A Birthday Tribute
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Posted:Apr 23, 2016 11:31 am
Last Updated:May 19, 2018 10:53 pm
51847 Views
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As flies to wanton boys, are we to the gods; they kill us for their sport.
The empty vessel makes the loudest sound.
The lunatic, the lover, and the poet, are of imagination all compact.
Have more than thou showest, Speak less than thou knowest.
Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player,
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.
Today is, most likely, the birthday of William Shakespeare. It's as good a day as any to celebrate his birth and his life.
"The valiant never taste of death but once."
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That Red Tail
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Posted:Apr 19, 2016 5:13 pm
Last Updated:May 15, 2016 9:45 am
59109 Views
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Yesterday we hiked our favorite circuit at Al Sabo Preserve. It was warm and sunny and the trees are just beginning to bud. The serviceberry has little vestigial blossoms that haven't quite opened, the flower petals still curled up into just tiny white berries. Woodland violets are blooming in patches and the myrtle is in full purple flower.
PD and Gracie have been taking an early hike in the morning. A tired Gracie is a docile Gracie. She isn't used to doing six or seven miles a day and she's quite obedient when she gets pushed like that.
The highlight of our hike came on the lower Lookout Trail next the swamp. I was dodging a pile of horseshit- a little like navigating the blogs can be lately- and A Red Tailed Hawk launched in front of us. I tried to get a quick shot of him on the fly, and did manage one but it wasn't a good picture. He surprised me by landing atop a broken tree some fifty feet to my left. I went down the bank, trying to keep him in the viewfinder and stopping to get some shots so that if he flew off I'd at least get something. But he surprised me again and posed very patiently and agreeably for as long as I wanted to take pictures. I got to within thirty or so feet of him, and he was up on that pole maybe twenty or twenty five feet. It wouldn't have helped to wade into the swamp- I lost height every step closer to him I took because of the steep bank. I must have taken at least fifty photos, maybe more. What a magnificent looking bird that Red Tailed hawk is!
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A Naughty Random Poetry Post
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Posted:Apr 18, 2016 12:20 pm
Last Updated:Jun 19, 2023 11:56 pm
54981 Views
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I never paid any attention to keywords in my posts until a couple of bloggers I follow posted about their own. That was interesting, so I took a look at my own. It was, if not hilarious, pretty damn funny. I like flarf poetry, and I enjoy cut-up and fold in compositions anyway. Cut-ups are just that- cut and pasted phrases to create a different meaning not of the original context. Fold ins accomplish the same thing by folding the pages of a book inward so that their edges meet and reveal a new sentence. A little bit can go a long way, but the images that are conjured and then juxtaposed can be pretty interesting, and sometimes jarring. I figured I’d try using my keywords to create a poem, kind of like tossing the lines in a hat and drawing them out at random. But it appears that even that’s too much work- they’re pretty funny just as they come up in a hierarchical search. So! Without further ado, a keyword ode to “Take two- they’re small”, from the first fifteen lines of a keyword search.
Love hike woods fuck head
Water black virtual fucking Michigan
Sunny watched dogs food third
Dark straight trip English group
Bound blogs parents America movies
Death pain blood members sweat
Wear brains shopping first time park
Temperature giving drunk books stories
Bottom word video bear email
Eighteen writers Italian beer bare
Owned events poetry animals control
Rope sleeping tight pussy damp
Hung bend beach website cock
Phone weekend party college leash
Catching sluts catholic engaged leather
I limited all the verses to fifteen lines, just because. You could go on forever, but just like that game where you add the word fart to a movie title, after a short time you’re gonna be playing by yourself, just as if you were actually farting. For some readers, fifteen lines is going to be going fourteen lines too far, kind of like tooting coke. I’ve always thought this technique reads better, and is more effective, as verse than as prose, which is the way William S. Burroughs wrote with it originally. It matters how you see it visually. Hearing it read aloud can be powerful too, if the reader lets herself relax and just takes it in. You can string together lines to try to construct a certain image in the whole, but it helps to expand the raw material if you’re going to try this. It’s a challenge to edit and come up with even a surreal total picture if your word or phrase resource is too small.
