Jeff Johnson's Blog: Will Fight Evil 4 Food, page 12

On Turning 50

I’m in eastern Oregon with my sweet gal. The air is crisp and cold and it smells like pine. The sun is shining. It’s quiet. There’s nothing to do but cook, listen to jazz, read, maybe go for a walk or mess around with a small painting. I saw a heron this morning, one of the best birds to see in the early hours. What a cool fella. Smooth. New Year’s Eve was… quiet. Peaceful. So was my birthday, the day before. How in the hell did that happen? What made me want this kind of thing? Time. Those 50 fuckin’ years, I guess.

People say that time flies, that it all goes so fast. I don’t know who the fuck those people are, but that bumper sticker is thankfully full of shit. We all have good years and bad ones, and I’ve had more good ones than bad ones when I total the score. I have a pretty good idea on how to roll from here, though what I’ve come up with hardly sounds sophisticated. But you aren’t here to read pedantic philosophy, are you, dear reader? No no, you’re reading to savor for a moment how the animals contend with time, to read the translation of howling anima, for the small revelations of beasts. My thimble of temporary wisdom-

At 50, I now understand that all song lyrics are true. Not to me, but to someone, somewhere. Reality is blurry in this way. I’ve lost interest in my title description, and this is blurry, so I imagine it’s all tied together in some way I’m too lazy to divine. I am an artist. A writer. A cook. A musician. But those are just the things I do to make money, to stay alive and pay the bills, etc. After every image comes another one. After every story or book, every song. In the last few years, really the last two, ‘being’ has become the goal rather than finishing the latest lap in an endless and ultimately meaningless race. I am transforming into a mushroom. And I like it. Atelic vs telic.

Entanglement, I realize after 50 years, is a bigger part of life than I previously understood. Social media entangles us is a nonproductive way, I think, mostly because it’s been hijacked by Big Message makers. The democrats, the republicans, junk shit corporate whatever, essentially anyone with an interest in guiding your beliefs has neatly crafted info packages to carpet bomb your mind with. And they do. Constantly. Once rational people have been sorely diminished by the social media experiment. Entanglement happens with individuals, too. ‘Surround yourself with good people’ isn’t just solid advice. I’m convinced it’s one of the keys to well-being. Historically, I’ve always thought I could cope with the difficult people in my orbit. Most of the time I have good will to spare. After 50 years I realize I was mistaken at the very root. I shouldn’t cope with anyone close to me. Neither should you, dear reader. This I know to be true, at long last. You deserve positive, uplifting, luminous people in your life. We all do. Very good things happen when you think this way. Here from Andrew Vachss, a great writer and a thoughtful man- “When our biological families no longer function, the only option is to create a Family of Choice- a family defined by shared purpose and mutual respect, not ties of blood.” Magnificent. It seems like this should apply to work as well. These are trying times, and most of us live in a state of Hand-to-Mouth Combat. To have a rewarding family life, you may have to make your own and there’s no shame in that in the end, but in work too the rewards may come from these very same notions- shared purpose (in the arts, to add to the non material richness of our species, the real wealth being in libraries and galleries, songs and kitchens and not banks or the New York Stock Exchange) and mutual respect (reciprocal good will, the communal fostering of well-being). You can’t avoid entanglement. We are ingredients, and we combine with our surroundings.

I’ve learned all kinds of things in my long years on this lovely planet. A bright chimpanzee would have, given 50 years. Right now, red beans, caramelized shallots, lamb merguez, with stock I made last week and rosemary from the garden is on the stove and it smells pretty good. The stars will be out later, so bright this high up, and there’s apple pie. Good books and fine company. Off to a solid start here in the third quarter. Croissants, they say, were made in the image of the Ottoman Moon. The great blue heron outside might be looking for lost earrings, or golden pine seeds from a mechanical tree. These things seem more important than ever. It is an atelic mindset, and it seems we all need more of it. Telic, from the Greek word for ‘purpose’, is the law of the land these days. Remember, dear reader, that laws of this kind are only suggestions.

