stacked rocks last springtime in Maine;

the ocean there spoke with strange

accent, heavy with granite

all these old outbuildings tend

to become rural temples

to self-science practices

juxtaposition of grid

designed by madmen and shed

supernatural petals

stacking rocks into altars

as they instruct from within

(within me, or within them?)

middle of nowhere mossy

oak wrapped with marking tape, but

nobody’s here to obey

"the freedom to exist without

fences" I wrote on birch bark

for a nice lady in Maine

empty farm building attics,

always with hardwood floor you

can see through, and elder crows

windowpanes become broken,

but the emptiness inside

remains, waiting for fire’s grace

r r s a d

"measure twice, cut once," preaches
old dude with yankee accent,
three beer cans in lunch cooler

Shiner Bock

AFFORDABILITY: I think it was either "All Bock Beers Are On Sale" week a few weeks back, or I just got hung up on the word "bock" as I am known to do. I'm a word nerd, bro, so sometimes shit just flows into my brain and gets stuck there and I conjure it up into a thousand different sentence structures. But this Shiner Bock, which I initially believe to be some fake micro style of some megabrewery fermented from the blood of the poor, was on sale at some point. It wasn't that expensive, relatively speaking, but I just balanced my bank book today and realized my tax refund wealth is gone, and now I'm just another broke ass fucker who can't go out to dinner like the rest of the world. Or at least the rest of the American world. The rest of the world doesn't even eat dinner. They are either fasting for their vengeful Lord or have flies hanging out on their eyeballs. 3 out of 5.
DESTROYABILITY: Shiner Bock has a beautiful yellow label with a goat on the motherfucker, so it makes me drink faster, and thus kill enough brain cells fast enough to try not to slur the words when I am telling my wife I paid the Best Buy bill. I know the label aesthetic category comes up separately, but whatever man. This is my gimmick. 3 out of 5.
LABEL AESTHETIC: I do not know the correlation between bock and goat, but between the Yuengling Bock Beer label and this harvest gold yellow mountain goat head label, it is clearly a winning drunkard meme, tailor made for shitty t-shirts. Beer and goats are two things I can get down with, and ideally would like to have be a part of the periphery of my life for all of this one, and to be buried with me in my home-welded pyramid-shaped camper trailer after death. I know it will not though, because the dreams of the celebration of my death are bizarre and outlandish, and everybody tends to get bogged down in the confining nature of their personal emotions. 4 out of 5.
CORPORATE MASTER: I vaguely remember looking up Shiner Bock and it's made by somebody in Texas that has a Shiner Fest, which conjures up old men in go-karts racing around town, getting drunk, and punching each other like bare knuckles fighters in dress pants from the Goodwill. At one point, me and my two oldest children were in Manchester, New Hampshire for the first time ever as my wife had a conference in Ruraltalia, New Hampshire, and we rolled into Manchester and it was some sort of holiday they don't celebrate in the South, like Old Yankee Day or Labor Day or something, and there had been a parade that we seriously had just missed, because old yankee dudes were loading their go-karts into trailers and the backs of giant ass pick-up trucks, and me and the kids were like, "Aww... we missed the parade." I would imagine the Shiner Fest of Shiner Bocks somewhere in Texas is pretty much the exact same thing, except with a different accent, and for breakfast they use sausage instead of ham in Texas because you need spices to make the shittier parts of the pig taste more good. I will say, at this point, even if Shiner Bock is actually owned by some multi-national corporation that destroys the ozone by shooting aborted fetuses of extinct eskimo tribes into space with hazardous waste duct taped to their bodies, that company at least still supports this stupid festival in somewhere of Texas. Although, to be honest, I may not have actually saw that briefly and might have just made it up in my dreams. Usually when I dream, I'm reading for some reason. Or having to piss really bad, but I'm back in high school, and every bathroom has no walls and the toilets are dirty as fuck and I'm barefoot but when I finally find one I can tip-toe my way to to start pissing, it starts to fill up and overflow because I have to piss so much. At this point, I usually realize I have to piss in real life and should wake up, but I also realize what if I wake up and it's like half an hour til the alarm clock is set to go off, which means I'll go piss, come back to bed, and not get back to sleep because I know the alarm's just gonna go off in a few minutes. So then I just decide to stay asleep and if my dream makes me piss the bed, whatever. At least I'll be well-rested. 4 out of 5.
OVERALL AMBIANCE: Hey, I have no gripes. This whole bock beer that sprung up into my consciousness like an internet meme and then disappeared just as quickly, I have no problem with it. I am sure that often times I make up large parts of the world around me, either outright or at least in the way I see it filtered into through my brain. Shiner Bock is something that I would probably not go out of my way to purchase on my own all the time, but I might sometimes. And if I went somewhere where people who only have one party every seven years were hosting so they had a big cooler full of expensive beer and this was in it next to some Newcastles and Widmer Hefeweizens and Becks Darks and so on, I’d grab this with gusto yet mixed with nonchalance so as to not tip off other mysterious undercover drunkards as to how enjoyable it might be. That’s about the highest compliment a beer that is massively produced yet still too expensive for my weekly shopping habits could ever hope to receive. 4 out of 5.
TOTAL RATING: 3 & 3/5 STARS!

