Sedona Brand Cat Nip

People always find it odd when I tell them how I grew up on a cat nip farm in Arizona. I tell them that a cat nip farm is really no different than any other working farm, no different than a dairy farm or a cattle ranch. No different than a farm that grows apples in orchards or oranges in groves. It’s just that our farm specialized in a peculiar crop…cat nip. Of course, cat nip isn’t peculiar to my family, The Gimbels have been slangin’ nip in the desert for four generations and other than a few acres of Dogwood my father planted in the North 40 many years ago, that’s all we grow.
The subsequent line of questioning is usually pointed at the pets we reared. “Was it a household full of cats?” and the answer to that would be no. My father was a dog-man through and through. Big dogs in fact; Alaskan malamutes. The Sonoran Desert is an odd backdrop for an Alaskan malamute. One wouldn’t expect to see such a canine, large and majestic with bushy white and black two-toned fur, all the defining characteristics of a great wolf, there among the saguaros and sage brush. One of our malamutes, named Caleb once killed a neighbor’s pit bull when the dog jumped our fence and threatened several of the area children that my mom would babysit at the time to make ends meet. Caleb grabbed the terrier by the back of the neck and shook the dog ‘till it went limp and its body flailed with the trajectory of the attack. That, however, is a different story, all together.

El Ranchito

Casey and I went to lunch at El Ranchito today.



We took my Olds Mobile because I wanted to take a hit from the Arizona Iced Tea can that I had malformed into a weed pipe.


Casey asked if the Olds was my O.G. car, like from Arizona. I explained that it was from Arizona but it was not my O.G. California car. My O.G. car was a beautiful 1994 Thunderbird, snow white and low to the ground. It was the type of car that Tron would drive when he wasn’t mounting laser bikes that travel at ferocious speeds, leaving laser-colored jet streams in their wake.


I told him that at the time that I drove the Thunderbird my only job was selling pot. This was an awesome job because it left me with lots of time to explore other interests. The only down side was my close proximity to all sorts of other delicious and tempting drugs. These drugs often took a lot of the time for activities that I was afforded by vocational choice of being a pot dealer.


Steffi was in school at the time and I would wake up every morning, after doing lots of exciting drugs the night before, to drive her the 4 or so miles to USC from Downtown.



On one such morning I was returning to our Downtown apartment when I was smashed with a wave of nausea from the previous night’s ecstasy or vicodin or some fucking mix of salvia and opium.


I began to puke out the window and for some reason had a knee-jerk reaction that caused me to swerve the T-Bird to the right every time I leaned my head to the left, to huck out of the window. It was a very strange reaction, the swerve corrected itself in the exact same degree as my head returning to postion, post-huck.


I was pulling into the underground parking lot of the Pegasus building on 6th where I then lived when I spewed one last puke n’swerve, this time hitting an exposed water pipe and screeching to a halt dead center in my own reserved parking spot.


I was concerned that my car was totaled and I was concerned about the water that was now quickly rising in the basement of the Pegasus but my main concern was getting the fuck out of there.


About a week later the manager of the Pegasus called me into his office, leaned very close to me over his big, oak desk and explained that he knew what had happened in the basement.


“I’m not going to do anything, but I know it was you that hit that water main and flooded the basement”


“I just don’t want you to think you got away with it”, he said.


“if you're not going to do anything then I sorta did get away with it”, I thought .

eat my butt

For Chris B:

Really?

You want to me to acquire a fork, a knife and eat your rear-end?

Devour it, consume it like so many chile verde burritos at El Ranchito.

This is what you’d like me to do so that you’d have nowhere to sit?

Soldier of Crist

Taken in the car park of the American Apparel
World Headquarters, AA employees are far
more religious then I had remembered. I don't
however believe that they will be winning any
spelling bees soon.

About three weeks ago Tory called me and informed me that he had pulled off what I thought to be an impossible task, he had won back for me my coveted slot with American Apparel. I had done a couple fun things during my six month leave but it was no secret that I missed the hustle, the bustle and the off-the-cuff creative flash flood that was an average weekday at the "big, pink factory". It truly was and is an unprecedented corporate experiment; Meryl Lynch on acid, in a tank-thong.
I'm wrapping up my second week. I now share an office at Sequoia with two boys. In the interest of their anonymity I will call my new(and much beloved) office mates Surfer Hulk and Maniac-Face. If you come visit me I will let you break a sweat deliberating which is which.
I remembered a poem, which I wrote merely weeks ago but which has achieved a greater level of obsolescence than the mac mini I use to type this correspondence. If you know me you would know that I believe that obsolescence should never blockade proliferation.



ode to my old job

I used to be a product developer for American Apparel, the greatest fashion label of our generation. A technical designer, really, I fit garments, calculated costing and decided between elastics with the best of them. One day, during a particularly rigorous fitting session, I pricked my middle and index fingers on a straight pin and found that I had technically designed myself out of a job. My factory issue blackberry still in my left hand, nostalgia is often delivered in alternating wafts of sheer jersey and taco truck asada.

