Redux Redux Redux Times Two

I have said many times that this picture could keep me telling stories for a long time. This is, in fact, the third go around with this picture. Don't believe me? Start scrolling. I have told many tales already by just staring at this picture and remembering stuff.

You see... Stuff happens to all of us. We are all part of the Cosmic Joke, and in our living, we accumulate alot of dusty story stuff that clings to us and only puffs off when we've been whacked a good one.

In other words, we all walk around with stories clinging to us like the clouds of Pigpen and all it takes is a jolt or a thwack or a smack with a racket, to release these stories into the wind where they belong.

So here is my third post about this picture. If by chance you garner enjoyment from this, may I suggest you go find the other two post and continue in your newfangled state of garnered enjoyment.?

They are easy to spot. They look just like this one.

***Paul is on the far left. If you were listening, you would know he is a builder and a boogie woogie piano player and owns a 27 foot sloop that he keeps in Bodega Head which is near where Hitchcock filmed "The birds.". He has a business where he sells plastic bins for keeping laundry soap that fit between your washer and your dryer. His motto is "six inches is all you need". Many men may agree with Paul.

Paul rigged his sloop to take outriggers that allowed him to troll commercially for salmon. What this meant to Paul is that he could use his boat as a write-off if he went commercial salmon fishing at least once a year.

A couple of years in a row, he asked me to accompany him, and we caught a few thousand pounds of salmon.

Commercial fishing is different than fishing for sport. In commercial, you put out as much bait at a time that seems reasonable to handle. You pull your fish in with a winch. You store them all in a big bin full of ice. Before you go home, you take them to the fisheries where they are weighed and counted, and you recieve a check.

Paul and I caught several salmon on our lines that were too small to keep. There are limits on the size of the salmon you can take. We had several that didn't make the grade. A few of those, we threw back. Two of these salmon, though, had died while being brought from deep depths to shallow depths in a hurry. We could throw them in the water. But we could never return them to the sea. We knew if we were caught with them, we were to pay a heavy fine. What Paul had come up with as a solution to this, was both funny and very clever.

Paul sliced both fish horizontally across their bodies in one inch thick slices. Chop off their heads, then chop down the fish, one chop, every inch. Then he threw away the dorsal fin and the other fins from one of the fish, plus the head and the tail. Just tossed them over the side. Seven inches out of twenty. Gone. Then he made one very skinny and long fish out of the two. He placed the segments where they matched, and lengthened one of the two short fish by inserting the one inch pieces of the other. What you got was a long and slender salmon that would pass the size restrictions of the local fish and gamer and perhaps even make the fish and gamer guy laugh...

Ever see a salmon that is three inches tall and thirty two inches long?

That was one fast looking fish...

I wonder how we managed to catch up with it?

***My Mum in the green shirt went to EST during the seventies when Werner Erhart and EST was a big weird thing in the nation. She was pretty and well spoken and after she "graduated" from their training, she was asked to be a spokeswoman for the seminar and found herself on local television talk shows selling the seminars.

I recall sitting in my friend's family room watching TV and clicking around to find my Mum, sitting in a chair, being asked questions and giving responses that made no sense to me.

EST was like that. You either "got it" or you didn't.

I never got it but I got that my Mum was fun to watch on televison while my friends all whooted and whoopty-dooed..

***The third guy is my buddy Baby Huey. I call him that, but I think he prefers Eric or "Easy".

Baby Huey was a Vietnam Vet. He marched his tall, lanky young ass across the swampy grounds of S.E.Asia quite often as the man on "point".

He was half Indian and half Jewish. He taught American Indian Studies as a young man after the war at a California State University.

Eric was in a seven eleven in Marin just north of San Francisco quite late one night, and in walks this pretty sleezy and dirty looking woman with matty hair and torn jeans and a bandana hanging out of a pocket and an attitude that suggested an untoward unfriendliness...

