Slackjaw's Forum

This is a picture of my grandparents right before he shipped out to fight in the trenches of WW I. Fortunately the only trenches he saw during the war were of the latrine type on the island of Hawaii where he lived as part of a contingent stationed in the South Pacific to protect our western flank. I have often wished I was older when he died, so that I could have heard the story on that one. As our boys were dying in the cold muddy trenches of Europe’s western front, he and his mates were keeping Hawaii safe for democracy. By the time I knew my grandparents they had already moved from Missouri Valley, Iowa to Chicago during the depression. Grandpa was retired from the railroad where he had worked as a boxcar painter and my grandma had gotten very heavy. They lived in a red brick duplex in Bellwood that had a cement stoop and a fence in the back where I threw rocks at my sister to knock her off and she broke her arm and a small yard where the fireflies came out at night. The Ch...

Well the littlest one had to go to the hospital to get his tonsil’s removed. We had already spent last Friday night in the ICU due to the fact that he was having trouble breathing on account of how big they got. They had tried to get us to move to the floor over the weekend but we were having none of it. It’s hard enough teaching the ICU nurses how to take care of the boy much less the nurses on the floor. Instead we went home, all got some sleep and took him back on Monday for the big operation. The boys fine, though his throat’s a little sore. Since his swallow isn’t that good he wasn’t allowed to have ice cream or a popsicle or anything so he was putting up a pretty big fuss. We had the operation done at Mary Bridge CH here in Tacoma. It was a good practice run for both them and us. Up until now the boy had always made the trip up to Children’s Hospital in Seattle and that commute is just about enough to do you in. I swear I don’t know how sweetie does it the three days a...

Dewy and Ham's little dog Pepper died. He’d been on borrowed time since the rope episode anyway. Not much of a bark left to go along with his poor eye site and patchy fur loss. No one quite knows what happened, he just went to sleep one night and didn’t wake up. Dewy said she thought something was wrong when he just lifted his head and watched her walk to the bathroom, instead of following her in the middle of the night like he usually did. I feel bad for the girls ‘cause they had that dog for damn near ever. Ham’s already talking about getting a new one but I think Dewy’s still not so sure. As anyone who’s ever had a pet knows they don’t live that long, unless it’s a bird or turtle or something and it’s hard to get back on that bicycle after the big crash. I’m thinking Dewy just needs a little more time before she can let her heart go somewhere else. Last night it rained. Usually the sound of it on the roof of the Airstream puts me right to sleep but not last night. I...

I wish I could say that I took the picture above but I didn’t. It was sent to me from my good friend Ignatius O’Hara a few days back. Truth is I’ve never seen the Aurora Borealis anywhere near Tacoma. Once, years ago when I was seven and living in Grand Forks, North Dakota, I remember my dad gathering me up out of bed and carrying me outside to look at it. It looked like green dancing smoke. Out in the snow of our front yard, wrapped up in my blanket and my dad’s arms, I kept thinking that I was missing something. That there was something I wasn’t seeing. At seven most of the world is still a wide-open mystery, so green smoke dancing in the sky didn’t impress me much I guess. I think at the time I was more interested in my dad’s reaction to the whole thing. The fact that he dragged me out of bed, carried me down the stairs and out into the night. I kept looking at the sky, at the shifting smoke and thought it looked as if the Milky Way was being blown by the wind. I know for a fac...

Right above these words is a picture of my new guitar. The first brand new guitar I’ve had it quite some time so I’m pretty excited, as you can probably guess. It’s called a Dobro guitar made by a company in New Smyrna Beach, Florida called Liberty Guitars. ( http://www.libertyguitars.com/ ) I called and spoke to the owner, Bill Blue, who said that they’re all hand built and they can set them up any way I’d like, so just let him know… Course, he also told me about catching a cold at some hippy wedding at Jimmy Buffets place in North Carolina the weekend before. I guess his long time road manager’s son was getting married and Jimmy offered up his place for the weekend. Bill and this manager fellow go way back I guess and he’s known the boy near his whole life so he went. Wound up way deep in the woods in a little clearing, getting soaked in the rain, and decided to spend the rest of the day in his wet duds instead of driving all the way back to the motel. At any rate, Bill was...

