Tribute to Marcel Duchamp

I sometimes get out of work earlier on weekends than during weekday because I arrive earlier to process obituaries. Sunday night I got out at 11:30 p.m. I bought a 6-pack of beer (Geary's pale ale made in Portland, Maine) and made a tribute to Marcel Duchamp with yesterday's (now yester-yesterday's) newspaper. (I wish more girls had mustaches.) Good thing I said that parenthetically! (skye.) (syke-syke.) (wtf?)

Bored in Augusta, Maine

It was bound to happen. It's happened everywhere I've ever lived or visited. Now I am in Augusta, bored. It's a lot more beautiful here than in many of those other places. But I'm here by myself. In an empty city. Bored.

Problemfall KSK - Deutschlands Eliteeinheit in Verruf

The German television news show "Monitor" used some of my 2001 - 2002 Kandahar, Afghanistan images in a report they did recently on a prisoner who was in the detention facility during that time.
I have linked the above images to the Web TV report. They used 6 of my pictures. I'm glad those pictures are still telling a story!

Augusta Non-Comic Strips

I was thinking this might be funny, wrong.
The first comic refers to an article in the Kennebec Journal's Opinion Page last week saying that native Mainers are less interested in the conservation of Maine than non-natives. Which is true most of the time, in most places.
2.) No ATVs in the Kennebec Highlands! The crazy people up here were trying to pass a law that would allow four-wheelers on the same trails as hikers.
The third comic refers to Rob, the psycho kid that lives on the third floor of the Edwards House Inn. He went to the mental hospital for attacking his mom, his dad is a state attorney. Now he spends his free time roaming the halls of the Edwards House Inn trying to bum money and beer and crapping in the second floor bathtub.
Forth, The Arby's up here has free wi-fi, wooooo! Roast beef and Web surfing!
5.) Lobsters!
Family Circus) the low-level crimes people get put in jail for around here, and the insane crimes they seem to go free on. The jails are so crowded the state is trying to take over the county jails to save money.
7.) There are actually an abundance of mentally ill folks up here. AMHI refers to The Augusta Mental Health Institute, now defunct. But they let everyone out, and apparently they're still here. Just hanging around the libraries and whatnot. They call them AMHI Alumni. Good for writing material, bad for shower hygiene.

Lake George, for Now

It was fun just walking through the trails at Lake George. Every step seemed like some place new. Ahhhhhh ... I actually caught myself in the cliche of taking in deep breaths of green forest smells, followed by long satisfying exhales.
I thought, if we hadn't killed of so many species already I'd be a little afraid of something wild trying to eat me out here. That seemed like a good feeling too, one that I might not have had for a couple hundred years.
You can get lost 'just enough' (crappy trail maps make that a lot easier), walking through all the trails. Lake George is large, and long as you remain conscious of it, you'll never get lost, it seems. And, you might find yourself (as I did), picking up rocks, poking at slugs, and admiring mushrooms.
The trees were extremely noisy; sometimes like a distant chainsaw. Sometimes whining. Always the loud hush of wind waving through them.



Looking for the 'Scenic View,' I've already taken the wrong direction & ended up:
-in a school yard w/ kids at recess
-at a trail head, where I picked up a near-useless map (of unmarked trails)
-and just as I was starting to feel like a human animal, on the right track, I popped out in someones backyard, by a clothesline in full use.
I headed back into the trails and decided I should just head for high ground. And, after about 10 minutes I ended up in someone else's yard. But it appeared no one was home, so I pressed on at the edge of the tree line. (Probably like Big Foot, or just another Maine psycho making his way to work in the evening.) I started running higher and higher, through the space between the trees. Spaces, that to me, appeared to be nothing but countless trails. Just as I was going to start worrying I ran across a marker, and a well-worn path. & about 200 more feet up the path I found the 'Scenic View.' It was. I enjoyed it and the craggy area it was located in for 20 minutes, then started my decent, passing the only other hiker I'd seen all day. I stopped to write something down and he passed me on his way back.
"Whoa! You scared me!" I said. "Heh," he laughed. Everyone laughed, even the trees.
Further down I started off the trail again. According to the map the trail was leading me in the wrong direction. The woods leading down to the side of Lake George seemed alive. Not with activity, but literally in a sometimes creepy way. These weren't the woods of European myths, these were the woods of the American Indian myths, tales, past, history, legends. I leaned against a tree and it yelled at me not to lean there. A high-pitched alien, not-heard-by-humans yell.
(Below: me as a human animal, notice the gables of someone's home through the trees.)



There were ferns and moss, and fresh animal sign that made it alive too! Mushrooms and leaves as brightly colored as tropical fish. Alive!

The Wal-Mart Effect

What!? I was bored, and it was the middle of the night. So! I went to Wal-Mart in the middle of the night, so what?! (I bought a tire pressure gauge!) Tyler Marshall, my Mid-East Politics professor, senior year at Corcoran College of Art, won a Pulitzer Prize for his contributions in reporting a series for the Los Angeles Times called The Wal-Mart Effect (2003).


And if you wondered, yes there are people there in the middle of the night just walking through the aisle, looking at nothing. (Like me.) Awesome!!