If you mix it up a little and pick lines that simply catch your eye, and even reverse the order on one or two, it’s just as much fun.
Bitch boots house responses behave
Greek mate biting Donald stroke
Appearance prick culture bite mental
Pregnant stiff furniture sweater Indian
Twisted scent stomach toes bush
Catching sluts Catholic engaged leather
Rubber suck training trips expert
Upgrade bone downtown faith
Lesson balls rubbed teachers tongue
Temperature giving drunk books stories
Damp pussy tight sleeping rope
Erection dirty queen cats bullet
Chains anal holidays weed outdoors
Therapist Toronto sore queer doctor
Fetish alley heels huge dick slit
It gets more interesting, and a lot funnier, if you rearrange the words in the lines. It’s really no longer completely random when you start exerting editorial control, but you’re still working with a limited vocabulary to construct imagery that’s not entirely of your making. You let the words choose themselves, in a way, but you can kind of nudge them a little to change what they express, to tweak the picture. I mined the keywords from my beautiful friend NaughtyInSO’s blog. For this I picked the lines that appealed to me and juggled the words in the lines until I liked the way they read. Then I shuffled the resulting lines around and rearranged the order.
It’s a mad, it’s a mad, it’s a mad, and it’s a mad world:
California strangers multiple meat romance
Email virtual water love food
Chocolate phone head shopping blogs
Dirty erotic events bite background
Messages dark black group cream
Artist stories parked vanilla breasts
America venus college teenage queen
Nasty members dogs forced pain
Control lovers service bottom books
Trick education backyard shower balls
Medical Italian mental singing skills
Kissing latin cats booty call doctor
Behave whining bone death guitar
Platonic sluts library bitch author
Visual throat condom rejection forum
So that’s it. Poetry for those who can’t.
Thank you, darlin’!
And thank you William S. Burroughs. You are still with me.
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Come one, cum all!
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Posted:Apr 11, 2016 3:43 pm
Last Updated:Mar 10, 2023 2:06 pm
58880 Views
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Lots of us have seen the movie “When Harry Met Sally”. It was written by Nora Ephron, and it’s really good Nora Ephron. The scene that’s tailor made to carve a permanent place in our memories is when Meg Ryan proved she could fake an orgasm in a crowded restaurant. It was scarily realistic and hilarious. I told my wife that I figured pretty much any woman could do this, probably had it memorized, in fact, and men wouldn’t know where to begin. She agreed. But could you describe an orgasm? Could you write or say in words how an orgasm feels? From arousal to climax to the after sex relaxation, could you articulate how it actually feels? Metaphor allows us to say what a thing is like, to compare it to another, not the same, but a similar thing.
I’m interested in how both men and women describe their orgasms. Not just “It feels good.” but how it really feels to you. I confess, I’ve had difficulty putting it into words. I’m sort of stuck at “It feels good” myself. It isn't an easy thing to do, I think. So let me hear it, if you will, males and females alike. You can answer here in this post, or in my private post, or in a message. But I want to hear you testify! What does it feel like when you come?
And then say "Amen, brother".
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Tits, ass and a gratuitous pussy pic
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Posted:Apr 9, 2016 10:21 pm
Last Updated:Aug 7, 2019 1:57 pm
64793 Views
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I've had a nagging feeling that my blog could use more traffic. I'm pretty sure any male blogger on the site might easily feel the same way. It's hard to compete with tits and ass. Most of the members are male, and most of those aren't looking to make friends with other guys. Not that there's anything wrong with that. Some of them are, and they're sure as hell welcome here. Not that there's anything wrong with that, either. The women who are here aren't- most of them- looking for dick pics. So, you gotta have a fucking gimmick. I could actually write something worth reading, but that's a lot of fucking work, and there's no guarantee that if I put in the time it's gonna be worth reading. Christ, life is hard! I was told when I was a that if I worked hard and did all the shit they told me I had to do, that I could get ahead. I'm not looking to be president or anything. Mainly, I just want some head. I don't believe the hype the site feeds me, but, goddamnit, my folks and my teachers all told me, forfucksake.
Anyway, this post is simply shameless pandering. There's no other way to put it. I'll be watching, and you can bet your asses I'm keeping a count.