She dropped a bottle of southern comfort (I think) on the counter and then fished for her wallet. Eric dropped a twenty down and told the clerk he was buying. The guy behind the counter thought he was nuts. The girl looked surprised, but let him pay. Big, tall, chivalrous, Baby Huey looked the girl in the eye, and said "Only if you sing that Mercedes Benz song you do..." and the two left together, Janis Joplin singing "Oh Lord, won't you buy me, a Mercedes Benz... My friends all drive Porsches, Oh won't you make amends?"

and Eric getting taken away by limo to a party worth a story all its own...

***The next curmudgeon is me, that being, yours truly. I once got stuck in Tokyo in Shinjuku during the height of rush hour, forced to suffer the cattle pushers and the packed trains where we all became one mass of human flesh and everybody did their best to remain calm and get through it all to the next station or two...

I was on the Yamanote Sen, and the door opened, and people poured in like sheep heading to the shavers. They just kept coming, even after it was apparent there was no room, and empty space filled up with hands and noses and ears and souvenirs...

Some poor girl, a cute little thing about five foot three, got herself wedged right up against me. I mean, her face was smashed against my chest turned to one side and her knee caps were knocking against my shins. Everything would have been forgetable except for the fact that she had one of her hands wedged right between my legs. And I mean right between. The part that holds the jewels and the other thing.

Right there.

And the more she moved and tried to remove it, the tighter the situation became. Her face got redder and redder. My disposition grew thicker and fatter...

Every time she tried to pull her hand out I wuld let out a soft groan...

"Gomennasai..." she kept telling me. (I am sorry)

"Daijobu..." I would tell her. (Not a problem)

We were conjoned like this for a glorious four minutes.

I was hoping for a phone number afterwards...



***The blue striped gal is my sister, Sandy. Sandy was once asked by her yoounger brother if she would teach him how to ride a horse. She was racing endurance hores in professional events at the time, and looked at the hapless greenhorn and said "You betcha! Hop on!"

She put me on an eight year old endurance champion, and climbed aboard a two year old she was training to be a champion. Then we raced.

I learned to ride a horse by simply holding on. I had bragged about having good balance and being an athlete and crap, and my sister took this all in and went with it. OK. You are a well balanced guy. You know how to not fall off a horse. Lets rumble!

She took me on a thirty mile race. Her horse against my horse. I simply held on. Up hills and down. Across large flat areas where the horses got up into the killing speeds...

My sister just rode and rode. I just held on and bit my tongue.

Ever bite your tongue?

It hurts like hell.

My horse decided it was supposed to be in front of her horse. Her horse begged to differ. All this silly "competitiveness' was going on with poor me growing blisters between both thighs that finished and tore at about four inches across.

Think about it. A blister on your inner thigh about the size of a small Folgers Coffee can lid, on BOTH htighs.

Talk about riding a beast all afternoon...

My sister enjoyed teaching me to ride, I think. You could tell by the way she was laughing at me when I started whining.

I got even with her though, for being so callous with my inner thighs.

I taught her boyfriend where she hates to be tickled...


***Finally, the last guy on the right is Jamal. Jamal is the illigitimate grandson of the famous heavyweight boxer Archie Moore.

Jamal had never tried LSD and asked Sandy and I to take him out to the beach on a full moon and let him have the experience. Like all things, I believe the the experience once is worth it, the experience repeated is abusive.

I had had the experience twice, though many years apart. I don't regret either "trip" and had ritualistic epiphanies at each 'viewing".

Goat Rock on a full moon is a great place to take a newbie tripping. Plenty of sand to catch your falls, no traffic to walk into, no buildings to fly out of. Safe all around. I don't know why, but not many people high on LSD get the hallucination "I can hold my breath forever."

So you get few drownings.

I gave Jamal his "dose" and told him the story of how I met Owsley (the originator of the blue microdot) one night backstage at a Grateful Dead show in Oakland, and listened as Owsley described his new diet of raw meat and art.

This was to get Jamal in the mood.

Two hours later, Jamal turned to me and simply said "It's all relative..."

Yes, I said. It is...