Wintah Maine 1959

Walking on a back road
From school
No sign of the sun
Leaden clouds overhead
Fields frozen by deep snow.
A northerly wind from Montreal
A long slog home___
Grey slush underfoot
The wet seeping
Through boots
Cold wet feets
Another mile to Grandmother’s house
Where waits
A warm pot belly stove
Dreaming
Pull off boots
Peel off soxes
Stick frozen toes
Under the heat

Aaah

A cup of tea With milk and sugar

Aaah

No more the cold
Grandmother’s house
Only another half-mile
To go
Till
Grandmother’s house

Spring
Another four months away.
Till then
Counting the days.
To April
Flowers
And no snow.

Aaaah

I spent my early childhood on Falmouth Foresides, Maine, sledding winters on Blackstrap Hill. It was over 400 feet high. There were really winters then, still are in Fort Kent. There are two season in Maine. The season of good sledding and the season of bad sledding. - Doctor Frank A Smith, who rode a sled on his visits around Gorham, Maine, when wintah was truly wintah.

Mars Versus Mount Washington

The atmosphere on Mars is a hundred times thinner than that of Earth.

NASA's Mars Curiosity Rover has measured summer temperatures as high as 70 Fahrenheit or 20 Centigrade at the Red Planet's equator, but as soon as the sun sets, the temperature can plummet to -100 F and -175F is not usual in the winter months at the fourth planet's pole.

BAck in 2017 the daytime high at Mars' Gale Crater as recorded by NASA's curiosity Rover, was 17.6 degrees F or about the reading on the thermometer outside the window in Fort Lee, NJ .

Mount Washington hit -100 with the wind chill and Old Agiocochook came close to beating the lowest natural temperature of −128.6 °F at the Soviet Vostok Station in Antarctica on July 21, 1983.

There is no way to calculate the wind chill on Mars.

Just life-threatening cold.

Same as on Agiocochook, but people live there.

Weather men, because Mount Washington breeds weather.

A lot of it.

One day we will be on Mars.

Dogs too.

Like there are dogs on Mount Washington.

Culiacan, Mexico 1975

In the winter of 1975 I rode a train south from Mexcali. The journey was slow on the sun-warped rails. Our stops included towns without names as well as bigger cities.

Hermosillo-Guaymas-Los Mochis.

I got off in Culiacan at dawn and hitchhiked to Matzatlan. Route 15 ran through the Sonoran Desert. The temperature rose with each hour. Winter was very hot in Mexico.

Matzatlan lay on the Pacific. After a few days of hanging on the beach, I took a bus a short distance to Teacupan, a small village on mangrove estuary. I traversed the town and bought three tacos and six beers. I found an abandoned hotel on the beach. The sheltered ruins echoed the waves crashing on the sand. I pulled out my transistor radio and listened to Mexican rock, watching the stars cross the evening sky to a destination before the dawn. After the fourth beer my eyes closed for the night and the universe tugged my soul not to the cosmos, but oblivion. It does give a good sleep.

The next day was Sunday. Families came for a break from the heat. The women cooked food, the men drank beer, the children played in the waves. They paid no mind to a lone gringo.

I went for a swim. The water was rough. I was a good swimmer. A young child was caught in a riptide. His mother screamed from shore. I was chest deep and snatched the boy from Neptune‘s grasp.

Ashore the locals toasted my heroics.

“It was nada.” Only stepped a few feet.

Not to them. I had saved a life. They invited me to eat and drink with them. Later I played soccer and fucked up my knee. They left at sunset. I drank my last beer and watched the sun drop into the Pacific.

Never lonely just alone.

Foto by Jocko Weyland

Lost Baggage Singapore 1990

From 2020

The Bugis people were great voyagers from Sulawesi. They sailed small crafts from Padang Padang to many ports of the Far East ranging from Burma to Northern Australia. Many practiced piracy and as Thomas Forrest wrote in A Voyage from Calcutta to the Mergui Archipelago, "The Buginese are a high-spirited people: they will not bear ill-usage...They are fond of adventures, emigration, and capable of undertaking the most dangerous enterprises."

