Cheesespread

Drifting along with the tumbling tumbleweed
After a bizarro night at the Reno Hilton last week, visiting a friend who fund-raises for the Girl Scouts (whose convention was being held in conjunction with a Lutherans’ conference, a wheelchair table tennis tournament, a rodeo and a Cult/Monster Magnet concert full of guys with mullets), my car completely died on Highway 99, leaving me beside an open field in Live Oak near where a farmer had died from a heart attack earlier that day. I sat there for three hours waiting for Triple A, during which time I experienced hallucinatory visions from the heat—cop heads shimmering into thin air, dancing hubcaps, ghostlike wind. I also re-discovered the valuable lesson of standing still with nothing to do. Even though I almost passed out, it was good to do nothing in the middle of nowhere (I should strand myself more often). And I ask you, what better place to stand still for a moment than Butte County this summer? Slow and low, that’s the tempo ­especially with record heat headed our way.

Ready for wartime?
“We gonna build us some more nuke-doggies. … We are, after all, humble and strong like the state of Texas.”
-George Dubya to the international press

Is anybody else bothered by the fact that our allies just booted us off the United Nations Human Rights Committee (while Libya and Sudan were voted on)? Or that Dubya cavorted around Europe like a punch-drunk farmhand at a Brooks & Dunn concert? “The Toxic Texan” (as Europe calls him) is creating a reputation for our country as a “crazed loner” bent on money and military might, and he is turning back the clock in every way possible. It’s worse than the Reagan years.

Greetings from the grave
An old college acquaintance of mine, Sander Hicks (pictured), is a rising underground star in the NYC theater scene. Hicks (the punkest guy I’ve ever known and perhaps the only person with a mohawk ever interviewed by 60 Minutes) also runs a radical publishing company called Soft Skull Press on the Lower East Side that’s famous for having picked up a book dropped by St. Martin’s (Fortunate Son) that details the cover up of a Bush cocaine bust in the ‘70s (currently on its second printing).

Anyway, Dubya’s birthday is coming up (July 7), and supporters BackBush.com are sending him a 6-foot birthday card full of 100,000+ email addresses and signatures (I wonder, GOP fund-raising, maybe?). Meanwhile, Hicks is encouraging people to infiltrate the electronic card and sign it using the names of the 152 prisoners Bush executed (or others like Osama Bin Laden, Arbusto Oil, Grampa Lovehitler, or Prescott Lovedadolf). Nice work, Sander—but watch out for the CIA, they’ve got your number.

Weekly props
1. Congrats John and Christine
2. Old Time Relijun at Moxie’s (6/22)
3. Gay Pride participants