present values

a curiosity of neighborhood kids

when ninety or so bats are squeaking under my eaves, that’s a colony. and when they fly out they are called a cloud.

and when I was taking these pictures the neighborhood kids began to gather too.

ok, some faces after all

sphinx moth hornworm caterpillar discovered hiding under the green beans. I don't know anything about bugs, worms but I think this one will turn into one of those moths that look like hummingbirds. if a cat doesn't eat it first.spadefoot toad. I accidently dug her up when I was planting some dogwoods by our neighbors' chainlink. a lucky miss of the shovelblade. she must have also survived applications of roundup to weeds and an earlier going over w/ a tractor tiller. sometimes being able to dig a hole is the perfect thing. she's pretty dazed here, before the reburial.
once, when I was like 9 I caught and kept a frog, which died. so I buried it in the ground in my neighborhood. I also buried in the back of my mind a scheme to later exhume the body when it would be just bones. then I'd have a frog skeleton which would be fantastic! when what seemd the appropriate span of time had passed (probably less than a month) I went to dig up my frog skeleton. I was having a hard time finding it down there where I remembered leaving it. then, off in the periphery I saw something kicking around in the dirt I'd been spading out. yeah, he had totally faked me out but he must not have counted on being dug up again. I only remember vaguely what happened then. amnesty, I think it was. I went home without a frog skeleton.

this nighthawk had broken its wing somehow, probably hit by a car. also called nightjars or goatsuckers, though they’re not related to chupacabras. they seem to be more closely related to boomerangs. that’s what they look like hurtling though the air at dusk, catching bugs in that big maw.
a couple more nighthawks
our newlywed friends in the house next door are in their 60’s. they like to spend some of their evenings eating late dinners or playing board games in their camper trailer parked outside.
on the other side of town I’ve noticed a place in the road where his first name is written very clearly in tar. knowing he worked for the city, I asked him about it one day. he kind of blushed and sheepishly confessed that it was him. she has an electric guitar she sometimes plays and sings with.
in their home, they have a room where their cat lives. this room has pictures of other cats, as well as a telephone. when they moved in they gave us a tour of the place and how they’d been fixing it up. “we’re just tickled, I’ll tell ya,” he kept saying.
the other night we went to sleep to the sound of crickets and their rolling dice on the kitchen table out in the trailer.

stringbeans to Utah

we’re currently being overrun with squash and tomatoes. you can split hairs about whether it’s an invasion or an occupation if you like but the rest of us don’t have time for that. I turn my back for a few moments and there they are, growing, always growing. how is it that I’ve allowed this to happen again?

earlier in the year. no shortage of high tension wires and twine for different uses. mostly to keep the huffys out until the sprouts can fend for themselves.

calabaza jungle

crooknecks and zucchini, a procession

radicis

chiles

and last season’s green beans stay perfectly fresh online.

hoboclowns & coelacanths

photos taken last week at the Sanpete county fair in Manti, UT.

the prize rabbits, frillback pigeons and clydesdale roosters were caged and stacked in the cinderblock house. this was then surrounded by even more colorful facades, each one manned by someone in a purple polo shirt. here are a couple examples.

After at least 20 years, they’ve kept this obstacle course in great shape. who knows what layers of unlicensed hollywood airbrush lie between the days of Indiana Jones and those of Harry Potter. LA Raiders? Goonies? LA Gear Shoes? Jurassic Park?
most of the light bulbs are even still intact!

alright alright, can someone please tell me just what is going on here?!

I’m asking for your help with this one. like Joseph or Daniel of Jewry. and any interpretation will be considered; there’s nothing too prosaic or extreme for a mural painted on a carnival trailer. this is your chance to truly shine so do take a crack at it. it may be years before we see something like this again, these guys appear very transient.

discourse deviations & schizophrenia

INTERVIEWER: Tell me about school.

PATIENT: School? Well there are schools of play and schools of fish, mostly you see fish school, people edumacating [sic] themselves, you see, sea is one thing and education is another. Fish is school in their community, that’s why the community of man stands in the way of the community of the sea…
(Ralph Hoffman 1986, 507)



“I know the human and the fish can coexist peacefully”
-George W. Bush 2000 (Sept. 29, Saginaw Michigan)

eruption

I hope never to have to use my underpants as a flag, because after that I could never let my underpants touch the ground.

