inlikeflint

Here is another example of chicks with dicks and The Devil in Mrs Jones depicted in the center. I like the Adam figure to the right... Ow stop! my neck, my neck ow... Great action paintng here. ("i can has apple?" NO... Rejected!)

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Here is part of  my story And There We Were... (A couple paragraphs from pgs. 5 & 6.) The photo is of me (Left) and my toothless Bosnia friend where a mortar pit was set up and a mirror on a pole that let the mortars aim and drop rounds on their target from a few blocks away. I think this is only the second week of being in country, I am still pretty clean considering it took well over 60 days before I get to take a shower... and then another feww weeks before I could get one with hot water (March/April in the Balkins.)

(And There We Were... Pg, 5 & 6...)

     -I spent more time fixing the Bradley than running it. I did not care about the game anyway. Green Bay and the Patriots could have gone to hell for all I cared. Besides, I had a couple of diet Pepsis and was more concerned with scrounging around for my stash of pougey bait. A new pack on the Bradley is a Cummings 501 diesel engine and an attached transmission that requires few adjustments and a couple of bolts to install. On a concrete pad on level ground in daylight, a mechanic and small crew can change a pack out in under and hour. This was normal provided that the crew knows what they are doing. Using headlights from the M88 (Mechanics wrecking vehicle.) and a couple of flashlights, we placed the pack in the Bradley in just four hours. Eighteen gallons of oil for the engine and ten for the transmission is normal for vehicle operation when getting a new pack. This is the discovery I had made when having to fill the pack from five-gallon containers in extreme cold weather. Sometime the oil would miss the hole and flow like the consistency of honey across my boots, pants, and hands. Jumping in and out of the driver’s hatch to turn the vehicle on and off gave me a chance to locate my emergency provisions. While the mechanics were bending into awkward positions to attach the drive shafts to the pack of the Bradley, I was inventing new ways to drink diet Pepsi.

     Depending on the condition of stress and feeling like crap because of a head cold, the proper amount of diet Pepsi should be consumed. If the conditions are not too severe, one third of the diet Pepsi can should be consumed so that there is enough room to mix one part Jim Beam. However, if the conditions are severe like not being able to go to the Super Bowl and working on the Bradley till the sun comes up, consume the diet Pepsi concoction until a third of the can is left and add more Jim Beam. This recipe agreed with me and the small handful of mechanics that were not able to participate in the early morning festivities.

     Lying down in the mud fixing mechanical parts on the track was a nightmare. Lying down in the mud in the dark fixing the Bradley was sadistic harassment. If your grip on a bolt with a tool did not slip causing you to slam your knuckles into other metal parts on the track, the mud would prevent you from threading the bolt into its proper hole. I had no problem with any mechanical part or mud, because I could not feel my fingers anymore, so working on the track became kind of fun. By the time the sun started to come up, the track was up. Crane had come back with the other Super Bowlers, and said that I didn’t miss much. They had stood out under a tarp outside watching the game in the cold. The Patriots had beaten the Packers, and all they got was some left over French bread and sodas. Crane asked me how it went with the track.

I told him, -You didn’t mish mush.

(It's short, but it is a short story, so I can't give away too much... )

 Derek

(White Stripes.)

Wichita is the kind of town like Dodge City, Kansas. You just sort of end up here and you want to get the hell out of. I was not sure what I would take photos of today, so I just sort of wandered around downtown and looked for touristic stuff. I call it touristic stuff because Kansas is one of those places that uses a historical register as something to stoke a fire with. (Because that's how they roll.) Other than having a couple people in town who know something about culture and art, and maybe other things like that the Earth is not flat and there is something called evolution... Wichita, Kansas is usually 20 to 30 years behind the rest of the nation... (Minimum wage in the state of Kansas is $2.65 an hour. I would say that it is better than some other state, but I can't because that is the lowest in the nation. Illegals don't even work for those kind of wages. It's just your typical Christian Conservative cow town.) Thank you to the distinguished gentleman from Topeka by the name of Brownback.)


Welcome to Wichita State University... You are looking at the Ulrich campus art museum. That there is a Joan Miro on the outside of the building... (It is under restoration.) WSU has more sports facilities and things related to sports than any other campus in Kansas (With exception to K-State or Kansas State ...maybe.) Xavier McDaniel, Antonie Carr and his Brother, Wilt Chamberlain, and a ton of other sport stars went to school here at one time or another and played professional sports with a ball of some kind. Wilt probably has the record for "hide the salami" for the short time he was here. Dennis Raider also went to school here, but he never played sports... He was a tiny man in stature and those guys with little man syndrome usually end up to be serial killers.) Most of the students here are from places more rural than Wichita... That means it is always easy to get laid if you are an executive at one of the Aircraft companies or one of the major oil companies that Bush comes to visit every so often. ~When minimum wage is less than $3.00 an hour, Christian Conservative girls will do anything for a five dollar bill, or somebody famous like Wilt Chamberlain.)


