News came last week about the grant for the new Amtrak station in Portland. Immediately, Portland’s jabbering class of predictable dupes sprung into action trying to convince the public that their ideas about station location are better.

Never mind that the Maine DOT released an exhaustive study back in 2021 that pronounced a multitude of reasons the site they chose is the best option. The knuckleheads that gave us free needle exchange and a downtown district that is suddenly resembling 1980’s Beirut just KNOW that they know better.

They want to put the train station back where it was, long before all their forward thinking got the damned place torn to the ground.

They don’t give half a pickled shit about your (or my) opinion. They just want to pat you on the head an tell you that their ideas are better, so why don’t you just run along and play.

Though they acknowledge that County Government AND the Cumberland County Sheriff’s Office think that building a train station next to the jail is a bad idea that ranks up there with midnight blindfolded highway running, they think those experts don’t know what they are talking about either. Shut up and smoke your legal weed, aside from the fact… ACAB.

One important fact is getting missed in all the discussion of whether our local elected (but think themselves anointed) officials will succeed in the campaign to change facts. The Federal Grant was written with that specific property that the NNEPRA (Northern New England Passenger Rail Authority) wants, listed as the only site available for that grant.

Portland government is what it was, but even more so. I had credible reports last week that the lawyers had been dispatched to DC to quite quietly and with a great sublety lobby certain members of Congress (particularly those facing election) to get that grant changed.

Luckily, a certain member of the Senate with the initials “SC” is smart enough to realize this won’t get her a single additional vote, no matter what the wormtongues speak.

I usually don’t speak about sources, but this one is extraordinarily reliable. The person was bragging about what they were about to do.

To them, this was a done deal.

Portland…same as it ever was. At the beginning of this, I put up a sub-headline about you being lied to. “You can’t fight City Hall” has been conventional wisdom for decades. A friend one put it simpler and just slightly more sarcastic, being a member of Gen-X.

“You can’t fight the system, cuz the system fights back”

THIS time…the system will lose.

When my computer got noked in a New York rainstorm at GonzoFest, I put the shock paddles to the old one, yelled “CLEAR!” and have been using it religiously for the last two weeks to not write anything.

Either I fried the memory, or the hard drive. Either way, it joined it's older cousin as paperweight status. Apologies if I seem to write shorter bits, doing so on your phone just plain sucks.

All things end. I was considering this yesterday when looking over the details of a particularly grisly attack here in Portland that now has manslaughter charges, as the victim bled out.

Nope, not an ICE shooting, this time. I link to the extreme vanilla version of the story here, but need to explain some of the story behind it.

One member of an extremely well protected class in Portland (LGTBQ+ whatever) was jumped, stabbed and killed by a member of Portland's other protected class, the violent and drug addicted or mentally questionable homeless.

Hear that silence? With a nod to Thomas Harris, I call it the silence of the crickets.

From one end of the city to the other, members of the DSA, local homeless advocates, local crime watchers, folks just running for office, the LGBTQ+ crowd… all are trying to figure out how to spin a tragedy to their own benefit.

The difficulty this time around will be trying to do so without alienating other groups that usually have your back. Hence…the silence 48 hours later.

Volumes have been written about the decline of this city. I remember having one of those clean uptown office jobs at an insurance company in the late 80’s-early 90’s. Lunchtime around Monument Square was a zoo, with sandwich and pizza places lines out the door, grab and go salads, anything quick so you could get into the square and sit in the sun for thirty minutes before returning to the dungeons of florescent lights.

Hell, there were half a dozen places on the ground floor of One City Center alone to grab a quick bite.

Now…even Tic-Tac-O is gone. When the business climate became too expensive via rents for office space and parking, business started to leave.

Tried hanging out downtown at lunchtime now? Meet the screaming meemees.

Every single protest group, and seems like everyone short on their required psychotropic medication in a hundred mile radius suddenly calls the square home.

And that is just during the day.

Somewhere in that march to a socialist utopia with limitless compassion in a city that actually tried for years to chase away manufacturing in favor of clean money machines like banks and insurance companies, your leadership fucked up.

Actually, they fucked up a lot. They started a homeless mission and policy they were unwilling and financially unable to sustain. I remember great swaths of Bayside buildings being scooped up as rentals or bought outright by state agencies and private contractors to social service agencies under Governor King’s administrations. Portland was to be the hub, the nexus of any party that needed help.

The Maine Legislature, being what is always was and still is (a collection of ignorant money grubbing shitbags) decided to screw Angus, because in a few years when he was gone, their party could do it better..

How's that working out for ya, Portland?

We've entered the death spiral, long passed the Swarzschild radius of the black hole that is government funding. No amount of money is going to fix this problem of free-needle and free shit addiction.

The funny part, if there is one is this:

Even without a computer with the latest AI upgrades and predictive software, I'm still one of the few that can see the heat will be coming down. Instead of meals and housing, homeless better be looking for bus tickets.

Shit is about to get real.

Look, last night was a spectacular display of indulgence. Planning for several days but still undecided as to details, I spent my Wednesday night drinking quite heavily, secure in the knowledge my old friend would approve. Sober travel is for suckers, and only a good hangover makes it tolerable.

Of course waking up at 3am was not in the plan at all. It at least gave me time to make myself mostly socially tolerable, and finalize details. I caught the Portland to Boston train out at 5:18am. I figured a short jaunt from North Station in Boston to South Station, then back on the Amtrack to NYC was a good plan.

Then I saw the ticket prices. Holy fuck I wish the World Cup had been held somewhere else. $300 for a ticket.

