Ever Get The Feeling... You Can't Win?

And the first one tore a picture

of a dead and hanging man

who was kissing foreign fishes

that flew right out from his hands

and when I put my arms around him

felt the blushing blood run through my cheeks

and an eerieness surrounded

when his tongue began to speak

and he said, "oh, boy, you are so pretty,enough to wrap tight in rice-paper string"

and when I finally kissed him

the whole world began to ring

lost like a bell that's tipping over

with two cracks along both sides

and I knew the world was over

so I took a look outside

and watched the fires that were reaching

up to the weather vanes and the tops of trees

and the waiting scene and the Sunday dream

they're all waiting here for me
Deli markets with their flower stands

and pretty girls and the burning men

hanging out on the hooks

next to window displays

and I took out my tongue

twice removed from my face

across a bridge and across the mountains

threw a nickel in the fountain

to save my soul from all these troubled times
and all the drugs that I don't have the guts to take

to soothe my mind so I'm always sober

always aching, always heading towards

mass suicide, occult figurines

and wasted gas-station attendants

attending to their jobs

and a nice drive in the country

finds a nice cliff to drop off

oh, when this life just gets so grating

all the grittiness of life

but don't take those pills your boyfriend gave you

you're too wonderful to die
And the last one tore a picture

from the pornographic page

and all the pleasure points attacking

all the looks of love were staged

and it's a lie that you've been given

that just hurts you every day

so why should I lie here naked

when it's just too far away

from anything we could call loving

any love worth living for

so I'll sleep out in the gutter

you can sleep here on the floor

and when I wake up in the morning

don't forget to lock the door

'cos with a match that's mean and some gasoline

you won't see me anymore

neutral milk hotel/ song against sex

which will you go for which will you love

which will you love the best...

who is that man?

sometime in march 2003. on the way to an anti-war rally in portland. who was this guy. what was he up to. doing his best bukowski impersonation. except in pink. nothing but ramen and red wine. i think everyone has to live like that sometimes. i dont think i'm recognizable now next to this picture.

this guy is probably 80 to 100 lbs. less than i am now. 4 years removed. and with a lot more brains cells. but never, NEVER any common sense... everything from now on will be measured and rational. good luck.

Merry Christmas To the Computer Address That Symbolizes The Spirit That You Are, BN.

This is Monica Bellucci,

..............First snowfall in a long time here, then it rained. God speed and Good Luck with aspirations on the new year. I'm all tapped out.

hiatus

bartles v. james

hiatus until dec.26 . read the rest, there is a great mess there.

(hiatus from what???)

exactly....

HOLIDAY BLACKOUT

with the first sips we fire up the ship. officially enter a time of holiday communication blackout. three days trying to sustain a suitable level of intoxication. get through christmas, it doesn't exist anyways. my sister is on a holiday meditation retreat for a week or so. my brother has his other family. i dont think bartles is in town.
i cant be fat and bearded and washed out like this much longer, but i'll give myself the next three days. communication blackout so i dont share the breakdown with others. merry christmas.
i'll be back soon enough with unattainable new years goals and resolutions...


***last minute addition***
but don't worry. your brother is a genius. and no matter the horror i have to live, i will make something of it. the glass is half full. but it's half full of shit. blackout/ rainout christmas. it's 55 and rainy in western new york. from 4:30 to 8:50 i've had 14 genny beers. i've 16 left for tonight and they don't work. i can't get drunk. what the fuck...

I'm Bitter, Merry Christmas Student Loan Co.!

This is a class from my school, check out the dude in the middle (as if your eyes weren't gravitated to him already). He is the mascot of our university, his very demeanor can sway our beliefs and weekend plans on any whim he pleases. He is a dorm-based matador of pot, ecstasy, PBR and drunken sex with sluts on a mission to get as much cock as they can before they settle down with the richest kid with a trust fund they can find.

His necklace is a beacon of weed deals to come, his thousand mile stare suggests that he is too deep for VCR Programming 242.50 but he is concentrating dammit, because Dad said at Thanksgiving that if he doesn't get his ass in gear he can kiss his Irving Gas card goodbye!