What The Fuck Is A Holiday?

What The Fuck Is A Holiday?

One of the great questions, isn’t it. I read somewhere that medieval dudes and dudegirls partied like motherfuckers with great frequency, as in they had many holidays and they enjoyed the shit out of them. But what do we do? What options does modern man have? Sniff glue, break shit, fuck shit up, eat cake, eat steak, drink cough syrup with ketamine, snort coke off beautiful asses, spray paint cop cars, track down the mythical mushroom nasal spray, burn the system, beat on this year’s mouthy fuckers, give obscene haikus to bland strangers, glue bank locks, jizz in the soap dispensers at the local JP Morgan, save someone, free captive birds, the peyote yoghurt smoothie, bla bla bla. Entirely too many options, which leads me to… James Beard. What did he do with a little free time?

Green Fish Stew with Dandelion and Quince

1 pound tomatillos2 cups cilantro leaves1 cup parsley leaves6 green onions, white and green parts sliced1 or 2 serrano chiles, sliced2 cups Kombu Stock 1 teaspoon fish sauce1/4 cup extra virgin olive oil, plus more for cooking1/2 teaspoon fine sea salt, plus more to taste1 1/2 pounds firm white fish fillets (such as rock cod or halibut)1 lemon

To Serve

Crème fraîcheCilantro leaves and/or blossomsParsley leavesThinly sliced white onion

Method

Bring a large pot of salted water to a boil. Blanch the tomatillos until soft but still whole, about 5 minutes. Remove from the heat and drain; place the tomatillos in a blender with the cilantro and parsley leaves, green onions, serrano chiles, kombu stock, fish sauce, olive oil, and fine sea salt. Purée until smooth. Transfer the sauce to a medium saucepan and bring to a boil over high heat. Lower the heat and simmer for 10 to 15 minutes, or until slightly reduced.

Meanwhile, pat the fish dry with paper towels and cut into 3- to 4-inch pieces; season both sides with sea salt. Place a large sauté pan over moderately high heat; add enough oil to coat the bottom of the pan. Add the fish in one layer and cook for 3 to 4 minutes, or until each piece moves easily with a slight prod. If you fuss over the fish too much, it will fall apart—resist the urge to move, peek, or flip more than once. Flip the fish (a fish spatula is handy, but a big ass salad fork works) and cook for 2 minutes more, or until the fish is opaque throughout.

Meanwhile, taste your sauce. Adjust the seasoning as needed: lemon will add brightness, and salt will add interest. If you’d like more heat, slice another chile and serve it on the table.

Divide the fish among the serving bowls and ladle the sauce on top. Garnish each with a spoonful of crème fraîche and a scattering herbs and sliced onions.

Make Your Christmas A Deadbomb Bingo Ray Christmas

“This evil strut of a book is wildly smart, utterly warped and exultant in its own mad glory.”–Warren Ellis, Transmetropolitan

“Jeff Johnson writes with a poet’s rhythm, a boxer’s attitude and an artist’s sense of style and flair.”–Norman Green, Shamus Award Winner of The Last Gig

“We lost George V. Higgins too long ago; thank goodness we now have Jeff Johnson. Deadbomb Bingo Ray is a shot of good old 70’s muscle-noir for 2017, written with a bounce and a turn of phrase that elevates it above the pack. If this guy’s under your radar, recalibrate!” —Sean Doolittle, multiple award winning author of The Cleanup and Rain Dogs

“Hard-boiled, hilarious, and as serious as a straight razor. It has more good ideas, great jokes, and splendid writing on one page than most books have in a full chapter.”—Tim Halinan, author of Simeon Grist, Poke Rafferty, and the Junior Bender series

