More Bobby This Morning

Here at 3d world headquarters we broke out another disc of the joy-pack Mr Lindstrom so gracefully put in my way and I'm glad I did. This one is a demo of cover tunes he put together a few years back and its a solid showcase of his perfect understanding of the genre.
The whole production simply drips professionalism: The drums are where they belong, crisp and true, You don't notice the bass, and you're not supposed to but the rest of the deal, the layers of bright and lively or sad and sweet or dirty blue guitar parts are quiet genius and that's not even the good part. The good part is the voice, man, and beyond that the voicings, which is only another way of talking about the heart of the man.
Shake Your Money Maker flat cracked me up Bobby is a madman and he ain't too proud to beg either. He get's so far into that crazy old Peter Green Lyric you can't help but wonder how is this guy not locked up? Seriously, this level of commitment to this peculiar form of self expression sounds a bit dangerous and there's very few guys that get this far into it, because it feels dangerous, to know the bad parts of the blues this deeply and the fear is you won't live to tell the tale.
I for one I am glad Mr. Lindstrom lived not only to tell the tale but to so wisely and deeply re-enact it and that he ain't too proud to show us how it felt.
It's a big deal. I love it, and I thank you Bobby for doing what you do.
Now that last cut, Who's been talking, Howlin'Wolf, got under my skin like I didn't think it could showing me something about my own heart that is dark and lonesome and tragic in a way and I don't normally look at that shit there's enough madness in the world but I think , as Studie Heckard used to say, "it's good for ya." And if you don't take it out and take a look at it in the light now and then it can come upside your head  and heart from the blind side, like it did for Studie, and then you are well and truly doomed.

 

Here's the thing I'm talking about Bobby and the band doing Who's been talking?

Fat Girl

Me.
Definitely.
When I checked in to the hospital in Phuket I weighed a hair over 90 kilos. That's an unmeasurable little tiny bit under 200pounds. Dr Sanguan looked at me funny when I asked him to do liposuction around my tummy and thighs and back-arms,  oh yes, the pendulous back-arms I can see Grandma Thorp in the kitchen mixing biscuits back-arms a-flappin' let me see where was I...
 Dr Sanguan, bless his little slant-eyed heart did not laugh. He thought a minute and then he said "Why?" He went on, "Heidi Sue you are basically built like a barrel, and nothing I can do will change that." So I passed on the lipo but instead I had a massive attack of ulcerative colitis and couldn't eat for nearly 3 weeks I'm not kidding and I checked outweighing 80 k which is 178lbs, very nice, thank you, very nice indeed.
I like to say that weight loss represents the massive male member Dr Sanguan removed but we all know that's a lie.
I judge how fat I am by how my black jeans fit and this Sept they were a bit loose and I had to make another hole in my black policeman's belt.
Now in order to get them over my massive thighs I have to first go into denial and then wiggle and squat a couple of times and then if I don't shit myself in the process I can at length get them over my ass and then a few more squats and letting all the air out I can button the waistband and zip the zip. You can't go on a Christmas baking spree, 3 batches of sugar cookies with frosting and two fruitcakes and an apple pie followed by two chocolate birthday cakes in January with chocolate butter frosting and expect any different. Sometimes late at night when the world has finally gone quiet if I listen very carefully I can hear my thighs growing like a field of July Corn a faint squeak and a rustling sound as the fat cells fill like popping corn of cellulite.
I'm a fat girl again.
I don't like it.
Help is on the way, though, and I'm not going to like that either. I'm starting the triple therapy interferon/ribovirin/Tesaclavil regimen in March. It's for 6 months, weekly shots and constant nausea and rashes and depression and hair falling out the whole magilla.
But I will lose weight like a cheerleader hooked on magnesium citrate.
Last time I did interferon I got down to 146 and I can't wait to get back there.

The Real Wild Women of Charleston

So They got this social thing with a high profile in Coos Bay called the wild women of the above title and while the women now involved are undoubtably women and in the eyes of a relatively conservative local culture fairly wild and I give them props for getting out there like that, the real chicks that did this thing are long gone.