Ship Sails on Solstice...

and with several blasts of the horn and a round of applause from the crowd, it was gone. tonight we finally said farewell to "that fucking ferry". and i regret never making those t-shirts. or getting a picture of that road sign for the ferry that was graffitied with the quote "enough, already". or something like that. a 30 million dollar ship. another 10 to 15 million dollars spent to operate it, not to mention the money spent rebuilding the lakefront. if you've never lived here you'd never understand. a poor, violent city. a broke city gambling it's cash on rather large ships. a broken city always hoping it can be the year 1908 again. a city with this strange self- esteem issue. jealous of never being as good as Buffalo? inadequate. limp. and now ship less...


it is my brother's bowling night so i couldn't get him to take me to the beach. instead i turned the t.v. so i could see it from the back patio, and i listened. it's funny how sound travels around here. the lakefront is a healthy half a mile from here, but i could here the horn and here the applause. it was like having a funeral in times square at midnight new year's eve. strange. strange. that's all i can say. this place has my temperament to a T. big dreams that are always bad ideas. bon voyage, and like every Rochesterian, we never bothered to ride you but we are sad to see you go. you big fucking ferry...

Christmas facts to facilitate your holiday celebrations

Christmas Facts

1. Sinterklaas is Santa Claus' retarded half-brother.
2. Saint Nicholas has a reputation as a friend of children because of various legends that include resurrecting children from death and saving them from prostitution.
3. He rides a white horse called Amerigo over the rooftops.
4. Having triumphed over evil, it was said that on Saint Nicholas' eve, the devil was shackled and made his slave.
5. Sinterklaas passed through a rainbow with his boat
6. Black Pete (zwarte piet) was said to be an imported African servant of Saint Nicholas. Today however, a more politically correct explanation is given: Pete's face is said to be "black from soot" (as Pete has to climb down chimneys to deliver his gifts).
7. Sinterklaas traditionally arrives each year in November by steamboat from Spain (which is odd as he lives in a palace in Madrid - a city without a port!)
8. Children put their shoes next to the chimney of the coal fired stove or fireplace, with a carrot or some hay in it for Sinterklaas's horse , sing a 'Sinterklaas' song, and will find some candy in their shoes the next day thrown down the chimney by a Zwarte Piet. (a bundle of sticks and/or a bag of salt for the bad children
9. Bad children will be put in the gunny sack in which Black Pete carries the presents, and be taken back to Spain.
10. After visiting all the children Sinterklaas silently returns to Spain.
11. Giraffes do not exist

(eleven is more of a personal opinion than an actual Christmas fact.)

(one fact that is omitted from this list is that the baby jesus was the first to use the expression "boo-yah" ,and that in his teenage years he spent a year in rehab kicking his nasty frankincense habit...)

(i know that's not funny, but not all jokes work, now do they???)

my late lunch with true james...

...exists somewhere between "my dinner with andre" and "my breakfast with blassie". we were out on the christmas hunt. or actually he was. i dont have money to scratch my ass lest purchase christmas gifts. we were at a Chili's restaurant. or applebees or olive garden. i mistakenly ordered a 30 oz glass of beer. who knew that's what the waitress meant? i never listen to waitstaff when i order. just nod and gesture and say thank you. my brother noticed that it had begun to snow, and i was relieved, but just as he mentioned the snow he asked the waitress to please close the blinds. bossy. bizarre. maybe it's just me. all in all it was a splendid lunch. the food was dreadful and the ridiculously large beer was warm before i could even have three sips. but i got a chance to explain to him everything from mt. hood mountain climbers to how i never understood where the homeless in rochester go in the winter until i learned about the abandoned subway tunnels. an awful lot of homeless for such an awful climate. but not really. maybe a couple days of snow, and that's about it these days. global warming can be global beauty sometimes.
but before this and before my horror in the chili's restroom i must mention the mall. true james and his girl always buy each other a lot of clothing.and lemon zesters. and other tame gifts. somewhere inbetween the gap and bedbathbeyond he was wondering what he could "really" get her.
as we walked out of sears i said
"you can give her a baby. i need a new title in life. elevate me. uncle br. would be magnificent..."
i'm not sure if he always sees my sarcasm. not so soon after that we passed by my eleventh grade english teacher, who i think is directly to blame for all of my problems. who was he to encourage me to write anyways?
but being a mess is good sometimes. true james said that i look like a longshoreman, and no one would ever recognize me. which was the reason i didn't want to go into the mall in the first place. i hate people who see me, and i see them, and i hate people, and they hopefully know it... a longshoreman whose just spent three days in county lock-up.
anyways, after lunch i found myself in a public fucking restroom. i've never been a germ freak, it's been my previous four years of employment that has taught me. there was nothing to actually clean my hands with. the sink, the soap, the paper towels were all contaminated , i mean you couldn't grab one sterile surface to grab the other. no clean surface to start or end with. but that's all right, sometimes it's better to push open the door with your foot then piss then not flush then fore go the sink then wait for someone else to open the door then slide out. germ free. it's a freebie for men i guess...