Augusta-Area Ponds:

Jimmie, Jimmies, Jamies Pond


After reading an article in the outdoors section of the Kennebec Journal I decided to go out to Jamies Pond, a 100-acre pond somewhere north of Hallowell, Maine. I had a little trouble finding the pond because I didn't have a map. At one point I wound up at the dead end of a road where a woman named Cynthia, who lives at the dead end, was putting some mail in her mailbox.
"You don't get many people coming down this road I guess," I said, pointing to the end of the road about 20 feet ahead of me.
"No," said Cynthia.
I asked her for directions to Jamies Pond and we talked for about 20 minutes, the whole time standing in the middle of the dead end road. She told me the pond used to be called Jimmie Pond before the Maine Land Trust took it over and secured it as a conservation and park area. I told her if you google "Jamies Pond, Maine" a road comes up "Jamies Pond Road" that leads to Jimmie Pond. She said people call it both because their speech is lazy and it changes through word of mouth.
Cynthia gave me directions, and I drew a map on a newspaper.
At Jamies Pond I met Dan Albert, a Maine guide who rents kayaks and canoes. I started talking to him about the pond. He said not many people take advantage of it, but today some day-shifters from town were taking in some nature via lunchtime canoing. I asked him about all the different names for the pond. He agreed that it was a 'word of mouth' thing that left this place with multiple names, but it is now officially recognized as Jamies Pond (except Google). Albert told me of another pond on the other side of the Kennebec River that is called Joy, Joy's, and Joyce Pond. You strange, strange 'word of mouth,' you.
When I finally started down the hiking trail I found that it was conveniently marked so that both stone-stacking Neanderthals and spray-painting Urbanites can easily find their way.
The paths are perfect for dignitaries like me, as the Kennebec Journal article said Steve Staples, a local fishing guide said, "I'm standing out there, and it's like I'm out here all by myself. That's the great thing especially with the capital so close. Who knows? Maybe a governor wants to entertain another governor from somewhere, and the governor likes to do a little hiking. What better place than that one that is so close?"
So if any governors want to come and visit this gov, and walk around in nature eating organic things out of plastic containers, let me know. And I found no plastic containers, and hardly any litter at all except a glass bottle. (Which I picked up to carry with me, but set down to take a picture, and then forgot about.)
On the way back to my truck (with new lobster license plates), I was jumping from rock to rock. I was careful not to damage the moss or sidewalk-crack/pioneer plants sprouting out of the rocks. Being observant, I noticed little burrows between the rocks; little holes in the ground. I thought they must belong to beavers or muskrats ... or snakes. Then I started thinking about bears. And about the skunk I saw in the Kennebec Journal parking lot a couple days ago. And the dead porcupine on the road. And I started thinking about Badgers. And that me, plus these beautiful woods, probably equals a badger or wolverine. So I left thinking happier thoughts of Joy Pond.


Joy, Joy's, Joyce Pond

I took Dan Albert's general directions, then asked someone working in their garage off the highway where I could find the pond. From those combined directions I found five different ponds in the same area. One of these is Joy, Joy's, or Joyce Pond.

p.s. according to the shower situation this morning- he's ba-aack!

Sleep Augusta

Maine is a strange place, and Augusta is the capital. Yesterday a new guy moved into the Edwards House Inn, across the hall from me and down a little. I saw that he left his room door wide open as he came out of the bathroom.
"Hey, you shouldn't leave your door open like that when you go to the bathroom," I told him. "There are some real strange people around here."
He looked at me and patted me on the back, "Oh, thanks for telling me buddy."
Oh, crap! You're one of them, I thought immediately.
I came home from work last night and looked down a couple doors. Yup, the guy's door was open with an eerie glow. I went to sleep listening to him walk back and forth in the hall.
I woke up a couple hours later and went to use the bathroom. His door was still open. When I came back from the bathroom I had to check the closet and under the bed this guy was so creepy. When I finally started going to sleep I received a text message from "5000" that read, "/Message to room. not delivered - Invalid destination address. From: 5000 1:47 am 9/10/07."
Does anyone else think that's freaky?

The Florida of the North

I walked across the bridge to the other side of the Kennebec yesterday to see 50 Ford Model Ts at Old Fort Western.
The are lots of public festivals and happenings that I'm starting to notice living way up here. Sometimes I feel like I have moved into a retirement community (not just because of the demographics of Maine), or someplace where somebody else has planned out weeks of 'interesting' activities for me in advance.
There had to be more free public events in D.C. than there are here, I just didn't take advantage of them, they became familiar, I didn't notice them. This morning I was going to go to a fiddle and art festival up north in Skowhegan, but it's raining- and I have to go into work earlier than usually to start on the obituaries.

Mans' Struggle

Last night the police never came. But for what seemed like a couple hours, a large man across the hall struggled to tear the doorknob off the door with a pair of butter knives. The man seemed nice. I offered to call the landlord for him; I offered to call the maintenance man. "No, no. It's the middle of the night!" the man said. (I'm aware of that, I thought.) At one point I told the man he was bleeding. I motioned towards the floor. "Your foot might be bleeding. You're stepping in blood," I said. "Oh, is it me?" he said. He went to the bathroom to wash off the blood. I turned up the music a little bit. And we both went on with our Stephen King-like nights.

Augusta: Day, Night

After being around a lot of people and then moving to a rural area, I am beginning to realize what a lot of people already know. I was thinking, back in DC and elsewhere populated, I had become a little piece of everyone I knew, everyone I hung out with. It is like here, rural here, you begin to see who yourself is. I have been thinking lately, "Man, I'm a jerk!" But then I realized it's not me at all, it's just my old friends.


This morning my truck came in handy for going to the laundromat. Saved time. Should have walked. Drove. Took years of my life. Have clean clothes.


Last night there was a racket up on the 3rd floor of the Edward's House Inn. I called Larry, the landlord, and said he might want to do something about the 3rd floor. It sounded like property was being damaged.
The cops and sheriff came about 20 minutes later. They were here for about 30 minutes and the noise stopped. There's a rumor floating around that when the cops came last night they took with them the mysterious 'Shower Crapper.'
To everyone's happiness the shower was clean this morning. I asked the Carla at the front desk, she said the police had come to the wrong address.