As you may have already guessed, “Fuck That… I’m taking the bus” was the order of the day. Air travel is right out, as I’m likely on the no fly list just for being a sarcastic subversive.

Possibly some other shit I did, or was accused of put me on that list. We’ve spent twenty five years amassing files on everybody, with the slightest political peccadillo (depending on who was in power at the time) being the ultimate invitation to getting a thorough examination if you DO try to fly.

Oddly, I notice less junkies in the streets, quite fewer people trying to bum a smoke off me, and a distinct lack of needles anywhere in NYC. I’ve yet to see one. In Portland, going an hour without seeing one would be a record. Smoke-bummers, well, I’ve had two in 24 hours. On Congress st that would be about 15 minutes.

Hostel has no wi-fi. Rather, it does have some, but it doesn’t work above the first floor. Since I’m on the 4th floor (with a broken elevator, no less) that sort of sucks. Every time I climb those steps up I’m getting a “Barefoot in the Park” vibe, except there is no scampily clad Jane Fonda waiting for me upstaris…

I’ll have more for #Gonzofest, was too tired to do any of the fun stuff last night.

The one party you might like to attend is one held after you are gone. A room full of your friends all swapping tall tales and legends, comparing notes while sipping whiskey.

For a while, Curtis had been working on a book, a collection of stories about his life and journalism/ projects called “Choose Your Lies”. It has to deal with the way folks seem to justify themselves and their decisions based on how comfortable they are or how uncomfortable with themselves they are willing to be.

Next week, America hits it 250th birthday. I was around and old enough to remember the 200th back in 1976. On the above subject, I suppose it was the lies and my age that stick in my memory. America was coming off the nightmare of Watergate, a Southern Peanut Farmer was making waves on the ballots, and a national fervor of patriotism was sweeping the country.

This time around? Meh. The hyper-vigilant sunshine patriots are back again, this time with a gift of grift. A visit from a foreign country’s football (soccer) team has us feeling pretty damned good about ourselves (#TartanArmy) since they seem to love us so much. A National Festival turned into a yawn festival, because nobody went or cared to get off the Netflix couch long enough to go. Several states didn’t even send delegations to put up decorations.

Maybe for me it’s a #GenX thing. You expect people to want to celebrate a country that since birth they’ve had a deep mistrust of. Want proof? here is a good test. Hand someone from GenX a hundred dollar bill.

They will immediately flip it over to see if it’s a counterfeit or photocopy. People just don’t GIVE you a thing of value, and they especially don’t for no reason. There is always a string attached somewhere.

Fast forward a couple to few generations, and everyone now expects everything for free, and street protesting and rounding up all the Billionaires to get shot will get that done in short order, we just lack the political will to do it. Free College, not free college loans are the order from the masses.

In the end, they will discover that degree is worth every damned dime they paid for it.

ZERO.

It’ll be just a tenured union card for an ever expanding social justice system that has failed every single place it has been tried. I place as much faith in Democratic Socialism as I do a portion of gas station sushi purchased at a Buc-ees in South Florida in July.

At 58 with no wife, no house, no kids and no car (“No Problem” I used to say) I guess I just have to get used the fact I’m just “Old And In The Way”

At least, that is the lie I’m comfortable with, or at least comfortable about sharing with others. Farewell to my brother CR. I’ll meet up with friends again at #Gonzofest in New York in a few weeks.

I love Maine, I grew up here. I’m seeing something happen several months down the road that I can’t be a part of, even marginally. I could fight against it…but the kids seem to know better than somebody that has had the shit wiped in their face several times.

Let the kids have it. I’m out.

Several other things, such as a work situation that has gone from good to untenable in a matter of weeks. Lovers far away, beckoning with longing from sheer loneliness and desperation, tired of the lies they’ve told themselves. A media environment so toxic it makes 1977’s Love Canal look habitable again.

I wrote this back in 1986. “A generation of lemmings, blindly sniffing the crotch of the lemming in front of us as we march gleefully toward the cliff”

(“In 1982, the CBC Television news magazine program The Fifth Estate broadcast a documentary about animal cruelty in Hollywood called Cruel Camera, focusing on White Wilderness, as well as the television program Wild Kingdom. The host of the CBC program, Bob McKeown, discovered that the lemming scene was actually filmed at the Bow River near Canmore, Alberta, and that the same small group of lemmings was transported to the location, jostled on turntables, and repeatedly shoved off a cliff to imply mass suicide.^[10][11] According to a lemming expert, the particular species of lemming is not known to migrate, much less commit mass suicide.^[10] Additionally, McKeown revealed that footage of a polar bear cub falling down an Arctic ice slope was really filmed in a Calgary film studio.^[12][13]”)

^{Choose your lies. I’ve chosen mine.}

America was tired and broke. Ever increasing inflation due to wars, ever increasing crime due to everyone being broke as fuck and stealing everything that wasn’t welded down. You might think yourself as being responsible to the environment and buy an e-bike for that short two mile trip to work every day, but you quickly found out that the uncuttable locking system had been disabled in a matter of minutes by a local thief. You were out the two grand you paid for the bike, and STILL had to walk to work.

Every day, you walked past junkies dying on the sidewalks…sometimes with the free needle from the clinic still stuck in their arm. You walked past the deranged and the afflicted just trying to get to work to get enough money to barely pay your absurd rent. IF you were lucky, you might have enough money leftover for whatever your personal vice or coping mechanism was. Books, alcohol, drugs… everything was just a way to cope.

