Bag-Crazed

I don't know what possessed me to think that going to the Super Walmart on my lunch hour the day before Thanksgiving was a good idea.

Now before you berate me with shouts of "It's NEVER a good idea to go to Walmart!", hear me out.

One, despite all the anti-Walmart horror stories and despite my disgust with Big Box stores and chains of any kind, groceries are just plain cheaper there. And with our economy, brought to you by President Shit For Brains & Co., the way it is, money is tight and getting tighter. And where we live, mass-transit isn't an option, everything is at least a 30 mile drive at $3.19 (and that's the low end) a gallon.

Two, my cousin's wife is a Senior V.P. in Bentonville. I like her. She's a great person and isn't evil in the least, that I've seen. So it's a little hard for me to truly buy into the Walmart Is Evil line of thinking. And really, they are a prime example of free enterprise -- if they didn't, someone else will. We really can't buy into blaming Walmart. The problem isn't Walmart. The problem really is us, buying cheap ass shit from China at the lowest prices possible, because of...well...see Point Number One. It's a vicious circle.


Be that as it may, I still have an axe to grind with the Descendents Of Sam. What in the name of all that's holy is with these new miniature bags at Walmart? It's bad enough that I do not have the choice of Paper over Plastic, as at least Paper is a natural, renewable resource that biodegrades. That alone sets me a bit off. But the real clincher is that there is no freaking point whatsoever in bagging things with these tiny miniature bags. They put one, maybe two, on a rare occasion three items in these diminuitive bagettes and then spin the carousel to the next bag. What would have been, in my parents day, 2 grocery bags worth of items turns into 37 friggin bags that I have to try to haul into the house past barking dogs, thru two entry doors, with my hands full. What the hell is the point of bagging ONE item? It's not like the flimsy bags are protecting anything. If they made prophylactics out of that plastic, we'd have another baby boom on our hands, that much is certain!

For my meager purchase of ingredients to make a turkey, mashed potatoes, stuffing and green bean casserole, I walked out with about 14 bags of groceries and a 12 pack of soda. They put a box of stuffing in one bag. They put brown sugar and 2 boxes of jello in another.

You would think that with oil topping 100 dollars a barrel, it would be too costly to send people out the door with 37 friggin damned bags made from petroleum!

CanJamming My Way Thru the Holidays

About a half hour south of Madison, WI is the smallish city of Janesville, noteworthy mostly for the origin of the Parker Pen and for assembling big gas guzzling SUV's for General Motors. Being that GM is their major employer, the community's economy ebbs and flows along with GM's (mis)fortunes.

Travel another 15 minutes thru the farm pastures outside of Janesville and you'll find yourself in the tiny farming village of Footville, WI, home to one "Chainsaw" Curtis Rodeheaver, who with his band, "The Creepers", has been cranking out some of the best Roadhouse Blues North of the Texas state line for many years. They might be Wisconsin's best kept secret.

I've known Curt for a number of years, although not well as I might like to...busy schedules and all. What's always impressed me most about him is that, despite amazing amounts of talent and a long and varied career, this man is not only humble, but wears his heart on his sleeve and is generous nearly to a fault.

I could go on for some time with examples of his kindness and generosity, but I need to get to the point here, as there isn't much time.

Since 2001, Curtis has been organizing CanJam, a benefit show featuring bands and musicians that donate their time, equipment and talents to collect food and raise money for the ECHO Food Pantry in Rock County, where both Janesville and Footville reside.

Being that the times we live in are what they are, this year the need is great--far exceeding what ECHO can handle--over 2500 Thanksgiving Dinners and over 1000 Christmas ones will be provided. And so, on a very short notice, they've turned to Curtis for help, and in turn Curtis sent out the Call To Arms (or Guitars?).

This Sunday, November 25, Curtis will be holding this "Emergency CanJam" as an open jam. So if you play something and can make your way down to Janesville for a few hours, please join in and help out--you'll get to play with a GREAT band, meet a lot of great people and help a lot of folks in need. If you don't play, then come and enjoy some fantastic live music for a good cause. Bring some canned or non-perishable food and your wallet--canned food will get you in for free, but a donation certainly wouldn't kill you either. In fact, you can donate without even attending if you want to save on the gas money. Just drop me an email at twintwelve1484 at yahoo.com and I'll send info on how to donate directly.

CanJam will be held from 4 til 8 pm at Wedges Tavern and Grill, 2006 N Washington, Janesville 608•757•1444. And I'll attend personally (not outsourcing this to Sanjiv!).

I can't think of a better way to start the holiday season than by helping others and having a blast with some great people at the same time. I'm hoping you'll agree.