(i'll save the bizarre best buy cattle herd for another day)

so after all of everything i get my brother to stop by Sonnie's for a fourty and gin in a teacup. his daughter was there, who is now some kind of fucking pakistani princess genius, and as always he is there watching al jazeera. and he knows by what i buy that i am broke. and i only buy something once or twice a week these days. maintenance drinking. sober for 72 to 96 hours then a night to stop fucking shaking. anyways he keeps saying i can always work for him again. that's a bit too much of a fucking circle for me. that's how the whole of fucking life is. the symbol i sharpie onto the back of my hand everyday.

FROM GOLDIELOX!!!

and i have been on a date with Edwin Heaven for the past week. and he lives in my neighborhood. by the way, he wrote howard the duck in case you are unfamiliar with his work. he was also close personal friends with richard brautigan. we have been riding around california at 3:30 in the morning in a fast european sportscar, all along the pasific coast highway and into the hills. this is a direct quote from his new book that won't be done until next year..."A shirt flies off.Then humongous corduroy pants sail overhead.Then several muscular actors step aside."that's all he would let me have for now and if he finds out that i posted this on my blog he is never going to fuck me again, so i hope you're all happy. i have been frequenting peepshows and slowly giving myself a tattoo of a circle...

* * *

... And i lived this way for the space of about three years.And the essential thing i needed was the blanket.And i always had one of them whereever i went.And one time i even found a quilt blanket up off of a trail up near upper FOLLY POND.And eventually i even slept in ROYCES old truck.That was when it happened to be raining outside. And it's to very cold to be apart of that wilderness up there in YORK. And we've got this thing as to where we all should be.And if it wasn't for housing i don't know where i'd be now.And i'm now preparing up my my latest BOOK,CALLED THE SCRAPBOOK OF YEAR 2005.And it's just about my very best of my collectables.And the CANINE POLICE WAGON has stopped a car out here.HOLY COW, just look at those flashers.THE whole road is lighted up.They have now just left.I'm not in any trouble whatsoever at the time being.And i'm so happy for ABBY THE CHOIR DIRECTOR at our CHURCH,And she finally has our movie for now.GOD BLESS her soul.And i'm so very happy foer such a wunderbar tag.IT couldn't have been any besser. And being around nice company is truly great credit.Thank you for the meal PHYLLIS.aND THE LADY PEPPERALL HOUSE in KITTERY IS up for sale.And we even talked about tree houses today also.And my cat is looking for something under the sofa.SHE'S a very playful kitty.And i'm very happy to have her.And so many wonderful friends.the NICE MAN COMETH,LOTHAR PATTEN

sufferer's time

Time is slippin’ awayAnd I and I no reach high oh yeahFe we time, fe we timeDis a sufferer’s timeFe we time, children, fe we timeDis a sufferer’s timeA time fe sufferer’s drive big carA time fe sufferer’s live it upA time fe sufferer’s drive big carA time fe sufferer’s live it upFe we time, fe we timeDis a sufferer’s timeFe we time, children, fe we timeDis a sufferer’s timeNow that rasta ???Time fe rasta ???Now that dreadlocks ???Time fe dreadlocks ???BecauseFe we time, oh lord, fe we timeDis a sufferer’s timeFe we time, children, fe we timeDis a sufferer’s timeFour hundred years of colonialismAnd I and I no get high oh yeahI and I no reach high oh yeah‘Cause too much ism and skism, childrenToo much ism and skismToo much ism and skism, taking overToo much ism and skismA so we stayA so we goA so we stayA so we goA so we stayA so we goA so we stayA so we goFe we time, fe we timeDis a sufferer’s timeFe we time, children, fe we timeDis a sufferer’s timeA time fe sufferer’s drive big carA time fe sufferer’s live it upA time fe sufferer’s drive big carA time fe sufferer’s live it upFe we time, oh lord, fe we timeStop the ism and skismFe we time, children, fe we timeIt’s a sufferer’s timeFe we time, children, fe we timeStop the ism and skismFe we time, oh lord, fe we timeDis a sufferer’s time

Get up in the morning, slaving for bread, sir, so that every mouth can be fed. Poor me, the Israelite. Aah.Get up in the morning, slaving for bread, sir, So that every mouth can be fed. Poor me, the Israelite. Aah.My wife and my kids, they are packed up and leave me. Darling, she said, I was yours to be seen. Poor me, the Israelite. Aah.Shirt them a-tear up, trousers are gone. I don't want to end up like Bonnie and Clyde.

Poor me, the Israelite. Aah.After a storm there must be a calm. They catch me in the farm. You sound the alarm. Poor me, the Israelite. Aah.Poor me, the Israelite. I wonder who I'm working for. Poor me, Israelite, I look a-down and out, sir.

