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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   possible Don Olin Mueller sighting
Wednesday, September 11 2019
The Subaru is an old car and there are known issues, particularly with the ill-fitting exhaust system, which tends to rattle at low RPMs. But on the drive to work this morning with Ramona, the backend had an unfamiliar squirrely quality. So later at lunchtime, I stopped at the Stewarts on my way to the Red Hook Hannaford to take advantage of their free air. I discovered that the rear passenger-side tire had only eight pounds per square inch of air in it. Strangely, the tire didn't look as flat as such low pressure would lead me to expect.
I'd forgotten to re-up my office supply of dog food, and initially I thought I had nothing to give Ramona for breakfast. So I scrounged together some human food that the office keeps on hand for its human employees. This consisted mostly of peanuts and a small bag of traditional DoritosTM. (Gretchen often jokes when feeding our dogs random non-vegan dog foods that it's like "giving them DoritosTM." But this morning I actually gave Ramona real DoritosTM. She thought they were great.) Soon, though, I remembered that I'd bought a big bag of peanut butter dog bones from the Agway, and I gave her a few too many of those.

This afternoon after work, I put in about an hour working on my stone wall project. This included adding a crude flying buttress to the outside of a gentle bend in the wall (which is following the side of a shortcut trail connecting the Stick Trail to the Gullies Trail). The wall is now about forty feet long.
This evening, I drove with Ramona to Woodstock and met Gretchen, Neville, and our friends Juliana and Lee at the bookstore (where Gretchen and Neville had worked their usual Wednesday shift). We all went to the Garden Café where, unusually given the muggy weather, we ate indoors. I ordered the cauliflower tacos, though I gave one of them (there were three) to Gretchen in exchange for some grilled tofu and mashed potatoes with gravy.
The most interesting thing that came up in our dinner conversation concerned Juliana and Lee's recent trip to the Appalachian South, where they'd been to both Ark Encounters (the "reconstruction" of Noah's Ark by creationists in Kentucky) and my hometown of Staunton, Virginia (a city whose name happens to be a pronunciation Shibboleth). Gretchen jokingly asked if Juliana and Lee had come across my brother Don, who, at this point, is Staunton's most well-established weirdo. Don is unwashed, wears filthy clothes, talks to himself, has unkempt head and facial hair, but can be reliably counted upon to purchase things such as books about dinosaurs, books about dictators, Coca-ColaTM, cheeseburgers, and other things of interest to ten-year old boys (though, of course, Don is now 54 years old). Juliana and Lee said they had indeed run across someone matching our description. The person in question had taken an initial interest in their dog Lulu and then become very friendly and engaged, following them around and talking to them, not really letting them get away. This definitely sounded like something my brother might do to someone extending kindness. To confirm the identity of the person in question, I found pictures of Don from his fake Facebook page and showed them to Juliana and Lee. Unfortunately, the pictures ranged from 10 to 20 years old, so they couldn't make a positive identity. But when I showed them a video clip from 2008 of Don talking about how best to survive a bear attack, they were pretty sure that the person they were seeing was the one they'd met in Staunton. I asked if Don had asked them, "Do you want to hear a joke?" which is one of Don's go-to icebreakers. It had, Juliana and Lee agreed, sounded familiar.
Another interesting subject was ayahuasca, the South American psychedelic drug that is suddenly fashionable and approaching mainstream (at least among coastal cultural elites). Supposedly it's even semi-legal to take it in the United States due to the irrational license now given to "religion" in the United States. If it's an irrational belief, nothing is more protected in this country except guns. Of course, most of this license is intended for Christianity in its more conservative, right-wing-supporting forms. But legally it's hard to give that license while cracking down on New Agers hoping to find God with the help of traditional herbs. Lee says some weekend recently he ventured to some place in Connecticut and took ayahuasca four times under controlled, guided conditions. He said there was lots of puking followed by, for him, a feeling of a vast alien intelligence underlying things. It was, he said, a very individual experience (even though he was tripping with a bunch of strangers in a room). My only experiences with ayahuasca have been second and third hand. From what I've heard, I don't know that it always does the person taking it any good; in one particular case I know of, the person who took it immediately changed his name and then let the successful animal advocacy organization he'd founded go to complete shit.

Before going to bed tonight, I drank a little vodka and took a xanax. The combination knocked me out shortly after I climbed into bed.


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