With bonus content OH WOW BONUS CONTENT YEAH YEAH YEAH!
_________________________________________________________
Sometimes you have to roast a whole chicken and then stand in the kitchen and eat it Henry the VIII style, right out of the oven. This we did last night, like the barbarians we are. We tore the poor chicken to pieces and dunked it in satay peanut sauce. It was DELICIOUS.
Por Kwan brand satay peanut sauce. It is HEAVEN. If it is available where you live, buy it NOW. I mean it. Go. Shoo.
______________
We took a long weekend to go visit Anacortes recently, and because I've gone on and on about Anacortes before I won't bore you with descriptions of how chill and excellent Anacortes is. I will instead show you some pictures I took of random things in and around Anacortes. Behold:
It's common to find cafe tables with advertisements pressed into the surface, particularly in very small towns.
This latter-day shamaness will tell you why your aura is black lately.
Her pioneer forebear Julius Bloedel was a rape-and-pillage lumber baron.
The more you know.
Here is a lovely Arbutus Menziesii, and...
...here are its wonderful flowers, caught only an hour after opening. The NW coast is covered in forests of these beautiful, colorful, dramatic trees.
Somebody bought their hippie grandma a glass kiln. Go buy a saucer. Make her feel wanted.
Possibly the ugliest painting I've ever seen in my life, an original signed work, selling for $550.00 which is...evidence of...a strong personal sense of...
Delusion. It's delusional.
ATTACK OF THE COLLECTABLE MORPHODITES
HOLY CRAP
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
I went to move the helmet so that I could see this things' face, and I was instantly sorry I had done so.
Vintage Anti-Reagan folk sculpture, Not For Sale.
What is this, you may ask? This is a Sitz Bath. It is for washing your ass. And it is from an abandoned mental institution.
Yup.
Pretty cheap for a fez.
And over in the hardware section we have this.
Yup, Northern State Mental Hospital. Fourteen miles away from this spot, way in the fuck out in the boonies, all abandoned and overgrown and scary even to just drive past.
I would expect the sitz bath to be a more likely target for the supernatural, but maybe my ideas about hauntability and the supernaturals' diverge widely, senor.
Haunted hinges HA. You see this shit? It was right below the sign ^^^. Now you tell me where the damn hinge pins are. Sheesh.
An unreasonably large flag, with a row of motorhomes for scale. Just off I-5 headed toward Sedro Wooley. Not a trick of perspective. This thing is hyooooooooge.
A bottle of Bushmills flanked by a bottle of screw-top wine and a six of Mac and Jacks.
The ladies' room at Fred Meyers, which is a grocery store.
Detail of a glorious, hand-beaded gown I found but did not buy, because it looked far more glorious than it smelled.
Hooray!
Hello. I am the Nose Pig of Ulm.
I invite you to drink of my fluids.
___________________________________________________________________________________
The Postscript You Did Not Ask For, Or Want
Do go here: Precious Moments, Inc. - Wikipedia
...and while the taste still lingers, visit this link: Precious Moments Chapel and Gardens
where your imagination will be unable to contain the creation of one man, who:
"Inspired by the famous work of Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel ceiling during a trip to Italy in the early 1980s... was sparked with the idea to create a chapel – a tribute to the Lord and a place where visitors could feel God’s spirit. Driving through the Missouri Ozarks in search of a location for his Chapel, Mr. Butcher was again inspired by the Lord and His intervention, as He proclaimed “you are here”.
One day far, far in the future, if this country hasn't been nuked into a lake of molten glass, this chapel will become known as 'The American Ste. Lazar.' I promise you.
Onward!
A Precious Moments figurine is best viewed in the hand. On a shelf, this is how they display...like a bunch of grieving children who were turned into pillars of salt.
My memories:
'Precious Moments' started around the end of the Revival of the Spirit moment in the 1970-early 1980's as a one-panel 'feel good' comic you could find in women's magazines. Suddenly blammo - these figurines were popping up everywhere like inedible fungi. Everybody's mom, aunt and grandma were collecting them. Not my mom, because although she was a fanatic, she was a fanatic with taste. That did not stop all her friends from giving her Precious Moments figurines as gifts, though, or from her feeling obliged to display them in the name of 'being nice.' I knew them as The Stupid Things, as in "I wish everybody would stop givin' me The Stupid Things' and 'What the hell am I gonna do with The Stupid Things.' And honestly....I mean....
