Thursday, March 7, 2024

SHOPPING RURAL AMERICA (with bonus mildly gay content)

  Well here we are in the Lynden Christian Thrift Store!
 
   Everybody in this picture is taller than me  


As you can see it's a big warehouse of a space, and that's because it's the old gymnasium building of the Lynden Christian School K-12.

 I've been going here for over 30 years and making out like a bandit, because the old dears they wrangle into volunteering have not the slightest clue as to value or collectability.  Few even know how to operate a cash register, come to that, and if they're feeling extra flustered they might just lean over the counter and whisper "Go ahead and take it."   

On the one hand I feel weird because the proceeds go to supporting Lynden Christian School, which is an institution that makes me itch for a whole number of reasons LOWEST TEST SCORES 'N' HIGHEST TEEN PREGNANCY PERCENTAGE IN THE STATE *ahem*  
But then on the other hand...


   Oh my Lord, they have the deals.   
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I always go crate digging first. Some mornings you can still find quality vinyl here!  
Sadly today was not that day. 

      
    

Didn't you hate this guy^^^ when you was a kid? This fucker would come on around 4: P.M. Sunday evening with his stupid accordion and play all thisEasy Listening, German hoot and holler Swedish barf music, and your parents would instantly fall asleep like they'd been clubbed. GAAAH Lawrence Welk!!!!

This is what the old dears consider 'A Collectable'. I ask you.  So lets head into the next room, shall we?


Oh damn look we're there. 

  Some of this used to belong to dead people.     


   They have excellent displays that they change out from week to week, always of local historic interest. This week we have Vintage Pep gear on display way up on a shelf where you can't buy it. (I was all 007-ing around trying to take pictures here, since they seem touchy about it, so I didn't get the whole thing. It must have been 25 feet long, all memorabilia.)

    


Let's get this over with first. 
This thing^^^ is 4ft. tall.  Now imagine about 32,500 tchotchkes following this^^^ basic theme and you have the LCTS shopping experience in full.  Old Testament quotes are prominent, as are anything they can lift out of context like this from our man Timothy:  

“A woman must quietly receive instruction with entire submissiveness. But I do not allow a woman to teach or exercise authority over a man, but to remain quiet.” 1 Timothy 2:11-12

I wish I had a fuckin' nickle for every time I've run across the above quote in this store over the years.  GAAH.  

*ahem* Anyway. Back to our shopping!

     

  Now this^^^ is an actual collectors' item, if you like Heritage Plates and Franklin Mint - type stuff. Me, I would lose the will to live if I had to look at this thing on my kitchen counter every morning. 
    

 It's Babs! 


   Do you know what this is?  This is a miniature soft-cheese spreading knife for all your Halloween soft-cheese needs.     

About twenty years ago the town of Lynden kind of, sort of, banned Halloween; as in people would go door to door and ask that you take down your decorations because Halloween is a pagan holiday and Lynden is a Christian town (no shit, this happened) so yeah, tacitly banned the celebration of Halloween - as such. No, October was for celebrating 'Harvest', all about farming and the land and making your kids dress up like scarecrows.  Lynden Christian Thrift Store rigidly upheld this stand. They wouldn't sell Halloween decor. It never got past the intake area. They pitched it all, folks...be it as innocent as Casper the ghost, or as bloody as a life-sized statue of Freddy Kruger. Which I saw there. Being shit-binned. 

Now look at them with their Satanic Soft Cheese knives. I guess these days money is green no matter whose Satanic claws have touched it first.

OK, enough of that. Onward. 
      


   See this lady?  This lady works here. In fact, this is all the ladies who have ever worked here. She is your cashier. She goes around and straightens things all day long. She stops to chat, and she takes misplaced things back to their rightful locations. She sweeps and dusts and sorts.  I am grateful for this lady and the job she does.  She makes the LCTS without a doubt the best thrift experience in the whole of Washington.   


I LOVE their yard goods selection! This is only a small part of it - and it's all quality stuff, too. Lots of people out here make their own clothes, and I reap the benefits when it's time for them to let go of their hoards. You can get anything sewing related here, from hand-held Ronco buttonholers to full sized pedal looms, sergers, armature quilting set ups, you name it.  Buttonhooks, leather working tools, felting needles and tailors  hams - you can find it here in good condition and...

FOR CHEEP!



Another thing that Lynden Christian Thrift is good for is old weird cookbooks! Out of shot I have an armload of them.   