For those of you who I might not have told, this last Saturday night was the début of the documentary Kennewick Man: An Epic Drama of the West ( www.Kennewickmanmovie.com ) for which I did the soundtrack. It was at the Seattle Art Museum, which has a little theater that holds about three hundred people and I would say that they had close to that number there. I had of course seen the movie in various stages of pre-production on the little monitor that sits in my recording studio but it was another thing entirely to see it up on the big screen. The audience seemed to enjoy it and the very first comment I heard in the Q and A at the end of the film was “I really liked the soundtrack” and it wasn’t even anyone I know! As you might guess my head’s about twice the size it was 48 hours ago. Sweetie and I had shipped the boys over to her sister’s house for the night so we could go to the party after and that proved to be a very good idea. No having to worry about getting home at a...

You can just start to feel the fall in the air. Things smell different, more like old wet leaves and earth, than dust and cut grass. I have green tomatoes that are hanging on the vine right now. A while back, the older boy and his friend, Levi, picked every little green tomato that they could find. They had made up some game where they were making soup in the sandbox or something. I’m actually surprised that I have any tomatoes at all, green or otherwise being that only two months ago the vines were empty. If I can just get a few more weeks of sun… Who am I kidding? It’ll be green tomato pickles for the lot of them. Got the fence up and stained over the last few weeks. That will probably be the last of the summer outdoor projects for this year. Minnie and Otto are planning to leave the Midwest for a bit and come visit us the beginning of October. It’s been awhile since they’ve been out our way and were looking forward to their company. Dewy and Ham decided to paint their pi...

I hope everyone had the time of their lives. Really happy to be staying up late, watching drunks shooting off guns. My neighbor Earl made a pit and spent the better part of two days lighting off fireworks just to see how high they’d go. At first both boys were pretty excited about the whole thing, but even they started to tire near the end. Only so much bangin you can listen to before your head starts hurting. The whole thing makes Dewy and Ham’s dog pepper a shaking mess. They put him on downers but that doesn’t seem to help any. He seems to shake for an entire week afterwards and won’t go near his food dish. I get a feeling that Earl set up the pit cause he doesn’t care much for that dog anyway and secretly gets a bit of pleasure listening to the whining. Corlis came by having trouble with the rat he dropped into his Malibu. I told him not to put in a Hurst V-Matic shifter in stock console without my help but he did it anyway dumb ass. So of course I had to spend the bette...

We had never met Carol’s ex before. We were spending the afternoon on the stoop with our neighbors drinking gin and tonics talking about the best birthday cake ever and the weather and if the DH should be allowed in Cooperstown, when this old gray K car drives up. Carol was the woman who sold us the mobile home right before she died. She had cancer and was moving in with her daughter so’s she could be better taken care of. She died not long after and we hadn’t even thought about her for more than a year. Out of this old dusty trap of a car comes a dusty old trap of a man. Greasy trousers, rumpled shirt with stains. What was left of his hair in a slick comb over and thick glasses whose lenses were held in place with tape. He shook. He left his dog in the car barking the whole time but I never saw it, I could only hear it. He told us he used to date Carol. It didn’t sound like they had dated that much but who knows, people change as they get older I guess. He was looking ...

I really need to update my Forums more often than this Itellyouwhat! Sometimes life gets so busy that there isn’t a whole lot of room to write. Doing this much writing is kind of new to me and what with trying to finish up the Soundtrack and all, a day can go by pretty fast with out me even looking at my web page. Glad to have gotten the Reverend’s question answered and up on the site this past weekend. The best news is that Pepper, Dewy and Ham’s little dog is back home looking none to worse for the wear, though his bark leaves a lot to be desired. Dewy said that the doc didn’t think he would every regain full use of his bark and with the straightest face I could muster I told her that was a shame. I know this forum seems more like a journal entry than a true forum. I would argue that sometimes the line between the two can get a little blurred. There are days when life and talking about life go hand in hand and days when they don’t. There are days when you just feel like sitting in...