Look at these pictures closely, because you know you want to. From this distance, they could be the little collectable offspring of...
Willow Tree figurines.
Sure! Once a Precious Moments hits puberty, it's eyes fall out. It's nose flattens. It's bare suggestion of a mouth fades. Boom you got a Willow Tree.
If this was a real goose it would be attacking this kid. The Biker surmised that she may have been hiding a shiv behind her back, though, which made me laugh, and so here she is: Cut-A-Goose Sally.
Behind study bars is exactly where these things belong. You know they go creeping around at night making dirty little Precious Moments ass-prints in the margarine. You know this to be true on an instinctive level, in fact.
Another thing you knew on an instinctive level is that there is a Precious Moments Nativity Set. Here's one I found online. 'One', because there's more.
Yes.
All of them variations on the theme 'Mouthless toddlers sadly staring at a mouthless baby.'
_______________________
One more link: Songs For Dead Children: The Precious Moments Chapel In Carthage, MO | Richard Lindsay (patheos.com)
One year the Shriners had their convention in New Orleans cause cheap liquor and negotiable whores are always a big draw for fat middle aged men. The shriners would wander around the French Quarter wearing their stupid fezzes and the local newspaper ran an editorial about kids snatching the fezzes off the fat guys heads and then running away and what a DISGRACE it was. Immediately there was a surge in fez thefts once the paper spread the idea about it.
ReplyDeleteI used to have a rockin' fez that I'd wear around the house. I wish I had a Shriners fez! I mean I don't wish $55.00 dollars worth but there ya go. I love the idea of roving fez bandits. It's so 'Casablanca.'
DeleteYou know, the Internet says the Arbutus blossoms are scented; the only thing I smelled was a faint hint of lilac, which could have come from one of the neighborhood gardens nearby. I am going to suggest combining our 'Chicken Massacre' with a weck. I bet the Biker goes for it! XOO
ReplyDeleteNot sure why you're "anonymous" on your own blog, Ms Nations...
ReplyDeleteI have no idea what a "weck" is. Jx
Dammit it's asking me to comment under my name now. IM SIGNED IN STUPID BLOGGER GRR
ReplyDelete
ReplyDeleteLove the tree. What is it?
I think we can only get Kwan brand satay peanut sauce online but I will keep an eye out in our local Asian shops.
'Precious Moments' and even worse 'Willow Tree'. They are far more disturbing than anything from the Northern State Mental Hospital.
But I must say that the look on Cut-A-Goose Sally's face as she is about to decapitate the bird is truly schizophrenic and endearing.
Arbutus mensiesii is the botanical name of the tree, 'Madrone' is the common name.
DeleteUgh, the Precious Moments figurines! Fortunately my mom was into frogs so she got lots of frog -related stuff and none of those things. I noticed that back in the 80s that all the poor rural White folk that I knew (aka friends and family) were all doing the "French Country" theme (the French themselves would had bleached their eyes at such a sight, I'm sure. As part of the French Country theme the Precious Moments always found a special place in a curio or high shelf.
ReplyDeleteThose type of grocery store bathrooms are always cold and drafty and I always try to avoid using them.
I love Satay Peanut Sauce but like everything else it's gotten stupidly expensive these days. Did the Millennials "discover" it? Driving up the price like they did with avocados?
No, the Biker discovered it, because he knows Thai food and saw it at Asia Market! This stupid little jar was four bucks, so yeah, not something you'd want to get all the time!
DeleteCrikey! Those Collectable Morphodites/Precious Moments figurines really are macabre, aren't they. In the first picture alone one of them is about to drown a box of kittens (but may be bashed over the head with a giant spoon/small saucepan before she can do so), another has whizzed into a bowl and is selling it as lemonade (and letting a puppy drink it!), then there's a baby thief, a fawn strangler, and one about to force feed a massive lump of cheese to a mouse in an attempt to make the rodent equivalent of fois gras. Monsters.
ReplyDeleteThey are all infested with demons, I tell you. DEMONS.
Delete