Let me give you a list of names. Ellen Eaton, Jeannie Taylor, Cammie Main, Bonnie Joyce, Jannie Vaughan, Blue Dilley, Sky Olsen and Sue Smith-Bailey

Ellen Eaton, known to all as Olive Oil, for her uncanny resemblance to the cartoon character was a pal of Kesey's from the California Days something of a wunderkind and a shoestring budget totally involved and resourceful mom of Ondine who went to Charleston Elementary back in the day. Ellen lived in one of the tiny dilapidated houses that used to line Troller Road where fishermen lived in their noble poverty for many years until rising sensibilities tore them down. I think urban renewal had something to do with it. Ellen was a wild child herself.

Jeannie, known affectionately as Jeannie Big Butt for obvious reasons was a pal of Ellen's from Eugene who married Buzz Taylor a local highline shrimper and tended bar at the Portside where her signature drink was the Dirty Mother made and sold by the pitcher and if you don't know what a Dirty Mother is made from I can't help you.

Cammie Main was a young and talented musician who originally showed up in Charleston as a student at the OIMB, met Ellen and Jeannie and went spectacularly off the rails because, among other dynamics, she was so heartbreakingly good looking. She eventually settled down (by Charleston's standards which aren't very high) married Stan Main, another successful salmon/tuna fisherman and lived for many years in the duplexes behind Kelly Boat works, which has since closed due to hazardous materials in the local tideflats I don't think Cammie had anything to do with that after all proximity is not proof. You still see Cammie with her tuna BBQ setup now and then at the tuna festival although she is quite modest about her fiery beginning ties to the place.

Bonnie Joyce was the better half of the Barry and Bonnie show before Barry quit drinking. Barry was known as the Sheriff of Red's County because he always noticed when somebody was out of line and usually did something noticeable about it. Barry was the first of us to get sober and he pioneered the alcohol treatment scene in Coos County. Bonnie was a teacher at SWOCC (look it up) and a bit of a poet and the most cheerful person in the room until she became the saddest or until Barry did something as usual and everybody was always glad when they took it outside. Sober now for almost 40 years she always will be a wonderful and wise and long-suffering woman.

Jannie Vaughan was another teacher from SWOCC who had a poorly concealed wild streak and another poet published and awarded in fact and a musician of sorts and a fine strong singer and if she had tuned that guitar she would have been great. Jannie had a willful nature. Jannie and her man Spike lived way up Coos River in the old days when they drove to town in an old black Cadillac and she and Cammie and Olive Oil were dangerous to be around but you couldn't help the vortex there was just so much love of experience and such an inexorable appetite for transcendent joy that you couldn't, I couldn't, stay away. And you didn't want to it was like being around the only campfire in a vast cold desert.
It wasn't that the men weren't welcome, it's just they A) didn't get it and B) they couldn't keep up.
You have to sing Rudolph the Red-nosed Reindeer to get what I mean and there was no Santa Claus but the meme of celebration and exclusion and the way the men considered themselves in those days of gender inequality there was a legacy of unexamined sexism everywhere in every human endeavor and the women felt newly empowered and knew they were better bonded and that they occupied the moral high ground even in this. And the men always thought it was about them and it wasn't and they couldn't see that and us girls felt sorry for them a little and not even that when inevitably some guy would start wagging his weenie and the women would order another round shouting out with glee.  So the guys would wander away lost and excluded because they couldn't hang with it they had to make it about themselves. And, make no mistake, these chicks were powerful beings. Those who are left like Sue and Blue and even Cammie blush a little with embarrassment and go into denial but back in the day they were the shizznit for sure even the ones in the back.

Shit I Bought/Made/Invented for my boat

VHF radio
depth sounder
LCD TV
electric bilge pump auto switch
elect fresh water pump hand backup
new wiring scheme, wire, distribution panels, fuseboards
plow CQR anchor 25#
Danforth type storm anchor 35#

A full spool of rope from the factory is a pantload of rope so I cut it up like crab fishermen do into shots of 10 and 20 fathoms and the chain into 5 and 10 fm shots a fathom is 6 feet just so you know I was going to sell some of it but I never did I'm kind of into hoarding boat gear it isnt really a problem its useful stuff but it does add up

400 ft nylon 9/16 bonded anchorline made off in modules of 10 & 20 fathoms
150 ft 1/4 proof galv chain made off in 5 & 10 fathom modules

Dinghy 8 ft wooden w/ builtin flotation and stern roller
Oars 6 ft spruce traditional style w bronze oarlocks and chocks and traditional manila fenders

There's glassed in flotation under that back seat now, and a foam roller where you can get back in the dinghy when you are swimming but this is a pretty good picture of the setup with the spruce oars and the traditonal rope fenders I made from old stuff Ross and Louis gave me off their big old yawl.