This is the rail bridge next to the Union Station building in downtown Wichita. Right now it is owned and used by the Cox cable company. (They suck.) Cox has to have the slowest broadband cable I have ever used. I have had faster download speeds on a phone modem. Anyway, this is a photo of what the bridge looks like underneath. It is a good breeding area for pigeons and Conservative girls looking to earn a quick $5.00.


This is the top of the rail bridge with trains that they have pulled up there to park. Parking and pulling a train will run you $10.00. (Thank you Jesus.)


Union Station of Wichita, Kansas... This is the place where the Cox work in and out of.


Here is an artist rendition of what the place looked like in 1910. They had trains there that would take people from city to city. I think this is how Wichita started to grow... There were bars across the street and people would get laid over before their trip to Chicago or Kansas City. They would end up staying at a place called the Eaton Hotel if they were not rolled first. Wichita has always been a rough town and people have been shot up all over the place. At one time Wichita had more crime per capita than Washington DC. Since Wichita has always been behind the times, out in front of Union Station, the horseless carriages from out of states are prostitutes waiting to get their first lick at all the new arrivals before they get rolled under the bridge going to the Eaton.


This is not the Eaton Hotel, but was another hotel that was closer to Union Station. Anyway, This is some of the original advertising in the alley that was not too clear until I saw it though the magic of Digital Camera and Photoshop technology. This is a big improvement over the Kodak Disk camera that I used to have. I had to get my digital camera in Kansas City. They are still using Polaroids here.


The Eaton Hotel. This building was put on the historical register in 1972. Unfortunately, this means that most of the stuff in this building is no longer here on the inside of the building. It is okay because when I was growing up, you did not want to hang around this hotel because of all the homeless people who used to squat here. I have been in a lot of places and seen a lot of homeless people. However, if you are homeless in Wichita, you are really homeless and selling your ass for a dollar ain't going to happen because that racket is completely saturated by the upper middle class. Anyway, the homeless made the place smell like piss and Night Train, so finally some entrepreneurial spirit from another state decided to come in and restore the Hotel in all of its splendor by ripping out the gas lamps and replacing them with original coaxial cable and Cox internet and fancy fangled copper wires for electricity and turned the place into Lofts. (What a novel idea, who would have ever thought that people would pay to live in an old building with loft style apartments?)


This is the top of the Eaton Hotel and I am not sure if the top floor was reserved for the poor because of cowboys with guns, and all those stairs to climb. Anyway, there was a bar down in the lobby or something... Some crazy prohibitionist bitch from Kansas City (Cary Nation.) came to town and went crazy with an ax and chopped up the bar and and one of the store room doors. (That one of my friends bought for $20.00 in an auction... no lie... and the bar is owned by the Smithsonian.)

((And that door smells like piss.))


Down where the bar used to be is a restaurant where you can see people eating.


For some reason I am thinking this is not the original glass, but it looks old... actually it looks like somebody ran out of gold window paint... That stuff is expensive and is more than a days wage in Wichita.


We say goodbye to the Eaton as it settles with the sun and we go deeper down Douglas to look for other interesting buildings owned by somebody else from another state or country.


This is the Brown Building. I am guessing that this is what color it used to be because it was build just before the Great Depression... And someday when we finally get out of the depression here, people will stop throwing them selves off this building with ticker tape parachutes.


I am so depressed right now.


Here is another old school advertisement from way back. It looks like something is .50-.60 cents... whatever it is, I am sure it is expensive and thanks to the restoration crew from California for coming in and deciding to make more Loft like places that made you think about real lofts.


This is the new Bank Building that is old now because it is a modernist structure. Most of the banks have changed and it is now called the Bank of America Center and is owned by some guy named Phil Ruffin who makes buildings with some geezer named Donald Trump. Whatever. The building is not really that important but if you can peer though the reflections and the crazy 60/70's groovy smoke tinted glass you can see this giant mobile that is hanging from the ceiling. This is actually an important piece of art work and it could potentially be worth way more than what it was originally purchased for back when the building was built.