Think the Great Depression of the 1930’s… but lasting a generation. What most people didn’t realize is that they were paying for the convenience of not being inconvenienced. Why spend three hours cooking a good meal when you can pick up your phone, hot the app and have the meal here in twenty minutes? Why plant vegetables or spices in your backyard, when you can easily get them from the store? Why wait for a check to show up in your mailbox, when you could just have the money in your account two days before the check cleared?

It was the death of a thousand cuts. We convenienced ourselves into our bed of insolvency. Then. we doubled down.

We kept electing people that told us exactly what we wanted to hear. Things were great when they were in charge, change was just around the corner. Other nations would eventually bend to our will, it was all just a matter of time.

A we usually do every couple of years, we invaded a country based on our interests in oil.

It didn’t go as planned. Thia time they had read the playbook we’d been using for the last fifty years, and figured a path around it. They didn’t fight back using the usual methods of bullets and tanks. They went biological.

Those that didn’t come home in coffins immediately were VA cases. It was a biological with a 65% death rate immediately, and the ones left exposed were left with something resembling severe Parkinson’s Disease.

We lost close to a hundred thousand troops in the first weeks of that war before we figured out what was going on. When we finally did figure it out, the international community gave us another pass when we dropped the nukes.

You can still drill through the glass to get the oil.

The combination of all of it was just too much for America. Way back in 2026, we were spending an average of a hundred thousand a year for every prisoner in state or federal custody serving life without parole. Multiply that times over 52,000 that were in prison then.

Now America wasn’t just tired. It was sick, and still broke.

The way I heard the story, it all started with a bunch of lobbyists from K Street down in DC. They were sitting at Old Ebbitt Bar, bemoaning the fact that another election cycle was coming, and that they might have to do actual work.

One of them came up with an idea. “What is the one group in the country that nobody gives half a pickled shit about, and how can we exploit them to get candidates elected?”

“Anyone serving life in prison without parole. Fuck ‘em” came one response.

“Terrorists, infidels, anyone from that shithole we just bombed or are going to bomb in the near future” came another

“Street junkies. I’m tired of walking past all these doubled over motherfuckers higher than giraffe pussy. I have to work to barely make a living, and these fuckers get free universal income checks? Fuck ‘em cubed, with an aluminum baseball bat”

“Social Workers. Did you ever actually meet anyone they cured? Fuck no..they just become part of the social-medical complex that replaced the military-industrial one.”

An elder lobbyist heard it all, and came up with a plan. “What if I told you by writing some legislation OURSELVES, dumping it in front of a bunch of people we WILL get elected so long as they promise to pass our plank, we could solve a lot of this shit while making bank ourselves?”

Those K street guys were not idiots. Over the course of several drunken hours, they worked out a plan.

Empty the prison of all the lifers without possibility of parole. The Medical-Social complex could make bank just by locking up the street junkies until they were “cured”, but still get almost lifetime payments for ongoing counselling. Revoke the citizenship of anyone serving life without possibility of parole. That was a tough one, since the rules for the Natural Born were different than those for the immigrants everybody always hated. Someone pointed out that all they had to do was will out a simple form, renouncing citizenship. They had to have a passport to do so.

A country was giving us shit, or waging some sort of economic warfare via tariffs? Suddenly, we could drop off anywhere from 20,000 to 50,000 people with weapons who were NOT soldiers of an invading army, but WERE armed.

“What you find, you keep. What You steal or take over is yours, as long as you can keep it. You can never come back to the United States, ever, for any reason. You’re fucking barred. IF found, you can be shot on sight by anyone without fear of imprisonment or reprisal. You decided to abandon our laws, so we abandon you”

Massive flights of C-130’s and C-141’s, dropping off people by parachute in the middle of the night. They were not just dropped off, mind you. They were given trackers so they could find dropped cargo containers of every sort of weapon imaginable. It was like some sort of perverted video game.

Then, twenty or so years later…we had to deal with the leftover former prisoners and what they had made.'

As Portland becomes more and more dependent on State and Federal funds to pay the rents of the drug-addled, the afflicted and the just plain poor, the situation gets worse.

New Housing rules, new MUBEC codes, new rental restrictions, new registration of rental properties, new fees.

It’s almost as if Portland only wants people to live here that make $150k/year as a local chef, own a business paying employees almost as much as they make, drive bicycles to work and recycle everything right down to household kitchen scraps.

Last week, a proposal got put out for 87 units on Congress St. The building has a history that a lot of folks don’t know. It was the upstairs for the old “B&B Cleaners” on the corner of Congress St and Washington Ave.

People lived there for years. Then, in the mid-1980’s…they didn’t.

Last I had heard, the property was still contaminated with perchloroethylene, also known as “Perc” in the drycleaning industry. Also known by a trade name Tetrachlorethylene 1,1,1.

Sure, lets build some housing on top of a known suspected carcinogen, and let’s make 25% of that housing public housing to boot.

I’m 99.99999% sure no lawyer will ever sue.

I want housing, and I worked around that chemical long enough (close to thirty years) that I’m willing to take that risk for cheap housing. I have no wife, or kids to put at risk. I need a secure place to keep my stuff while I’m at work or off on some sort of shenanigans likely to get me indicted or arrested.

But that is MY choice. I’m betting most don’t know the history of that property area.

Hell, my Aunt was working across the street at the cleaners when the 7-11 just a few yards down the road was digging up the contaminated oil tank on their property, and the guy doing some cutting on the tank made the mistake of not doing a triple-flush first…and it exploded.