HalleluJAHSalvation, and glory, and honour, and power, unto the Lord our GodFor true and righteous are his judgments: for he hath judged the great whore, which did corrupt the earth with her fornication, and hath avenged the blood of his servants at her hand.HalleluJAH

And I saw heaven opened, and behold a white horse; and he that sat upon him was called Faithful and True, and in righteousness he doth judge and make war. His eyes were as a flame of fire, and on his head were many crowns; and he had a name written, that no man knew, but he himself. And he was clothed with a vesture dipped in blood: and his name is called The Word of God.

Stratovolcano

..."You make me feel like a wash-out," I told her. "I can't be that bad! There must be some good in me."
I finally got dressed. I went to the bathroom and threw some water on my face, combed my hair. If I could only comb that face, I thought, but I can't."

Bukowski, Post Office

it's been decided that the remainder of the year will be spent in bathrobe and slippers and cowboy hat. i've no appointments. no need to be anywhere, anyways. so why pretend. i bought several packs of cigarettes today, enough for two weeks under strict ration. i am going to learn to end this daily self dissection. there really isn't as much to me as i'd like to believe. i thought about the opposite today. what if i was well and healthy and strong. i would have to quit pretending that i am terminally ill. get rid of the fucking notion. something i have followed long enough. like i've said before, it's something i was pretending to be and i eventually became. a loser. a fucking deadbeat. but i'm just not that good at it anymore. i want to be able to make logical arguments again. make enough money to not have to live on this silent street. if it's not alaska, then i'm going back to portland. i don't need to see any other part of the u.s. find a place where i can skate by & be just fine. be another king of nothing much, nothing at all.

(Sam Kinison as the angel in "It's a Bundyful Life")

in 2007: br. James Roosevelt Belmont

and Dr. Bartles E. Americana

we love the all, the all of you...

pale blue dot

this feeling makes everything possible. woke up early enough to catch a biography of John Fante on pbs. also saw a program that explained how nasa put these insane gold records on the voyager satellite which is now hurdling through the universe, offering all the best of the earths culture, at least the best of the 1970's...

(instructions for aliens)

this program also had a little piece on how teddy roosevelt survived an attempted assassination because the speech he was carrying in his breast pocket was so huge that it deflected the bullet enough not to cause serious harm, and how after being shot he went on to give an hour and a half speech.

had a dream that i saved a building from burning down. the building had this huge industrial clothes dryer. the noise from this dryer annoyed this squirrel so much that he cut the wiring and nobody could use the dryer. but he didn't chew the wires, he used a set of wire cutters. someone came along and tried to fix this by twisting all the wires together. "we" were playing cards upstairs ( the "we", i think, was just random people, at least not important to the dream) and i smelled smoke and grabbed a fire extinguisher- which sprayed seltzer water?(was this vaudeville, or a circus clown act?)so i put the fire out and i was a hero. until i told everyone they were stupid mother fuckers for not wiring the dryer properly. i then went into a detailed explanation of the complicated wiring of a dryer. (which i have done in "real" life, the time i took our clothes dryer apart and felt proud when i fixed it...)

the dream was really not that strange, it's the squirrel with the wire cutters that gets me...

???

bartles v. james

we've lost control of this blog. the posts are nonsense.

an almost perfect stride as we close out 2006.

Bob Ross: An Obituary

UNTIL HE DIED ON THE FOURTH OF JULY AT the age of 52, the most famous artist on the face of the earth, and I use the word artist loosely, may well have been Bob Ross. His name doesn't ring a bell? Don't panic; you're not going to find him in the standard reference books. You'd do better to go channel-surfing on your television, which for the last dozen years was Ross's domain. He was the bearded, fuzzy-haired host of "The Joy of Painting," the public television series on which he gently guided couch potatoes through the intricacies of painting a landscape in 26 minutes.

Speaking in an anodyne voice much like the one police officers use to coax jumpers off ledges, Ross encouraged viewers to paint "happy little clouds" and insisted that anyone who followed his simple instructions could succeed. He provided art's version of "A Better Body in 30 Days." Each week, millions of viewers, from Akron to Ankara, from Harrisburg to Hong Kong, tuned in -- a whopping 97 percent, according to Ross's calculation, just to hear his voice. His laid-back on-screen image belied his off-screen drive as a businessman. He wrote popular books with easy-to-follow recipes for painting snowcapped mountains and lakeside vistas. He designed courses to train instructors, hundreds of whom have spread across the country, preaching the gospel according to Bob. He even marketed his own line of art supplies, with his smiling face emblazoned on each tube of paint.