3lb folding grapnel dinghy anchor
10 amp generator hookup charging system
Raymarine tiller autopilot
survival suit full gumby
Floats/fenderballs 2
Whiskerpole telescoping boathook
2 spinnakers small and huge
canvas sunshade awning
Chapman's Piloting, Small Boat Handling, & Seamanship
Knight's Modern Seamanship
Pacific Coast Pilot #11
Columbia River Cruising guide
oversize bookshelves
Charts from Tatoosh to Vancouver
Samson Post /billboard lignum vitae
Fuel tank covers purpleheart grating

If you squinch your head to the right you can see this is the tiller handle posing in front of the ladder before the coachwhipping and the turk's head knotwork got all dirty with handle schmutz after 2 summers in my hands

Traditional coachwhipping/turksheads on the tiller handle
18v tools drill circular sawsall spotlight
red nightlight
Ryobi palm sander
Ryobi 4 " angle grinder
Ryobi 3/8 drill motor
3"slick, fine chisels
ships auger bits
Volt Ohm Milliammeter
socket set
palm and needles/wax twine
French Sinnet traditional harbor gaskets
Stainless Steel Barbecue grill propane mounted on the railing in the stern 
Bulletwood Companionway Cover


Every one of the things on this list is a separate story and an evolution of tradition and engineering and a personal journey of design and creation. And a project brought to fruition mostly by myself out of books and conversation with all my pals at the marina particularly Fred Vosun a kind of a marine genius type guy that knows his shit about boats and motors. He's always around the docks where I tie up at McCuddys out in Scappoose. It breaks my heart to be leaving that milieu but I got a bad feeling that something particularly shitty is going to happen to me or Felicity Jane if I try to go another season.
I can't take that I got to quit while I am ahead.

Before and After

Way back in Dec of 2008 Maggi and I started haunting the local marinas looking at boats and trying to figure out what was up with the whole sailboat scene in the depths of a snowy and cold winter which only got snowyier and colder as the year changed numbers. We found out there are a lot of fuckt up sailboats about and some lazy-ass owners with unrealistic delusions about the worth of said algae collecting hulks.
This one Columbia 21 down at Westport had 3 feet of water in the moldy cabin and the tiller was rotten like black cheddar cheese and the guy got offended when I noticed how utterly abandoned and denuded and hopeless this worthless pile had become. And there was worse.

you can't hardly tell this is a foot and a half of water in the area below the cockpit and in the cabin it was twice as deep. It's snowmelt the owner just walked away and left this little boat to fend for itself. What an asshole.

The tiller in question once again clear snowmelt water six inches deep. I don't know how the rotten tiller turns black, maybe it was oak and reacted to the iron in the cheapass rudder bearing under the water

                                    

See what I mean? just run up on the bank and abandoned this place was like the Hell of boats

We got pretty tired of all the depressing shit people destroy in their personal lives and boats deserve better,

Finally in February we went out to Scappoose to look at an Ericson 27 which was kind of fuckt up but not too bad and moldy but not very moldy and nothing worked  and it was just cluttered and lonely and lost and I fell in love with this thing the very first time I saw it and we sneaked onboard and looked around and I felt right at home.

Then one day towards the end of January this is what we saw that day in Scappoose. Parked backwards like the power boat guys do it and the motor up in the garage. Lonesome.

 I rooted up all my fugitive money and cashed checks on credit and I gave the guy what he was asking which if I knew what I know now was still a grand too much but then it was my problem because the paperwork went through and my name on the title.

I never watched the borrowed TV behind me there so I gave it back I just mostly read books and work on the gear

I still feel utterly at home on the boat and I have a great life there and I am competent and resourceful and patient and creative when I am  there, and I feel connected to something elemental.

You can see all the differences if you hold control key and run the mouse wheel and blow it up go ahead theres plenty of pixels.