They say the mountain holds many secrets, but the biggest is this: “I am a fake mountain.”

I hope I never do anything to bring shame on myself, my family, or my other family.

deep thoughts, Jack Handey
(crayon volcano, that's mine)

substitute

fake fish for fancy fish
watch out!
(no big deal really)

the foxes have holes

and finally after all these wonders
a note folded between stones
and left specifically, reveals only as much
as the tall late afternoon clouds
where Poseidon
stately and foreshortened from below
rides a camel.

then three brothers of ten miles consider thirty more
consider fifty mile mountain and a bag of screws
consider the taste of jackrabbit’s blood and thin urine
and roll up for the night like the rest.

bigfoot taxonomy 1010

this is where all of the field research gets broken down into quantifiable data and tabulated into an easily referenced chart. something to send off in the packet to the new interns so they know what the hell they’re looking for. I mean these kids get a head full of romantic ideas and before you know it they’re running off into the woods with next to no preparation. and you can’t help but feel personally responsible when one of 'em gets hisself into a mess. it’s getting to the point that I don’t even like to pick up the paper anymore… p.162
pretty much everything gets covered here. physical and metaphysical characteristics and behavior, speed, whistling.

still, there are things that just can’t be reduced to tables, dashes and plus marks. for some of us, charts are too abstract and there’s something to be said for being able to put a face, however homely, with your bigfoot experience.
p.272
you say Zinjanthropus. I say Nutcracker Man.

the venus of ernest sound &c.

just so we don’t get a partisan view, J. Robert Alley includes some other perspectives. so there are also drawings here that are not done by the author. like this lady sasquatch reported by a taxedermist on page 74.

as well as this drawing that James Endershaw did of a “large male sasquatch reported seen sleeping in a cave” in 1982.
p. 49
it’s definitely rustic, with pine trees and river stones shown to indicate relative size. a little surreal, kind of like a worn treasure map that’s actually one of those pictures that you turn upside down and it turns out to really be something else: a sloth hiding in its slothnest.

3 final encounters

your firearms are useless against them p.233
2 hunters (foreshortened from above) approach the scene of a pack of tribbles assembling round a black bear. bear apparently having fallen from the heavens, making a modest crater. the message parcel, with upturned hind foot, travels all the way from Ursa Minor bearing no more than a lame pun.


signifying bigfoot
p. 53
bigfoot advancing through the variegated foliage & and presenting an enigmatic token with the left hand. a gesture which his cheerless poker face doesn’t offer any key to understanding. (more rubber stamps too)

p.31
bigfoot retreating back into the scribbley umbrage, not without displaying proof of his true identity. now this would have made a terrific classic bigfoot photo.

bigfoot analogy test

ok, I get it.
typically, people are to bigfoot as black bears are to grizzlies.

p. 168
and we are poor, helpless, hairless creatures indeed. and without claws. it’s a wonder we can even feed ourselves and tie our own shoes.

bigfoot on the beach

little bigfoot p. 83
barrel-chested and caught midstep, emerging from the tangled brush. I think some of it is even made up of rubber stamps. evidently the witness somehow associated this experience with earlier memories of scrapbooking. yeah, we're now to the point where some people are actually starting to process their memories that way in advance. can you believe?
so when you’re doing a drawing from a witness’s account, sometimes you have to coddle them. it’s been a distressing experience for her.
that and she wears a faint halo.

if you go out in the woods today
you’re sure of a big surprise
if you go out in the woods today
you’d better go in disguise

if you go out in the woods today
you’d better not go alone
it’s lovely out in the woods today
but safer to stay at home

p. 86
shameful

with any good pair of binoculars must come a measure of discretion. this is definitely not meant for your viewfinder.

boatside antics

there aren’t any studies out there comparing dolphin and bigfoot intelligence. but one thing’s for sure; dolphins can get away with this kind of behavior and bigfoot cannot. it just comes off as needy and kind of pathetic.
this guy’s had enough and he’s about to karate kick him.
p.50

have you ever sat in a bright diner on a dark night. you know about the fishbowl effect. sometimes it feels as if the darkness is reaching in at you. that’s what happened to the skipper one night in his galley.
p.55
bigfoot chooses between 3 tables and their contents.
through window #1- a pair of binoculars
through window #2- skipper Harold A. and his personal effects (pen & paper, cappuccino?)
through window #3- dripping wet gloves, galoshes and rain slicker.

this bigfoot has no use for our material superfluities but chooses human contact, affection.

illustration rendered in grainy detail, like it was taken with high-speed film.

