houston we have a problem

i think i am losing my mind.

First off i should not be posting anything at this time. It is friday evening and I am curently under the influence of perscription narcotics and alchol. Some would consider this a stupid mixtire yet I call it "dinner". Ok so thast a little over dramatic. I jus thappen to be unwinding after a particualr grueling week that seems to bring no end to the bad news. Im not getting into it because I am not in the mood but lets just say its been less than a stellar week and yes, my relationship is fine and so is my health but i am still miserable.

Shitty bitty boom bitty.

My car. My little sports car needs a llot of work to pass inspection nfortunatley. Course what did I expect for a cheap car that is over 15 years old and has spent its life in shitty New England weather. Fuck winter and fuck rust and fuck bad radiators and fuck state inspection guidlines.

Did I mention I am going insane? Well not really but i have a funny if not scary story. An hour ago, well before ...oops.

My phone just rang. Someone was trying to sell me Motley Crue tickets real cheap. Whover is selling them is obviously high on drugs and needs cash quick hence the immediacy of the sale. Its funny what people will do to get high! I didnt buy them. though it was a good deal I just cant part with the cash right now. Now where was I..

Oh yeah the story. So I pull in my driveway and I had some photos to give to Jess that her mom had given me earlier. I walked inside my house and noticed they were not in my hand anymore. So I retraced my steps.
They were no where to be found. I started doubting if I ever even brought them home but remembered distinctivley clutching them in my hand as i shielded them from the sprinklers that were spraying all over the lawns at Jess's Moms place. Where the fuck had they gone?
i retraced my steps again. Nothing.
I checked the car, my pockets, the ground, under my hat(seriously),my ass, still nothing. What the hell? Im not even messed up yet!

finally after an hour of searching i found them. In the garbage on my front porch. I had thrown them away with some trash I brought in from the car. Ok, maybe its not that great of a story but the fact that I lost these photos in the matter of minutes, a 40 ft walk from the car to the house blows my mind. I think I will not drive anywhere tonight.

Now my cuzn Rick is having a shitty time on his hike. i spoke about some of his troubles earlier and now he has ankle issues that have pulled him off the trail once again. Im sorry bro. i wish I was out there with you. Speaking of Lord Duke I have to get the interview I conducted with him transcribed and up on his site. Someone remind me will ya. Hopefully I didnt throw the tape recording in the trash like a alzheimers reject.

by the way has anyone noticed that gas is 250 a gallon?? Why the fuck arent we rioting in the streets over this?? It costs someone the same amount of money that it would take to feed a small family to fill yer gas tank. Why are the kids dying in Iraq again? It sure aint for oil thats for sure. If anyone has a chanec be sure to check out the FX show "Over There". A great new show about the bullshit in Iraq. It madwe me think about why I am paying so much for Gas. then I watched "Apacolypse Now" for the hundreth time and couldnt stop asking myself "Didnt we learn anything?" I guess not.

Ok, enugh of this crap. I am not spell checking this so all yo grammar monkeys can blow me. i am probably going to regret hitting "publish post" but what the hell. At least I wrote something!

i am going to cuddle up with Jess and forget about all the shit in my life right now that really isnt all that bad its just easier to feel sorry for yerself. She is fast asleep and dreaming. I hope they are good dreams bursting with hope and promise.

I hope.

hugs and kisses,
justino barbarino

Random acts of Beef

Just a few things today. First off my cousin Rick has covered a few hundred miles of his CDT hike out west. I finally had a chance to have a live chat with him and got to interview him for his website. I am still working on transcribing it and once I do I will post it here and on his site, http://www.jigglebox.com.
I tried to read as much as I can. I am a news and information junkie. I try my best to keep up with current events and even pop culture to an extent. Sometimes I come across a story that didn't make national news but still resonates with me for one reason or another. On June 20th, in Chicago Illinois, three men,Michael Dahlquist, 39, John Glick, 35, and Douglas Meis, 29, all member of the Chicago indie music scene were all heading to lunch on break from the Shure microphone factory they all worked at. Just three regular Joes getting a bite to eat, no doubt talking about music and wondering if their respective bands would ever make it. As they waited at a red light they never got the chance to have those questions answered. That's when Jeanette Sliwinski, 23, an unemployed model with porn star looks plowed into their car at 70 MPH, deliberately trying to kill herself because she was "depressed" and had just had a fight with her mother. The three men were killed instantly, their bodies strewn across the intersection.