I’d tell these stories in the newsroom at the Daily Sun, and nobody would believe it. They couldn’t believe things like that still happen.

Folks, they are happening. Look to the explosion at the paper mill yesterday in Searsmont.

You are workers. YOU DO NOT FUCKING MATTER. YOU CAN BE REPLACED.

Everybody wants you to get upset about that, except me.

I just want you to understand it, accept it, and take care of yourself accordingly.

The national company I work for lost somebody yesterday out in Washington State. They didn’t lock something out (which is a dismissible offense) and got themselves killed in the process.

For cheap housing in Portland, there are risks I’m willing to take. That being said, I’m not sure the folks that bought this property were ever informed about the actual condition of the property. If they were, their lawyers would be screaming in terror.

To take care of the problems of homelessness, Portland NEEDS ideas like this to happen, along with coffin hotels, SRO’s, people renting out couch space and rooms that under current rules would be illegal. WE NEED TO GET PEOPLE THAT WANT TO WORK OFF THE FUCKING STREET, and become part of the LOCAL economy…not the economy of Buxton and Standish.

I have a co-worker that drives in from Massachusetts 4x per week because HE CAN NOT AFFORD TO FUCKING LIVE HERE.

Thinks about that for a second. Even the gas, tolls and mileage involved make it cheaper for him to live far away. And he’s making about $36/hr.

Portland, with your progressive policies and ever increasing social net (being the social net for the entire fucking state) you are killing yourself.

Over time and through painful experience, I’ve come to grips about certain facts. Gonzo has its own rules, its own rules and above all its own physics. In the Gonzoverse things just do not obey the conventional laws of physics, but seem to follow a warped universal fabric.

Just when you need a story, you will inevitably stagger over one. Same can be said for sources. A tree may fall in a forest and may or may not make a sound, but the laws of the Gonzo Universe act almost identically to the laws of the Great Lebowski and Dirk Gently. You find yourself at exactly the place you need to be, exactly to the moment when you needed to be there.

Case in example, my travels. Years back I was “on walkabout”, which is slang for being of no mind to be anywhere at all, unemployed, and just wandering around the country looking for something to do. I was meandering down the road next to a Civil War Battlefield when a friendly lady and her daughter stopped to pick me up and give me a ride. They dropped me off at the closest truckstop, telling me I’d likely get a ride out of that place in a matter of minutes.

I was there three days. During that time period, there was talk of a “National Trucker Strike”, a plan to paralyze Washington DC by angry truckers. They would take to the beltway surrounding the capital, and slow all traffic down to five miles per hour by blocking the lanes and driving that slow.

Where do you think I got dropped off? The Southbound rally point. Talk about timing for a Gonzo story.

On the academic front. there are rules too. If you are a fan of the good doctor, or of his works, or Gonzo in general, follow this rule: NEVER TELL YOUR JOURNALISM PROFESSOR.

With the limited exception of a certain Professor McKeen, Gonzo has no place in academia. If you admit to such interest, you will be marginalized at best, as Gonzo isn’t considered by the lofty kids to be a legitimate form of journalism. At the very least, you will be examined by professors with a look of horror on their faces usually reserved to that of a scientist examining a particularly offensive social bacterium under a microscope. At BEST, you will find yourself the determining factor at the lower end of the curve.

I suspect a lot of those college professors were once fans themselves, spoke of it, and saw careers killed before they started…and never forgave the establishment. I’ve run into many professionally that admired my turn of phrase and uncanny luck for staggering into a story like a drunken moose. Inevitably when finding out where my loyalties lay they head for the hiss like someone has shouted “plague!”

The mathematics of Gonzo are quite simple.

Your story will cost you three times in expenses to get than what you budgeted, so budget accordingly. Cheap digital receipt printers are common these days, so feel free to pad things up a bit.

You will (eventually) be paid. It may take several months to a year, and your editor and his business managers will certainly make the noises Ned Beatty was commanded to in “Deliverance”

Tipping is not optional: HST had certain rules I’ve been advised about. If trouble follows you around like it does me (and HST) clinging to your back like a particularly horny monkey. tipping starts at 30% for NOT calling the cops. An old friend now deceased claimed to have waitressed at Woody Creek Tavern, and her tales to me about bringing “The Colonel” his beverages and quietly scooping his guns back into his journo bag without alarming the other customers have been verified by others.

30% is the baseline. The average is around 50.

I found this to be helpful. While in a couple of establishments in Florida, the bartenders were used to a tip of anywhere from a quarter to fifty cents on a beer, depending on the beer price. When I announced it has been standard policy of mine for at least a decade to tip a minimum of a buck on a beer and a buck on a shot, you’d have thought I was a rock star…at least after embarrassing locals into doing the same. “IF you can’t afford a buck on each, stay the fuck home and drink on the porch, ya fucking goon. Bartender has bills and tits to pay for, too.”

There are more, and I’ll be working these into a short diatribe to deliver at Gonzofest, time permitting, stage access permitting, and my ability to kick the shit out of whoever they have doing security permitting.

Hell, my family doctor as a kid said I’d be lucky to live to 30. He’s long dead, and turned out to be a pederast to boot. Found out when he’d closed his practice that he’d been abusing teenage girls for decades during school mandated physicals, among them, my cousins. Had we (brothers and I) known that at the time, his life expectancy wouldn’t have been minutes.

But I digress. America is growing older, and although I honestly believe our countries medical system is just designed to get you to take an increasing amount of drugs that don’t CURE you, just treat the symptoms of your malady We seem to have a desire to stick around past the age of 100.