Price County In Da Moonlight

It's the weekend before Thanksgiving, and in Wisconsin, that means the opening of Gun Deer Hunting. The Saturday-to-following-Sunday season is as ingrained into the culture of the state as beer, the Packers & cheese curds. Witness the change of the crowd color at any home game in Lambeau during this time period from green and gold to Hunter Orange, and you get the idea.

I come from a long line of deer hunters. My father has hunted since he was a young man, my grandfather hunted his entire life, as have most of my uncles and cousins. Deer Camp has always been a special time of the year, a manly, testosterone-fueled time of year when the everyday courtesy bans on farting, belching and swearing are temporarily lifted, drinking can be to a bit of an excess, and food is plentiful and often off of the beaten path (pickled deer heart, anyone?). Stories abound, most of them have a grain of truth to them but have been embellished and honed to make a better story with each retelling.

For many years, our deer camp was held at my parents' home near Wautoma, WI, and we hunted on land leased from a friend of the family. The group consisted of my grandfather, my second cousin aka Uncle Tom, my father, several of my cousins, my uncle and one of my dad's friends. It was predictable, comfortable and timeless. We had rituals and repetition, a very important element in any deer camp. I never gave much thought about the hunt itself, it was more about the camraderie and the event of deer hunting that about what I was actually doing out there in a tree with a loaded gun, sitting in snow and sleet and rain and wind in 34 degree weather from 6 am til 4:30 pm.

But as all things must pass, so was it with our deer camp. My grandpa passed away in 1991, leaving the first gaping hole in our group. It was never the same afterwards, the familiar orange hat and lawn chair wasn't on that ridge any more, no cigarette could be seen glowing faintly in the early morning darkness and no one was there to greet me with a nip off of the bottle of blackberry brandy when I got cold and took a walk. Cousin Tony moved far away, so the comedic relief of the sibling rivalry of the Brothers Kohn was lost. Uncle Mike was making infrequent appearances, after moving to Minnesota, where it honestly didn't pay for him to hunt over here...for what it cost, he probably could have went to Jamaica. Then Uncle Tom passed, leaving another huge vacancy. His scraggly, haphazard ramshackle tree stand was empty, and never again would an S-10 Chevy drive thru the whole woods at 9:30 in the morning with it's horn blaring in celebration of a big buck, despite screwing everyone else's hunting up. After Tom's passing, the family friend who my father leased the land from decided to sell the land, so the Deer Camp As We Knew It was no more.

We made a try of having Deer Camp up at our land near Prentice, WI in Price County for the last couple of years with much of what was left of the original crew, but it wasn't quite the same--you can never 'go back', as they say. Thus, thru attrition and the passing of time, Deer Camp is down to just my father, myself and my neighbor and long time friend Roy and his buddy. Roy and I have invited our wives this year, so it won't seem quite as empty, and because they're good sports and a lot of fun and can handle the offenses of Deer Camp.

With the loss of All That Used To Be, it's given me more time to reflect on deer hunting itself and how it's changed over the years, and why I'm less enthusiastic about it each year. The Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources (aka the DNR - Do Nothing Right) has monkeyed around with their deer management nonsense, based on herd numbers that they must have pulled out of thin air, to the point of taking what existing sport was left in hunting deer with a gun. It's become akin to shooting fish in a barrel, where there's not as many fish in the barrel as the DNR thinks and about 650,000 hunters pointing guns in the barrel. Such assinine programs as "Earn A Buck" and areas where a hunter can take both a buck and a doe are based on numbers that some beaurocrat in Madison pulls out of their ass -- if there's more deer in Price County now than there were 5 years ago, I'm not seeing them! Add the added hunting pressure of an ever-growing population, and the average rural road or woods looks less like people are hunting and more like there's a manhunt going on and the whole community has joined in. Just the number of trucks parked along the roads to our cabin last weekend, of people who were just *preparing* for deer hunting season, was unnerving. And hunting on opening weekend is like drinking on New Years Eve...it's amateur hour. People who haven't held a gun all year are suddenly racing out of the big cities via the interstates, headed North..

Why do we even have a deer season, you might ask? Well, we (as in mankind) have eliminated the deer's natural predators (including harsh winters thanks to global warming) and have created an environment, particularly in the agricultural part of the state, where food is plentiful. So deer herd numbers are unnaturally inflated...hugely unnaturally inflated, but nowhere near where the DNR seems to think that they are. My fear is that one of these years, there just won't be any deer around anywhere, while the DNR scratches their ass and wonders what happened. And to me it just seems wrong to manage the animals in such a way where their average life expectency is 1.5 years. 1.5 years!