Here is another angle... this is an original Alexander Calder mobile (A real monster of a piece.) This is more of a historical piece because of what happened to the work, not so much the scale or that it is Alexander Calder... For some reason the bank who owned the building decided that it needed to remodel and the color orange was out of style, that they decided that they needed to go with a more dominant cool color like purple. The bank decided that they would paint the sculpture purple because it no longer matched their new interior. (...Oh yes, they did...) So Calder eventually found out and he was still alive to take them to court and win... and then the bank had to pay for removal the shipping of the work back to Calder's studio, the paint removal and restoration work, the court costs, shipping back and installation... maybe even taxes too. Anyway, it was sort of a landmark case where it just sort of lays down and enforces the copyright rules in the visual arts and another reason that the buyer of visual art can never own the work outright just because they purchased the work. (Did I mention that Wichita was a real Christian Conservative cow town?) I am sure that the interior decorator and the banker had to live down under a rail bridge for a few years to pay that debt off.


Looks like one of the secretaries downtown has gone renegade with a label machine again. Can't keep the riffraff out of anything nowadays.


Just a little further downtown, down by the river... there is a statue that was donated because the city of Wichita was too cheap to give anything to the local Indians... "Keeper of the Plains!" This was put up right before the bicentennial year of 1976 by an artist named Blackbear Bosin. Anyway, you don't see the artist's name anywhere near the sculpture or on even on the bronze plaque that has everybody's name but the artist. There's the landscape architect's name, city council member names, the guy who operated the bulldozer, and the gofer who brought all of them donuts and coffee in the morning. Blackbear's name ain't up there. Do you know why? Because Wichita is a Christian Conservative town and the name Blackbear Bosin is too exotic. It has the word bear in it and nakedness is not tolerated in the city limits, and then there is the black thing, not to mention that most of those white people that are named on the plaque don't like Indians or the minimum wage crackers they paid to move dirt around and string up a bridge.


This is a photo of what the Keeper of the Plains gets to keep his eye on everyday since 1976... Power lines... I now understand what the Wichita Linemen song was about. Wichita loves power lines so much they string the bridges together with them. They have power lines all over the place and coax cable... Must be a modernist thing. I haven't the heart to tell anybody here that the modernist movement ended about 30 - 40 years ago. (And you thought North Korea was behind the times.)
(Off in the middle of the photo is a tall building that used to be the Holiday Inn. It is now law office and owned by Phil Ruffin... This is where we are going next...)


This is Century II. The round building that landed here many moons ago. I am on the second floor of a gated off - what used to be the parking garage of the Holiday Inn. Unfortunately, they turned some of the building into offices and ... (You will never guess...) Loft like places that were once hotel suites that make pretty crummy loft like places the size of hotel rooms.. This building reminds me of the video game Grand Theft Auto. You can drive right up to a good vantage point and...


...observe the chic chain link. It just screams Kaucasian Khristian Konservative. Many years ago somebody went crazy further up and decided to start shooting people from the top of the building. When I travel though Wichita... I ... Understand... The woods are lovely dark and deep... and miles to go...


One of the finer qualities of Wichita are the ways that the builders and architects of this city have really kept up with continuity and managed to fit about every architectural design element of any time period and jam it all in one city block. You have this Romanesque revival thing going on next to a modernist structure and it is all strung together with power lines. Historical buildings are scuttled out and sold off to people in towns in neighboring states... Somebody always asks what Wichita can do to make this town better or more interesting for tourists. I love my retro city and Wichita is a great place to visit. If you have old clothes and old cars and make less than $10,000.00 USD a year, You are going to love Wichita. (Okay, maybe not, but it was worth a try.)

I am still not sure what the band White Stripes was singing about, but maybe the Wichita they were talking about was in Wichita Falls, Texas.... And maybe somebody will tell me for $5.00 and a spin around Union Station.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1144548/

(It seems I am not the only one who has noticed the B.S. closeout sales prices.)

Don't blame me... Keb started it!

The classic Levis 501’s button-fly blue jeans are America’s blue jeans. Levis has cranked out probably enough pairs of them to cover the entire surface of the earth in 100% shrink-to-fit denim five times over. I suppose this is one of the main reasons that they are so expensive nowadays.

It’s not like I am a cheap bastard or a penny pinching scrooge. I just don’t like burning a hole in my wallet if I don’t have to. I usually get about two years out of a pair of jeans provided that I purchase my jeans six to fourteen pair at a time. I purchase this many because I know that I can usually have a fresh pair for every day, and if I have to go two weeks without going top the laundry-mat I do not smell like stale day old jeans.

When my third or fourth pair of jeans started to disintegrate, I knew it was time for a new set.  I went directly to the mall and collected $200.00 at the ATM to add to the knot in my pocket. If you carry cash, people know you mean business and green speaks to everybody.