 This is how I feel about a wonderful part of my life and I never really got hurt or fucked anything up and I fixed up everything that was wrong with  Felicity Jane and I put in a fortune in equipment and rigging and all that marlinspike bosun's work.
She's for sale.
Somebody is going to get a nice place to start.
I'm gonna quit while I'm ahead.

Short Stuff

Fair Warning Department here at 3dWorld tells me to make it clear that I am going to be a bit tedious about this here  music man and pimpin' in general.

But what I want to say is that there's 148 songs on this play list I got in the mail yesterday and not one that I hate, and I hate a lot of songs.
There's a half dozen I never heard before, Rolling Stone shit from the last ten years since I quit paying attention, but what I know about the stones is they got a line to the well and they're likely to be rockers too.
Lindstrom's taste in music pretty much exactly matches mine and the less bullshit the better.

Package in the mail today from Hefferdust Music and oh lord I opened it up

 Lindstrom changed my life today, and I think it was probably high time. Got the goosebumps this morning, now there’s tears all down my face. Feel like I connected with the old days and I can finally face today. Is that just corny lyrics or what? Let me go wash my face and calm down and I will tell you.

And that’s the shit I thought I would never feel, an old time connection with heart and soul and Lloyd's of Bandon and this guy that plays guitar like English is his second language, the absolutely most fluid natural guitar player I ever heard, maybe Keith Richards in second place by a hair, for just plain understanding the language and sayin' things without the mediation of the verbal reflective level of mind anyplace in sight.

That’s another issue too, once you learn the language what is it exactly that you got to say? Where I fall down, sure I can write, but I’m an essentially shallow thinker, and shallow thinking well expressed is what they mean when they say better to keep the mouth closed and be thought a fool, than to open mouth and remove all doubt.

But this here Bobby Lindstrom he’s got shit to say that somebody has to say and nobody says in such a way that means it so completely and so easily. And I don’t even really think he knows he’s doin' it. I really don’t.

I’m listening to the CD of a performance he did at Lloyd's down in Bandon Oregon in October of 2001. I can’t stand it that I wasn’t there. 

Now it’s the last number one of Bobby’s anthems that I remember from back in the day Station Man a rocker with Peter Green implications from Fleetwood Mac which is the tune that made them an important part of my life even before Stevie Nicks came along and changed the deal.

They got Mike Correil on the drums a workman and good beat and great frame for the guitar.. Bill Jansen has been the bass backup for Bobby since the last ice age, and there’s a horn player Paul Biondi. Bobby does this number like a voyage to Pitcairns Island, just a starting out and the strong theme and the feeling of discovery and mystery and tragedy and danger and sublime beauty and the bond of human experience and this horn player getting all tropical and emotional there in the back and dammit I do love an extended musical improvisation on a theme. So now we’re down to the end 12 minutes went fast and Bobby is shouting through his hands and there’s nobody that can and will do this shit anymore. When he comes through that guitar line and the theme comes around, I believe they call it the 5 and back to the chorus it swings right into the back of my knees and into that rhythm jump/swing there’s one measure of ¾ time in there and it makes me glad to be alive.

I don’t listen to music in my daily life, to entertain myself like everybody does these days. I find the practice infantile. And this CD is a big part of the reason why. It means too much, it says too much, and when its playing I want to get down and live the groove and listen like its savin’ my life.

Which it is. 

Thanks Bobby, more later.

End of the Line

A lot of my friends have ended up here as gray powder ashes floating around the South Slough estuary and this is the spot where those who are left behind congregate to have a last shot of Black Jack and a puff on a reefer and tell a joke or two to keep off the heebiejeebies. This is the Winchester Creek arm of South Slough, a few miles out of Charleston Oregon which is the fishing village out at the mouth of Coos Bay.
                            
The tradition goes back to Paul Muirhead who, back in 77 got real drunk and did something real stupid and then in a hungover fit of remorse went off in the sand dunes and got up close and personal with a Colt .45 automatic. Roger Kalawercz did the same in 2009 after the cancer diagnosis but he didn't bother with the sand dunes part and his last bullet, after it was done with his brain-pan, went through the tin on his trailer house and the shingle siding next door on Davy Jones Grocery's storeroom and wound up in the cooler in what was left of a can of Budweiser.
My old pal Jannie Vaughan is in here too after the cancer got through the second time when she said fuck it and declined the chemotherapy. "Once," she said,"was enough." Bill Chard Junior is here, and Digger, and some day I hope to be as well but not anytime soon although you never really know...