Most westerners are unfamiliar with the Bugis and especially their complex five gender society.

Men and women are joined by 'bissu' which combined all five genders, 'calabai' a false woman, and 'calalai' a masculine female.

Thriving Bugis communities existed throughout the Orient, although few as famous as Singapore's Bugis Street on which calabai transgenderettes gathered in the 1950s to sexually entertain randy sailors and curious travelers. According to legend the easy way to discern which working girls were female and which were trannies was that the calabai were beautiful and the female hookers were ugly.

Singapore banned wanton behavior in the 1980s to transformed the tawdry area into another worthless shopping mall.

In 1990 I flew from Sumatra to Singapore. Back to the modern world away from orangutans, volcanos, jungles, and cannibals. My bag wasn't in the carousel. I informed the airline of my loss. They gave me money for a hotel and food and said to come back tomorrow. I had the shirt on my back. I exited from the terminal to discover a elderly Chinese man sitting on my bag. He didn't understand a word I said, but surrendered my bag. Lucky and I took a taxi to stay at a cheap Chinese hotel on Bugis Street.

The trannies were few.

The sidewalks were clean.

The Long Bar at Raffles was undergoing renovations.

I left the next day for Penang.

Each time I returned to Singapore, I stayed for enough the time to catch the train.

Singapore has nothing to offer anyone looking for a walk on the wild side. Not anymore.

It's the most boring big city in the Orient, but not in the 60s.

It swung with the best of them.

Bugis Street selama-lamanya.

Forever.

Hashish Farts 2008

I smoke pot.

I started smoking pot at the age of 18. It was the summer of 1970. I stopped while during the government poisoned the marijauna crops of Latin America, then resumed with the advent of home-grown sinsemilla, although the potency of that reefer called 'killer' rendered it less user-friendly than the lightweight grass of 1970 and I refrained from inhaling the herb in the modern age. Either I went comatose from a few puffs or consumed the entire refrigerator even if it meant eating mustard and carrot sandwiches.

In Thailand I smoke a little at my brother-in-law's farm. He was cultivating a patch in the banana trees for personal consumption and gas money. It was a little milder than the chronic joints of America. A little more laughy but not cheap. $5 for about a fifth of a ounce.. I could make millions exporting it to Koh Samui. Go to jail for eight years too, so I remain destitute, since hard crime is a young man's game.

The White House, America's ultimate expert on marijuana, has released a report warning the nation that the THC percentage has increased to almost 10% in 2007, posing new health risks to smokers.

"Marijuana is not harmless." The White House director of Drug Control contends that the twicing of marijuana's intoxication ability further heightened 60s survivors' misconception of the herb's danger, although proponents of marijuana counter that the strength has transformed smokers from three puffs to one puffs nor is there any proof to the allegation from 1600 Penn Ave.

The White House wasn't available to comment on that view, but was quick to point the finger at Canada for potentially addicting millions of Americans to marijuana.

"They will no loinger able to just say no. Think of the children."

Better pot than Ritalin, except for mass murdering psychopaths.

Keep them on Thorazine.

I tested reefer on the crazy dog I'm taking care of in Palm Beach.

Put Pom Pom in heaven.

In 2008 on Koh Samui a middle-aged English tourist arrived at the local emergency ward with complaints of severe stomach and intestinal cramps. The ER staff fought for several hours to extract a long plastic bag from the Englishman's intestines. They were surprised to discover the bag's contents werea nearly a kilo of hashish worth approx. one million baht. The Thai police arrested him on charges of smuggling the Class 5 drug onto the island, which sold for 1,500-2,000 baht a gramme. In custody the UK resident explained he had been in pain for over five days and panicked upon his farts starting to smell like the drug, indicating that several of the sealed packets might have burst in his stomach. None of his customers wanted to take a bong hit from his butt and now he will be subject to the full measure of the law for his folly.

Provincial governor Vinai Buapradit suspected Mr Jones swallowed the drugs when he was overseas so he could pass through drug detectors and sniffer dogs at airports and at the pier on Samui where boats leave for Koh Phangan.