“The launch of Johnson’s new series, as inventive and comic as the Darby Holland books (Lucky Supreme, etc.), introduces Philadelphia fixer Dead Bomb Bingo Ray. … Descriptive gems—“the costume brought out the side of him that was dangerous in a next-level way,

beyond angry beehive and well into biblical-serpent territory”—make Johnson’s writing a rare treat. ” –PUBLISHER’S WEEKLY

“Ray is a Philadelphia fixer and problem solver, who picked up his nickname in Vegas during a crooked card game that involved a grenade. Three years ago, he’d thwarted a hedge-fund scheme operated by Tim Cantwell and Anton Brown that would have cheated its retiree investors. Ray continues to mess with Anton and also falls for Abigail, a geek goddess who may wreck his fixer mojo. When Tim comes looking for revenge, things quickly get twisted and nasty. Chapter soundtracks (including songs by Rev. Horton Heat, Nick Cave, the Ventures, King Harvest, Leela James, and more) help to establish the ambiance and set the scenes. VERDICT The author of the “Darby Holland” crime novels launches a fast-paced, quick-witted neonoir caper series packed with cons and double crosses, larger-than-life characters, and vivid language. Bound to attract fans of Norman Green, Roger Hobbs, and Max Allan Collins’s “Quarry” novels, as well as the gritty works of Stuart MacBride and Pete Dexter.”–Pick of the month, November– Library Journal Review

[image error]The audiobook is a total blast! Check it out and your hearing will improve!



[image error]The novel itself, look at that cover! Barnes & Noble all the way!

The Art of Holiday Shopping

You must approach IKEA with a blank mind, airplane glue Zen, an empty paper vessel. Envision a zero made out of smoke and become that zero, then inhale yourself. Repeat. You are ready to enter when the Uber driver panics at your dead stare and tries to mace you. Don’t drive there yourself. The aftermath of IKEA Zen is sometimes disorienting.

Shopping for something specific is a mistake. Even shopping for a specific person.

In my thirties I usually gave people liquor and weapons, but now it all revolves around cooking, hence the IKEA. Without going into too much detail, they have a pepper grinder with an adjustable contact disk that can be dialed in to fine grind fennel seeds. If you really like who you’re giving this to, toast a cup of fennel seeds in a cast iron pan and fill it. Here’s a cool glue trance shopping zone- Ethiopian Grocery Stores. They have bags of unroasted coffee! And curious mortise grinders and whatnot. Plus, the spices. Unbeatable.

Art is maybe the finest gift. But where to purchase affordable original art? Bars and cafes. You can probably find local art groups on Facebook. Also, tattoo shops. I’d estimate that more than half of your local tattoo artists produce paintings on the side. Check ‘em out! And while you’re sniffing around in your local tattoo shop, if you like them consider a gift certificate for your asshole boss or your favorite niece (she’s going to get one anyway). Here below is an example of one of the art gifts I’m giving out this year to friendly acquaintances. Clothes pin art. These mushroom/octopi are almost done-

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The Holiday Groove

“When you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change.” — Max Planck, German quantum theorist and Nobel Prize winner

Fine advice for this time of year if you ask me. The last few years, I’ve been a tad ambivalent about the holidays. I used to enjoy them more for some reason, and this year, for a variety of reasons, I’m having a good time. What’s the difference? Would you too, dear reader, like to get down and groovy? The key is planning. I know. Planning.

I finished The Devil On Macon Street and that had a huge amount of planning involved. I had a good time doing it, too, and now I get to tinker with a slower novel, Dime Bag Sadie, while I monkey with huge watercolor paintings. Scene- the twenty foot long dining room table has a big Great Blue Heron in progress on one end and I can see all the way through to the living room, where Secrets Of The Dead on PBS is in continuous rotation, while off to the right is the guest room, a splendid place to lay around and work on the newest book. I can go back and forth. I don’t even have to wear pants. I planned it this way. For the rest of December, I am pants free roughly 70% of the time.