Great tits!
Ass!
Gratuitous pussy pic!
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90
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The Secret Shit
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Posted:Apr 2, 2016 5:12 pm
Last Updated:Nov 30, 2017 5:58 pm
67468 Views
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Secrets Is The Topic For The Eighteenth Virtual Symposium
“Secrets” Is The Topic For The Eighteenth Virtual Symposium
When I was young I thought there was some secret knowledge that would make you wise. I come from a family of readers. My mother read us to sleep every night with Mark Twain when we were still small, and we were taught to read and to spell before we went to school. My father was quite smug about being smarter than a couple of and a mere woman, and I wanted to be smart too.
I read the books that other read- “Black Beauty” and “Beautiful Joe” and “The Hardy Boys”. I also read whatever was lying around, and when I got the flu at ten or eleven and stayed home from school I found a copy of James T. Farrell’s “A World I Never Made” and I read that too. I was a little young for that one but I liked reading about young Bill Lonigan skipping school to go to burlesque shows and picking the longest cigarette butts he could find off the street. The book was about the Irish in the Chicago ghetto at the turn of the century, and it was world like nothing I had ever seen and could never have imagined. I read “Mad” magazine and at twelve or thirteen I discovered P.G. Wodehouse, the brilliant English comic writer. That was the mother lode- Wodehouse wrote a lot, and none of it meant anything. It was all just for fun.
I kept reading as I grew. A book I never read was the Bible. No one had shown me that the King James “Ecclesiastes” is soaringly, gloriously lyrical, and wise, and that there is great and sonorous beauty in “The Song of Solomon”. We were taught instead that there was a moral lesson in every story, but those morals looked pretty fuzzy to me and it didn’t appear to me as if the elders who came to church every week had got the message either. Certainly the other students in my Catechism class were a pack of heathens- rude, loud and irreverent, they ran off three instructors before a big bald Norwegian was assigned the class to restore order. His name was Thor. He fit but I didn’t. We didn’t back sass our elders in my family, on pain of death. My grandmother would spank us before we went shopping, telling us that was just a taste of what we’d get if we didn’t behave.
I left high school and still kept reading. I was sure that if there were some final piece of knowledge that would render me wise, a key to the magic of knowing, I’d find it in books. At the same time it was becoming clear that you had to take time to live. If I kept my nose stuck in books I’d be missing a lot of fun, a lot of terror, and I’d be missing out on a lot of women too. The academic life wasn’t for me and I abandoned my hope of teaching and abandoned school too, and directed my own study. It was beginning to dawn on me that there wasn’t any sure path to to knowledge, but I kept after it. Getting high and chasing women demand a lot of attention but can be more immediately rewarding than philosophical studies, and I gave them plenty of attention. I feel my pursuit of this particular brand of learning was singularly profitable. I sampled a lot of drugs and I never fucked a woman I didn’t like. Can Will Rogers say that?
I still didn’t fit in anywhere. One part of me was blue collar stiff sweating for my bread and the other was devouring the written word voraciously. There was a strict division between the two. The working people I knew gave you odd looks if you let on that you were reading- they didn’t quite trust me any more, like I was a fucking egghead. And the students and teachers I knew didn’t much regard me at all. They were sure I was wasting my time and my life with some working class hero bullshit and that one day I’d regret my ill spent youth, and I wouldn’t have any money, either. I looked like a fuck up to both sides. Sometimes I looked like a fuck up to me. But I kept reading, and I kept living.
Somewhere in the middle of the Beat writers- Kerouac and Burroughs, Ginsberg and Corso, it began to sink in that the point to life is that there isn’t any fucking point. I don’t suppose I was having an existential crisis, but I knew my life lacked a theme and existentialism felt like a good theme. I couldn’t make sense out of anything anyway. Western philosophers are wordy and boring and very hung up on the completely abstract and impenetrable jargon of their trade, the shop talk of Friedrich Nietzsche and Immanuel Kant. If George Bernard Shaw could paraphrase these guys, why couldn’t they just do the paraphrasing themselves and then not need Shaw for an interpreter? Has anyone ever read and enjoyed “Thus Spake Zarathustra”? I set it aside and read “Man and Superman” instead.