Yeah, I get it. Kids…grandkids…great-grandkids. You want to see a line succeed based on your intelligence or just plain stubbornness. Think the perversity of the movie “Idiocracy” but in reverse. You think you’re the smart kid in the room, and you assume all the descendants will continue to get smarter, thus continuing the human race.

But what are we racing toward. That is the question.

One of my favorite series of books involves a genetic experiment. Find all the people in the country whose grandparents on both sides lived over 100 years and treat it like a genetics horse-breeding program. Get the young of that group to procreate with each other, and reward them handsomely for doing so.

Doesn’t take long in the series for the main character to observe they should have breed for brains instead.

Yet here we are, with America celebrating the few that make it to a century in age. Used to be the few that did looked forward to the Weather guy on the Today Show putting up their name and picture, sponsored by a national jelly company.

If you lived that long, you were likely in a nursing home with brains of jelly anyway.

We are told we must exercise, diet, maintain our weight and vigor to make it to a healthy old age. My Grandmother lives well into her 90’s as a smoker and drinker, just because she was stubborn.

That gave me the grandfather of all bad ideas. “The Prize”

You took care of yourself, obeyed all the rules of society. You lived to 100.

The rules of polite society should no longer apply to you.

Want to take the last of your fortune, buy an hour of National Television time and go on the air doing nothing but calling Donald Trump an idiotic cunt? You earned the right.

Want to go down the street whacking people that are doing stupid shit with your cane? You earned it, we can’t retaliate or touch you.

Sit on the steps of City Hall and inject yourself with whatever? Go for it. Kick politicians in the tits or testicles? Yup, it’s a right you earned.

Of course, there should be some sort of brassard or commonly identifiable symbol you should have to wear. Think that stupid "hall monitor” type thing from our youth. It would immediately identify you as untouchable, and free from retaliation.

As a side note, the legislation would be simple. A one sentence Constitutional Amendment reading the following. “No Law, statute or code passed by any state, jurisdiction, municipality in these United States shall apply to any citizen that has achieved the age of 100 years”

Free will, free reign. You’re now a sovereign.

Hell, we could even sweeten the pot. If you EVER had any kind of life insurance policy, be it through an employer or something you bought yourself and cancelled because the premiums became too much…It becomes IMMEDIATELY payable at a rate of `100x the contracted payout.

Had $50,000 in insurance to take care of your family for six months or so, bury you and whatnot? Cancelled it because when you hit 70 the premiums were $200 a month? You immediately get a cashier’s check delivered to you for a cool $5 Million.

They made their money. Fuck ‘em.

According to the actuarial tables, I have a 3% chance. Let’s say I got serious about my health and quit all my bad habits.

How many of us would do the same? Damned few.

Look, if you were lucky enough to stomp on this Earth for over 100 years, there should be some sort of bonus prize for being stubborn enough to stick around.

Like most bad ideas, this one came somewhere between the seventh and tenth beer. There is no more accurate describable time, as that is where I generally stop counting and just go with the flow. It started over a simple childhood memory of a venison stew, that was so tasty and tender, the very thought of it brings a joyous tear to my eyes to this day.

That brought up the general subject of hunting. I hang out with a lot of, well, lets just say “gun enthusiasts”. These folks like to go shooting on the weekend and generally enjoy blowing the snot out of anything that vaguely resembles a target. No simple beer cans for these folks, I’m talking tires, old vehicles, and on one memorable occasion an overstuffed chair. We decided that not nearly enough of us had been hunting over the previous several years, and those that had were being damn stingy with the prime cuts of meat. We needed to have a hunt, and a huge bonfire style barbecue after to celebrate.

There were a few around the table that had pretty strong feelings about hunting, trying to talk us out of the prospect of dressing up in hunter orange and wandering around the woods in search of little Bambi. They had obviously never tasted this wonderful stew from my memory, or were just plain vegetarians, who I tend to ignore just on general principle. I countered with the argument that, if we really wanted to be entirely sporting about it, we should try hunting the old fashioned way.

“What, with bows and arrows?” one member of the group protested.

“Nope. Much older than that. Let’s go hunt down a deer with pointy sticks”. The reaction was mixed, from serious consideration to a few souls who just barely managed to contain their internal waters from a deep and raucous belly laugh. The majority of the onlookers in this group figured that there was no way on this Earth that a chunky-monkey such as myself was ever going to chase down a deer.

I hadn’t gone into this discussion without some preparation. The subject had been on my mind a bit, having received yet another “meat is murder” lecture from someone who was availing themselves of the opportunity to have chickens in their backyard. I had devised a plan, but all I needed were a few un-indictable co-conspirators in this foray into the Maine woods. I decided to try the logical approach on the few that were leaning toward my point of view, and see where that got me.

“First, The weapon is a pointy stick, not a spear. If I can manage to chase down a four legged creature and tire it out or corner it at some point before my cholesterol laden heart explodes, I deserve the damned thing. I don’t give a flying braided twisted (unprintable expletive) what the warden has to say about it, I’ll sign the damn ticket and go talk to the judge about it”. That seemed to gather a few more to my side of the argument, so I kept piling on.

“Second, Let’s just say that I did end up wearing the orange jumpsuit in front of a judge for my misdeed. I don’t think that there is a judge in this state gullible enough to believe the tale told by the warden, that this fat miscreant did on such-and-such a day chase down a deer and kill it with a pointy stick. Just about the time the judge pulls himself off the floor from laughing, he’ll dismiss the case and send me home.” There was more than a little truth to this prediction, as a simple look at me matched with the thought of me chasing after anything but an ice cream truck is patently ridiculous.