My first stop… JC Penney. I stop at JCP maybe once every few years to get a smell of something familiar. For some reason JCP has a light fragrance of fabric dye or carpet synthetic that lets me know that I am in JCP. The décor has not changed much, it always seems dark and neutral with white walls. JCP is a no frills department store and I suppose this is why I don’t usually get excited when I shop there. To my surprise there’s a sale on clothing for 50/60% off… There are racks of clothing stacked high enough to be a fire hazard. I find a couple of turtlenecks by St John’s Bay for $9.00 a shirt. I figure since it is difficult to locate turtlenecks and artist types like me and hipsters wear these kinds of threads, that this was a good find for $20.00.



James Cash Penney Jr. (Called Money for short.)



St John’s Bay might as well say JCP on the label. I don’t know too many other places that carry the label. It to me is like Ralph’s Grocery brand of food called Private Select. The name Private Select is a little nicer sounding than Generic Cola Soda, or Generic Seasoned Pork Chop. The product has an identity and so JCP turtlenecks are St, Johns Bay… Anyway, I tote the shirts around for a bit and look at Izod brand Polo’s and notice that the alligator must not be the logo anymore. I think I remember wearing  my last Izod shirt in the early 80’s so Izod must be new and improved or cleaning up their Evergladesque image. JCP has everything marked down and I am just cruising the prices and looking at all of the clothes marked down from the special JCP price of $50.00 to $25.00. Dockers, Haggar, St John’s Bay… everything  JCP 50/60% off… I make my way to the JCP Levis Jeans wall and read their sign JCP sale sign thinking I am getting by one get one free. (50%.) I burn a good ten to fifteen minutes looking for my size and finally come up with six pair. This is a task in itself because I never can seem to find my size when there is a sale. So I thought that it was karmic and the planets were in alignment. $42.99 per pair – 50 percent… That’s $129.00 plus the $18.00 for shirts bringing it up to about $150.00 plus 6 percent sales tax  that’s $156 plus $3…. $160.00 bucks I score. The sales lady at the counter is still ringing up my stuff and I already have the bills in hand…

Two hundred twenty six dollars and twenty seven cents…

-No, I don’t think so, how did you get that price?

The argument does not last for long when I am shown that the sign says buy one pair at the full price and get the second pair for 50% off…I guess with all of the 50% off things going on in the store they did not have room of a 25% sign. The store clerk asked me if I wanted to take a few pair off, and I just decided not to buy any of them because I felt mislead. I bought the turtlenecks and split. I’ll see JCP again in a couple of years when I need underwear or something.



Levi Strauss pictured sitting on left. (Not to be confused with Plate-O-Shrimp/Lattice of coincidence Levi Strauss the philosopher.)



My second stop was Sears. Sears had a sale too, but Sears had their clothing marked with a straight price. Levi’s… 501’s… 34 x 34’s… $32.99 a pair. That’s 30…60…99… $200.00 times 6 percent makes $212.00… Sears was having the same sale as JCP 9okay a little better.)  so, I bailed and checked out some place called Von Maurs? Von Mars? Something like a Nordstrom’s just without the Levis. So I stopped in at my fourth place. Dillard’s. Dillard’s is like a dumbed down Saks 5th Ave.  Actually they’re not a bad store, just proud of their prices. The people in the store act as if they care about you as a customer they know their products, and will go out of their way to help you. The décor is nice and there are usually a lot of women in the cosmetic, fragrance, and jewelry section… It’s a nice place to walk though just for the scenery. The Levis section in this store is like a micro vault if perfectly folded blue jeans neatly displayed with no more than four pair to a shelf. 501’s… 34x34… $48.00… no sale.  560 relaxed fit… $48.00… 501’s shrink-to-fit… the most inexpensive pair of Levis known to mankind… $48.00. And then I remembered why I only walk though Dillard’s. -The scenery.



 The logo shows how tough the jeans are... but this logo was invented long before things like false advertisements were investigated and Snake Oil Salesmen still traveled America. I see this logo and it make me want to put a dab of Crazy Glue on my work helmet so I can hang from a steel girder.



I spent an hour or so looking for Jeans and ended up wondering if I could not find a place online that has cheaper prices. The Levi’s website quotes the MSRP (The Manufacturer’s Suped-up Rip-off Price.) from $48.00 to $50.00 for the 501’s and The Shrink-To-Fit 501’s are the same price.  As if I was buying a Volkswagen, I now have to have a Kelly Blue Book valuation guide for buying a pair of blue jeans. I think K-Mart or Target used to carry blue jeans and shrink to fit is what you would get because they were the cheapest most long lasting pairs of jeans you could buy. You get a pair and go home and have to wash them a few times by themselves just to soften them up and knock some of the blue dye out of them.