Sliwinski broke her leg.

She is due in court soon, charged with three counts of first degree murder. Technically she could get the death penalty. Quite frankly I believe she deserves it though we all know she wont get it. If her lawyers are good enough maybe they can convince the court she is crazy. After all who would be so fuckin stupid as to kill themselves in such a way to endanger so many innocent lives. I'm all for a persons right to off themselves but the minute you involve someone else you become a criminal and a murderer. That's all Jeanette Sliwinski is. She is a fucked up, selfish murdering cunt. I have no sympathy for anyone who cannot deal with their issues personally. Her dream of making a huge spectacle out of her suicide backfired when she made it out alive.

I would have gladly let her borrow my gun.


This is a much more positive story though it will most likely fly under the radar. We all know how much of a fuss the recording industry has made over pirating music. They have sued 14 yr olds and college kids and they slapped that really ugly FBI warning sticker on all CD's now. Not to mention that fucked up CD copy protection that any 12 yr old can break yet it is known to cause some CD's not to play in certain CD players essentially making them useless pieces of plastic. Then again most music these days pretty much transforms those CD's into useless pieces of plastic anyway. I got to smile a little today when Sony music, the worlds largest music publisher, was ordered to pay over 10 Million dollars by the NY Attorney Generals office because of a Payola scheme they got busted for. "Payola" is a term coined in the late 50's. It basically means that record companies used to pay Radio Stations and DJ's to play certain songs. Unfortunately when the dimwitted masses hear a certain song a hundred times on the radio they think this means its good and then they go out and buy the album. So record labels paid people off to spin their records which in turn would make these records sell and turn shit into gold! Well this became illegal in the USA and was stopped. Well it turns out Sony has been pulling the old "Payola" scam again and they got busted. There are still plenty of investigations ongoing also. We've all known for a long time that contemporary pop music stinks. We hear "hits" on the radio and wonder, "How can this be?"
Well now we know. Some of those "Hits?":

Jennifer Lopez's awful record, "Get Right." Sony paid up to $1000 to get that horrid shit played.

Franz Ferdinand, Jessica Simpson, Good Charlotte, Switchfoot.

They paid up to $4000.00 a spin for Franz Ferdinand. Who the fuck is Franz Ferdinand???

Exactly. This kind of stuff makes me smile though as I said in the beginning it probably wont be big news. So next time you hear that big hit on the radio really listen to it. Is it really any good?

No Shit! This explains that damn Hoobastank song....!


Well its hot as hell out today. Supposed to be close to 95. The air quality will be shit. I'm glad I bought a car with T-Tops. I am getting a little worried about the impending inspection. I got pulled over by a town cop yesterday. It was no biggie but the cop looked at my license and goes
"Your J? (insert my name here)"
I said "Yeah that's me."
He goes "Haven't seen you around here lately."
I said "That's good isn't it?"
What the Fuck? I haven't had a run in with these boneheads in over a decade yet they know who I am and now what car I drive. And since I am the only one in town with a black 300ZX I will be a beacon of opportunity for the local constables.

Lucky me.

Kiss me I'm Italian,

J

69 and Some Hot Coffee Sex!

What a friggin lying ass I am. A few days ago I promised to write everyday and what do I do? I don't write shit! Well I am mostly out of that funk I told you all about so to commemorate my 69th post here on the World Famous Beeflog I shall make this post extra long and extra moist! (eww.)

Pat your Republican friends on the ass today. The House voted to make our favorite Act permanent! What act you ask? Why the Patriot Act silly! You know the one that makes America so much safer because it allows the good guys to use all their power to stop the bad guys! So when your neighbor calls the FBI on you because your dog shit in his yard and tells them that he thinks he saw you check out the Koran from the local library you can thank your politicians when the FBI and CIA checks out your reading, eating, fucking and shopping habits. They can get your Visa records your bank records your health records etc, etc, etc. After all is said and done and they find out you are not a terrorist you will still be fucked when they kick in your door without a search warrant and find a week old bag of pot your cousin left under your couch. Oopsie!