Eastern philosophers are riddling, entertaining, inscrutable and a lot more fun. As if I were a little , they teach me in parables and metaphor. They tell me that words will not express knowing and that any meaning is within my self. Their lesson has often eluded me at first but I was able to accomplish it without learning Greek. Besides that, Zen monks kept concubines for their Yab Yum meditation sessions and that still looks like a good approach to the problem to me. I have found deep and profound meaning between a woman’s thighs on more than one occasion.
The best articulation of the result of my own quest was made by Jack Kerouac himself, in “Desolation Angels”. He was on a somewhat similar mission and in despair, up on Desolation Peak, he wrote “I don’t know, I don’t care, and it doesn’t matter anyway.”
It really doesn’t matter. If you enjoy wrestling with polysyllabic expressions of Latin and Greek derivation, and you can have fun dazzling and impressing your friends and family with your erudition: “Look Mom! I’m positing hypothetical constructs!” then by all means have at it. Just don’t tell Mom the secret- that you don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about even as much as Grandma does. Mom already knows anyhow. She’s smelled your shit before and she knows it stinks.
Participants List For The Eighteenth Virtual Symposium Secrets
Participants List For The Eighteenth Virtual Symposium: Secrets
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Draw a circle
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Posted:Mar 31, 2016 6:54 pm
Last Updated:Nov 30, 2017 6:07 pm
54445 Views
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Waawiyebii'an- Ojibwe: Draw it as a circle
There’s chaos in nature, and there’s chaos in life. We try to make it seem less chaotic. We look for order and we try to understand it. Why do things happen the way they do? As , we’re simply in the world, and find joy in it- it’s all miraculous and we don’t understand any of it, but conditioning directs us to try to figure it out as we grow. Language is crucial to this, but it’s a barrier too.
A ’s explanation for why life is what it is seems rooted in his own imagination, and many of us see creation myths in the same way, as lovely and imaginative but not rooted in reality. But don’t have our training or our language- you can’t expect them to use the language of molecular biology or biochemistry to describe what they see any more than you could expect it of neolithic people or of the Ojibwe. Neither have that specialized technical vocabulary. So we have beautiful and poetic creation myths that are our legacy from our forbears, if we’re wise enough to recall them and credit them. They’re a metaphor for life, not an engineering blueprint.
Science teaches us to learn by observation. We accrue empirical knowledge of how nature behaves, and we invent elaborate mechanical devices to help our eyes to see better and help us make more precise measurements. This gives us an intricate picture of how the systems of life interact and intertwine, and we can construct immutable rules for how life behaves in our world. Here is our engineering blueprint. It’s incomplete- to know all and understand all would make us God. But we understand some small systems very well nonetheless.
What both methods agree on is that there’s a cycle of life. Ours appears to be a closed system. There is no new thing under the sun. Everything is recycled. I’ll ignore the discussion of antimatter and alternate universes and warps and holes in the space/time continuum. That’s a different kind of post. The ancients knew that life was recycled not just intuitively but by their own empirical observation. Without controlled and extensively notated experiments, they saw it by patient and diligent reflection, by watching and learning. Theirs was the accumulated knowledge of hundreds of generations of oral history, their legacy and birthright from their mothers and fathers from time immemorial.
Western philosophy has looked outward for answers and has put its faith in science and empiricism. Eastern thought has looked inward and enlightenment is sought within ourselves. Any knowledge of life and our place in it is arrived at by meditation and a spiritual understanding, not to be expressed in words but in knowing. There is a yearning for understanding in western man that science doesn’t satisfy, and many have looked east for the answers. The chemistry and the physics, the mathematics of life are discoverable by study and by empirical analysis, but we don’t find meaning this way. For meaning we look to our ancestors again. We look to the ancients. But both approaches to the problem look to understand what makes us tick, why we are as we are.