Far be it from me to cast a dark little cloud over Ross. I'm just struck by the whole Ross phenomenon, which seems so quintessentially American, notwithstanding his global appeal. Perhaps there's nothing more American about him than the fact that at the end he became an icon for Generation X-ers. Following in the unlikely footsteps of Tony Bennett, he achieved cultlike status after starring in a series of promotional spots for MTV. Ross was so unhip that he became hip.

He was a throwback. His show consisted, basically, of one camera trained on him or his canvas the whole time. The approach was calculatedly homespun, like his voice. In that sense, it was the very antithesis of MTV, and it tapped into a nostalgia for the cozy can-doism of America in the 1950's. The 50's, after all, were the heydey of Grandma Moses and the paint-by-numbers craze. Ross updated both, with his treacly pictures of a mythical frontier and his do-it-yourself technique.

Of course, he also promised instant gratification, which wasn't so different, ultimately, from what MTV offers. Give him half an hour, and he could teach you to paint a picture. He was said to have completed 30,000 of them himself, which by my calculation comes to an average of almost two a day for every day of his life. Or put another way: all alone, Ross could have decorated virtually every pizzeria in America. In any event, his reported productivity represented another bygone American ideal, namely the Yankee work ethic.

Ross's pictures were thickly painted, garish landscapes that conformed to age-old formulas about balanced composition: trees on one side, mountain on the other, moonlit lake in the middle. He didn't paint people -- because they might spoil his unspoiled vistas or because they were too difficult to do, I can't say which was more the case. In any event, his landscapes were resolutely American, chock-full of fruited plains and purple mountains' majesty.
Whether Ross actually invented the technique of instant art is a matter of debate: his archrival on television, the Bavarian-born William Alexander, was also his teacher, and Alexander has claimed that Ross stole the fabled wet-on-wet technique from him. I leave it to Ross's biographers to sort out this sordid affair. I only want to point out that Ross's life was a Horatio Alger story in that he was a drop-out, a carpenter's son, from Daytona Beach, Fla., who made good after hitting upon a scheme to market himself.

Americans have always viewed art as therapeutic. From the beginning we have believed that it should be uplifting, that it's either good for us or no good at all. Which is an insupportable notion, if you think about it. But it's the populist doctrine that Ross championed all the way to the bank. His feel-goodism rang true to millions who watched his show, and who, like him, probably distrusted abstraction as something that foreigners sneaked into the country, which in a sense it was. Ross said, "If I paint something, I don't want to have to explain what it is," an odd remark coming from someone who made his fortune explaining to millions of viewers each week precisely what he was painting. Still, I know what he meant.

Ross will live on, through reruns. I don't foresee a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art any time in the near future. But you never know, considering the recent fashion for thrift-shop and outsider art. Given his wealth and popularity, you can't call Ross an outsider, exactly, but he certainly wasn't an insider. He was somewhere in the middle. As in Middle America.

Bob Ross: A Eulogy

Bob Ross: "We don't make mistakes here, we just have happy accidents. We want happy, happy paintings. If you want sad things, watch the news. Everything is possible here. This is your little universe."

Bob Ross (October 29, 1942 - July 4, 1995) was a grandmaster American oil painter who primarily practiced the finer, more respectable arts of relaxation and kindness. His quiet, nurturing disposition was a form of therapy to the weary, and the reassuring intonations of his gentle voice hypnotized entire generations of would-be illustrators into creating a million-dollar art supply store enterprise.

His PBS series The Joy of Painting duped viewers around the globe into believing they too could create impeccable rectangles of content suitable for framing in just under twenty-six minutes. For this reason, it's no wonder The Joy of Painting is the most recognized and studied art show in the history of television. Ross's light, experimental excursions through nature and beyond have thrived since 1983 on over 300 public television stations -- a phenomenal achievement for programs of this genre. Every thirty minutes, on a public TV station somewhere in the United States, Bob Ross is just starting (or just finishing up) another masterpiece.

The phrase "harmless international cult" certainly applies. Foreign distribution of The Joy of Painting began in 1992. Responsive audience members armed themselves with palette knives, brush beater racks and base coats across the United Kingdom, Mexico, Canada, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, the Netherlands, Turkey, Iran, Hong Kong, Costa Rica and Germany. The Bob Ross machine continues to be an unstoppable force, as many of his original broadcasts tickle people's imaginations from the safety of a VCR or DVD player. What television neighbor Fred Rogers does for the lonely, alienated child, Bob Ross does for the isolated, emotionally unavailable adult. Or at least a person who considers his own existence to be more of a mistake than a happy accident. He accomplishes in mere minutes what it's taken Dr. Phil, Dr. Laura, and the Deepak Chopracabra a lifetime to fail at.