Next

SCOTT McCLELLAN: (White House Press Bitch): "The president has set high standards, the highest of standards for people in his administration. He's made it very clear to people in his administration that he expects them to adhere to the highest standards of conduct. If anyone in this administration was involved in it, they would no longer be in this administration."

Hey Prez! It seems Karl Rove your favorite ass boy and the guy who helped you pummel John Kerry most likely leaked an undercover CIA agents name to the press! Shouldnt he be fIred just like Scotty Boy said above???

PRESIDENT BUSH: "We have a serious ongoing investigation here. (Laughter.) And it's being played out in the press. And I think it's best that people wait until the investigation is complete before you jump to conclusions. And I will do so, as well. I don't know all the facts. I want to know all the facts. The best place for the facts to be done is by somebody who's spending time investigating it. I would like this to end as quickly as possible so we know the facts, and if someone committed a crime, they will no longer work in my administration."

Wait a minute though, that's not what Scott said, he said nothing of a crime, only if someone is involved, why is the White House changing there stance all of a sudden?

PERSIDENT BUSH:"Anyone else watch Desperate Housewives? HmmHmm Mom and I dig on that picture show!"


Next

My Shut the Fuck Up award this week goes to....Senator Hillary "Well Hung" Clinton!!
And here is why: A statement distributed by the Senator's office this afternoon sets the scene, stating that "following recent reports revealing that the video game Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas has graphic pornographic content which may be unlocked by following instructions on the Internet, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton will hold a press conference to discuss legislative solutions to keep inappropriate video game content out of the hands of young people."

I am so glad Hillary will take up such an original stance to protect today's youth from pixilated porn. I mean did you se the Pics I posted above!! For anyone wondering what is going on it seems that hidden inside the worlds most popular console video game, Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas you can unlock interactive sex scenes when using a "Mod" called the Hot Coffee Mod. These "mod" codes can be downloaded from the internet and used to mod the PC version of GTA. I am not sure how the hell they are modding the console versions but I can only think you would have to use some kind of Game Shark or other peripheral device used to cheat or add codes. To the layman that means that the Xbox and Playstation versions can not be modded by themselves yet Best Buy is pulling all their console versions off the shelf. What they are doing is changing the rating from "Mature" to "Adults Only", making GTA an XXX rated game. Which it is not. R-rated definatley but X-Rated is bullshit. So dipshits like Clinton and Senator Joseph Lieberman (D) (I hate this guy) are calling for a sweeping measure to clean up the torrid Video Game industry. So who do I blame for all this bullshit? Actually I blame Rockstar Games and Take Two Interactive, the makers of GTA. Surprised? You shouldn't be.

The GTA series took off a few years ago when they released GTA 3 for Playstation 2. It was an incredibly violent and fully immersible game that blew away the competition. The game was non-linear so you could literally drive or run around the city doing whatever you wanted and not being locked into a certain path or storyline. It was "free roaming" at its best. You could also run down pedestrians, beat people with baseball bats and gun down hundreds of cops on a whim. Definitely a Mature game and rightfully rated. GTA:Vice City came next and was even better, adding tons more game play and upping the violence factor especially during "missions". The profanity grew in scope also and of course it was rated Mature. Vice City went on to become the best selling console game of all time. Somebody's parents sure and hell were not policing what their kids were buying and playing but luckily no kids stole the family station wagon and flew down Main St running down pedestrians either. So back to why I blame the makers of GTA? They had been pushing the envelope so much with these games and had luckily been flying under the radar so in the meantime they were getting rich and we had some kick ass games to play. Sure there was controversy but nothing like there is now.
With GTA: San Andreas they crossed a line putting in these silly sex scenes. They simply did it to push the envelope even further but now it backfired on them. Saying "Fuck" and killing hookers with a shovel wasn't enough for Rockstar. So now their game is under fire and this will hurt every gamer and game company out there. I fully support Rockstar's choice to put whatever they want in their games and I still believe that Parents are still the first line of defense when it comes to choices of games but this was just silly. I am sure they didnt expect this reaction. With the wicked bitch of the east Hillary in charge we can expect more bullshit censorship on its way. I guarantee Wal-Mart pulls GTA from their stores right away if they haven't done it already. So this weeks Shut the Fuck up goes out to Hillary Clinton and Rockstar Games. I grew up in the 80's and got to see shit like this first hand, remember Tipper Gore and the PMRC? Hopefully this witch hunt doesn't even last as long.


