next to you and gave you the pleasure of her company it was an experience of the highest order. I can’t quite explain how good she could make a person feel, how welcomed, how supported, how happy and funny life could be when she was around, but that was her way. Making a business out of giving people a good feeling about how good they can do something turned out to be her work. Next time you see a ribbon hanging off a jar of best of show pickles you could be looking right at what Jane has left behind to mark her having been here.
BANKRUPT HEART THE SECOND NOVEL
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE EBOOK RIGHT HERE FOR THE HANDSOME PRICE OF $1.00
Being Yourself is What You do….Nevada
A Long Way Between is the Point
The Sourdough Saloon marks a near rock bottom crossroads. North is Tonopah, south Las Vegas while west you’ll head into Death Valley.
Last night hard choices had to be made. We cast our culinary fate with the saloon. The bar changed hands two months ago and new ownership was still working out the kinks. The Sourdough is slathered in felt pen signed dollar bills. They are stuck to kingdom come, floor and ceiling, a museum of currency desecration as tourist sport.
Of course bonus throwback libertarian amenities include geezers that have come out from under a rock in the desert and bellied up to the bar with their sweethearts doing that slow motion suicide move- smoking cigarettes.
Been a while since I saw an old rail thin desert soul wearing a sweat stained Stetson. The old cowboy had got so skinny that beneath his cinched up jeans wasn’t much of an ass left. It doesn’t look like a jackpot has paid out in these parts since before the atomic test site was still in its luminous booming business.
A man dressed like Buffalo Bill Cody comes on in. He’s got one of these swollen red and purple noses. It is a storied nose. The saloon owner played Patsy Cline on the jukebox. The gent broke into a saloon monologue. He had technique too. I could not detect any discernable gap in his soliloquy. This is an unsettling oratorical device. Man like that if you don’t break the grip will filibuster the life out of a room.
We voted with our feet.Nevadafolk believe in truth. You might tolerate a big bag of hot air in some other state but not here. Here every kind and type is allowed to find their place in the world. Strength here is in the allowance a man extends to another to be who they are, the forbearance one citizen bestows to another to do things so long as that thing does not harm another soul.
A New York State of Mind explains one kind of mind and Nevada explains another. It is a never mind.
Between these outposts, these isolated boom and busted towns stretch an ocean of sagebrush and creosote bush. In between there’s heartbreak and emptiness; sometimes a coyote. Here on a thin ribbon of asphalt Nevada takes hold of a soul to test the mettle.Nevada puts you in the embrace of a sweltering summer or a cruel cold winter. It bends the will. It seasons appetite. You’ll eat wishes and drink fate. A meal like that makes a person careful about what part of what they are that they put on the stove. Nothing and nowhere is not what it seems. Might be a place you pass through or the end of the line. What’s your pleasure pilgrim?
When in Doubt and All Else Fails
The Not So Secret to Happiness
Okay, here in San Francisco the weather is doing its impression of paradise. I looked into my heart and my heart said go, just go, and so indeed going is where I will go…