   LCTS also has the best glassware of all glasswares that can be selected ever of the moon and Venus! I have found signed Chihuly pieces here, and not just the tourist jellyfishes - the big statement pieces. Fact. I've found Waterford too, and Scandanavian lead crystal, and French Pyrex, all   


FOR MUCHO CHEEP



But what is the very best thing to buy here at LCTS you might ask?  Well let me fill you in buckaroo. 


For all your
CHEEP
   
...reading needs, damn bro, you could do a heck of a lot worse than make a trip out to the Lynden Christian Thrift Shop and visit their tremendous book section!

You know you want to.      

It looks nothing like this.

       
A lot of the people out here homeschool their kids.  And they don't fuck around, either**. They invest in quality materials, and then...dump it all. LCTS is where I've scored most of my hard reference over the years. I mean stuff like the Harvard Classical Encylopedia for TWO BUCKS BABY and The Websters Unexpurgated Dictionary of the English Language FOR A DOLLAR FIFTY OO RAH and hard rocking selections like that.  If you party like I party, go here for your high-end reference, and be assured it will be sold to you


...quite inexpensively indeed.


And then we have regular books that normal people like.  Travel books, hiking books, manuals, magazines. Yes, you can find Fifty Shades of Gray here.  I got a copy of 'Lolita' here years back. Anne Rice, Kurt Vonnegut, they're all here.  Mostly you'll find Hot Romance novels - oh yes, the train enters the tunnel and fireworks do go off - and Dude Stuff about snipers and spies and fast paced thrills and danger and explosions and shit. It all sells 50 cents for a paperback, a buck for a hardcover. The selection is huge!
        
   OH DAMN AND THEY HAVE VINTAGE BOOKS GALORE 
You can read about Jane!  She's a stewardess!
  
   

      
 I mean look at these old hardcovers!!     

I adore the cover of this Teen 'Career Girl' novel!  Reminds me of Mistress Maddie out on a binge!

    

OK I'm sorry but I came back to this book cover about ten times asking myself if I just had a really dirty mind or was this a really...charged...image. I know two things:  This is a straightforward Christian book about Forgiveness, and dammit, that image out of context looks way more homoerotic than the publishers probably intended.    




    Being a bisexual person, this title seriously appeals to me. 
I flipped through it. Basically Janie climbs trees and runs when she should walk and gets her clothes dirty, and all the adults around her express grave worries about her character.  Well, as it turns out, Janie obeys the Lord in all things, and the adults finally just shrug and tell each other 'She'll grow out of this stage.' 
(Sequel:  JANIE WINS A NOBEL PRIZE and all the adults around her shrug and tell each other 'She'll grow out of this stage.')    


OO! Here is when the baby gay stars aligned and the gods sniggered like doofuses:

    Well well well!  I opened it to flip through and see what those rascals on Gay Street got up to on Saturday night, when I saw this on the flyleaf. 
I swear to you, I gasped.

Look who used to own this book -   

In her best Palmer Method.  

      This was a peak experience in my thrifting career, made ever so much more delicious by the fact that it happened in the Lynden Christian Thrift Store. I am a six year old. I know. I know.

Well there you have it.  

Next time here on whatever this blog is called:  GROCERY HIJINKS!  That is if I haven't lost you with the 'Lela Fagg' thing. 

 

      

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     **If you intend on homeschooling a kid all the way through high school here in Washington, your kid must, by  law, pass state competencies in order to receive a transcript. Once Billy matriculates -Suzie will be two kids on by then - Mom and Dad dump the books at the ol' LCTS and I swan in and grab'em 

 FO CHEEEEEEEEP 
        
    



 

Saturday, February 24, 2024

Combustion Normal Frog 5000 Times

 Yesterday, the frongs began singing in the woods. I opened my bedroom window and froze my shabadoos off just so I could lie there in bed and listen to them croaking. Which is not to say they were deceasing. No no. They was singing

Greep.

I am not one of those people who is squicked out by flogs. I like them a lot. If they hop on me, I am all "Rock on lil' goggie" and I am cheerful because a frug has seen fit to land on my surface; and I try and aim him or her towards a patch of nice damp cover so it has a comfortable place to escape to when it has realized its error/smelled the patchouli. 

I have had quite a lot of gogs jump onto me, in fact, because I used to garden, and I got right down in there up el-close and personal with the dirt. That's where the flugs hang out, dude. 

This is a fnorg.  And in case you lost the instructions for your flbog, here you go:  
______________________________

There is no difference between frogs and toads.  None. They're all frogs. I learned this off Wikipedia.

______________________________

Two samurai and Woody Allen as far as I can make out    


I have three post ideas in mind. What would you like to see first?