"We tell people sometimes: we're like drug dealers. We come into town and get everybody absolutely addicted to painting. It doesn't take much to get you addicted," Ross says while touching up the branches on a birch tree with Titanium White. He gestures toward a limb with his angled sponge brush: "That's where the crows will sit. We'll have to install an elevator to get 'em up there because they can't fly. They don't know that, but they still try."
Not a tremendous amount is known about Ross's youth, but he spent most of it in Daytona Beach, Florida. He mentions from time to time his childhood pets: an alligator who constantly chomped at Ross's fingers until finally it was set loose, and an armadillo who "tore up" everything in his father's carpentry workshop. He intuited that painting could change a person's life in much the same way people gravitate toward music, writing, or gardening. Following a brief career in the U.S. Air Force, Ross started to develop a quick-study oil painting technique meant to appeal to the masses. By distilling the artistic process into steps and keeping the number of colors to a minimum, he grew to be one of the few artists whose name is associated with the "wet on wet" technique: the progressive addition of oil or watercolor to a canvas without wasting enormous amounts of time waiting for content to dry.
"Little bit of black, a little bit of blue.. some criss-cross strokes, or little x's, whatever you want to call them. Whatever. There you go."

His half-hour television performances unspooled before the cameras in more or less real time. The only sequences edited out were bloopers: his enormous house painting brush had a habit of knocking the canvas off its easel while Ross rhythmically dap-dap-dappled fall colors onto sycamore trees. And there were intermissions between strokes -- ranging anywhere from five minutes to an hour -- so layered undercoats of white or black gesso were allowed to dry. Not everything has to be "wet on wet," of course. This is your universe; feel free to experiment with hilly landscapes dotted with craggly trees, lush meadows, or snow-dusted farmhouse panoramas suitable for abandoning in a thrift store. While some folks distract themselves toting iPods of shitty music around like colostomy bags, others prefer to remain focused on a cardboard canvas with a modest fan brush.Bob Ross was like a chef on the Food network capable of turning an ungreased cookie sheet into white chocolate cheesecake with caramelized apples on the side, simply by producing from under the counter a time-lapsed version prepared prior to taping.
Viewers sometimes felt like they were left standing in their kitchens without a VCR, struggling to follow along. The real reason folks at home couldn't immediately replicate his paintings? Ross infused about thirty years of practice into every stroke.

As he streaked his flat, disposable foam brush down the entire length of the canvas to paint the soft craggling of a birch, he'd pause to "dirty" his instrument on the palette so the painting would look better on television. By loading the bristles in a deliberate, gradated manner which took into account the fractal nature of bark patterns, or the leafy, hyperkinetic color schema of fall, or the predetermined uniform direction of celestial light sources, he was able to provide as much instruction as one could possibly telegraph into a video camera.

Bob Ross historian and former business associate Annette Kowalski (along with her husband Walt and their daughter) presently run Bob Ross Incorporated from the quiet, secret suburbs of Washington, D.C. People clamor for his books and videotapes, his brushes and paints, his discarded dropclothes. What kind of easel does he use? What's gesso? They want to know everything, and they're prepared to put it all down on their Discover card.

The Bob Ross empire leverages no small degree of delicate sorrow from its participants: often audience members fall in love with Ross before they realize he's been dead since 1995. Viewers who maintain emotionally wrenching, co-dependent television relationships with him latch onto him even harder once they discover he's "not here" any longer. They simply cannot let go.
Nearly twenty-four hours a day, a team of four operators fields calls from American viewers. Overseas sales are handled abroad. An army of dedicated, enthusiastic would-be painters strive to populate our world with the Bob Ross aesthetic. His namesake company has recruited and trained over 2000 art teachers, all of whom proudly wear the "Bob Ross Certified" logo, and all of them capable of delineating the proper technique for landscapes, wildlife, and flowers. Students have been known to pay $375.00 for an hour of instruction in the Bob Ross technique.
Co-owner Walt Kowalski: "The vast majority of people do have a private urge to be creative. Generally speaking, people think you have to be blessed with talent to be a painter. I think we've pretty much reversed that whole notion."

After Bob Ross died at the age of 52, the majority of his original oil paintings were donated to charity or PBS stations.

Meanwhile, a Louisiana band calling themselves The Bob Ross Experience continues to play gigs. Their influences include Poison, Dave Matthews and Lynyrd Skynyrd. Ross did in fact do a promotional spot for MTV (as well as posthumously appearing in a Celebrity Death Match videogame opposite Jerry Springer), but the bona-fide Bob Ross can only really be experienced in the syndicated wilderness of public television.

This Pretty Much Sums Up My Childhood

I swear I will research this further, but I was told Bob Ross did all those shows live...from prison.