Still Killing hookers with a shovel,

JKA

Funk Town

The last few weeks have been those types of weeks where all you want them to do is end as fast as thy can. You sit at work and concentrate on nothing but passing the time. I think I have been in one of those midsummer funks where you wish you were doing anything but what you are actually doing at the time. I have not returned emails, phone calls and haven't spoken to some people that I usually do on a regular basis. I have been lethargic, tired and all around spaced out. I am not sure what it is really but I am working through it. I think. I had all these great Ideas I wanted to accomplish and I haven't done shit. I think I just value my time so much that when the rare opportunity comes along when I have even 30 minutes to myself all I want to do is crawl into a ball and daydream. Then my phone rings or Jess needs something or something needs to be done. I know this sounds awfully selfish but I think everyone needs peace for themselves some times. The even more fucked up thing is I really do want to email or talk or spend time with these people! Its not that I don't like them or anything. I just can't seem to divvy the time up enough and then I just give up, shut off my phone and accomplish all the shit I need to do. Then next thing you know it's too late because you have to go to sleep for work and you have 14 messages on your voicemail. This weekend alone I tried to help plan a bachelor party, look after my Mothers house and animals, hang out with my brother, spend time with Jess, get some much needed info and talk with my Cousin Rick who has hiked over 100 miles by himself, set up a get together with my Dad who is up from Florida, get some stuff put up on Ebay cuz I need the extra cash and go see my friends band on Saturday night. I didn't even accomplish half of that. I even missed alot of the most important stuff. I especially aplogize to Rick for not even being able to call him back. I guess I do not work well under pressure at times. Sometimes I implode and crawl into that ball.

I am writing this to apologize to anyone who feels I have not been very social lately and if I didn't return any calls etc. Today I will be catching up at work (I have been neglecting this area also) and doing my best to get back to everyone. I know I have said this A DOZEN times but I will post daily (except for weekends) on here. I always come up with cool stuff to write about but then never do because I find myself off doing something else! Maybe I have A.D.D. Anyway don't give up on me. I will be back late today for some beefy fun.


Being Bi-Polar,

J

Special 4th of July guest post!

Here's a little treat for the faithful beefloggers. This is an excerpt from my cousin's upcoming book entitltled "Dead Men Hike No Trails", the first person account of his Appalachian Trial thru-hike of last year. This excerpt covers our adventures during the week of the 4th of July last year and is written in his familiar gonzo with a grain of salt style. I just recently read this for the first time myself and it put a smile on my face for sure! Enjoy.

The following excerpt is reprinted with permission and all copyrights are held by RS McKinney, 2005.

On a journey full of seemingly endless favors and kindness and hospitality and graces and trail magic and angels, this one was truly unique. I'd been helped out in time of need by many a trail angel, but real angel Mark beat all.

Thank you Mark Noel, wherever you are.


Then ding! With the jingle and the brief jostle of an elevator ride, I was in New Hampshire. What name would the Namers of All-Things-AT give to flying a section of trail, skipping ahead, as it were, via Flugzeug? (I've always loved the German word for airplane. Oh, and Hubschrouber, that's another good one, for helicopter.) The sky is blue, but blue blaze is already taken. Perhaps jet blaze! Yeah, I like that. Ding! I jet blazed to New Hampshire.

The intention had been that I would, by early July, have hiked sufficiently close to New Hampshire that my cousin could just zip down and pluck me off the trail in Connecticut or so. But I had only made it to very southern Pennsylvania, so fly I did, my father most generously throwing-down for the plane ticket. Most of the week or so spent there is a happy blur, seen only in retrospect as I was way too busy having fun and truly vacationing from the trail to write a word the entire time. Independence Day was, like every other weekend day or holiday in New England that summer, damp. It rained, but did Cousin Justin let the rain spoil his vision of a wild weekend of pool party and margarita debauchery? Heck no.

