Several Quaint Vignettes etc. El Apartmento

Important break for sexy logger chicks:

If there is one thing the Biker loves, it's gore. Naturally, today's modern media is his playground.  Yet imagine my surprise when I found him watching episodes of 'Botched' from nine years ago!  This is generally not his jam. If it's medical, he'd prefer they show up on the autopsy table.  

Well, I took me a look.  "Aha," I thought after a few scenes. "He's watching this for glimpses of bare titty.  Good Lord. Straight men."

Then I took a second look. 

"Holy crap," I thought, doing more than my share of mental heavy lifting this particular evening "These are some familiar faces...?"

So I went online, and between my spotty memory and IMDB I was able to identify several aged 'third shepherd from the left' actors from the Seventies, a future Ru-girl, and a whole lotta potential for an excellent drinking game. From misused medical terms to poor special effects, from bad stage management to 'Didn't I see you playing Judith Lights' sisters' chauffeur on an episode of Columbo?" this show has it all, including more bad wigs than you can shake a can of Aqua Net at. There is scar tissue. There are bad body doubles. There are doctors who cannot tell the difference between a vagina and a hole in the

- yes well.

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Since I am never going to have the chance to travel to all the places I want to go (everywhere, including the past) I love to go on Google Maps > street view and virtually roam.

One of the things I've realized doing this is just how fucking huge America really is.   

Another thing I've realized is how much of an accomplishment it was to cross all that bullshit in a covered wagon.  Both my grandparents (and their families) did that. Oh, and one uncle who was a Civil War deserter who fucking walked here.

Interesting story: they tried to conscript my uncle Karl right off the boat from Germany; and he said kthnxNO and booked it over the purple mountains' majesty and across the fruited plains. The dude went from New Orleans to Milwaukie Oregon afoot, folks. 2517 miles. Speaking no the English.  

My grandmother hid him out in an outbuilding when he arrived in the middle of Winter, and then in the Spring he went up the mountain and worked in the woods. You didn't have to know English to work in the woods. You just had to survive, and he sure in the fuck knew how to do that.  He survived knife fights, bare-knuckle bouts, strike breakers and rail bosses.  An old-growth cedar took him out. 

Not him. 

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I was virtually visiting a tiny-tiny little place in the middle of my home state when I happened across a cemetery in the literal middle of nowhere. No town, no nothing. Not even a road that goes there any more. Just a collection of stones marking the graves of the few people who had settled and died on that land.  Those stones are as perfect as they day they were carved. No vandals have touched them. 1842 to 1902. A single family and their two servants. 

Dickens was still alive. Poe was still alive. Victoria BC was a clearing in the woods when these people were building their house and opening land to cultivate out along the Columbia River. They came from Germany to a place that no books of the day described truthfully. They had no idea of what to expect and plenty of opportunity for even their most conservative expectations to be crushed. They arrived to find country where the land is all horizon, where the wind is almost ceaseless, where no grass grows, where no trees relieve the view.

You think about the dreams those people had and the huge, huge distance that they travelled.  Maybe they were leaving something worse, and maybe here they found a place that might have, for a few years, made them happy.  You're glad they can't see that it all came to nothing.

They were killed by Indians.