I see this on our daily hikes. Seeing may be too narrow a word- I feel it. I know how many of these small systems work. The sun warms plants in spring, and that energy awakes a genetic code that tells them to wake up and grow. The trees sprout leaves that follow a special preordained, programmed in chromosomes, path from bud to blossom to leaf. Each leaf is a photovoltaic cell that draws water laden with nutrients up from the soil, and energy flows back down again to the roots and spurs growth there to supply more raw material to build a tree. A tree is a woven structure of cellulose tubes, blood vessels glued together that transmit the stuff of life to the organism, the living thing that is a tree. All trees are alike, and every one is different. But they all follow this engineering blueprint, and that’s simply miraculous to me.
Knowing how and why only adds to my feeling of awe at this marvel of design. It seems pure genius. But time and space are infinite- there was no hurry to design this system. Hurry is for the organisms themselves, for the tree and for me. The cycle and the system go on, reinventing and redefining, constantly evolving. My time, and the tree’s time, are limited. So in the forest a tree will shoot rapidly for the sun, greedily soaking up the sun in the canopy, and then slowly put on girth over the decades or even the centuries. A man is like that. He can’t wait to reach adulthood and from there it’s a constant struggle to put on the brakes and stave off decrepitude, decay and death.
A tree topples in the swamp and immediately is beset by fungi and bacteria, breaking it down into its minerals, feeding from its corpse. Turkey tail mushrooms and moss grow on the downed trunk. Insects invade and skunks and raccoons tear apart the rotting wood to get at the insects, and shit them out on the ground.
I see these things and not one is marvelous in itself, but it’s all a part of the cycle of life in the forest and the swamp. The system is a miracle. The cycle is marvelous. But this is just the way I perceive it. My own brain works like all the rest of them, sweating hard to find order in the chaos, striving to understand. It doesn’t mean anything- it just is. I understand the order and the working of some small systems, and I’m content that I have some understanding. Gracie does not care, and she’s content too.
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Photos....
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Posted:Mar 28, 2016 10:05 pm
Last Updated:Mar 31, 2016 6:58 pm
51817 Views
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Ten more photos from our week's hiking.
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Easter...the sixty fourth
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Posted:Mar 28, 2016 10:00 pm
Last Updated:Mar 30, 2016 7:25 pm
49218 Views
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In winter the cold settles in the low spots. The swamp and marsh get very cold and chlorophyll vanishes from the leaves on the trees. This is where you find the most brilliant color earliest in autumn, and where the chill descends and crusts the pools with ice. The leaves drop here first, and as the blaze of color creeps onto the uplands, autumn is over in the swamp almost as it begins up on the hills and slopes above. Spring comes to the swamp earliest too. A warm and sunny day will find tadpoles morphing into frogs and garter snakes out on the hunt after their long winter fast. The waterfowl come too. There are green shoots sprouting and we see geese and swans ducking their long necks under the water to pick the tender new shoots. Sandhill cranes are browsing too- they’ve been here for a couple of weeks now.
The mosses everywhere are flowering, slender green spindles poking up from a field of moss on roots and logs, with their little cobra like heads dancing toward the sun. Skunk cabbage is growing everywhere in and near the swamp. It has a round ball of flowers concealed in its red leaves. This stuff always make me think of “Little Shop of Horrors”. It generates heat when it grows and will melt the snow in a circle around it in March. We didn’t have much late snow this year- last year winter was tenacious and held on with a vengeance. We watched sandhill cranes browsing on the edge of the marsh on the twenty third of March in a fresh snowfall. March this year has been very springlike. Sunday was sixty seven degrees and sunny.
We’ve been sly and sneaking into Al Sabo Preserve from the west on weekends, from the east parking lot at Kalamazoo Valley Community College. The main entrance on Texas Drive gets crowded on weekends these days, and when the weather is warm it can be hard to find a parking place. There are a couple of other back ways to get in, but I’m not telling anyone local about them. We can walk south from the college and cross the marsh on a plank walk that takes us to the island in the swamp. Gracie loves this route because there’s so much water and muck. The more swimming that’s involved the better she likes it.