1. The Shit Ditch - How You Find Where 'The Other Side Of The Tracks' Was In A Pioneer Settlement (featuring the first video I've ever made!!!  It's of a shit ditch.) If I can figure out how to get a video off my phone and onto this blog!

2. We go thrift shopping in Lynden, with photos!

3. Hunts Tomato Sauce Cookbook, 1976  (includes brown sugar used in unspeakable ways) with photos!

VOTE NOW BITCHES
You better vote.
I mean it.

Sunday, February 18, 2024

Did I steal this idea from Mistress Maddie? Yes. Yes I did.

What are your favorite and least favorite cities?        

Well let's get right down to it.

LEAST FAVORITE: Tijuana, Mexico.

The first and only time I visited was back in 1977. 

The Tijuana I visited was a sprawling mountain of garbage with a few streets running through it.  It existed to traffic in the very lowest and coarsest type of obscenity, vice, and sleaze, and it stunk like a thousand sewers. 



That ^^^ is a picture of Dharavi.
 
Now imagine dogs, crows, seagulls, rats, and hundreds of little kids climbing all over this trash.  Paint the buildings fuschia, orange, porn-yellow and blue, and then burn half of them down.  Imagine roiling black tire smoke meandering over the rooftops and down the streets. Then you'll have an idea of what Tijuana looked like in 1977. No one wanted you there, and no one wanted to be there.

I guess it's supposed to have improved since then. I don't fucking plan on going back to see.


Most Favorite City: Nope, not giving away the name or precise location

It's a little town on the Oregon Coast.  

Might be me. Probably isn't.   


The modest main street was built using 1940's war dollars,  lots of brick and a little neon. The residences are neat and the streets very narrow.  Nice, tidy, not garish, not touristy. 

The place hit an economic low in the 1950's, and then beatniks and hippies came up from California in the 1960s looking for cheap real estate and found this little town preserved in amber.  



Shimmering afar like a blessed vision of hope in the darkness:  A Freakin' Brewpub   


They brought in head shops, book and record stores, coffee shops, posters and textiles, and kites - huge things! Giant geometric kites that take a gang of people to fly! It became the home of what would become this whole underground community of extreme kite flyers. (That's when you wait for a huge storm, then tie a dude to a kite and fly him way out to sea, or up a mountain, and let the wind mess with him; and other ill- advised shit involving kites and testosterone poisoning.)      


Yes it is!

There are a few full-sized homes; mostly it's vacation cottages. Very, very old vacation cottages, perfect miniatures of housing styles further inland - little Victorians, little Sears houses, faux log cabins, tiny Ranch styles and Cape Cods, you name it. Can I find a picture of what I mean?  Dang ol' dang ol' NO I cannot. So look at this vvv and wish it was in your state/country/on your planet.


It is my little town.  MINE.  You can go there to visit, but don't bring your party buddies. 

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In case you were interested in how we deal with shit in the PNW (like throbbing mountain studs, is how) check out this video. Just skip ahead to 1:19 and let it rip.

(3) Exploding Whale 50th Anniversary, Remastered! - YouTube

Thursday, February 15, 2024

What Makes You Feel Lively?

 You know what is not cute is feaguing.  And I'll tell you why. 

Feaguing is when you stick a live eel up a horse's ass. 

Knock knock! GUESS WHO?     

Yes it is. 

Feague Definition & Meaning | YourDictionary

There is even a SONG about it. Guess where it comes from? 

 Come on. Guess. 

I'll give you a hint: It comes from a country where people danced to a song about sticking eels up a horse's butt.  

Feaguing Before Ginger: A Lively Horse Discussion - The Eels of History: Dead Fish Stories (historiacartarum.org)

I mean what in the hell. What in the hell. Come on.

Why was I even looking up this stuff?  

I wasn't!  Really! I was looking up a recipe for seafood cocktail sauce!

The ingredient that gives cocktail sauce that kick is horseradish. I was wondering if I could sub in a red radish, or even a daikon, and so I began my search at horseradish.  

Read read read. Scroll scroll scroll. I'm suddenly getting a lot of equestrian related results, so I hit a link, and...


Gingering!  Yes, that ginger. A root vegetable with a sordid history, apparently.

 Use? It's the same idea as feagueing, just not with an eel.  

Now ask me about horseradish. (Hey, so what's the deal with horseradish anyway, 'Nations?) Funny you should ask.  Gingering was the way nice people livened up their horses. Mean people? stuck a

Whole Peeled Horseradish   


  ...up there.      

Yes. Yes. You or someone you love just...sticks it right up there. Right up that horse butt.