            

 A couple guys who were lost at sea didn't leave anything to put in here but we got together anyway and threw the cork in just to make sure their spirits had a place to look through from the other side.
Walking John wasn't a fisherman but he is in there too. An Artist is always welcome in a community based on real life.
                             
WE all became friends at a fishermen's tavern in Charleston called Red's. It was famous in the salmon fleet as the rowdiest fisherman's bar on the West Coast and that is saying something. Most outsiders were either too scared or too smart to set foot in the place, although usually the worst that would happen was you would go home a little later and a lot drunker than you planned. Not counting, of course the occasional unsolicited LSD experience but that only happened a couple of times to guys that had it coming, rednecks that came in to bust up the place or start something stupid and left in tears swearing universal love. Everybody usually had a wonderful time, rich or poor, stranger or old pal, and when somebody had a good salmon or scallop trip they would holler at  Helen behind the bar to ring the bell behind the counter and stand the house a round.
And it seems to me I remember dancing on a table one night because the floor was too jammed to move, pitchers of Olympia beer passed from hand to hand and the money the same because you couldn't move from where you stood, Jannie singing her John Prine country like the call of the wild and me in the corner smoothing out the edges of the melody on my Epiphone 3/4 acoustic guitar.
Red's burned down after Chuck lost the mortgage, he didn't pay much attention to anything after Nancy died, cancer got her too, and the building just sat there in the rain all lonesome needing a roof and the Roger finally did what needed to be done with a can of regular gasoline and a book of matches while the rest of the pals at the reunion party back in 97, those who were left anyway, finished off the keg down at Little Patty's place on Battle Flats, next to where Bob Olson and I started our trip to Altamount.
Nothing is left of Red's now, it's just a bare spot now, but the bamboo still grows wild up on the hill behind there where Muirhead and Short Man and Roger and maybe Blind Bob and Ed O'brien and Mueller and me and Spike used to go to smoke some doobie to punctuate the rythm of the evenings of our golden age.
(EDIT: the memorial was destroyed two years ago by vandals and has not been rebuilt these are the only photos I know of recording how it used to be. Fucking vandals)

Boo Hoo

The Fourth was about the only nice day in the whole stupid month of July last year. Not really Bikini weather but I made do. It was really pretty nice but not one of those days where you have to get naked as possible and then jump overboard as a  mental health issue.

 But the guys at my marina were doing some day sailing in Multnomah Channel even though it is narrow like a drainage ditch or the ICW down on the gulf and all you do is tack and tack some more. I suppose that's good for a crew and so since I am the crew I forced myself to get into my good old Tahiti Print 2-piece and hit the ditch. I can't let the men make me look lazy even if I actually am I have a reputation to live up to.
 My buddy Lynn lives on a very nice trawler style yacht parked way out on the end of the dock so she took my camera and made a couple of pictures as I went by it doesn't look like much going downwind but with that big Genoa headsail you keep pretty busy with the sails out one on each side like that.

I took this photo into MS Paint and blew it way up and made some white pixels for teeth, turns out my mouth is exactly four pixels wide and so there's three white pixels and a pink one to give it a natural look.
The Boo Hoo part is that, come spring, I'm selling my little money pit, Felicity Jane.
Yachting is expensive. I want out.

Losing Sleep

This is in NW Portland the amazing thing is actual payphones! Analogue! 2008 was a fun winter for sure.

I think this is Cissy Johnson getting all meta in the streetlights at 10 PM we were ghetto sledding with Miranda and Pete way up

 at the end of Lovejoy street where it dead-ends into the west hills. It was steep and fast and we had improvised sleds of storage totes and garbage bags and one actual snow saucer. It was a beautiful night cold and clear and happy.

Then in a week or so the snowpiles got all icky and fantastical this was 12th & Washington at the bus stop. The photo below shows you what can happen to a century plant when the century comes around it was over by Good Sam I dont think it survived.

 I keep waking up in the middle of the night expecting to see this again when I look out my window. Not happening. This is NW Portland and the tv weather guys are all jacking us up for a winter weather event.