Late Night Conversations

Followed by huffing the gasoline fever bag. I went to the store to get cups and got followed by a swallow in a muffed up ride only to be damaged minutes later; with insurance man & ambulance in tow carrying plastic forks and knives, the dangerous caterer will consist of black and white and flesh driving a catfish and guilty of not using blinkers in the fog.

The beard will work there once everyody else passes; the pen will cause cold sores; the pencil will damage the gums and the spider prays on the dust mite before he takes a bite out of you.

Stick and vinyl have an intervention as Wendel plays the oboe. You are cordially invited to a royal bowel movement.

Due to a plastic allergy Brother Bartles is hereby permitted to miss class today. Signed Doctor Robert.

"Hey Baumer!..........Alright.......................................Alllllllllllllriiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiight!!!!!!"

end up here.

...full of holes

horror to glory to coma to ever since that first umbilical snap to back again this circuit open and close open and close open and we keep doing this i can trace it back it is this even line it directs me we'll go on this cycle again it will take bare knuckle rain we'll take the ride i have every fucking memory from every fucking life and i know that i don't need to end up full of holes i don't want to end up like bonnie and clyde but if you'd like to?

and brother bartles and sister ethel and anonymous nicolle and the real brother james i will be expecting you to contact me you all know my home phone. this is the holiday season.

Hello Fat People

I played this system the past two nights and I'm sore as hell. This gaming system might just lead us obese americans on the road to recovery:

Lazy Tuesday

Waiting for the Celtics to trade for Iverson.

Waiting for the Red Sox to sign Matsusaka.

Waiting for the Patriots to eventually lose in the playoffs.

Waiting for the day I realize NASCAR is cooler than the NHL (and embracing it)

I saved my kitten today from dying underneath our basement stairs.

I cooked dinner (shrimp scampi over angel hair)

I redeemed my Ben & Jerry's coupon

Officially made Long Trail Double Bag my beer of the week.

This is the first time I have completely re-edited a post, I must be taking this seriously.

Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm?

year end remnants

baubles, blue lights, and other assorted bullshit. decorations are hung, most of it i just stacked on the mantel. created a kind of xmas/sgt. peppers cover. it's the black and white dylan head in the background that causes that effect. listened to the sirius christmas station all day and i was reminded of the goodwill holiday torture made famous in 2002. realized it's better to write everything like writing a telegram. change subjects frequently. realized this year has turned out to be an al bundy kind of year. those later seasons when the show was just unwatchable. no ma'am. watched brewster mccloud late last night. was it a good movie? should i see nashville? i never noticed robert altman until he died. next year something needs to happen. anything, really, would be nice. i'll finish this one later. after my headache subsides. it's not very well lit in here, with just blue lights. Come to Santa Poco put on show, stop.

"I Get By With A Little Help From My Friends"

Hey I found that teacher that compared Bush to Hitler. And we are a match made in heaven, holy shit, can this guy drink Jameson or what? I'm still sweating off my hangover.

great things on planet earth?

last night i meditated on the snowstorm. pulled up the blue chair and sat in the dark and watched. the sideways snow. the ufo's. one every 17- 21 minutes. the ghosts in the room behind me, one for every memory. these are my great things on planet earth. there is western new york and lake effect snowdrifts. there is david bowie's : "Hunky Dory" . and there is my precious few. without which i would never be able to survive. the precious few who have a tendency to forgive me no matter how far away I try to be. thank you. and i realized this and i realized that and i think what i need is discipline instead of excuse and a goal that is anything better than just rotting. somehow the game got away. what i used to play ---

i actually became...

i need to go on christmas holiday. atleast in my head. i poured all the decorations on the couch and told my brother : "that's as good as it gets..."

so thank you , the precious few, and merry christmas.

i'm on holiday.

Deepraved bith gets her first anaal porkingcode

today we drove around looking for angle grinders and other assorted power tools. me and the true brother j. we hit all the big box retailers on the greece side before we ventured into bizarro greece. the town of Irondequoit. drove past the hot dog shacks and guitar stores. finally found the appropriate tools to cut the floorboard of a '68 mercury. we crossed the bridge and i got to finally see the great ship.

there is only four days left - until they close the st. Lawrence for the season. i want a refund. i've asked and they won't let me live on it. this ship belongs to me. it was an idea that was just fucking wrong. and they got it while i was gone.

anyways , got a lead on a job driving cars for a chevy dealership up and down the eastern seaboard. this is the job for me. the hours are incredibly random. drive to buffalo or drive to tampa. i think i could see a lot of what i NEED to see on a job like this. this is just shit in the wind- but that is what i pray upon. or prey upon shit in the wind. either way i understand. i saw someone i knew today from highschool and i ran away. i went outside to smoke. i need to be one of those people who are proud of what they are up to. i need a spine. christ.

i guess that's it...