I like the way she shaked it right then

this should totally be a Hardy Boys book cover.
p.219
we could all see it coming. now bigfoot returns to that white sedan; championing women’s equality, a Rosa Parks among Alaskans. she teaches the guys a lesson they’ll likely forget. but those vigorous shake lines will stay with them forever.

guess she didn’t like their antagonistic NRA bumper sticker either.

bigfoot regulates

"the many recurring themes such as transformation, capturing the drowned, and stealing and/or cannibalizing children may be viewed as recurring folk motifs with regulatory functions in culture."
p. 160
p. 108
a neo-goldilocks tale to keep the neo-nazis in check.

moonwalking bigfoot

p.77

what more is there to say here?
he seems to be really feeling it.











a uniquely American reworking of the Abraham & Isaac story. except in this instance bigfoot intervenes with a large bouncing boulder instead of an angel. can you make him out there in the thicket? I can’t. bigfoot doesn’t reveal his corporeal self but does make his will known: “noli me tangiere, for bigfoot’s I am.”
p. 221
and again there’s the hunter on the right trying earnestly to win favor in his sight, dancing.

jaywalking bigfoot

ok, so we still haven’t caught one in the very act yet. but you know they’re doing it all the time when we’re not watching! look at this one.
p.20

he’s just about mustered up the courage when a cyclist approaches. how awkward for both of them: bigfoot pretends to have dropped or lost something in the grass, a contact lens maybe. and the cyclist is in no position to call his bluff. just keep pedaling. boy, you got that right.


this next one’s a bit more dramatic. can you imagine?
p. 227

up until this very moment the big kid in the middle has dominated the conversation (and the little girl’s attention) the whole way. he was really on a roll. suddenly his authority begins to fade as he doesn’t seem so big nor his stories so great. this kind of formative experience often begins the arch nemesis relationship or other such complex. (now I hate you bigfoot, that’s what he’s feeling.) this is a constant difficulty for bigfoot. what we see as showboating is just bigfoot being himself. you know, keeping it real. this is simply what he does all the time when we’re not looking.
really, it’s not technically jaywalking on a dirt road like this, but he clearly cut those youngsters off. he’s just lucky nobody was hurt.

further early frontier narrative & legend

p.44

you may be sure that you have reached the edge of the earth when you stumble upon Sasquatch cleansing his hands just upstream from the last waterfall, well done.

although you have now already passed by the fountain of youth and all seven cities of gold, this is a far greater quarry.

peace to you

cain & bigfoot

“The damnedest thing happened. We were just about to break out of the timber, you know, to get to the meadows, and right above us twenty-five to thirty goats come stampeding down on us…He said to me, ‘did you see that thing that was running those goats up there?’ I said, ‘No,’ and he said to me, ‘You should have seen it! It was about ten feet tall and all covered with black hair…”
(eyewitness account, p.90)




we read that Cain was a “tiller of the ground.” so how is it that now we find him in the company of goats?

a lot can change in 6,000 years.




“tell me about it,” Cain says. “and damn the rainbow! I’m about ready for another flood.”

american bigfoot

I’ve been doing a little research on bigfoot lately. you know; went out on my porch with the binoculars for a while, talked to some close friends and family about it, subscribed to all the scholarly journals on the subject. yeah, you could say that by now I’ve read most of the guys.

this one’s pretty good and has some great pen/ink illustrations by the author himself.
Raincoast Sasquatch by J. Robert Alley
2003, Hancock House Publishers. Blaine, Washington
there are a lot of lessons that we can take from here. some teach us about bigfoot and some teach us more about ourselves. hopefully you can discover some new things for yourself from the drawings.