rules for new blog

Rules for the new blog: Wee Ginger Cunt doesn’t serve me any longer. I’m a different person now. I’m still a ginger, I will always be ginger, but I’m a different ginger now. I tend to spend less time in the watering holes that birthed a thousand wgc entries; less time in La Cita, less time in Barragins… actually, no time in La Cita or Barragins. I must establish rules so that voices of chastity doesn’t go the way of ginger cunt; stale, offensive. 1. v.o.c. must be about the art, about the writing. 2. I must post whether a project is “complete” or not. These posts should serve as sketches for me and others, building blocks for projects fully-realized. 3. Will I write of records I play and things I buy, as I did with the cunt? Is this relevant? 4. Will I post of books I’m reading? Is this too boring, even though I would see things very differently, therefore write very differently, while reading Voltaire’s Candide, as I am now, then I would while reading Mann’s Holy Sinner, as I just have?

The way eye see it

I claim:1. An assembly for simulating a dilating and constricting pupil in an eye, comprising: a shell comprising a material that is at least translucent to light; and a dilation mechanism comprising a deformable member positioned to contact an inner surface of the shell and an actuator connected to the deformable member moving the deformable member toward and away from the inner surface to vary a size of a contact area between the inner surface and the deformable member. 2. The assembly of claim 1, further comprising a light source directing light onto the inner surface of the shell, whereby the deformable member blocks the light from reaching the inner surface at least at the contact area. 3. The assembly of claim 2, further comprising a pattern on the inner surface including a portion that is illuminated when exposed to ultraviolet light and wherein the light source comprises an ultraviolet light source and wherein the contact area at least partially covers the ultraviolet light portion of the pattern. 4. The assembly of claim 1, wherein the shell comprises a semi-spherical wall, the ultraviolet light portion of the pattern is located in a center area of the wall, and the contact area is positioned in a center of the ultraviolet light portion of the pattern. 5. The assembly of claim 1, wherein the deformable member is formed of a resilient material and the deformable member has a position that is variable by the actuator from a first position in which the contact area is at a minimum value to a second position more proximate to the inner surface in which the contact area is at a maximum value. 6. The assembly of claim 5, further comprising a controller controlling the actuator to move the deformable member in response to ambient light levels proximate to an exterior surface of the shell. 7. The assembly of claim 1, further comprising a colored liquid contacting the inner shell and being at least partially displaced by the deformable member at the contact area. 8. The assembly of claim 1, further comprising a supplemental light source directing light onto a side of the deformable member. 9. An eye assembly operable to provide a dilating pupil effect, comprising: a shell with an inner surface comprising a pattern formed with fluorescent materials; a light source generating ultraviolet light directed toward the pattern on the inner surface of the shell; and a dilating mechanism with a plunger formed of resilient material that is positionable at a first position to contact the inner surface within the pattern over a first contact area, at a second position to contact the inner surface within the pattern over a second contact area that is greater in magnitude than the first contact area, and at positions between the first and second positions. 10. The assembly of claim 9, wherein the dilating mechanism further comprises a linear actuator attached to the plunger via a shaft, the linear actuator operating to selectively position the plunger at one of the plunger positions relative to the shell inner surface. 11. The assembly of claim 9, further comprising a supplementary light source focusing light onto a side of the plunger. 12. The assembly of claim 11, wherein the supplementary light source comprises a colored light emitting diode and further comprising means for varying a brightness of the light emitting diode. 13. The assembly of claim 9, wherein the resilient material is black and the plunger is conical, frustoconical, semi-spherical, or spherical in shape. 14. A method for creating a dilating pupil effect, comprising: providing a pattern including fluorescent material on a surface of a wall that is at least partially transparent to light; directing ultraviolet light toward the pattern; and blocking the ultraviolet light from illuminating a portion of the pattern, whereby the portion of the pattern appears as a dark hole in surround portions of the pattern illuminated by the ultraviolet light, wherein the blocking of the ultraviolet light comprises contacting the portion of the pattern on the wall surface with a plunger formed of deformable and resilient material. 15. The method of claim 14, wherein the blocking comprises altering the contacting of the wall surface with the plunger such that the portion of the pattern blocked from the ultraviolet light increases or decreases in size. 16. The method of claim 15, wherein the positioning of the plunger is performed by operation of a linear actuator with a movable shaft attached to the plunger. 17. The method of claim 16, wherein the linear actuator is operated in response to sensed ambient light proximate to the wall. 18. The method of claim 14, further comprising directing supplemental light onto a side of the plunger concurrently with the blocking of the ultraviolet light.

lots of vicodin

for stephanie:

when you take lots of vicodin your pupils become pinholes

your eyes are an oriental rug in a rich family's foyer