1. Who looked at a horse and said to, say, Abraham Lincoln, 'You know what we should do? We should stick a whole peeled horseradish up that horses' ass.'  Think about this the next time someone hands you a five.  Yes yes I read the article, but who would just go up and say something like that to Abraham Lincoln?

Oh, and  this practice is the reason that people call that particular plant 'Horseradish'. I know our parents told us it was because you had to be strong as a horse to eat it but they were LYING.

 I, after more clicking and reading and needing to pause to sort out my head, chose a link at random, and whaddya know? I found out how mixed drinks got the slang name 'cocktail'!  

A look at the (possibly) vulgar origin of the word ‘cocktail’ | WLNS 6 News

This makes so much sense that my mind is settled on the subject.  It's exactly the kind of barnyard raunch you expect to come out of old-time drinking culture.

Now see? Here we are right back at 'cocktail' again. It's that six degrees of separation thing at work, or however many degrees. And I'm still in the dark about radishes.


_______________________________

OK FINE yes. You in the back there. Savannah. To answer your question: Yes. People do this to each other too. Or to themselves.  It's called figging. Well it is in horses too, called figging, but mostly in people. Now that's me assuming based on what I've read online. Quit looking at me like that.

2. Once again I'm left wondering who first thought 'You know what I'm going to do with this piece of ginger? I'm going to jam it straight up my butt."  And they asked their neighbor soccer great Lionel Messi 'What do you think about me jamming this up my butt?" and he said "Never speak to me again or I'll call the landlord." 

This is just how I think it probably happened. So quit bugging me about it, Savannah. I mean it.





Friday, February 9, 2024

Fresno Fugitive Flees , Forfeits Final Ford Festiva

 I've declared yesterday as The Last Day of Winter.  There's nothing you can do about it so don't try.

I had to go out to North County, and rather than lurk around Sumas or go hang out in Lynden (aka Dutch Reformed Hell) thinking Liberal thoughts and dodging thunderbolts from Heaven, I thought to myself 'Self, why not go hunting for Spring?'

So off I went, AND I BROUGHT MY CAMERA!  (NOTE: Exciting eagle digression ahead!)

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There is a certain way the air smells on a winter day. Like getting ready for school in the morning, like the way a rain barrel smells in the cool of the day.  Everything is waiting to grow. Cold damp earth and old leaves, damp wood, you smell that, and moss - it's the moss that smells the most like Winter, I think. 

There's still a little ice in the air, but no movement. Not even a breeze today. 

Here we are under the eaves of a storm I've spent three hours travelling beneath, just skirting the raindrops. I'm standing in a ditch looking out over a fallow corn field.  It is so, so still.



This is a favorite place of mine way, way up in the brush.  Not a ripple on the water. Not a sound.  It's a view that hasn't changed in hundreds of years.   
Up in that tree ^^^ there is a little dot.  When I utilize the miracle of modern technology, lo and behold:


...we get a lovely little kingfisher!


      

I have found my way out onto Rez land today.  Here is what it looks like when you cross onto a Native Reserve:


See the line in the pavement?  That's it. One side - the left, here - is maintained by the County, and the other side is maintained by the BIA. There you go. 

 That field is planted in year-old raspberry canes, and the white things are bundles of string used to tie the canes over to one side in order to train them so the pickers can go among them later in the year.  You can make out tan patches on the hillside in the rear - those are managed clearcuts. 

I thought about going around taking pictures on the Rez but aside from that being in poor taste, there simply isn't anything to see. Here's what I mean:


Up the road and....


Down the road.   No buckskin-clad Indigenes shooting flaming arrows or anything. 

My people are boring.


Here we have a field full of sad, sad Brussels Sprouts - that have spent the last month under water - and in the distance a line of trees along the upper Nooksack River. In those trees there is a little clump way up in the branches...right in the center...


....and here's what that's about - an eagles nest the size of an ATV!  

A month ago this nest looked like it had been hit by the truck. But the eagles came back from their winteer sojourn up in the Haida Gwai, found love, and began hauling around huge broken tree limbs getting the nest fixed up, and now the hen eagle, I presume, is hunkered up there on a clutch of eggs. 

These are Ball-Headed Eagles. 
*ahem*
As they are known locally.

From my personal store of nature experiences:  Bald Eagles don't mess around. When they decide to settle down, stand back. They'll scream at you. They'll fly low and hiss and clack. They'll tear limbs off trees and take stuff out of construction site dumps and off beaver dams and it's just a hazardous situation. They don't care if they drop a huge branch on your car in the process. And the nearer to their nest they are, the more a Ball-Headed eagle likes to shit, which is an impressive sight;  but not so much when one ass-blast paints your entire windshield.  