like for example I learn that bigfoot:
* has pin-straight hair.
* has large feet. I think you need to be at least a size 18 to really be a bigfoot.
* tends to manifest himself to those of low estate, like people with fetal alcohol syndrome.
* sometimes gets cross, just like you and me, and can sometimes express this anger inappropriately with snowballs and tree trunks.
I mean let’s face it. life is not as simple for bigfoots as it was, say 400 years ago. modernity has brought bassboats, travel chess, bug zappers, Maverick country stores and white sedans deeper and deeper into what was once bigfoot country. along with all this comes the complexity and the difficult choices that accompany such developments. it’s really enough to run a fellow ragged.
p.68

here we find him at the crossroads, if you will (and I know you will). alienated between pines and asphalt, obscurity and illumination. 2 pair of perpendicularly overlaid binaries. like an origami fortune teller; you might print this off and make one.

an artificial Eden for our amusement

a month or so ago, my wife, brother and I were driving up to the Sawtooths in central Idaho. on the way we passed through Eden, where we found the most paradisiacal truck stop I’ve ever seen. like any mall or pentagon food court, they had a Blimpie sandwich place, Taco Bell and TCBY frozen yogurt. here’s the thing though: Eden had been recreated in the dining area! no, not Eden, Idaho in miniature. I mean the real Eden, the first one we all read and hear so much about. yes, the tables and chairs were placed in the midst of a small pleasant landscape of cement rocks and a fake banyan tree with fake bracket fungus. hanging from the tree, notice the giant green python. there were also some real plants and there was real water running over those cement rocks. what a place. they even took my coupon, with some difficulty.


earlier this year, in the spring, I was reading in Walden where he talks about the pond thawing and all the geese coming in.
Thoreau says, “In the morning I watched the geese from the door through the mist, sailing in the middle of the pond, fifty rods off, so large and tumultuous that Walden appeared like an artificial pond for their amusement.”
this is something I’d never noticed before. and the passage is the earliest example I’ve ever seen. you know, when we’re like “wow, those lichens are so brilliant they seem fake!” or “see that tanager up there? it doesn’t even look real.”

growing up I never saw a tropical sunset except on capri sun pouches or on the cover of my trapper-keeper. so when I finally did see an actual tropical sunset for the first time, I’ll admit that it brought back those airbrush on mylar images from my childhood. my mom tells me that when I was little, I called sycamores “storybook trees,” probably because somewhere in some children’s book, they lent themselves well to watercolor for the illustrator. or, less likely, I could have imagined them altogether from the narrative before actually seeing one. in which case this would have to be the earliest example.

growing up… (I know I keep going back there but with this all being so experiential, I see no way to avoid it. you have any better ideas?) anyway, growing up, we had a jigsaw puzzle of Mount Rushmore. once when we were working at it, my younger brother asked me if the monument was natural or man-made. he was young and might have been thinking about a recent family trip to the old man of the mountain in New Hampshire.
what a wonderful question, and so revealing about the anthropocentric spell through which we tend to see our world. I don’t remember exactly how I responded but, as an older brother, I’m pretty sure I took advantage of the situation and made fun of him. I still haven’t made it out to Mount Rushmore or the Dakotas. but if I ever do, I'm not sure I’ll be able to leave the North by Northwest movie set out of it, fake lodgepoles and all.

and then growing up…(just kidding). but I bet you can think of your own experience. seeing faux wood graining where there is real oak. glimpsing model train sets from the airplane window. visualizing a golf course in a mountain valley. or imagining Versailles at the edge of, eh. well, Versailles is just too far out there. I think I’m going to be sick. man, that Louis XIV was sure an s.o.b. wasn’t he? you know, the first time Europeans got a hold of a platypus pelt, they thought it was a hoax too.

maybe Plato was right to post “no mimesis: seriously, cut it out!” signs all around his Republic, casting out Walt Disney, Thomas Kinkade and other taxidermists. I won’t venture to say whether or not all this is healthy. that's why there’s a comments section. but, even after all the mass produced imagery and retail that streams through us, we are still astonished to see real glaciers and iguanas.

and when we did get to the Sawtooths, they were incredible.

raising the stakes of your shell game

ok, just one more do you have pvc periscopes sticking out of your lawn? maybe you’d like to conceal a tiny missile silo or enrichment facility. you probably hadn’t thought of that but now is a good time and you should really get going on it. these also fit great for covering giant tortoises, stubborn belly fat and ugly smaller rocks. you see, the trouble with real rocks is they’re so solid.