I found a pair of cranes using this trail Sunday. There’s a promontory that juts out into the creek channel just east of a retention pond and I could hear cranes nearby so I took a chance and walked out there. I got lucky and found the pair browsing just across the channel, maybe seventy feet away. I got a good hundred shots of them. Even at that distance they can be hard to see in the reeds, but I was patient. I could hear them talking and soon I could see a red head poking along in the cattails. The other wasn’t far behind. When they aren’t threatened they move very methodically and ponderously, so I had a lot of time to watch them. Every hike is worthwhile, but that was a special treat, to just stand and watch these big wild birds leisurely picking salad from the bog.
This was my sixty fourth Easter.
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There's More!
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Posted:Mar 18, 2016 11:50 am
Last Updated:Mar 24, 2016 9:23 pm
51502 Views
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Just more photos from this week's hiking.
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42
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March at Al Sabo
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Posted:Mar 18, 2016 11:34 am
Last Updated:Mar 22, 2016 9:10 am
51139 Views
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We’ve been hiking every day all winter. We spent more time at Asylum Lake this year. The prairie is larger there than the meadow at Al Sabo and as gloomy and grey as this winter was we were craving some sunshine and open space. We got the open space but the sun was fairly elusive this year. Last winter we saw ten feet of snow, and it stayed cold so the snow lasted all winter. This year our snowfall must have been more like six feet, which is actually right on average for southwest Michigan, but we had constant warmups that melted all of the snow in a week or two. There was never much accumulation.
Now spring is creeping in and little green shoots are starting to peek out. Everywhere in the forest the moss is blooming. Frogs are croaking in all the ponds and on the lower Lookout Trail along the swamp between the honking geese in the marsh and the croaking frogs there’s quite a racket going on, occasionally punctuated by the cuckoo cries of sandhill cranes.
The cranes blend in so well they’re hard to spot in the marsh. You have to look for a ball of grey-brown about the size of a goose, and then watch it for any sign of red, or maybe a very slow movement. Gracie’s very good at spotting them, if she’s interested, but they’re kind of old hat to her now and she isn’t very impressed by them anymore. I heard them before I saw them this year, which is usually how it goes. Finally I noticed a crane on a point in the marsh. It must have been Tuesday, and I tried to sneak down the hill and maneuver out onto a dry boggy islet on the edge of the marsh that jutted out for a closer look, but that promontory was so littered and clogged with brush that I made more noise than the Battle of Waterloo, and scared the crane away.
A couple of days later I found a pair browsing below the bank of the east marsh in heavy brush. I’ve seen them here often before so it’s a good place to watch for them. It’s still amazing to me how hard such big birds are to see. Except for that red patch on their heads they’re nearly perfectly camouflaged.
Gracie is a year older this spring and I can trust her off leash more and more. We usually wait until the return trip to unclip her lead and let her run- she’s tired by then and less likely to go batshit crazy, and she minds better. A year ago I couldn’t let her loose in the forest or she’d run off like a wild thing into the woods, and I had a hell of a time getting her attention to get her back. Now she follows the trail and doesn’t wander off too far. She’s also obedient about returning when called. She can tell by my voice and the look on my face when she’s fucked up and better check back in. All that squabbling we did last year over her hardheadedness is gone, and she doesn’t go rogue very often.
She has a buddy out there- Ollie- who thinks she’s the hottest thing on four legs. He’s a yellow lab and when he spots her on the trail he gets so excited he charges so fast he runs right past and then circles back to try to hump her. This confuses her, and she gets a “Dude- control your urges!” look on her face, but there’s no meanness in her. If she’d bite him once or twice he’d knock it off, but Gracie’s no fighter. My Malemute Rocky would have flayed him alive- at least I don’t have to worry about fights any more.
One photo I included here- the bright green moss girdling a big oak at its base- looked unreal. It has a retouched or edited look to it, but I didn’t change a thing. The contrast between the grey of late winter and the vivid green of early spring seemed the perfect way to illustrate what March in the forest here looks like.
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The First Stage
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Posted:Mar 7, 2016 10:48 am
Last Updated:Apr 22, 2023 3:10 pm
54775 Views
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Unknown
"The First Time" Is The Topic For The Seventeenth Virtual Symposium
The First Stage
The first time I saw the topic listed as an option for the Symposium the very first thing that popped into my head was the beautiful song by Roberta Flack, “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face”. That took me back a long way, back to the early seventies, and Albuquerque, New Mexico. I’ve told this story before and I’m going to tell it again. This is what old people do, re-tell the same stories and jokes over and over again. It’s comforting to us if not to you.