Saranac Irish Stout

AFFORDABILITY: I does not remember where I got it, maybe the Harris Teeter in Crozet while wilding away the hours of my daughter’s ballet class, but it wasn’t that bad. Saranac tends to come in cheaper than most beers, which makes me suspect it’s owned by Coors. But I was still on my Russian Stout kick, and you can’t get thick dark beers like that in regular people America, so I went for what looked like it might be dark (it wore black on it’s label because black was how it felt inside) and cross-referenced that with how much I felt like enabling myself with stupid purchases of alcohol horror stories, and ended up going with this. In that sense, and in the spirit of capitalistic competition, it is a pure winner. 4 out of 5.
DESTROYABILITY: I have an unfinished giant hurricane-strength shelf system in the hallway, and it stays cold in the wintertime in our hallway because our upstairs has baseboard heat and our main house part has woodstove heat, but the hall just sits there, no sunshine, no heat, dank and coolish. So I stashed the Irish Stout in there on a shelf, and when I'd want one, I'd have to go in the hallway and get one. I noticed as I got further into the back part of the six-pack, the floor in the hallway had a little more slant to it. I put a marble on the floor but it rolled the wrong way of what my slant had expected. Fermented drinks. 4 out of 5.
LABEL AESTHETIC: It's at the bottom of the recycling bin at this point, but I remember it had one of those intertwining line designs that look like really stupid tattoos but really good garden layouts. I am into the idea of keyhole gardens where everything wraps around a bulbous design, although it has occurred to me that this is basically a cul-de-sac for plants. Luckily for me plants don't have cars and children and the need to go somewhere to buy shiny new plant things, so it'll probably work in the yard better than it does in the sprawling death of our modern society. I do remember drinking the Saranac and thinking they should do an acid label that was basically the same thing but really darker black and day-glo green, so that it looked like it vibrated if you were in the right mindstate. And companies have money to waste to make sure their labels do certain things in certain demographics, like make dicks hard or gay women happy or appeal to Asian men from age 23 to 37 and shit like that. So I'm sure they can make sure the day-glo green could glow under a black light. 3 out of 5.
CORPORATE MASTER: In my brain, which doesn’t necessarily always coordinate with reality, Saranac is some non-Babylonian Homeland of the UN New York state type shit. I could be wrong, but that’s what my brain thinks. And for as long as we’ve lived on this road, up the road towards town, there’s been another old farmhouse like our’s that this longhaired dude lives at. He had a beat-up pick-up truck, nice but wrecked, and then a Volvo sedan, and a basketball goal, and he would ride his 10-speed the 8 miles to the IGA to buy 12-packs of Miller High Life in the bottle, and he reminded me of my homeboy from growing up who lived down the road named Eric who loved Rush and dirt bikes. I’ve never really talked to this dude, though we do the “What’s up” finger waves in passing, but I’ve built him up as a lounger in my head, though I didn’t know dude. Some chick who was friends with my wife said she knew the dude and he had cheated on his wife and that’s why he lived alone or some shit, but that same chick had beef with someone else we knew, another melodramatic chick, and in a battle of the beefs between two melodramatic chicks, it’s best to remember they are both melodramatic, so be cool with both of them, because they can help not their natural craziness. Anyways, I bumped into that dude up the road at the store the other weekend when me and the baby were buying baking powder and bananas and more beer, so I introduced myself to the dude. He talked funny, like a northerner, and he seemed to lack work, which is no different than he has the whole time he’s lived here, so obviously he comes from money. So I assume he’s heir to the Saranac throne. It kinda bums me out, because I buy three or four dollars worth of lottery tickets every week, hoping to financially bankroll a leisurely lifestyle where I can concentrate on writing and rambling words into coherent statements instead of struggling upstream against the shitflow of my life all the goddamned time. Fucking Saranac ass dude, building a shed with scrap wood that he said he wanted to keep snakes and bugs out of. Who the fuck is worried about snakes and bugsin the goddamned country? The dude up the road, that’s who. The northerner Saranac Volvo sedan dude. He better not come round my house when I’m not around, trying to talk at my wife, or I’m gonna get all Billy Gibbons on his ass. 1 out of 5.
OVERALL AMBIANCE: I don't know, it was a beer, with fake Irish themes, and I was anxious for warm weather so I could wear my alternate Celtics Paul Pierce jersey, black with a shamrock stitched on the front, that I got for $4 from a Goodwill in Shithole, Virginia. It is a beer that I will probably not ever buy again, and in fact, Saranac seems stupid to me. Even the word is annoying. 0 out of 5.
TOTAL RATING: 2 & 2/5 STARS!