We lit out Friday night heading northeast on highway 20 to Vanderpool Crossing. Sweetie had heard that there was an estate sale going on up there from a friend, who also collected snow globes. She's always had a penchant for the antique ones and in the last few years had taken to collecting pre-WWII globes with Bakelite bases. The woman who died had been her friend's teacher from her grade school days I guess. She had met up with a logging truck repairman and moved into his house near the Okanogan National Forest. It was a hard life after the timber all dried up and the last few years of her life were spent scraping by on her teaching pension and a few items she auctioned off on E-bay. We left Friday night because sweetie wanted to be the first ones there when they opened up Saturday morning. We spent the night in our sleeping bags in the back of the El Camino looking up at the stars and talking about if Jesus was cool or geek. It was my contention that he was cool cause w...

I had wanted to start this week with a forum on music recording. Talk a little about what I've been up to in the studio and what music I been writing. I have a converted tool shed off the far end of the mobile home where I keep my computer and studio equipment so they don't get underfoot when your pacing the trailer at two a.m. trying to get the little one to fall back asleep. Unfortunately the computer problems I have been having as of late haven't allowed me to do this. I have been spending far too much time on the technical aspect of my life and far to little on artistic endeavors. I have found it's not enough to just keep ranting about my troubles with the vengeful god in Redmond. True, without him I would not be having these problems, but he has given me the fruit and now I will forever need to quench my hunger with it. I have been through all the stages: denial, anger, beer, VH1 behind the music, more beer, shopping. To tell the truth my problems ...

Last night before I went to bed the moon rose over the little stand of Cedars that line the bottom where the road turns. Sweetie had to work late so it was just me and the boys. I had got the guys all ready for bed and that's where they should have been but instead they were out with me looking at the moon and asking when's mamma coming home. Sometimes when you're so tired your bones hurt and you can't stand up straight. Sometimes late at night it's hard to keep your balance and keep from falling over. You start asking questions of yourself, of your worth. You get the most annoying songs stuck in your head or think about a time when you were embarrassed when you were a kid. It's easy at times like this to think that everything good is dead. That whatever prime you had wasn't much and a long time gone. But sometimes what's easy isn't exactly what's true. The oldest boy climbs down off the steps and runs around in the coo...

The picture on the right, is of some nurses like we had at the hospital. Don’t be fooled because they’re smiling though. That just means they fucked something up, they're drunk, or both. Now a drunken nurse is not something most people I know would see as a problem, especially at a Children's hospital. Most people understand how hard it is to stay sober when you've got a room full of screaming babies and your shift doesn't end for another eight hours. A little nip here, a little tuck there and before you know it you're on the road home trying to keep the 74 Plymouth Satellite between the dotted yellow lines. It would be one thing if they admitted it: Passed a bottle and shared with the floor. But they deny everything. They give you that holier-than-thou stare when you ask for a snoot full to tide you over. Threaten to call security when they find an empty bottle in the trash. Then it's off to that little room past the nurse’s station for a snort with the ga...

Well this week I stumbled upon a picture of a trailer-park that really got me thinking. Perhaps the juxtaposition of palm trees and pavement. The way the evening light reflects off of the Airstreams. Anyway... It's a different type of park than I'm used to seeing. Here at home our road is dirt and the ruts fill up with rainwater and oil. Here, the moss is king and mildew stains every last piece of plastic furniture left outside. We do have room for carports and wading pools though. Our friends Earl and Heather who live next door have even made a little bar-b-que pit out of some old bricks that used to be the Burton boarding house's chimney. It burnt down in the 70's and I guess Earl just kept hauling them around everywhere they went until Heather got fed up and told him she was gonna dump them in the river the next time they moved. Nice couple, those two. Let us use it now and again when the weather's right. When I dream a heaven, it's not that di...

Now please don't be put off by the sight of my mouth. I came across a dentist a while back that is a pioneer in recycled fillings. So while they might not be the prettiest things to look at, they do the job just fine. See his theory is that though you get a thorough checking of your deeds and misdeed when you're trying to get though the pearly gates, God doesn't take much notice of your bicuspids. That's not to say he's not lookin at your smile and all, it's just that even God's had a filling or two in all of the eternity that he's been around. I imagine He has bit of a sweet tooth and needs a Jolly Rancher once in a while like the rest of us.