As I recall, we were somewhere around Tilton on the edge of.. well, Tilton in central New Hampshire's lakes region when the drugs began to take hold. I remember asking Justin just what was IN the MSR hydration bladder he'd gone to an outfitter and bought just to make hiker-me feel "at home while drinking." He had suddenly taken on an unearthly, airplane-toilet chemical blue glow. I flipped down the passenger side mirror to get a look at his girlfriend Jess and sure enough, same glow. When my cousin turned to respond to me, his eyes had gone alien black, and he grinned a wide grin with multilayered, sharklike teeth. Oh, Jeezus, I remember thinking. This is going to be one helluva ride. And so it was.

Justin had spent a small fortune on fireworks; his mother (my aunt) Mary a small fortune on booze. Apparently, I'd specially requested top shelf tequila, fresh lemons and limes and Grand Mariner instead of standard triple sec. Justin squeezed lemons and I whipped up some 5-star margaritas, and with drinks in one hand and roman candles in the other, Justin, Jess, Mary, her husband Chris, myself and Justin's amigo Dennis all ran screaming around their farm in the dark blasting one another with fireballs. Mind you, this came directly on the heels of a long soak in the redwood hot tub in the barn and was performed in the drizzling rain, so there was no danger of immolation involved.

Everyone wore eye protection. Those without prescription glasses wore welding goggles or welding hats with protective face shields scrounged from Chris' shop. Afterwards, and before a scrumptious prime rib on the grill dinner prepared by Mary, we took turns running through the rows while those in the driveway unloaded several gross of bottle rockets into the cornfield. It was good clean American fun, and everyone treated themselves to a double dose of Prozac to celebrate our freedom to wage war on anyone we want all around the Globe. Gosh, it felt good to be an American that night.

We later drove over to Justin's friend Shawn's house on the lake and got completely twisted. All I remember through the haze of Jack Daniels is standing at the helm of Shawn's parent's speedboat, ripping across Lake Winnipesauke at Mach 5 and Justin screaming at me over the wind, something about larceny and "We're dead!" upon which he returned to his fit of giggles, nailed as he was to the back of the boat by the tremendous G-forces. "I'm not dead!" I remember thinking. "I'm more alive than ever." I had no idea what he was talking about.

I remember we did a lot of tooling around in my aunt Mary's new bumble bee yellow and black Jeep. Mary's the greatest, truly the antithesis of all my maternal aunts, although, to the credit of the latter, I never spent a lot of time with mom's much older sisters. But I'm pretty sure that's a good thing. Mary reads like a fiend and is no doubt responsible for Justin being the extremely literate news aficionado that he is. And perhaps because she reads, she more than anyone in my family appreciates what I do and how hard I've struggled to keep at it when all the world wanted me to be a Fuller Brush salesman or something.

Anyway, aunt Mary and cousin Justin delivered the goods. All inheritors of depressive genes, we share a love of self-medication via "ye ole cocktail." We put a good dent in the New Hampshire state liquor store that week, let me tell ya. And every morning, Mary whipped up a batch of her famous bloody namesake to kill the irksome ache of last night and lay the groundwork for another day of liquid summer fun. Although Justin's lovely redheaded, sharp-witted and barely-out-of-her-teens girlfriend Jess never hooked me up with one of her hottie young friends as I begged her do, we did manage to squeeze a lot of fun into that Fourth of July week including waterskiing, wave-hopping with tear-ass jet skis, pole-vaulting over livestock, rope-swinging and jumping off the train trestle into the river, and of course 18-holes of golf with New Hampshire native Adam Sandler, in town to visit his folks.

Jenna Whatsherface from the first episode of Survivor, she's from Justin's hometown of Franklin. She must have been home to visit her parents, too, because we ran into her at this seafood joint on the lake with a dock and boat fueling area out back where my Grandpa used to take me to fuel up the boat. Justin's brother's best friend's cousin's sister went to high school with Jenna Survivor, and I was apparently sufficiently intoxicated that night to draw a six-degrees of separation connection out of all that, bringing it down to one degree as I sidled up next to her at the bar.

I don't remember saying anything to her, kind of like you don't remember the moments leading up to a major car crash you were in. But according to Jess, who smelled trouble and followed me chaperone-like from our booth to the bar, I laid that line on her from the comedy film "Joe Dirt," you know the one with the girl at the fair: "If I told ya you had a nice body, would you hold it against me?" It's that whole useless celebrity thing I was talking about, I guess. I didn't really want her. I guess I just wanted to piss her off. Apparently, I succeeded. The next morning aunt Mary served up not only a bloody but an ice pack for my right eye. That Jenna Whatsherface apparently has a mean left hook.