The plan is far bigger than that, though. I have no plans to deal with any holiday weirdos this year. Do you, dear reader, have that one ruined hole in the ground relative who likes to sneak up on you during the holidays? I shut mine out. Same with the professional contacts I have who want to cozy up and score some good will for bad faith negotiations in the coming year. All sidelined for my own sense of wellbeing. This has the duel effect of creating a lasting, more permanent distance. That kind of planning is just common sense, but historically I haven’t gone long on it. Now I do. What joy, to wake up and know that the majority of interactions I’ll have during the holidays will be positive ones with warm, kind, good natured people. We have such people coming over for dinner tonight! Plan dinner parties. It just makes sense.

This is all well and good. But I’ve always overlooked what might be the most important thing. The Aftermath. January. February. What the hell? So what, you have a fun holiday season, full of good food, good people, fun art projects and if you’re clever you even saved a few choice books to read (for me Jo Nesbo and Jeffrey Ford, way different but set for binge reading, with savory sprinkles of Dickens, Jim Harrison and Machado) and then New Year’s Day, oysters and kazoos and then… January. The heart of darkness. The rain. The cold. Skillful planning is required here. I was going to move to LA for a few months, possibly relocate there entirely, but the more I thought about it, the more I realized that was it going to be expensive and the financial and numinous rewards were no only speculative, but almost certainly ridiculously bad. Laughably so. I make enough money to live anywhere in the world (not like a heathen Rock God), especially now that I have a powerful agent (all my agents have been okay to good, Stu is just the best one for me) so why there? Why Los Angeles? I like LA, but I’d be there to work for showbiz. The creative path has, at its root, two things to consider above all others. One, the harmonious. Does this creative effort, this medium, this environment, add richness and color and illumination to the human experience? And two, can you sustain yourself doing it? The starving artist is something of a misnomer. You can only go without food for a few weeks. If the answer is a resounding no on both counts, it is the wrong path. Writing pays okay. We actually turned a few deals down last month, so work is plentiful. Tattooing pays okay too, lots of fun stuff to do for a veteran professional. Painting is steady work. So is bar blues, but music pays shit, about 50 bucks a day (night), so more than triple the dire starvation wages of screenwriting (in general), but with lots of drunk people (again, in general). If something I already did in Hollywood catches fire, good, I’ll play ball. I’ve had very little fun there so far, but my last trip was so seriously no bueno that it changed my mind for good. There are other, much more pastoral fields, and I’m heading in their direction. And the last element is also planning intensive. I’ve deeply loved so many of the places I’ve been. Paris, this little Spanish island, Tokyo, so many more. But I always came back to where I started. This time I don’t plan to. To quote a character from The Salt Water Mercies-

“No man is supposed to die anywhere remotely close to where he was born, as Mr. Mayhew pointed out in his tale. That coward’s fate is not ours.”

Still a long ways to go. I was born in Massachusetts, and Portland is far from it, but I find the distance unacceptable. Time will tell. Tonight, the very near future, there is dinner to consider! Roasted chicken with green chili stuffing is the main course. Here it is, for your holiday enjoyment.

Roasted Chicken With Green Chili Stuffing

Small to medium sized chicken. Remove neck and liver, etc, and rinse. Place in roasting pan and rub with olive oil, salt, pepper, toasted cumin seeds, minced sage, garlic, smoked paprika. Pack with stuffing-

The stuffing!

Cube half a baguette. Place in bowl. Sauté maybe ten quartered button mushrooms and some garlic in olive oil, add to bowl. Add as many green chilies as looks sane to bowl (maybe a cup). Then add oregano, cumin, salt, rosemary, pepper. Stir and then stuff that into the bird. Don’t be shy, pack it in there. DO NOT RINSE BOWL. Next, add to bowl quartered small red or yellow potatoes, carrot, green beans. Touch more olive oil, salt, and paprika, stir, then surround chicken.

Bake at 420 for fifteen minutes, then 350 for 1 and 1/2 hours, basting at 20-minute intervals after first 30 minutes. Depending on the size of the bird, the time here might not be right, but you know your shit so there we go!