$45-$300 from skymall
(you could even hide out and watch tv under the extra large one!)

punctual spacesuit

the alien sport jacket gracefully disembarks from its airy craft.











“why, you’re just in time,” said the man, buttoning his shirt, “we’re expected at the lounge in 20 minutes.”

$200 from skymall

deviant headphones

observing this scene, I get an ominous feeling. but I can’t quite put my finger on what is so unwholesome. could be a combination of things; a whack-a-mole game in 2 static dimensions.

how innocuous, a well groomed (immaculate actually) gentleman, upright in his pajamas, watching baseball on tv. yet this is all somehow very deviant with his sleeping wife laying beside him. and he, so smug in his headphones. regardless of whether they have an understanding, or he, a condition, a mole is definitely out of place.

like when one late evening, in the darkness I heard a bee droning through the night air. so baleful and lost.

$40 from skymall

rest for the bleary

skyrest travel pillow integrates waterwing buoyancy and doorstop wedge mechanics, then floats the product out on the market in turquoise upholstery.

a simple machine softened: it’s an inclined plane that lets you rest on the same principle that keeps your airplane up there. actually they looked into this and found out that all of our textbooks and scout manuals are wrong.

but it seems to work well enough here.
1- just fish the thing out of your carryon.
2- blow it full of rum breath until fully inflated.
3- pass out.

he’s all tuckered out from good times at warmer latitudes. a lot of leaning and sweating going on here, kinda yucky really. isn’t he getting a little old for this sort of thing? so much for dignity. still, Whitman teaches us that even the bathetic yankee hedonist is beautiful when asleep. and in a way, so peaceful at 40,000 feet.

$30 from skymall

dignity in the fumes

you don’t normally see people wearing suits with their gas masks. is that a fair thing for me to say? he hasn’t even loosened his collar. hang on to your dignity amid all the turmoil with this EVAC-U8 smoke hood.



nightmarish


made in Canada by DuPont
$80 from skymall

getting organized

when I was a teenager in suburbia I would go over to my friends’ houses and notice these intercom things built into the wall. you may have noticed them or even grown up with one in your own home. they are kind of like the intercom box at the gated community, cheap country club or fancy apartment building entrance. except these ones also go in your living room, kitchen, bedrooms, heck wherever, put one in your potato cellar if you want. the other difference is these play radio and I’ve seen ones with cassette decks too. I don’t think they survived into the era of mp3 or even compact disc; that is one venn diagram we may never see, but who knows? if my friend was up in his bedroom wasting time, his mom could tell him through the kitchen intercom to come down and vacuum. then mom can turn on KSL and listen to traffic and weather on the 9’s.
the same principal also gets applied to vacuum cleaner hose technology in some rich houses. where just about every room has a suction intake and all you need is the long flexi-ribbed hose to plug in. now your floor is nail-clipping-free, a lot fewer dust mites. it all empties into a big midden in the garage. it’s not enough to have electricity, plumbing & air ducts running through the house. we want them completely biological; with a mouth that speaks inside and out. conscious motion sensors aren’t quite eyes, but then again starfish don’t have it so bad. home security system pain receptors get wired into a decentralized thalamus like ADT or Peak alarm and so on. not quite anthropomorphic but we’re definitely getting there.

except in the case of this shampoo dispenser. not only does she have a face but we can see enough of it to tell that she also seems to have a gender. although I think the mouth could use a little work, still seems kinda robotic, don’t you agree? and is that soap for a tongue or is she being punished for coarse language? hard to tell. it’s also possible that I’m misconstruing the whole thing and this shampoo dispenser is neither gendered nor intelligent. but rather a simple integration of video intercom and shampoo dispenser technology. see who’s been using too much of your fancy conditioner, that kind of thing.
either way, it’s another set of hoses to run through your house behind the drywall so all the liquid soaps in all the bathrooms can be fully integrated. a veritable xylem and phloem of shower gels and stuff.

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