Your leaking thatched hut during the restoration of a pre-Enlightenment state.

 

Hello, my name is Judas Gutenberg and this is my blaag (pronounced as you would the vomit noise "hyroop-bleuach").



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   spare-changed by an SUV-driving hippie
Tuesday, January 29 2008
This afternoon I drove into town Kingston to get a tuberculosis test, one of the prerequisites for being able to go into and out of the local state prisons. The facility I went to is called Emergency One Urgent Care and Diagnostic Center, a small streamlined hospital (and probably a symptom of all that is wrong with America's health care system). Still, as bad symptoms go, Emergency One is a relatively pleasant place to go for minor medical procedures such as TB tests. I was in and out in less than a half hour. The nurse who stuck me with a needle (he was a guy with hair nearly as long as my own) told me that mine was the toughest skin he'd ever encountered.
Next stop was to pick up three pounds of Zanzibar coffee at Catskill Mountain Coffee out on Route 28 half way to Woodstock. As usual, I had the dogs with me and I took them for a short walk at adjacent Onteora Lake. It was a weird day in the lake's parking lot. As I was about to head off down the trail, a woman ran up to offer me a Barack Obama bumpersticker (which I happily accepted; Obama's uselessness hasn't been pissing me off as much lately).
The lake was completely frozen over and I could walk out to its center without fear of an icy bath (though I nevertheless feared an icy bath as I did so). There were a few tire marks on the ice indicating people had come to ice fish, though I saw no fishing holes.
Later, as I returned to the Onteora Lake parking lot (the one on 28, not the one near the lake), Sally and Eleanor briefly socialized with a brown intact male Pit Bull who was proud of having discovered a deer spinal column in a ditch. The Pit Bull's owner was a rough-looking hippie dude hanging out in an SUV. The hippie dude said hello to me in an unexpectedly friendly way, as if he knew me. But then, a minute later, I learned the reason behind his friendliness. He wanted something from me. This want took the form of an inquiry as to whether or not I had any spare change. This had to be the first time I have ever been spare-changed by someone with a later-model vehicle than my own. But I gave him a dollar anyway.


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