Happy Holidays! Eat tacos daily, make a pie every afternoon and share it with good friends, and shine. And do some planning! Try to get to the kitchen below! I’m going there, too. See you at dinner.

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Holiday Monte Carlo Shazam

Here we are! Every one of us in a chopped down Monte Carlo gliding into the holiday season. Gangster Christmas is coming, fruitloop variety, with tons of mad shit in the news to keep everyone paranoid. We have to shrug it off and take the outsider road, so this holiday season will have a twinkly outlaw vibe. This year, like some years, seems to be gathering creative momentum right at the end. I see it happening all around me. Personally, after making a short film, I decided all things Hollywood were not for me. That thrill you get from writing or painting, making music or pottery, that warm bloom in the stomach, just wasn’t there. Light, camera, action for me was dim, flat, and motionless. Leave it to the good men and women who feel it, I thought. In making things, you add to the ‘real’ wealth of humanity. This is no shit true. A hedge fund manager should probably be executed on sight, but a street weirdo drawing on cardboard? Give that human a flower and a sandwich. He’s actually helping you and you didn’t even have to ask. But you should feel that act of creating in your skeleton as your true reward. Shaping the vast nothing into something has to create its own golden gravity to pull you along. Molding the primordial cosmic zero begins as an act of will, but it only begins that way. Art always takes on a life of its own as it begins to emerge. Or it should. And I was cool with my film revelation. I have all kinds of fun and rewarding things to do. But right at the final hour, as I was preparing to book my tickets to Japan and resume my satisfying life as an artist who sometimes writes, I spoke with the great Susan Ferris at the Bohemia Group, and that combined with the insights of my book-to-film agent and the brief glow I got when we showed the film to the cast left the door open a crack. And a really interesting group of people just came through that crack yesterday. So I changed my mind, for the moment. In that preliminary discussion I could ‘feel’ the creative juice, the flow of The Force, or whatever, and it was a good, familiar feeling. In the tattoo world too there was great and very recent change. Doing at guest spot at Jay Aiken’s Eastside Tattoo has totally renewed me and my interest in tattooing in general. Holy shit that place is awesome. Fantastic talent pool, every one of them world class, in a stunningly beautiful shop, this is everything this kind of art should be. Craftsmanship to atmosphere, this place gets the highest possible score. Atmosphere is a key ingredient in restaurants, too. You can’t really savor a great wine in the Detroit bus station on a daily basis. Eventually the fluorescent lights and the dead vibe will turn the wine glass into a possum skull and transmute the wine itself into bum piss. Finishing out the year at this magnificent place has made my phantasma grow. And the month of December holds even more fun. I just delivered a novel to my agent, The Salt Water Mercies, and I’m two weeks away, maybe less, from completing the Deadbomb Bingo Ray sequel, The Devil On Macon Street. I absolutely love working on these projects. Aside from the obvious, the food is good. I can see my splendid kitchen from here. Roasting now is half a chicken, basted with my version of the Sauce of Lust and Violence. In all candor, I write lounging on the bed in the guest room. Right out the window there is winter, and across from me all kinds of art from that last trip to Japan. Manual typewriter on the dresser for haiku, landscape paintings behind be. Atmosphere, once again. Which brings me to my bigger point. The atmosphere of personalities.

Dear Reader, 90 percent of you are artists of one kind or another. Painters, poets, craftspeople, writers and musicians and original thought smiths. Here is one thing I believe might help this momentum we all try to build as the year closes. Surround yourself more closely with the good people in your orbit. Help them for no reason at all. Feed the good, starve the bad. Be Fred Rogers to the first, Steve Rogers to the second. Cultivate yourself in this way. Shake hands and share stories with one, raise the vibranium shield to the other. Shaping being an act of will, regardless of content, be it dark or whimsical, is best fueled with a richness of will, and that richness comes from inside and out.