Just so you don't think my family and I are a bunch of complete miscreants, we did do something altruistic and selfless that week. We did trail magic! That's right. You see, I wasn't the only AT thruhiker playing hooky from the trail that week. Party Girl was in Contooquack or Loonville or whatever the name of that town she's from in New Hampshire. Big Stick was in the Granite State, too, somewhere on Lake Winnipesauke with his family. We weren't able to contact Stick in time, so he missed out. But Party Girl, Jess, Justin and I headed up to where the AT crosses some isolated highway just south of the White Mountains with a cooler loaded with hot dogs, sodas and beer. Oh, and a big jug of whatever insane cocktail had turned my cousin into the Great Black-Eyed Alien Shark back on the ride home from the airport. This was for late-evening consumption, after we'd established camp and spent the day feeding hikers, just in case things got boring.

Well, it was boring all right. Right from the get-go. Why? Because we didn't have one damn thruhiker customer in the two nights spent out there. All I can figure: location, location, location! We were just too far north for the AT in early July, and no one, not even speedy Elly, had yet made it that far north. Sure, we saw hikers and fed or watered a few. But these were all just day or weekend hikers. And I'm sorry, but after a thousand miles, I was already a hiker snob. Day hikers just weren't up to snuff. I gave them sodas but sat on the beer cooler with zipped lips until and only after a hiker had proven their salt. If they were cool, we gave 'em the works. If they were dorks, they went hungry. We were savage and cruel by the afternoon of our second day. I had wanted to show Justin and Jess REAL thruhikers, and I was sorely disappointed and took out my disgust on every ill-equipped day-hiking dork.

No, wait. I remember what it was that really chapped my ass and had me bad-mouthing hikers just out of earshot. It was that whole "don't talk to strangers" fear thing adults instill in their children. Okay. There are monsters out there, and sometimes children get eaten. This is horrid, but it is nothing new. Look at poor toaster muffins Hansel & Gretel from centuries old folklore. But after all the beauty and kindness and trail magic of the south, I'd forgotten to fear strangers in the forest. Everyone in the south was an angel. So I was unprepared to be treated like a potential monster by fearful parents out hiking with their kids. But that's exactly how we were treated.

Think what you want, but it had nothing to do with us. The beer we had for beer-thirsty thruhikers was, as I said, hidden from view. So then was the beer we consumed, poured from cans into our Nalgene bottles or plastic cups. Both Party Girl and Jess are extremely attractive women, and Justin and myself are at the very least non-threatening in appearance. But the fear-addled parental units had never seen trail magic and apparently had no idea why we were sitting there trailside handing out sodas and cooking hot dogs. The children, thirsty from a long hike, would dive for our sodas, but the Units would intervene and tell the children "No, you're NOT thirsty. You can wait until we reach the car."

Yeah. That was it. That was what turned me mean by day's end. I'm disgusted by war. I'm disgusted by television. I'm disgusted that every other show on TV is about cops and lawyers busting people. But what really disgusts me, what I'll go so far as to say I hate, is fear.

Funny. All these years I've been repeating Hunter Thompson's famous phrase "fear & loathing," taking it at face value and enjoying its linguistic weight in describing some general state of darkness surrounding all good and honest pursuits. But you are what you eat, as they say. And the heart listens; the cells listen. And the fear has undercut everything in my life; and the loathing, denied expression in the form of healthy anger, has no doubt also been my downfall.

But philosophical bullshit aside, I would rephrase Thompson and call what I felt there in the woods trying to be an angel but being regarded as a threat, "loathing of fear." And it pissed me off something royal.

So at day's end, we gave up and retreated to our camp not far from the trail and drank the devil's punch. When in Rome, you know the rest. I wasn't the only one who felt smudged by the largely-ill reception of our good deed. And so we drank. And out came the politics: abortion, capital punishment, you name it. I learned that night that Party Girl, like Jester, was a misnomer of a trail name. Party Girl was actually a fairly serious, sometimes-contemplative, sometimes-hot-headed woman with stone-set conservative values. If she was the life of the party that night, it was only because her every political stance was so absolutely 180 degrees from those held by my cousin, and to a lesser degree (because I'm about as fond of polarized political parlance as I am of TV), me.

