Frustration

I was making this for someone's birthday. I was going to give it to her tomorrow. I'd just finished securing the tail of the thread and weaving it through, when I went to cut it off.....



Now I'm counting to ten....


...and ten again....

I was making a green something for another friend, but I'm afraid to touch it now.


I'm going to fix it and give it to her later, I just can't look at it for a little while. Tomorrow, I'm just going to bring a nice bottle of wine. And maybe another bottle to share.

Farewell to a wonderful human

I loved his voice, I loved the stories he told. He was a voice for the working folks and the people on the outskirts of society. He reminded us that everyone's got a name and a story. And he was funny as hell.

The offical Obituary as provided by the family. May 24, 2008:

"Folksinger, Storyteller, Railroad Tramp Utah Phillips Dead at 73"
Nevada City, California:


Utah Phillips, a seminal figure in American folk music who performed extensively and tirelessly for audiences on two continents for 38 years, died Friday of congestive heart failure in Nevada City, California a small town in the Sierra Nevada mountains where he lived for the last 21 years with his wife, Joanna Robinson, a freelance editor.


Born Bruce Duncan Phillips on May 15, 1935 in Cleveland, Ohio, he was the son of labor organizers. Whether through this early influence or an early life that was not always tranquil or easy, by his twenties Phillips demonstrated a lifelong concern with the living conditions of working people. He was a proud member of the Industrial Workers of the World, popularly known as "the Wobblies," an organizational artifact of early twentieth-century labor struggles that has seen renewed interest and growth in membership in the last decade, not in small part due to his efforts to popularize it.


Phillips served as an Army private during the Korean War, an experience he would later refer to as the turning point of his life. Deeply affected by the devastation and human misery he had witnessed, upon his return to the United States he began drifting, riding freight trains around the country. His struggle would be familiar today, when the difficulties of returning combat veterans are more widely understood, but in the late fifties Phillips was left to work them out for himself. Destitute and drinking, Phillips got off a freight train in Salt Lake City and wound up at the Joe Hill House, a homeless shelter operated by the anarchist Ammon Hennacy, a member of the Catholic Worker movement and associate of Dorothy Day.


Phillips credited Hennacy and other social reformers he referred to as his "elders" with having provided a philosophical framework around which he later constructed songs and stories he intended as a template his audiences could employ to understand their own political and working lives. They were often hilarious, sometimes sad, but never shallow.


"He made me understand that music must be more than cotton candy for the ears," said John McCutcheon, a nationally-known folksinger and close friend.
In the creation of his performing persona and work, Phillips drew from influences as diverse as Borscht Belt comedian Myron Cohen, folksingers Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger, and Country stars Hank Williams and T. Texas Tyler.


A stint as an archivist for the State of Utah in the 1960s taught Phillips the discipline of historical research; beneath the simplest and most folksy of his songs was a rigorous attention to detail and a strong and carefully-crafted narrative structure. He was a voracious reader in a surprising variety of fields.
Meanwhile, Phillips was working at Hennacy's Joe Hill house. In 1968 he ran for a seat in the U.S. Senate on the Peace and Freedom Party ticket. The race was won by a Republican candidate, and Phillips was seen by some Democrats as having split the vote. He subsequently lost his job with the State of Utah, a process he described as "blacklisting."


Phillips left Utah for Saratoga Springs, New York, where he was welcomed into a lively community of folk performers centered at the Caffé Lena, operated by Lena Spencer.
"It was the coffeehouse, the place to perform. Everybody went there. She fed everybody," said John "Che" Greenwood, a fellow performer and friend.
Over the span of the nearly four decades that followed, Phillips worked in what he referred to as "the Trade," developing an audience of hundreds of thousands and performing in large and small cities throughout the United States, Canada, and Europe. His performing partners included Rosalie Sorrels, Kate Wolf, John McCutcheon and Ani DiFranco.


"He was like an alchemist," said Sorrels, "He took the stories of working people and railroad bums and he built them into work that was influenced by writers like Thomas Wolfe, but then he gave it back, he put it in language so the people whom the songs and stories were about still had them, still owned them. He didn't believe in stealing culture from the people it was about."


A single from Phillips's first record, "Moose Turd Pie," a rollicking story about working on a railroad track gang, saw extensive airplay in 1973. From then on, Phillips had work on the road. His extensive writing and recording career included two albums with Ani DiFranco which earned a Grammy nomination. Phillips's songs were performed and recorded by Emmylou Harris, Waylon Jennings, Joan Baez, Tom Waits, Joe Ely and others. He was awarded a Lifetime Achievement Award by the Folk Alliance in 1997.


Phillips, something of a perfectionist, claimed that he never lost his stage fright before performances. He didn't want to lose it, he said; it kept him improving.
Phillips began suffering from the effects of chronic heart disease in 2004, and as his illness kept him off the road at times, he started a nationally syndicated folk-music radio show, "Loafer's Glory," produced at KVMR-FM and started a homeless shelter in his rural home county, where down-on-their-luck men and women were sleeping under the manzanita brush at the edge of town. Hospitality House opened in 2005 and continues to house 25 to 30 guests a night. In this way, Phillips returned to the work of his mentor Hennacy in the last four years of his life.