December is rereading month, so here are two good examples of willful passion, one about those wrinkles we should all be concerned with and the other about life and art. First, Henry Miller. I read Tropic of Cancer when I was 19 while wandering around in Africa of all places. But this stuck with me.

This from the mind of artist/writer KJ Bishop’s The Etched City, on the reread list for the month of December. I’ve shared this before, but here it is again. Go forth, Dear Reader, and continue to a make a numinous phenomena of yourself.

“Art is the conscious making of numinous phenomena. Many objects are just objects – inert, merely utilitarian. Many events are inconsequential, too banal to add anything to our experience of life. This is unfortunate, as one cannot grow except by having one’s spirit greatly stirred; and the spirit cannot be greatly stirred by spiritless things. Much of our very life is dead. For primitive man, this was not so. He made his own possessions, and shaped and decorated them with the aim of making them not merely useful, but powerful. He tried to infuse his weapons with the nature of the tiger, his cooking pots with the life of growing things; and he succeeded. Appearance, material, history, context, rarity – perhaps rarity most of all – combine to create, magically, the quality of soul. But we modern demiurges are prolific copyists; we give few things souls of their own. Locomotives, with their close resemblance to beasts, may be the great exception; but in nearly all else with which today’s poor humans are filling the world, I see a quelling of the numinous, an ashening of the fire of life. We are making an inert world; we are building a cemetery. And on the tombs, to remind us of life, we lay wreaths of poetry and bouquets of painting. You expressed this very condition, when you said that art beautifies life. No longer integral, the numinous has become optional, a luxury – one of which you, my dear friend, are fond, however unconsciously. You adorn yourself with the same instincts as the primitive who puts a frightening mask of clay and feathers on his head, and you comport yourself in an uncommonly calculated way – as do I. We thus make numinous phenomena of ourselves. No mean trick – to make oneself a rarity, in this overpopulated age.”

Riverdale Like A Rebel

These are turbulent times, just like all those other turbulent times. Climate change, China is selling fully autonomous killer drones in the Middle East, our TVs are spying on us for perverts, those vape pens are full of mildew, the UK wants to sequence the DNA of all children at birth, mad rich fuckers are in charge of everything, bla bla bla. If you avoid Facebook and Twitter, Selfiegram and shit like that, the radioactive sewer element of the world today diminishes. Light comes back to the windows.

Positive things happen right away when you’re focusing on it. Good news is everywhere. Elon Musk is building a super cool spaceship. Japan is toying with a four day work week. French women are getting paid more. Someone discovered a star that’s older than our universe. Recently, researchers trained a neural net using a Cannibal Corpse album. That’s all good stuff. Big stuff. Some of this goodness can be very subtle, but I just noticed one. My dreamy sweetheart Sylvia is watching Riverdale on the CW Network as I type this. She’s knitting at the same time, so neither of us are really paying attention, but let me tell you what I see out of the corner of my eye. Archie, Veronica, Betty, they’re all ghastly role models for teen horndog porn. I find myself thinking how glad I am I don’t have to sodomize any of them. Generation X (and here I sound like an asshole) had Northern Exposure. The kids today have this. Now, it’s not entirely unwatchable. In fact I’m rooting for Jughead. He needs a big tattoo on his chest, something mighty like a dragon eating a dolphin, and he better finish that book of his. But he’s probably going to get Betty pregnant. We’ll see.

Which brings me to another point, the best one I’ll make tonight. Don’t lose your shit like Archie. His best quality is that he invests in himself, as in learning (though he’s incredibly stupid) rather than investing in his herd/hive account, which will be absorbed in the next ‘financial crisis’ anyway. Learn to fight evil instead of taking that investment seminar. Pick up guitar instead of PowerPoint. Build a friendship instead of climbing a ladder. The world only kicks that dummy’s ass when he plays by the rules. I’m pretty sure that truth snuck in there on accident, but truth is like that.

PS! Visit my groovy website http://www.greatpinkskeleton.com and check out all the book and film news.