“Third, lets just imagine that the judge believed the warden. Do you seriously think that he would entertain the concept of wanting me to appear before him in court? I’d be shackled down like Hannibal Lechter. The idea itself is so patently silly, that the case would be continued until I had a beard that was a foot long. It’d eventually get thrown out, just to clear the docket.” This got a few more nods of assent from those gathered around the table.

The next thing I knew, I had a tribe, a group of wary hunters who want to go out to one of the islands of Casco Bay in the next few weeks and get a deer for an enormous meat-festival. There are four of us now, and one extra who wants to come along with a still camera and a video camera, just so he can chronicle all the events both pre and post disaster. He figures that he’ll make a killing himself on the video rights. Who wouldn’t want to see four drunken fools with pointy sticks running around trying to take a deer? He is calculating that he’s going to get a pretty good shot of the hoof, right before it clocks somebody in the head.

Ahh, but we are men of Maine, now filled with a blood-lust that will not be denied until we take our prize. And yes, we plan to be extremely careful, and not put any-ones eye out.

For those that had a history of going to public meetings, COVID was a disaster. I know now that even though the disease has waned, the disaster still takes a toll.

Public meetings used to be a thing. In every society there are a collection of crackpots, malcontents and members of the journalism establishment that attend just about every public meeting. Some attend because they have serious concerns about public debt. Others attend because a local issue intrigues of concerns them, and members of the press attend because they have to cover what happens.

Some, like me, attend because it’s good to see the planning behind what will be a public scrim in a few months. Long before any vote happens at a public meeting, you can tell who is where on any issue just from observation.

Observe who is sending sidelong glances to other board and committee members, and when.

Observe who just hates everybody, everything, and everything about everybody because their feet hurt.

Observe who is playing a game online on their laptop, and who is napping and needs to be prodded with a sharp stick when it comes time to vote on an issue.

Covid killed the public meeting, with a tool called the ZOOM Meeting platform.

Here we are, six years later…and almost half of all public meetings in Portland are conducted on Zoom.

Yes, it’s convenient for the appointed and elected. Not everyone likes to wear pants all the time (The former-Future-Ex-Wife regularly declares “No Mas Pantalones” post normal business hours) and attending meetings without brings a sense of whimsey to the process.

But the cranks and malcontents had a point. Public meetings are where you find out things. It’s too easy for the process to be abused. how do we KNOW that there isn’t a private group chat attached to this live digital meeting, which would be a violation of the law unless such records were kept? You can’t tell on video.

We’re still limiting public access, years after the emergency is over.

We’re also practicing historical revisionism on a grand scale.

Take this gem from the March 11th meeting of Portland’s “Social Housing Task Force”

“A discussion followed regarding potential meetings moving forward, and if this subgroup format might be pursued again.

Because groups of three members trigger public meeting laws, the group acknowledged that some work and

collaboration done in pairs may be an efficient and reasonable way to make progress on subgroup work.”

Wow. They clearly knew they were in violation, and came away with a scheme to continue doing so. Imagine a city hall gadfly of as little as ten years ago stumbling on that fact. I don’t need to imagine it, I’ve seen it.

We’re limiting public participation for an emergency that no longer exists.

There is a council meeting scheduled for next week. The meeting held on Monday will be in Council Chambers, but the public will likely stay home, since that is what the last six years has taught them to do, During the public comment session I’d be the guy taking his three minutes to say the following.

One of the issues coming before the council is the possible $30 Million dollar project to rebuild the Portland Expo. I’m against the project for a simple reason. The Expo has a history. Back in the 1960’s and 1970’s a skinny kid was given a territory to manage by his Dad, an event promoter. That skinny shrimp of a college kid first turned his minor Maine to Boston territory into a 1980’s Worldwide juggernaut Called World Wrestling Federation (WWF) later renamed WWE Entertainment, a Billion Dollar valuation company.

His name is Vince McMahon, and because of hefty political donations his wife Linda is now in charge of the US Department of Education.

He’s an alleged serial sexual predator in the workplace.

He swore for years he’d never set foot in the Expo again, the city at the time doing so poorly a job of maintaining it or even cleaning it.

Can’t we keep ONE building in Portland just the way it is that Vince swears he’ll never set foot in?

Normally, I’d like to point the link to the online site of a dead-tree press. Can’t seem to do it, since the Portland Press Herald has become of joke of what it once attempted to pretend to be. Keep in mind, this is coming from a guy that worked for a paper that gave away FREE what they now charge $3.25 for.

Hey, if your goal was to have hyper-expensive paper to wrap fish with, with the possibility of that paper rendering a stench unto the fish that makes it unpalatable, you couldn’t do better than the Press Herald.

Getting back to that storefront ordinance. “The Congo” has turned into a vacant wasteland of late. The combination of atrocious rental prices, declining traffic due to the homeless situation, spiraling increases in consumer prices, and the ever popular neo-fascist policies of the “Portland Parking Partnership” have dealt a death knell to what was once a thriving district.

Not even the collapse of the Maine Mall’s list of tenants can save it at this point.

Portland City Council: If you looked in the dictionary for a definition of blindsight, they would be proudly featured in a photo. I’m not just talking about the current members, but going back to the mid 1980’s. If you’ve ever been to a city council meeting, you’d walk away convinced that the Sun would rise tomorrow in the West instead of the East, simply because they argued without end that is the way it SHOULD be in our slice of heaven. The Sun and whole universe would eventually relent just out of sheer exhaustion.