In the early seventies, in late winter, I left frigid Toronto for Phoenix, Arizona and the desert. One of my best friends- Ray- had moved there and was living in a semi-communal apartment with a colony of freaks from southwest Michigan and a scattering of hippies from all over the country. The apartment wasn’t anything artsy or quaint- it was one of those nondescript and bland complexes that spring up overnight and immediately begin to decay, dropping pieces off like autumn leaves to lie in the dust, fading nearly instantly in the hot sun. It didn’t have a lot to recommend it the day it was built and went downhill almost before it was finished. There were thirteen of us crammed into that antiseptic two bedroom box, eleven guys and two young women.
Ray and the brother of an acquaintance of ours named Bobby were working for an outfit called Special Events Coordinators. The company rented sound, lighting and audio visual equipment- remember audio visual equipment? Projectors and screens, amplifiers and speakers, even slide projectors. They had stage lights and staging and huge Altec speakers that stood five or six feet tall and were stackable. Nothing was digital but solid state components were beginning to make an appearance. The most powerful amps still had tubes.
I took a part time job as a casual stage hand with SPEC. Phoenix was a sort of second tier convention destination and was trying to promote itself to top tier, and they had built a shiny new Civic Plaza with a trade show arena and a concert hall to that end. An annual event was the Phoenix Gift and Jewelry Show, and one of the first jobs I had was building exhibitor booths out of portable drapery and running cable for electricity to the booths. The company had a finger in all sorts of shows and presentations so I also humped speakers and amps for various concerts, like Procul Harem, Lee Michaels, Rod Stewart and Grand Funk Railroad. We’d build scaffold towers in the desert and mount Trouper and Super Trouper spotlights on the towers, and then run cable for headsets to the top so the lighting coordinator could cue the spotlight operators. Spotting the show with a Trouper was one of my first jobs too.
The Trouper was a carbon arc spotlight and it looked like a cannon on a pedestal. It had a darkened glass window on the side so the operator could watch the arcing, burning carbons and advance them with a crank mounted on the barrel to keep the arc burning clear and bright. At the breech end of the cannon was a reflector that beamed the light out the muzzle end through a lens. You could attach a device to the barrel with colored gel sheets on levers and filter the light red, green and blue, or whatever colors were called for.
All of this stuff counts as a first for me. I was a farm and a factory grunt before I saw Phoenix. I learned as I went along, and it was all new and exciting. One of the things that kept it exciting and worth doing was that the local girls saw us stage hands at the concerts and remembered us. We had rubbed elbows with the stars and that rubbed off on more than our elbows. My own specialty became one of the less romantic jobs, supervising the trade show setup. I was made the “floor man” after a few months and supervised the crews in laying out and setting up the exhibitor booths. We were a small outfit though and everyone pitched in at everything so I still did duty at concerts and delivered AV gear when I had to.
The boss bid on building a stage for the Elton John concert in Albuquerque. We had folding stage sections, called risers. They were exactly like a folding table, but a lot heavier and sturdier. The stage for the concert had to be exactly the specified height and no combination of stacking sections would get our staging to that height, so the plan was to build a stage somewhat less than half the height called for, lay four by sixes on top of that in rows, and then build another layer of staging with the feet resting on those four by sixes to achieve the correct height. It was a complicated, a labor intensive and a dumb plan. We were and we looked sidelong at each other when he showed us the plan. He should have known better. We DID know better, but none of us refused…we were young and in love with our jobs, so we went along with it.
We stripped out my trade show semi trailer of all the molded plastic chairs and carpet squares and overloaded it with staging. We wouldn’t haul the four by sixes. Part of the genius of the plan was that we’d buy the lumber in Albuquerque and sell it for salvage when we were finished with it. The boss had dotted every “i” and crossed every “t”. He thought it was a masterful plan.
Our sound tech Paul, the boss’s Mike and I got the nod to ramrod this job, even though none of us had ever built a stage this size before. Our company had never built an entire stage this size. And I’m pretty sure nobody had ever a built a stage with a plan this bad.