Halloween Parties That Went Robustly Mad

There have been millions and millions of Halloween parties.
I’ve been to dozens and dozens of them. I was thinking back this morning to
some of the better ones. The Halloween where I dressed as a ninja in this black
imitation silk thing and wound up snorting coke with a pack of strippers in my
friend Pete’s bathroom, the Halloween where someone fell off the roof and
landed right on this terrifying asshole two feet in front of me, the super
dumbass Halloween where I ate some kind of turbo mushroom/hash brownie and
suffered heart palpitations, all fine and dandy, but no Halloween holds a
candle to the Fountain of Blood party more than three decades ago in
Albuquerque, New Mexico. I don’t even know how that shit happened. People went
crazy that night, and I, a 15 year old fugitive, was among them.

The story begins with the fugitive part. I’d run away from a foster home in Missouri and people were looking for me. It happens. You aren’t supposed to split and cross state lines and bla bla bla. I’d fallen in with a pitiful group of losers but nearby, a bionic nest of bigtime losers were up to cool shit. Fountain of Blood was a punk/grunge/industrial band and they had a party, such was their wherewithal. And in that party, a Chernobyl guy brewed up a massive cauldron of tasty mushroom tea. I was dressed as a monk, just underwear and a Hindu-looking bed sheet, not really the right look for that kind of shindig, but whatever. One mug of mushroom tea, filled at the bottom with great slimy snails of mushroom goodness, and I lost that fucking robe sheet and became, in all my glory, a fifteen year old kid in his underwear.

The music was loud. The people were freaking out. A guy
covered in blood rushed past me at one point. A naked chick was dancing on a
table and wiped out. I went outside and lit a cigarette from the pack I had in
my underpants elastic and there, in the sultry New Mexico night, a night full
of bugs and stars, I stared longingly at a Honda Passport scooter parked
nearby. How I would have liked to have one of those, I thought. Oh just to
ride, to be free, to leave the howling pack of mad people behind me and roll
through the darkness. What fun that would be. About that time I noticed a key
sticking out of the other side of my underpants elastic and I realized that
scooter was mine.

Quick as a flash I was gone. The streets were oddly quiet for a Halloween. Some time later I stopped at a traffic light and a lowrider full of Mexican thugs pulled up in the lane next to me. We looked at each other, kindred spirits, and I saluted them. I don’t know what they were thinking, but they somberly saluted back. I finally made it home and hours later I watched the sunrise, at peace with the world. Stories from that party are told every Halloween, from Portland to New York, from Hong Kong to Cape Town. That group of revelers went on to spread across the globe. In the end, that might be the true measure of a Halloween party. Three cheers to my old pals Mike Martinez and Alan Deem, both survivors of that night, and both members of that fabled band, Albuquerque’s own Fountain of Blood.

Halloween Parties

There have been millions and millions of Halloween parties.
I’ve been to dozens and dozens of them. I was thinking back this morning to
some of the better ones. The Halloween where I dressed as a ninja in this black
imitation silk thing and wound up snorting coke with a pack of strippers in my
friend Pete’s bathroom, the Halloween where someone fell off the roof and
landed right on this terrifying asshole two feet in front of me, the super
dumbass Halloween where I ate some kind of turbo mushroom/hash brownie and
suffered heart palpitations, all fine and dandy, but no Halloween holds a
candle to the Fountain of Blood party more than three decades ago in
Albuquerque, New Mexico. I don’t even know how that shit happened. People went
crazy that night, and I, a 15 year old fugitive, was among them.

The story begins with the fugitive part. I’d run away from a foster home in Missouri and people were looking for me. It happens. You aren’t supposed to split and cross state lines and bla bla bla. I’d fallen in with a pitiful group of losers but nearby, a bionic nest of bigtime losers were up to cool shit. Fountain of Blood was a punk/grunge/industrial band and they had a party, such was their wherewithal. And in that party, a Chernobyl guy brewed up a massive cauldron of tasty mushroom tea. I was dressed as a monk, just underwear and a Hindu-looking bed sheet, not really the right look for that kind of shindig, but whatever. One mug of mushroom tea, filled at the bottom with great slimy snails of mushroom goodness, and I lost that fucking robe sheet and became, in all my glory, a fifteen year old kid in his underwear.