(7s) Longest Serving U.S. Senators #3 - Senator Patrick Joseph Leahy (Democratic Duke of Vermont)

Leahy took office on January 3, 1975, when I was almost 2-years-old, and I am old enough to not understand youth culture at all and to condemn it as stupid because it’s incomparable to back in my day. If I am old, and I was not even 2 when Leahy became Senator, then he’s old as fuck. The odd thing about Leahy that I did not expect is that he is the only Democratic Senator ever from Vermont, ever. Not only that, but he’s one of only three Democrat-flavored men who have ever represented Vermont in Congress since the Civil War. This is shocking to me because when I think of Vermont, I think of well-off hippie types, liberal NPR listeners, and public skinny dipping at a family lake somewhere near Glover, maybe called Crystal Lake. Hard to remember because I was stoned most of my three days in Vermont, and falling in love with a hairy hippie chick from Rhode Island with a unibrow. When you are constantly high and cuddle underneath a scrap of tarp with a female in the ditch alongside the road for safety and warmth, you tend to manufacture emotions in your brain.
In recent years, Leahy is probably most notable for being the dude that Dick Cheney told to go fuck himself, and was one of the few Senators voting against re-authorizing the stupid Patriot Act, where Patriot means you let the gubmint know everything you do motherfucker. Leahy and Orrin Hatch (next on the list) are homeboys who co-author shit all the time, including some bullshit anti-pirating nonsense allegedly meant to protect copyright infringement but more likely meant to keep the stacks of gold coins on the desks of entertainment execs from not stacking as fast as they always have. Oddly enough, Leahy is also a fan of The Grateful Dead, which is a very vanilla “counterculture” thing for a famous politician to proclaim nowadays, and very unshocking to me, though regular people may be all like, “Wow, isn’t that neato?” For me, I’d be like “wow” if some dude got elected from Montana or something and was like, “Yeah, I’m a huge fucking Hank Williams III fan. I used to rock G.G. Allin’s acoustic shit too, but his rock stuff was too hit-or-miss, like Hank the 3rd. In fact, one of my first acts as Senator is going to be to convince him to stop doing the stupid punk shit and concentrate on the drug-fueled somber outlaw country, because this world doesn’t need more stupid suburban kids in black clothes with self-screenprinted patches staple-gunned to a leather jacket so much as it needs angry, hazy-headed, militant rednecks. How else are we gonna beat the Arabs? I mean seriously. All this sterilized Toby Keith Wal-Mart Supercenter television monitor overload of commercial patriotism is bullshit. Let’s keep it real.” Yeah, I’d like that guy, until he got busted reading The Turner Diaries on the Senate floor as a filibuster.
But back to the intricate tentacles of the beast, I have never quite figured out why Leahy was an anthrax target, although I would expect it might have something to do with him and Cheney being at odds in other matters. Leahy was probably a stubborn man who wouldn’t go along with the back room game plans, so they had to perform a little very public mock execution, showing the potential for just such a thing, to get him back in line, at least partially. That whole anthrax affair is another thing that was all over the news and now is just a faint memory, with a Maryland scientist taking the fall for it. I don’t know, it seems odd to me anthrax would be that easy to get without someone knowing. The immensity of bureaucratic procedures, for those who have not worked inside the belly of the beast before, is an all-encompassing and supremely stifling thing, like the worst southern humidity times three thousand. It smothers everything, and makes it hard to believe one solitary guy could pull off such a thing by mailing anthrax he jacked from within the bureaucratic beast, because no private entities keep that shit around unless commissioned by one branch or another of the Department of Defense anyways.