The party, then, was largely a joust between P.G. (as she would later call herself, trying, like me, to shake her given trail name) and Justin, with occasional shouts, screeches, guffaws and camel-spitting by Jess and myself. I would say it was a drunken joust, and often enough jocular, but there were a few explosive moments, and I recall P.G. claiming she was sober. Anyway, as far as I recall (and this was probably intentional on my part) the debate and all else that night degraded into madness as I took to speaking, nay, shouting in tongues and dancing around and occasionally into the fire like an insane native whose spirit animal is the moth. In the morning, there was rain. A deluge, really. We packed out and went our separate ways.

Then it was off to Hampton on Friday for an all-family barbecue at Dad's house by the sea. Love my Dad though I do, I wasn't looking forward to a weekend in his wife's house (that's what he calls it). With her daughters grown and moved away and my sister and I gone 23 years ago after our parent's divorce settled, the house is like a little museum of New England-flavored.. whatever. Everything is very neat and clean, and one hesitates to besmirch with one's presence. Ever since I arrived fresh off a cross-country train trip, and, upon being shown my room by my father's wife, was told I stank, well, I just feel dirty when I'm there. And unwelcome. The refrigerator in my step-mother's house, like most refrigerators in America, has pictures all over it. But there's something decidedly different about her fridge. One, all the pictures are arranged in a neat square, dead center of the fridge door; and two, every member of our extended families all the way out to distant cousins is represented except one. Can you guess who?

As a joke, Mary and Justin bought the prodigal son a milk advert knockoff t-shirt, black with white lettering that said, "Got Jesus?" Oh, how I wanted to wear it. But going to my stepmother's house meant sobering up. Not out of etiquette, but angst. There's nothing worse than being emotionally hungover in a house where the ill-repute is you. With the copious cocktails of the past week, so went my nerve. Thus, no shirt. I mean, I didn't wear it in front of them anyway. Besides, it would have been a conversation starter. And the last thing I wanted to talk about after 1000-miles of walking off the death of a not-likely-religious buddy who blasted his way into Heaven with a double-barrel shotgun, was Jesus.

Not long into the barbecue, Mary and Justin and Jess drove off in Mary's bumble-bee Jeep and left me. The sting was almost unbearable. A drive to the beach and some time spent with my lovely step-sister helped a lot. When my step-mother made a shockingly uncharacteristic laundry blunder and shrunk my favorite wool sweater, she sent my Dad and me shopping for a replacement. That done, Dad took me to his old watering hole, a fish and cocktail joint off some ocean tributary in Portsmouth. I watched the sun set over the water and all the pretty boats at dock and Dad had a few drinks with me (he doesn't drink around his wife) and eased into himself, into a more comfortable version of himself as the father of a nearly 40-year old man, a man who had inherited all his insecurities and proclivity for depression but was this very summer climbing Mt. Everest 17 times, and it was good. And in the golden light of the magic hour he joked with the waitress and here and there announced my great undertaking to people around us in the bar, and that, too, was good. It made up for the erasure of me from his wife's fridge. In the morning before he took me to the airport, we attended service at his church and some woman he knew well stared wide-eyed upon meeting me, having never heard he had a son. In retrospect, our sunset moment in the Portsmouth pub makes up for that, too.


So now Jesus is a pita here at the Rye Bethany church, and the pastor says he will come like a thief in the night. And steal what? I wonder. All our bread? The pita and the rye. Ha-ha hodeeho. (Until today, I'd never seen a communion where the Body of Christ was finely chopped pita bread.) Let him come. Me, I'm gone. Been here, done the family thing, and determined perhaps once and for all that discussion of politics or the news or religion is pointless with my father. God bless him. The banquet has been laid out, and he will have his place at the table. Me, I'll return to the pure, unquestioning Christianity of my youth when all Christians everywhere open their arms and say all who believe in a supreme being will be welcome in Heaven, religious-affiliation aside.