The music was loud. The people were freaking out. A guy
covered in blood rushed past me at one point. A naked chick was dancing on a
table and wiped out. I went outside and lit a cigarette from the pack I had in
my underpants elastic and there, in the sultry New Mexico night, a night full
of bugs and stars, I stared longingly at a Honda Passport scooter parked
nearby. How I would have liked to have one of those, I thought. Oh just to
ride, to be free, to leave the howling pack of mad people behind me and roll
through the darkness. What fun that would be. About that time I noticed a key
sticking out of the other side of my underpants elastic and I realized that
scooter was mine.

Quick as a flash I was gone. The streets were oddly quiet for a Halloween. Some time later I stopped at a traffic light and a lowrider full of Mexican thugs pulled up in the lane next to me. We looked at each other, kindred spirits, and I saluted them. I don’t know what they were thinking, but they somberly saluted back. I finally made it home and hours later I watched the sunrise, at peace with the world. Stories from that party are told every Halloween, from Portland to New York, from Hong Kong to Cape Town. That group of revelers went on to spread across the globe. In the end, that might be the true measure of a Halloween party. Three cheers to my old pals Mike Martinez and Alan Deem, both survivors of that night, and both members of that fabled band, Albuquerque’s own Fountain of Blood.

The Portland UFO Story That Never Was

I’ve never seen anything I could point at and say without
doubt ‘There is a spacecraft from another world’, but I have seen a few things
I couldn’t explain. More compelling, I’ve heard stories from unrelated sources who
definitely saw something that was almost certainly not of this earth.

More than twenty years ago I went on a four day hiking trip
in the Mt. Hood area with my old pal Mike. It rained the first night, but on
the second it cleared up. We were camping just below the tree line and the sky
was impossibly clear and bright. We could see satellites. We talked late into
the night and at one point two satellites traveling parallel to each other
began crossing the horizon. It seemed odd. I pointed it out and Mike saw them
too. Halfway across the sky they split away from each other at perfect right
angles at the same instant, then moments later they were gone. I was about to
say something about it when a red light appeared in the same part of the sky.
It tracked much like a satellite, following the same track as the traveling
pair, and then the red light abruptly zigzagged, incredibly fast, and vanished
in the same area the first two had split. Interesting enough to get me talking
about it, and that’s where it got interesting.

Some years later I mentioned it in a conversation about
hiking when I was tattooing an older man. When I got to the UFO part of the
trip he looked way back in his life to his only encounter. It happened when he
was in his early teens, sometime in 1976 or so. His mother was driving. They
were on the freeway. Traffic stopped and for the first time he took notice.
This wasn’t usual rush hour traffic. People were getting out of their cars
looking at something in the sky. His mother got out and then so did he. There,
hazy with distance, was what appeared to be a truly massive UFO, hovering
between Portland and Mt. Hood. Everyone watched for several minutes until it
gradually rose into the sky and vanished.

The guy was a plumber or an electrician, something like
that. Not one of the old weirdos we had in Portland in those days, just a guy.
I didn’t think much of it until a few years later someone told me the same
story. Same profile, too. Portland native, mid-fifties. She shared an
interesting new detail, “It was never in the news. Not in the paper, not on the
TV, nothing. Hundreds of people stopped. There were cars as far as I could
see.”

Fascinating. Over the next decade several more people told
me the same story. The details were all a little fuzzy, but the root was always
the same. I asked a few random Old Portland people if they ever heard of this
and only a few had, but those few had wondered over the years just as I do now.
Is it possible, we all asked, to completely bury an event with this many witnesses
just by never reporting on it? Do events vanish from the public record if
they’re never recorded?