I’ll wait a few weeks and see what is on sale in the newspaper and if nothing turns up… maybe I will change my brands over to something seven to twelve dollars a pair.

It’s expensive nowadays to run around looking like a degenerate.

This was the flower in my back yard that I managed to snap a shot of while I was hot on the trail of the Chupacabara.

I had been enjoying my day with a cold Tecate after my long day at work in the fields of corn. I'm a shucker by trade and I come from a long history of shuckers in my family. My mother is the biggest shucker of us all, but when it comes to high volume loads... I have my mother's shucking beat hands down. My day had been long, hot, and grimey, so when I broke the first can of Tecate it went down like water. When you work hard all day long you end up urinating less because you sweat most of you body fluids out. I swear before I popped the top on the next beer I could smell it comming out of my skin pores. And this is when I heard the noise.

I was kicked back in my Lazy-Boy recliner just finishing my beer and picking cornsilk from out of my fingers when a loud thumping noise came from out in the backyard near the goat pen and the chicken coop. I thought what I heard was a stray dog or a fox or something trying to get at my chickens eggs because I had heard the noise before when a dog had broken into the chicken coop again to get himself a snack. But this time there were some sounds that sounded  like the dog was killing chickens and goats. So I grabbed my digital camera and a pistol and ran out into the yard with intentions of just spooking the dog away by shooting into the air. When I got out back to about where the cages were I did n ot see a dog but something that I have never seen before in my life.

This thing that was almost three feet tall with almond shaped eyes and sharp teeth was sucking the blood out of my goats and when he saw me he sprang from the cage with a gaot under one arm and started bolting around the house dragging the goat like a gunny sack.


 This was the flower when I took a photo of with the black and white feature knob while I was chasing down the chupacabara and what was left of my goat.

This little sonofabitch was fast and I thought I had lost him, so I did what any other normal red blooded American working man would do... I had to go collect a few flowers for the goat as a reminder that I now need to pick up chupacabara traps at Ace hardware when I come home from work tomorrow. The flower was the one that I snapped photos of while I was chasing the chupacabara... somehow by accident I managed to capture this flower on my camera and the rest were real crappy shots because I had the portait setting on  my camer set insteat of the knob setting for the guy running.



I thought everything was over and there was not much more I could do but go back to what I was doing. I had left the screen door open and I saw the blood trail going up the steps into my house. This is the point when I dropped the camera and pulled out my pistol . I'll be damned if he takes my damn goat, but he sure as hell better not be drinking my beer because payday is another week away. I hear scratching and plates breaking in the house so I storm in doing a ranger roll I learned from watching all those Rambo and cop movies growing up... the lights go off in the house and all I see is a gray blur busting out of the screen door...

Thump'
 Thump'
Thump'

Three shots rang out into the night and I am sitting on the floor with a dead goat.

-I Dreamt That I Was Dreaming.

I was looking for more happenings of Self Immolation on the internet and I stumbled into this website. Self Immolation is sacrificing yourself for a greater ideal... Something like diving in front of a bus to save a child. The Merriam Webster's definition is; a deliberate and willing sacrifice of oneself often by fire. This is what Ritscher did in Chicago as a protest to the war in Iraq.

Self Immolation is the alibis or exception to the rule of suicide being sin in most belief systems. This destruction of self is what mindset a soldier is conditioned to accept; as I am a soldier fighting in the forces, which guard my country and our way of life...I am prepared to give my life in their defense. (First article in the U.S. soldier's Code of Conduct.) Jesus accepts death on a cross so that others can live without sin is an act of self immolation... So this Malachi Ritscher guy who decided to set himself on fire and painfully burn to death is just as big a deal as the guy who dove under a subway train to protect another person. (Wesley Autrey Daniel Fitzpatrick in NYC.) Malachi Rischer is a martyr for peace.

Did it get good air time? I think I read that some tool in Chicago wrote a story on how useless and pointless his death was. (It was in Wikipedia so the info might be a little iffy...)




It made for lousy news because I am just now hearing about it. (July 22nd 2007.) A guy sets himself on fire in November of 2006 and nobody says a damn thing... Paris Moron goes to jail and Britney Stupid shaves her head and you hear about it for months. I read Rischer's self-obituary and I understood his position.
In reading a lot of the Mission Statement or Self Obit you can hear Rischer's loneliness and despair... and the idea of making his life count for something... even if it is a last act of defiance and self sacrifice.



Self Obituary & Misson Statement Link