"And all in all we're just like you/We love the all of you"

"I bought some rock star ashes, from the back of rolling stone/

I guess he wouldn't mind it, they couldn't sell his soul/

The tiger in my tank, is going to go extinct/

And I'm not feelin so good myself, I think I'm on the brink of disaster/

I had a dream last night, the tv and the phone/

Grew some legs and took a walk, and left me all alone"

--"Tiger in my Tank" by Eels

Welcome to the Terrordome

The alternate title for this was: "Have you seen that Britney Sex Tape?"

mr. bush can we fail?

Big babies. Big random babies...

Is there anything as creepy as currier and ives? way back in the attic of my childhood memories with scenes of some kind of christmas torture.

(and rockwell rubs me the wrong way, feels like being sick?)

i'm tired of feeling useless. i'm done typing about it.(this is never writing). it's ridiculous to think that one of the greatest people ever born should feel useless. perhaps i'm too great to do anything. i'll carry that one around for awhile.

watched a nova special on dogs. there was this great part about narcoleptic dogs. this sad little guy starts running down a hallway, gets about twenty feet before completely collapsing, then he gets up and makes it twenty more feet and again collapses. that is the dog for me. it can never get happy it can never get upset. it just goes to sleep.

and what about the homeless in those states that don't carry a bottle deposit? i'm sure there is a study on this. point me towards it.

the car has a flat, which is fine, i don't drive it anyway. i'm trying to get my brother to get me a job at the bowling alley. i worked there when i was 19. i don't want to work there again. but i'm tired of looking for anything else. i have my anything else. i have my everything. and the knowledge that -- the knowledge that just getting up is enough. or even napping is enough. just stay alive is what i learned long ago.

just stay alive is what i should remember and carry. me and my narcoleptic dog.

tomorrow I will decorate and make myself a happy christmastime.

A Brief History of Technology

01/1983: Cable tv and HBO become reasons to stay home from school for many days to come

06/1984: I am five and though I have no recollection of the time period, I know from past documentation that I have a record player that plays only singles. It is on this record player that years later that I will listen to Prince and realize I am a freak. I realize like to get freaky and secretly like the color purple.

12/1988: Nintendo! Given at the final minute of Christmas morning. Though I was also bequethed a small television and a rather large space in the entertainment center under the family tv. I would hide in this cubby space and close the magnetic doors and play in silence. Thank you Nintendo, you were my best friend.

06/1991: My first tape player, a Walkman. Accompanied by a tape called Bon Jovi: Slippery When Wet. I shun this music and decide to spend my life savings on the La Bamba Soundtrack. A financial move that I still condone.

12/1993: Sega Genesis. It's almost like they knew I would be smoking pot soon.

06/1995: Discman, the rich man's Walkman.

04/1997: My first ATM card/credit card, like I can handle this sort of responsibilty?

From here a huge technological gap takes place, history experts claim insufficient funds created a dark age for new products to surface. Although oral historians say a nicotine addiction is far more likely.
Although the Internet is invented, creating a world of masterbation so scandalous...

12/2002: Cd Burner, my dreams of Prince are finally realized. The jazz collecton reaches depth beyond my dreams.

05/2003: My first cell-phone. It is now 100% easier to get laid at 2 in the morning. I can also drink and dial, a habit harder to break than smoking.

12/2004: Talking Elmo (hey it's worth mentioning, sold like a billion units)

01/2005: I purchase a copy of Madden'06 for XBOX and my world is shattered, I will spend the next four months ignoring everybody and only addressing them with grunts. I will also accomplish very little in the real world.

10/2006: Blogger comes into my life, thank you blogger.

another t.v. dream

if i could live on the first cup of coffee i would be fine. if that feeling could support me i'd certainly get something done in this life. i've got all the decorations out but i'm not sure i want to put them up. it only means to take them down again. and what happened to another week. sober but i still missed most of it. my job search has reached an all time low and i realized i haven't left this house in ten days...dreamt i had open heart surgery. not a heart attack. instead my heart was in the wrong place, no joke. and dr. romano performed the surgery. as they were putting me under i kept questioning the fact that he got crushed by a helicopter years ago- or something like that. i was so pleased by the surgery because it gave me the perfect excuse to just sit around for a couple more months....it's exhausting feeling in amongst the millions fighting addictions. i just need it out of my head.everyday to wake up praying "god help us jesus god and baby jesus help us..." but 'tis the season. and that's where coffee comes in.