Phillips died at home, in bed, in his sleep, next to his wife. He is survived by his son Duncan and daughter-in-law Bobette of Salt Lake City, son Brendan of Olympia, Washington; daughter Morrigan Belle of Washington, D.C.; stepson Nicholas Tomb of Monterrey, California; stepson and daughter-in-law Ian Durfee and Mary Creasey of Davis, California; brothers David Phillips of Fairfield, California, Ed Phillips of Cleveland, Ohio and Stuart Cohen of Los Angeles; sister Deborah Cohen of Lisbon, Portugal; and a grandchild, Brendan. He was preceded in death by his father Edwin Phillips and mother Kathleen, and his stepfather, Syd Cohen.


The family requests memorial donations to Hospitality House, P.O. Box 3223, Grass Valley, California 95945 (530) 271-7144 www.hospitalityhouseshelter.org

-Jordan Fisher Smith and Molly Fisk (Molly Fisk, 530.277.4686 molly@mollyfisk.com Jordan Fisher Smith 530.277.3087 jordanfs@gv.net)

Word document here: www.utahphillips.org/utahphi...at73.doc PDF version: www.utahphillips.org/utahphi...at73.pdf

Unscratchable Itch

When a disability keeps your body from moving properly, it would be nice if you could dial back on the energy your mind thinks it still has. I'm still a spazz, I just can't act on my spazmoid impulses like I used to. Two years ago I was doing bizarre and tacky things to my garden and had an absolute blast doing it. There's a non-mathematical, non-verbal thing that lives in me. It loves textures and colors and smells, and letting this thing off its leash for a while is pure bliss. It thrives on movement and sweat, it loves releasing heat energy via muscle work. It seems to really like the Dead Kennedy's and Ojos de Brujo. Don't ask. I don't know.

This morning, having hit precisely the right balance between vicodin and caffeine, I was finally able to do a little bit of pruning and weeding. It was wonderful, and that is what I'm trying to focus on. My spring-frenzied mind kept making plans that I can no longer put into action, though, and I had to slap down that non-speaking thing. Again. Worse than having to slap that thing down, I worry about the day when it stops trying to come out.

So, in two weeks I'm going to learn to ride a motorcycle. I think that might feed my inner non-verbal thing. It's certainly been excited about the idea - we've been compulsively researching motorcycles for over two weeks now. I don't think I'll end up with the '40's Indian Scout I've been lusting for - maybe just a small scooter to begin with. Something broken in and kind of ugly, something I can relate to.

Maybe the Universe will crash me, saying "Thou shalt not ride", just like it told me "Thou shalt not make tacky garden art" before.

I don't think it will say anything. I don't believe the Universe has any mystical will. I do believe in physics and the infinite stupidity of Napa drivers. If I get a good handle on both, my inner beast and I might just be okay.

WoWing

We finally became WoW capable a few months ago, so every free moment is spent killing, looting, and questing. As the picture above indicates, I haven't really focused on getting a decent screen shot yet. I suppose that will come when the addiction loosens it's grip a little. Most of my characters are on Hyjal, but I've got a few on other servers. Message me and we can enable each other's addiction. I usually play tanks. There's nothing like a massive slaughter after a long day dealing with the public.

I started doing that thing

You know, that thing where you pick up a piece of paper, then move it farther away from you and squint down your nose at it.

I'm getting more and more like my mom every day. Here's to being able to glare menacingly over the tops of my glasses at all those "damn kids".

Things are better.

Wow, I'm sorry I left that last entry up so long without some sort of update on how things are better. Ugh. Quick, look at the picture of the kitty! This is our shy little baby kitty.

I fell off the face of the virtual earth for a bit, there was a lot of "stuff" going on. My brother is doing amazingly well now, though, he has a job that keeps him too busy to get high. He now weighs more than me (which is really saying something these days).

Life is good here. Look at the cute kitty, be happy.

more nighttime writings

There are many levels of controversy.

Pro life v pro choice
Is the death penalty a holdover from more old testament times or is it still a valid sentence?
Tastes Great v Less Filling
Ginger v Maryanne
who's gonna be the next big bang in the next big reality show?

you wouldn't think that relative levels of importance would be hard to assign priority and relevance

but then, many people report that the American Idol vote they cast was far more important than voting for the presidency.

due to the seismic brainfart emanating from the clueles majority, we may all have to batten down the hatches, duck, and cover, emerging only for drive-by depoprovera injections and random fish flingings. Subversive anti-transmitters cancelling out the mind-numbing pap caught by the toilet-bowl satellite dishes and distractingly displayed for our amusement.

My culture 'tis of thee
to find the best damned deals you can on that there Wal Mart clearance rack
My culture 'tis of thee to buy the products of overseas slavery at prices that scream of the injustices that keep them low, then we complain about them foreigners flocking to a land that provides a living wage and how lazy they are for doing so. What right do they have to try and escape our companies' factories in their country, keeping costs down by cheating and beating the workers and paying the CEO's $14,000 and hour....How much lower if the CEO's were the ones receiving the beatings?

My sub-culture tis of thee
to sit back and sneer at the fat Wal-Mart shoppers, the Starbucks junkies, the evil-overloard oakie W
Without really having a grasp on why.
It's just cool, makes us better than them....don't know quite how though...just accept it.
Secretly voting republican and praying no one finds out. The closet ain't just for the gays anymore, folks.

Republican v Democrat
Dodgers v Giants
They get treated like the same game
Pick a favorite and wave, wave, wave that pennant.
Debate has been reduced to "boo, you suck!" and "hurrah, our team is winning"

It's all about the color of the jersey and not about who's in it.

Here endeth the rant of the sleepy and dejected. More happy and useful posts to come when that big ol' neurotransmitter wave hits again. G'night campers.