For now, however, the Jews are out, and forget about the Mormons, the Muslims, and the Buddhists. "Don't get hung up on that," my father says. "Don't get stuck on that issue or you'll never come to know the good things about Jesus." Don't get stuck? Does that mean don't think? Turn a blind eye? Pay no attention to those people being loaded onto boxcars. They're not going to Heaven, anyway. They're not Christians!

I am stuck, thus, at the exclusivity clause. I will probably always be stuck here. Stuck in the Hades between Heaven and Earth. Stuck between the zealous likes of my father and all my independent, intellectual, artistic and thoroughly anarchistic agnostic or atheistic friends who believe in a different god or no god and find my hopeful belief in Heaven an absurdity.

In my father's church this morning I met a pretty woman named Katie. Very lovely, tall, intelligent, no doubt believes in Heaven. I doubt she smokes, probably "my ideal" match. I left the church sad this morning, sure that no such woman would ever embrace the likes of me, a broken and hobbling Christian summer camp refugee-gone gonzo drug-addled devourer of earthly life. Despite all the walking, all the depression-busting levity, all the fun where might have run the blood of suicide, at times like this I feel less the athlete, less the accomplished writer and more the Mad Hatter in an oyster-sucking contest with the Walrus. The Walrus is winning. And after ten days off the trail, I am forgetting. And when the oysters are gone, the Walrus is going to eat me, my hiking boots, this book, and yikes! If you don't let go now, he'll probably even eat you!

It's July 11th here at the Manchester airport bar awaiting the flight that will take me back to Duncannon and the Appalachian Trail, and these are the thoughts that I'm thinking.

Where am I? What's it all mean? And will I, when I crest that cold rock far up in New England where Maine juts hard into Canada, will I have written something worth reading, worth publishing? Will I have stomped the American terra and told the tale well enough and with enough pride and gratitude in my American freedoms to please a nation of fear junkies, and maybe even, the poor battle-crazed soldiers in Iraq?

Will I?

Shark fish turbine with whirl of deadly spinning whiskers walks me, effortless, through cumulous sky seas high into the blue July of coming night. And it's Pittsburgh below...

[end of added material]

Thanks to my cuz for that and for more of his adventures and prose dont forget to bookmark jigglebox.com. He is soon heading out on a fully sponsored hike of the Continental Divide Trail to raise awarness for Depression and Suicide Prevention. Stay tuned for more on that in the future.


J

Happy Birthday America

The 4th of July weekend is now over and we can all shuffle back to our daily routines once again. Sometimes I wonder if people really stop and think about our Independence Day. I know I usually don't but this year was a little different. After all we have thousands of US troops in harms way across the globe fighting to keep us all safe. It doesn't matter if we agree with this bullshit Iraqi occupation or not because the utmost honor and respect should be bestowed upon these brave men and women. They do the jobs most of us are too chicken or lazy to even think about doing. We wish them all a safe and quick tour of duty.

I also want to thank Amber Deahn. Amber works at a Denn'ys restaurant in Idaho. She was smart enough to recognize a 9 yr old girl eating at one of her booths at 2 am as a missing young girl who's family had been brutally murdered. In essence she saved Shasta Groene's life. For anyone unaware of this true life horror story I will fill you in. This young girl and her brother were kidnapped 6 weeks ago from their Idaho home. The rest of the family had been bound and beaten to death. Shasta's brother Dylan is still missing and feared dead. A 42 year old pedophile has been charged with the kidnapping and most likely committed the murders. He also sexually assaulted these young children. This is a perfect example of how the system DOES NOT work in this country. Read this piece of shits Blog here and tell me he should have been released from prison!? Again, thank Amber for not being stoned or too lazy to recognize this girl and actually keeping her eyes out for the missing kids. Most people would never have even noticed her. Sometimes I have hope for our race.

On a lighter note I would like to recommend a great DVD collection for anyone who enjoys British comedy. Some of you may have heard of the show The Office. It was an original comedy on BBC in Britain and recently got a makeover for US audiences and was quite good but not as good as the UK version. There were two seasons and then a special that followed, catching up on all the characters a few years after season 2 wrapped. It is funny, sad and poignant all at the same time not to mention extremely well acted. These are feature most American shows sorely lack. I highly recommend it. Pick it up here.

I am tired now. It was quite a weekend though I cant remember anything incredibly remarkable happening. At least it will be a short week at work.

Cheers.

J