I don't know where I'm going with all of this but it feels good to get it off of my chest. Tonight Carol and I will load up the truck, drive out to the cabin, eat well, have fun with our friends and my father, and tomorrow I'll go sit in a tree for a while and watch the squirrels and birds, and in all likelyhood will not see a deer, let alone shoot one. I'm just not that committed to bagging a deer. I'm more committed to staying warm and spending time with people who are important to me. I guess that's why I still do it. I suppose I could outsource this to Sanjiv...

If you're going hunting, good luck to you and your crew. If you're not, be careful out there...there's a lot of nuts in the woods and bullets flying around.

The Outsourced Life

So Stu and I are engaged in our usual commuting babble, when Stu explodes with great excitement over an article he was reading in Esquire, where the author had managed to outsource nearly every aspect of his life...to INDIA!

From sending flowers to his wife to penning memos to his boss to reading bedtime stories to his child, his Personal Assistants Across The Ocean did it all!

Stu excitedly continued to babble with great enthusiasm about this revelation, also including mention of a book called The Four Hour Work Week, and mentioning a website called Your Man In India.

My initial apprehension regarding this turned into full blown appall, upon reading the Esquire article myself. Also mentioned is another website, Brickwork India, which performs similar activities, and another book, The World is Flat.

How they must hate us Imperialistic Pig Dogs. Imagine people so arrogant, so self-important, shallow and callous as to outsource their personal relationships with so-called loved ones. So-called because anyone who would even consider outsourcing conversations with their parents to India absolutely is incapable of love of any depth. How screwed we are as a society when we feel the need to have someone thousands of miles around the world wipe our asses for us, while those performing these menial tasks for a fee increase their ever-growing stranglehold on the American economy.


Have a nice and productive day!

(written for Mikay by Sanjiv Kumar, his personal man-servant in Bangalore, India)

Another Great Idea Shot to Hell

So my usual partner-in-weirdness Stu and I were having our usual mutual commuting chat the other morning, when I had a brain seizure of an idea:

Bobbleheads of Dictators!

Mao Tse Tung! Castro! Mussolini! HITLER!

Imagine Adolf, happily bobbing his head up and down in the back of the SoccerMomMobile while jamming out some Green Day! Great Neptune's Man-Nipples! What joy!



And, alas, as usual, someone had beaten me to the quick.

Well, kids do love Hitler. He's so huggable and loveable! Look at that cute little mustache! C'mon, kids! It's the Adolf Hitler Action Figure! You can tie his shoes in little nazis! Woo hooooo!

Death of the Neighborhood Bar

Every time I drive by an Applebee's, I'm appalled at the gall of referring to their crappy chain establishment as a "Neighborhood Bar". I cut my teeth on neighborhood bars, I know neighborhood bars, and Applebee's is no neighborhood bar. The fact that it's located in the parking lot of a mall ought to be the first clue. Ba-BING!, Rule Number ONE of Neighborhood Bars: They should be located in a NEIGHBORHOOD.

I was pissed off enough when the Milwaukee Icon known as the National Liquor Bar was torn down and replaced with the evil McPharmacy, Walgreens. In fact, I was livid. Not only did they kill every Mom n Pop pharmacy within 25 square blocks, they took down something so uniquely Milwaukee as the National Liquor Bar with it. Chain franchise by chain franchise, we are losing our identity and heritage in this country, and the Moron Collective that makes up our populace embraces it. Is it any wonder that Milwaukee Magazine's reader poll elected The Olive Garden as Best Italian Food a couple years back?

Well, the latest chapter in my Loathe Of Things Called "Progress" was brought to me by fellow blogger and musician, Guy Lannewehr. Guy informed me that the Brookfield (Milwaukee suburb) iconic establishment, "For Pete's Sake" at 14640 W Capitol Drive had been bulldozed in the name of Progress. Granted, Pete sold the joint about 3 years ago and I think that they had changed the name, but it was a true neighborhood bar nonetheless. In fact, it was about the only true neighborhood bar for many, many blocks in a town that is almost entirely comprised of McBusinesses like Starbucks, Noodles & Co., Einstein's Bagels, that focking Mexican place that puts rice in it's burritos (rice is cheap, their burritos are not), so on and so forth.

Pete's was a place where I'd often go for lunch, back when I worked in Brookfield. I'd also go there to interview potential band members, meet fellow musicians after work for a mug or two of beer, etc. It had a funky smell. The bathrooms stunk. It wasn't particularly charming, and therein one found it's charm. It was unique, and uniquely Brookfield, and there was no other For Pete's Sake on earth.

I can't for the life of me understand why people would travel to another city, state or part of the world and dine at some McChain that they have right next door at home. It goes along with how I can't understand how someone would go to a beautiful place like Hawaii and spend all their time golfing. Greens and fairways are greens and fairways, wherever you go! It's grass! Get over it!