The concert was to be held at an arena on the edge of town, and we hired local stage hands as labor. They were a rare breed in Albuquerque so we added a few temps to help haul the materials. We had a deadline and only a small window of time to build this thing. We had a bitch of a time finding enough four by sixes to use as our boosters. It took Mike all day driving around town to buy enough perfectly straight lumber- it HAD to be straight- and by the end of the day we barely had enough, it wasn’t nearly straight enough, and we were way behind with him spending the whole day timber shopping. We had worked all nighters before and this was gonna be another one.
We did get the thing set up in time but it was close, and we were nervous. The feet on the riser legs were an inch around, with plastic shoes on them, and they rested on the six inch surface of the timbers to bring us up to the right height. They could slide three inches in either direction before falling off the timber. It looks good on paper, maybe, but in assembling this thing we learned that it was hard to get everything straight and square, especially with our somewhat crooked lumber, so some feet were very close to the edge, maybe an inch. If anything moved…we were in for a disaster.
Roberta Flack opened the show, and she was wonderful. Paul, Mike and I watched the show from the back of the arena and we were feeling good. Each of us took a turn at inspecting our staging underneath and it was holding still even with all the traffic of setup and performing. Then Elton John came out.
That -of-a-bitch performed his heart out, God damn him. His crew cranked up their amplifiers and he bounced around at the keyboard and jumped on stage like a wild thing. The speaker towers stood on right and left wings that we had built and the stacks were twenty feet from the stage to the top. You could see them vibrating with all the noise. The whole damned arena vibrated. We breathed a collective “Oh, fuck.” and rushed underneath to take a look.
The four by sixes were walking around on top the stage base and the top layer of risers was dancing on top of the lumber. It made me nearly sick to my stomach. I ran to the semi and grabbed three hammers and a box of spikes. We began trying to arrest all that random jump and shimmy by nailing things down tighter, toe nailing the four by sixes right into our staging, which would ruin it, but we didn’t give a shit. We had to keep those wings sturdy or the speaker towers would topple over, maybe right into the crowd. We weren’t musicians but we tried to hammer in time with the bass. That didn’t work- how Elton’s sound manager heard us I don’t know, but he crawled under the stage and chewed our asses for all our racket. Paul and I explained what was going on, and he said he didn’t give a shit- we had to stop. Mike carefully explained to him that he was a stupid motherfucker and he threw us out- banished us from the arena and said he’d get Security to toss our sorry asses if we didn’t go. We went.
We went out to our semi and sat in the cab, waiting to hear screaming and pandemonium from inside the arena. We talked about what we were going to do and wondered if anyone would die in there. I had read that the mountain lakes of Bolivia and Peru were teeming with fat green frogs. Have you ever bought frog legs in a restaurant? They aren’t common and are therefore pricey. We could run away to Peru and trap frogs for a living, beyond the reach of American justice. Buy some llamas for transport and hire a couple of sloe eyed senoritas to cook. It was one of the longest nights of my short life. Perhaps soon to be permanently short.
Our stage held up. The concert finally ended. We hadn’t slept in seventy two hours and now we had to tear down that fucking monstrosity. We left the four by sixes next to a dumpster. To hell with selling the goddam things. Then we drove to a Motel Six and slept before the drive back to Phoenix.
When we got home the boss asked how it went, and in perfect three part harmony we told him “Fuck you!” That was the first and last full sized concert stage I ever built.
To read other posts for the Symposium, follow this link: Participants List For The Seventeenth Virtual Symposium The First Time
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I'm pimping a peach
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Posted:Mar 1, 2016 10:58 am
Last Updated:Jan 4, 2018 11:57 pm
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It's my pleasure to note that we have a new Top Blogger. It's nicelipss66 and her blog is succinctly and unpretentiously named "My Blog". I like it! Congratulations nicelipss66. You earned it!
Please pay her a visit and give her an ovation. She deserves it. You might want to watch that blog, too. She's very sweet and a lot of fun.
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To link to this blog (kzoopair) use [blog kzoopair] in your messages.
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