Pinyo Thongchai, the deputy chief of the Department of Special Investigation, said trans-national criminal groups were rampant on Koh Samui.

As well as the Bandidos motorcycle gang, which recently faced a crackdown by authorities, there were also international mafia gangs doing illegal businesses in drugs, land and property deals and extorting money from foreign businessmen.

In June last year police on Koh Samui arrested Frenchman Pittet Pasca Maorica, 53, who was also admitted to Samui International Hospital after suffering from stomach pain.

Doctors found one kilogramme of heroin in his stomach. 

He was lucky his bag had not broken.

The Police might have caught these two, but the real drug dealers are the banks laundering oney for the ja bah and heroin trade, controlled by people whose name can not be said in public.

Not if you want to live.

ps No one's farts smell better than your own.

pps What kind of French name is Pittet Pasca Maorica?

The Gulf of Naha

The Maga president had been out of the White House fighting criminal lawsuits and the prospect of prison. His 2024 presidential victory assured that the Orange Messiah had redeemed himself in the faith of Religious Right. It was not a landslide. Only 58% of the eligible voters participated in the electoral process. Trump received 28% on the actual vote. His Democratic rival lost by 1,500,000 votes. Roughly the combined population of of North and South Dakota. North Dakota is one of the two states to which I have not been. Kentucky is the other. Both came out for Trump in a big way.

Judging from his first month in office Trump had spent the last four years making lists and his slurry of executive orders has revealed the depth and breadth of his spleen. No one or thing is safe and last week he forced the US Government and Google to erase the Gulf of Mexico from existence. That body of water had been so-named since the Conquest. Almost five hundred years. Poof. Gone. Wikipedia's search engine still responds in the old fashioned way, but it wasn't always called the Gulf of Mexico.

In the Aztec religion, the gulf was called Chalchiuhtlicueyecatl, or "House of Chalchiuhtlicue", the deity of the seas. The Maya call it Naha. The big water. Believing that the sea and sky merged beyond the horizon, they called the seas Ilhuicaatl, meaning "sky water. The Aztecs were landlocked, the Mayans on the sea. I go with The Gulf of Naha. I have tried to annunciate the Nahuatl version and Naha is much easier. Fuck Trump.

Mile High Club 2011

Ever since the Wright Brothers flew at Kitty Hawk man has been attempting an endless assortment of tricks and risks in flight. Most aviators and passengers are content to get from points A to B. Up and down without ragheads hijacking the plane for an unscheduled landing in a prominent building or getting arrested for drinking too much duty-free liquor.

Of course a safe flight doesn’t exclude a little fun such as joining the ‘Mile-High Club’ or MHC. This society is open to those passengers who have experienced sex on an airplane. I surveyed twenty male friends. Five professed to be members. Three of those were lying for sure. One of the remaining members said his girlfriend satisfied him manually under a blanket, which along with fellatio isn't consider sex according to the President Clinton Rules of Engagement.

The act of sex on a plane is considered contrary to British Law, but whipping is regarded as okay. Those Brits are strange birds. Singapore Air banned sex in the Airbus A380 for first-class passengers. Coitus in the beds of the deluxe cabins is off the menu. No surprise, since Singapore is the least sexy city in Asia. Laws and regulations are damned by those libertines seeking a thrill.

My friend Dean explained that his moment of glory came in university.

“I was young and agile, which are required skills for accomplishing this deed in a tiny bathroom. It was sort of like having sex in the back of a VW Bug, but those diaper changing tables are much stronger than they look. At the moment of truth I flushed the toilet which caused atmospheric havoc and gave my companion a thrill.”

Several years ago I myself joined the club as an honorary member, having abused myself during a trans-Pacific flight. I know it’s not the same thing, but it’s not like the airlines have a go-go bar in the cargo hold, which isn’t such a bad idea, unless you’re traveling on an Islamic airline. Strippers in chadors are as much as turn-on as a fat lapdancer.

Everything has its place.