I mean it. Eagles don't care.  They don't. 
Nope.


Aha!  Here's the eagle. You bet he just shit a gallon bucket full of Fuck No before he flew up to this branch to take a look at me.
 
You might think "Poor bird, what are you going to eat?  All the field rats drowned and washed away. Why are you hanging around here by the Brussels Sprouts?' 
 
The eagle doesn't give a rip about field rats. That eagle is waiting for a duck to swim by in the river down below, and then it will have a duck dinner. I deliberately did not take pictures of all the duck parts that were lying around in this area by the eagle nest. People get squicky about Nature doing things like that. But yeah, that's how eagles live. They rip up a chunky duck and sling the beak and feet just wherever.
 

First sign of Spring - check!


Now here we are waaaaaaaaaay  up the mountain.

This tree would have scared the life out of me when I was a little kid. 
 
This is another lake out in the brush that I've fished quite a bit. It's loaded with fat cranky bass and aggressive trout. The water is clear as a bell and the marsh and woods are verdant and beautiful and alive with birds in the summer.  

Now here it is in winter.  

And this is beautiful too, in its way.   






If you want to live in the Pacific Northwest, you need to accept this ^^^^ reality.  This is what Winter looks like here.  The sky is silver, like a pearl, like the inside of an oyster shell. The fields are tan and the forests are grey and black. 
This is what life looks like sleeping. 
This cold, wet, waiting silence is what births the Spring.
 
I will never love another place as much as I love this place.


























Tuesday, February 6, 2024

Nude Hammer Combat

Here's an ill-considered post.



Every single year since I can remember, California has suffered catastrophic flooding. Every single year. Streets awash, houses collapsing, houses sliding down hillsides, all that. Every. Single. Year.

Every single year, ________________________ (fill in with Southern/Midwestern state of choice) experiences horrific tornadoes. Entire towns are wiped off the map. People, livestock, swept away, dead, gone. Financial ruin. Power outages, fires, gas leaks, chemical spills, all follow in the wake.

Every single year, the Northeast has crippling blizzards that bring huge metropolises to a complete stop. Everyone goes out in their Yugos, Kias, and Ford Festivas and does doughnuts on the freeway and crash, and freeze to death and get covered in snow.

Wow look! This is a radish that looks like a butt!  Bring up 'figging' now. I dare you.   
    

Locally, Skagit County floods every single winter, and always the same area; the same families and businesses are annually rescued off their roofs, out of the attics and from trees, millions of dollars go into cleanup and then those same-ass people move right back in to the same stupid fucking place. 

This is happening right now in Sumas. 

My capacity to give a rusty rat's ass about it is just about kaput.

Gratuitous and non-sequitur wiener goofiness   


It's difficult not to throw out a lot of 'Why can't they just' solutions.  I know that people have different reasons for why they might be economically tied to a certain place, or why it might be difficult to plan ahead. I am not talking about them. I am talking about when it's an entire region! When it's the rich, the poor and everyone in between going through the same cataclysmic thing year after year and making absolutely no provision for the future, changing nothing, moving back into the same place, living in the same flood plain, on the same earthquake fault, squarely in the path of the same extreme storms, throwing up more tilt-up buildings and mobile homes and....I mean come on!

 

This is a rubber fishie toy! If you squish it the eyes bloop out.  
      

My ill-considered comment on this is, maybe forego the Lexus this year and throw some money into improving your property with an eye to the fucking future. Four-wheel drive vehicles for you snowbirds. Reinforced cast concrete is a good thing. Raise those foundations.   Or hey, maybe take that look into the future and realize the environmental cards are stacked against you and SELL. Freaking leave. Move away

I find that particularly in the Midwest, there is a 'Storm Rider' mindset going on.  As though subjecting yourself to easily-avoided, disastrous annual setbacks is a virtue.  It isn't. You aren't a fine specimen of a hardy breed. You're an idiot

When disaster is normalized, this is what you get:

Natural disaster is inevitable in California. And it can define a governor’s legacy - Los Angeles Times (latimes.com)

It's like living in a woodchipper that just spits you out and then sucks you back in, while all the businesses aimed at relief and re-building winnow out an annual cycle of economic return. 

Meanwhile you think you're quite the hardcore soul indeed as you keep feeding yourself into the hopper. 

Mobile Homes vs Tornados - Home Nation


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Well I'm glad I got that off my chest. Now here's a thing.


Try not to think about it too hard.       

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You want to see change?  Write in your vote:

Write In Chthulhu (youcanwritein.com)