They’ve passed this ordinance that will fine property owners for having vacant space on Congress St. Building owners can get around the fine by filling the windows with “art” approved by the city.

As I raised elsewhere, this brings up a lot of questions unanswered to this day. Who approved the art, and when did they do so? Did we elect those folks, or were they appointed to public positions without our consent? What was their training for that position? How much are we paying the artists? Is this a one-time demonstration license for the art, or does the city own it in perpetuity?

Keep in mind, this is the same organization several years back that agreed graffiti is a legitimate art form. I remember covering the story, about a local spray-can menace claiming his blasts, down to even his tags were art. Defining art is like defining pornography. Not everyone defines it the same, and you know what it is when you see it.

Of course, not everybody agrees on what they see.

To highlight the absurdity of fining owners for empty spaces, but negating the fine if they display public art, I present to you the two following examples of what I’M WILLING to find a local building owner who wants to challenge the policy to do. Let us display the following.

These were some of the original images that caused Moslem activists to storm a newspaper in Paris and kill 16 people. Seeing local press of late, I’ve no doubt we could get the Maine Wire to pay for reproduction and printing costs.

Then, this being Easter weekend, we could easily display this gem from the late 1980’s publicly paid for art kerfuffle.

Andres Serrano’s “Piss Christ”, a crucifix submerged in a jar of the artists’ urine.

Yeah, the combination of these two in the same window would piss off a LOT of people. But it would illustrate a point, provided the buildings insurance covered fire and broken windows.

Getting to the second part of the issue, the homeless issue.

No, I am not one of the folks that believe all the homeless are people bussed here from elsewhere, given free tickets from other cities. That HAS happened (and still does) but that ignores several realities. A LOT of these folks are our own home grow. They get sent to Portland when their community is too tired to deal with shenanigans anymore, or they come here in search of legendary services that no longer exist. They are drug addicted, and think coming to the largest city in the state might get them to the front of the line for a rehab.

Nope. Line is about a year long right now. Need housing? That wait-list line is a few years long. Medical care? Good luck with that.

Hell, since we’re not cooperating with ICE anymore at the County level all we have for you is jail cells. I say this knowing the Cumberland County DA has long held a “Catch and Release” position for just about every crime other than manslaughter. Possession of enough Fentanyl to kill half the city, and you’ll likely bond out of county in under a day.

Caught with heroin? You’d be lucky to be arrested.

But as I said up at the top of this column…the heat is coming. I’ve seen this show before.

The Maine Bank and Trust building on Congress street started it’s reconstruction about a month ago. The owners plan for it to be a destination hotel.

With ZERO parking. With Homeless shooting up and leaving needles (not to mention shitting) everywhere. With nothing but vacant storefronts, overpriced restaurants, failed social experiments, libraries and banks.

Sound like a great place for a hotel. Perhaps I should ask a group of investors to help me on a project I have in mind for Kharg Island.

The heat is coming for the homeless of Portland, and they don’t even know it.

My friend Curtis Robinson passed away over a week ago, and the loss still stings. A couple of great bits were written here and here.

It takes a special kid of soul to be an editor. It takes an exceptionally rare one to put up with writers that are described as “excentric” when using the polite terms. He knew I blew past the polite label and saddled up on bat-snot bug fuck crazy.

He didn’t flinch away from that. Underlying everything, he knew I had a passion for news, and Truth with a capital T. He also understood when opening up the Portland Daily Sun newspaper, he was coming to town with two reporters that didn’t know the lay of the land, locally.

Who to call. Who NOT to call. Who you can’t reach on a Thursday night because they are at an AA meeting. Who you’ll never get a return call from since they are likely in court as a defendant. What council member was in a particular developers’ pocket.

I called it local knowledge. He understood that I was one of many who knew where the bodies were buried; Not because I buried them, but because I spent a lot of time drinking with the guy (or a friend of the guy who talks too much) that had the local shovel franchise.

He bailed me out multiple occasions in times of trouble, stood by supportive when I lost “she who will not be named” to an overdose, and on occasion took prompt action to keep me on this side of the iron bars. Then, we’d spend many a good time talking and planning possible shenanigans at the wooden bars.

As little as a few months back, he claimed a bunch of his DC folk were still trying to figure out who exactly a certain disposable internet identity was, chuckling the entire time as the incident in question happened over ten years ago.

He edited me with a damned light touch, even at the beginning. Many (if not all) writers get editor-panic. They see a word cut here or there, the occasional phrase replaced, or a paragraph shortened and start squealing like every single word cut was a finger, limb or genitalia.

“Nope…I’m just going to sprinkle a little pixie dust on it. Here, let me show you what I’m cutting or moving and why…”

Then, I suddenly saw something that not only read better, but flowed better. He’d take a meandering stream of Mississippi Muck and make it navigable.

That is art.

He tried to get me to keep writing, even after the paper canned me. I had about four readers that were excited when a screed from this platform hit their email, and he was one of them. He helped me move back to Maine, about three times.

His laugh and smile were damned infectious. He lamented a few weeks back about February being the longest and cruelest month, seeming to take a good chunk of the year all on its own.

When Michelle texted me, I was floored. I still am 12 days later. When she said he had gone peacefully in his sleep, it struck me. He told me that joke once, with a wry grin, the one about the bus driver that passed away peacefully in his sleep “undisturbed by the screams of his terrified passengers”

All who considered him a friend…we are all terrified passengers now. If Furthur ever needed a relief driver so Neal Cassady could catch a few winks, Curtis would have been an obvious choice

My second brother in under a year. Jesus, aging sucks rocks.