Well, Pete's is gone, as is the National Liquor Bar and hundreds of other local, colorful restaurants, bars, pharmacies, bakeries, grocery stores, etc. All replaced by faceless corporate stamped-out chains that deliver an inferior product, mass-packaged for the mass idiots.

Krispy Kreme, anyone?

Political Hoo-Ha

We're a little slow to receive the latest, new, hip things here in the Northwoods. One has to erect a New Hip Thing Parabolic Antenna just in order to catch the tail end of All Things Hip, usually about 20 minutes before Hip Expiration. That being said, forgive me for just discovering the comic strip, .This Modern World by Tom Tomorrow.
I was perusing the Entertainment Rag for Wausau, WI and stumbled across the following, piss-my-pants-funny cartoon:


(if you can't read the tiny font, click on the cartoon for a larger version)

Sad but true. Ironically, this cartoon summarizes about 2 paragraphs of the interview with Bill Maher in Rolling Stone that I read this am, whilst dropping some neo-cons off at the pool.

This morning, oft-partner-in-crime Stu called me during our mutual commutes. The conversation turned, as it often does, to politics and how Stu had seen the cartoon (I posted it on my Myspace as well). A Neanderthal with a Big Rock seems to be just the sort of candidate that the American Public (read "worlds largest collective of total retards") wants.

I asked Stu, "What in the name of all that's holy will we have to choose from a year from now? -- Hillary and Rudy...Good Lord!"

He concurred. There is no lesser of these two evils. Vote for Corporate Puppet A, or Corporate Puppet B? And voting for anyone else is 'throwing your vote away'. And if you don't vote, you don't have a right to bitch.

I ask Stu, "So how far are we from public hangings of all of our elected officials?" Stu replied, "About 4 more percentage points on the rate of taxation, if you look at History".

We then started to discuss what we think would be the ideal replacement for the current system of government, which we both agreed was far outdated from what our founding fathers envisioned in a day before radio, television, the Internet and mass media hysteria.

Stu proposed that the Presidency, which is mostly an ornamental job anyway, be a one-year term and have little power. Which is pretty much what it is now, except that it goes on way too long. No re-election, a one time term, period.

The House and the Senate would also have one year terms and a salary of around $25,000 to $30,000 a year, and would be a part-time job, requiring about 5 hours of work per week (which is more than those fat ass lazy drunken bastards do now!). Again, no re-election concurrently. They can run again after a year, unlike the Presidency.

The Judicial Branch, no more lifetime posts of drooling, pants-shitting alzheimers victims. There's a lot of judges in this country, one year is sufficient on the bench.

By limiting these terms, no one is sitting around idle in a desk with time on their hands long enough for corruption to foster. No egotistical Texas Cowboys will be in office long enough to get an attitude about losing face in a war that shouldn't have been started. No one will have to poke a supreme court justice to make sure that they're still breathing. No evil vice president will be able to put together a sinister, Third Reich-like plan for world conquest and execute it in a year's time. And, it puts government back in the hands of the common man and takes it OUT of the hands of lifelong bottom-sucking political sea-lamprey types.

I don't always agree with Stu, but this time I think he's got it dead-on.

When You Don't Know Where To Start, Go To The Beginning...

For years, I've admired other blogger friends of mine, such as the wit and wisdom of one Tata in her blog, Poor Impulse Control. I've admired her adherence and perserverance at keeping it current and updated on a regular basis with a never-ending stream of amazing posts. Ditto for my other blogging friends. I've often longed to do this myself, but knowing that I have the attention span of a teetsy fly, have shyed away from attempting such a foolhardy undertaking.

A couple days ago, Mrs. Mikay had mentioned how she would like to start a journal of our adventures, as every weekend since we met, we're doing *something*, and it's beginning to become difficult for our aging ADHD collectively shared brain to keep track of it all. Since she is very computer-friendly, probably moreso than I, I thought a blog would be a great tool for her.
And, as long as I'm setting one up...well, what the hell, I might as well jump in the see-ment pond of cyberspace myself.

But where to start? I can't possibly explain myself in 3 paragraphs or less. Let alone 3 pages. It would take *volumes* to really explain what's going on in my melon in a way that would sufficiently lend you, dear reader, an understanding of just what the hell I'm all about. Hell, I've known me for 44 years and I'm still trying to figure me out myself.

Only thru my diligent adherence to posting on a regular basis will we both come to know Mikay better. That is, if you continue to read this over, say, the 2008 Federal Income Tax instructions or other more interesting material.

I'll hold up my end of the bargain...at least til a shiny object distracts me.