 Which keeps on not happening. This a weird winter so far anyway it never hardly rained in December at all. And so far January is also being a dick about it.

Like some story book wonderland the place went nuts and there was this stuff on the ground for more than a week. I had a good time hiking around and feeling all vigorous and when I got cold there was plenty of hot water for a long soak in the tub. It did get old after a while but it was a lot of fun. I hope it snows tonight. I got my lynx-fur parka and my homemade ughg liners handy and the battery in my camera is fully charged.

Family Entertainment - Yet another Movie

I'm a windy old bag. No doubt about it. And I can't leave this movie alone, now on its 4th version see if you can spot the difference...

         

Syncretism 2.1 Voodoo Doll

What syncretism actually is is kind of sneaky. But if you have been kidnapped and you don’t want to get the stuffing beat out of you or get slave-auction sold down the river you will go to some convoluted lengths to keep your African Traditional Spiritual practices on the down-low.

“What’s that, Massa? Why it be jes a pictcha o’ Sain’ Hannah, Massa, an dat be good ol Michael evabody favrite archangel right thar by she.” Heh Heh, apologies to Harriet Beecher Stowe for the unflattering phonetic transliteration of stereotypical African American dialect. Oh, right, she invented degrading colloquial dialect as a literary device. Never mind.

What it actually is is the invocation of Anaisa Pye, a powerful and benign African Loa, or spiritual presence, as seen by the Voudon practitioners of Haiti and New Orleans and yours, thank you very much, truly. She is often paired with her pal Belie Belcan, a male Loa syncretistically represented by Michael the Archangel as she brings healing and clears difficulties and brings sisterly love and good cheer to the oppressed among us chicks.

I dunno so much about Belie Belcan, I don’t study “fe dat mon,” but this is my interpretation of how I want to invoke the healing of Anaisa Pye, and I am fresh out of icons of Saint Anne, who is said to have been the mother of Mary.  Historically nobody knows very much about Christ's Grandma, so everybody claims something different, according to their own needs and cultural prism.

I'm not keeping this on the down-low. Nobody is going to sell me down the river. I be past my sell-by date...

Sometimes... Version 2 ASDGCAD

I think I have attention surplus disorder. ASD, and maybe Getting Carried Away Disorder, GCAD, so I’m ASDGCAD which is more letters that those other guys that can’t stick to one thing and get all the good drugs like Ritalin.
I made myself a flannel nightie. And of course I got carried away in the process but it came out very nice and very much what I wanted it to look like and what I wanted it to be.

It was a simple robe off some hippie website for renaissance clothing until I got ahold of the design; by thetime I was done I was $60 down and I had two trips out to 82^nd and Holgate to the Joanns, which, by the way, is the Dollar Tree of fabric stores, only backwards, because it’s all plastic low-rent craft stuff, and nothing is a dollar, but that is a different discussion.

And two trips downtown to Josephine’s Dry Goods Fine Fabrics just to look at stuff which I always do its just so, well, fine in there and the ladies are nice to me, but the red velvet ribbon was at the Button Emporium over by the library, and their store name also says Ribbonry and let me tell you they got the ribbon in there I barely tore myself away and I am damn lucky I have Fiscal Discipline or I would be in Credit Card Hell by now that ribbon collection is a Jaw Dropper and an All Day Sucker. But enough gratuitous capital letters.

Not to mention I don’t use a machine and I do all french seam to protect the backside from unravelling which means that every seam is sewn twice, and the lace, and the hems, and the ribbons, and it took me a month to handstitch it. 

It made me glad I have this tailors dummy standing around with a rotating hemming bracket on the bottom for marking the hem height which with the ruffle makes it exactly floor length and nice and even all around. That dummy was a $180 whim a couple years ago and now I finally used it. From, guess where, Joanns. Irony abounding.

 Drawback is that my beautiful new Peppermint Pink Nightie weighs about half a hundredweight, what 7 yards of heavy flannel weighs, and the gathers make it 4 or 5 layers deep around the upper half and it like trying to get  a # 16 flannel spinnaker into the bed at night and hot as the dickens so I now turn the baseboards to the fully OFF position at night but I do feel cozy and well loved.