Hungover, dizzy and not entirely unsurprised to find out that we were bombing people somewhere.

I guess in a normal world the first two would be acceptable. Waking up to the third is one of those “third cup of coffee” things that you don’t need to hear immediately on waking. Notes about bombing people somewhere are just uncivilized before that third cup, your first egg or bit of toast, and a healthy deuce.

Letting you in on something that is being kept quite quiet in the media in the US. We didn’t fire first. Israel did. Though we’ve been building up for weeks with Naval deployments and flopping of genitalia on the negotiating table, our friend in the region took the first poke.

This is the equivalent of a barfight standoff, and you buddy three feet behind you suddenly cracks somebody’s skull open with a pool cue. You’re there already, beer muscles flexed and ready for action, and that friend behind you just committed you while you were pumping up the adrenaline, so you feel no pain.

Doesn’t really matter, you were going to skrim anyway. At some point later, after the blood has been mopped up and wounds sutured, you have to pull your friend aside for a conversation that begins with the word “Dude…”

So now we continue to have the debate about whether or not a President can do this type of shit without the approval of Congress.

It’s called the “War Powers Resolution”

Congress gave up that power long ago, back under the feared era of Richard Nixon. To his credit, the screwy prick tried to VETO Congress limiting its own power, but they overrode him. He felt having 535 nitwits who lack the ability to dump water out of a wet boot having check power over the Commander in Chief of the Armed Forces was just silly.

Of course, true historians trace the power back to Lincoln.

Just so we’re clear, I’m not a big fan of this action. Everybody seems to think that killing Khomeini will lead to a sudden groundswell of Democracy, (Yes, with a capital D) but the real truth is that ship sailed in the Middle East long ago. It’s not going to happen, and I’ll give you the simplest reason why.

Do you think a Theocracy (or Religious Dictatorship) maintains its power by who is sitting at the head of government? You’d be sadly mistaken. It’s not even ruled by his inbred cross-eyed nephews, or local Mullahs, or even his dastardly secret police.

It’s street gangs.

Imam is hesitant to rule on anything. Like all alleged men of learning, every matter needs more study. Although local law and code may be quite clear, there is always another text to consult or consensus to be reached about what the prophet actually said and who he said it to, and his actions.

Meanwhile, local thugs just rape, pillage and stone detractors with little or no oversight. These are professionals. Think a cross between Whitey Bulger, a Parish Priest and a tattooed fucklehead with an aluminum baseball bat and a retinue of guys following him down the street intent of causing mayhem.

THAT is who is actually in power, and always has been. They used to work for the Shah. He fled the country, and now his son claims to be able to control those gangs he’s never even seen.

Meanwhile, this goofy prick needs to be the first one in front of a draft board, if one is called.

In current political court terms, that 6-3 ruling was a total kick in the testicles for Trump. Any other time, he could get five judges on the Supremes to agree with him if he suddenly decided to announce on X that the Sun tomorrow would rise in the North instead of the East.

This is just the latest distraction of the week, and this one was full of them, From Obama announcing (somewhat, parsing the language) that aliens were real but he hadn’t seen them, to the momentary announcements of the latest Epstein slime, adding on the DC “Pizza Delivery” account near the Pentagon and White House (whose sudden uptick in business usually indicates we are going to bomb the batsnot out of somebody in the next few hours) and the current situation in Iran or Greenland or Venezuela, adding in an addlebrained and suitably deadnamed trans shooter of his wife and kids…this was a week of distraction.

Hey, back on October 4th I posted this gem. “Clearly he’s never going to release the Epstein Files (since he’s in them) but if he ever did, I would lay a big bet that will be the day the Government finally acknowledges the existence of Aliens.”

Guess what else happened this week. As a kid, we used to say “I shit you not”

This is all just distraction from the bigger questions in my life right now, like “Where the fuck is my tax return?” to “Now that the courts have ruled, will we ever get that fat tariff check?” to “What the stuttering fuck is wrong with the guy downstairs?” (who in the course of the last two weeks was caught naked and beating off in another roommates room, standing over him at 7am and also almost burnt the house down with us in it a couple of days ago)

Distractions. I used to have a cat (or two) for that. Pets seem to be the ultimate distraction, whether they need to be walked or just make you wonder about their stubborn indifference to anything you want.

Guess that makes them similar to politicians and voters.

Distraction, the con artists greatest unteachable gift in the art of grift.

Related or not, I’ve been following the local issue of the new music venue, Portland Music Hall. The biggest part of the kerfuffle is the pushback from other local venues. There was an organized campaign against the hall, complete with painting LiveNation as just another corporate rapist that was planning on bending over the Portland concertgoer and every other venue.

I knew the fix was in when the initial plan was rubber-stamped by the planning board with unusual speed. This is a group that likes to spend months looking over your plans to see if there are the appropriate number of gender neutral bathrooms, electrical vehicle charging spaces, appropriately colored bike racks (yes, Portland does have this requirement by district) and leash-free dog exercise areas. A few columns ago I called this “Virtue Signaling Bingo”, a gift of grift that Portland has been an undisputed master of for the last thirty years.

Build it, don’t build it…just never ask me for a bailout if it fails like the original Portland Public Market or a cruise ship terminal that allegedly makes money.

I see the salt trucks are out on the road now, ahead of this coming storm (Portland Maine, 5:10PM on Friday Feb 20th) the latest distraction and unsettlement to weekend plans.

Gawds, I miss petting the cat to distract me from distractions.