Pages

Friday, May 29, 2009

¡Soy hombre del carne-buñuelo!

By: Michael Keith Rebstock

I work on a boat.

We transport provisions and personnel to vessels in the Gulf of Mexico.

I live on this boat for Two weeks at a time. Yes, I spend a lot of time on Facebook.

John has requested I write a blog for Blind Butcher. I told him I didn’t know what a blog really was. He assured me it didn’t matter. I said no, he promised Karma. I Told him I didn’t want to, he called me a pussy. I hate John sometimes. The only blogs I think I've ever read were his, and experience tells me - nothing he has ever done should be used as a template. I said fuck John Cramer and his karma. I went to bed.

I was awoken a few hours later by a pounding an my cabin door. “Red get up we gotta run, 12 hours out and back.” I guess karma gets up early. Good, now I don’t
have to write shit. Was karma gonna get me extra sour cream at Taco Bell? Would the CV joints on my car fix themselves? If I had written the dumb thing, would my name be an ointment poured forth to make virgins follow me?

Doubtful.

How disappointed can john really get anyway? He's an admitted Misanthrope. Everything he says is cryptic. He seethes disappointment. Before you think that’s mean, I see mental health on a continuum. Everyone's at least a little fucked up one way or another. Depending on what's wrong with you affects your perception of others. In short it's all relative to your state. I also think that aside from any genetic predispositions or nurture effects, we subconsciously (and sometimes consciously) adopt ”abnormalities” that afford us the best coping strategies for the world around us... Whatever. Cramer has settled into a nice, mild “introvertic neurosis.” (Thank you, I just made that up.) He is a cynic. One of the best. He gives enough of a fuck about the world around him to hate it, and refuses to make it worse by participating in it in any substantial way. Instead, he has opted to cringe and bitch from (and at) its redundant stupidity and obnoxious hubris. Essentially, people like me. John is a better person than me. I am astounded by my magnanimity. Myself, I have forgone the ulcers and opted out into a semi-controlled light manic state. If you find yourself struggling for defenium here, picture a buddhist monk meditating, now picture one of the Zombies from the movie 28 Days Later. OK, they both live in my skull. One spouts archaic babble, and one wants me to eat your brain. I consult them about everything. This lands my relative sanity squarely between “quirky” and “shithouse rat” (John, why are we friends again?).

For more about how cool I am, join the Facebook Group, “Rebstock,” and get all my psychotic ramblings.

Oh yeah. Fuck John, and his blog, and karma. I got out of bed. I put on my boots. I peed. I got some coffee. I checked Facebook from my phone for validation - no notifications. I suck. No E-mails. Everyone hates me. Four new people joined my group. I am a Rock Star! Validation achieved. I have attention. I have approval. I am an insecure God. I need a therapist. Hold up, someone wrote on my Wall. It's Claire, John's girlfriend. “Write The Blog, Asshole.” (I'm paraphrasing.) I have not met Claire. I hate Claire. I hate Claire not because she is telling me what to do, but because she is smarter than me. Writing the blog is better than getting into an argument and making her prove it. Fuck. I will write the blog. I closed my phone and walked out onto the deck.

On the deck I see a semi-truck and a passenger van. This is a no-brainer. I am good with people, I am charming, everyone loves me - right up until the moment that they hate me. There is no in-between. Besides, I would much rather check passports and deal with customs requirements than drive a forklift around in the dark. I approach the van, the crew pile out, they are Asian, two have mullets. These are Filipinos (the mullet is still huge in Manila). Cool. I like Filipinos. They are polite and they never vomit.

[As of the final draft of this Ive learned Filipinos make meat doughnuts. They gave me one, I didn't want it. They insisted, I refused. They got insulted, I ate the fucking thing. I ate three more.]

Unfortunately, in this industry they never speak English, which makes paperwork really suck and I would rather be bound in duct tape and spend the day in someones trunk than fuck with it. I took Spanish in high school, I failed it. I took it again, I failed it. I took it in College, I failed it. I took it again, I coasted by on charm. I got a job as a waiter and learned Mexican in two months. Immersion works. Had I known the industry I would end up in, I would have taken Greek, or Russian, or, well, Filipino. Since I went to high school on Earth, I was offered none of these (not that I would have passed anyway). In short (too late), I made a beeline for the forklift. When I'm not listening to a mp3 player, I soundtrack life in my head; and when I operate heavy machinery, I forgo my brain's shuffle function and head for Black Sabbath. Iron Man should do well. I start the forklift, Tony bends the first chord, I disengage the handbrake, he bends the second. Enter Ozzy. “I AM IRON MAN!” Open the fuckin' truck.

FUCK!

Stop the music.

Let me explain something.

Warehouses have a machine, this machine has a button, this button has a label, and this label reads as follows: “Fuck up dockworkers day.” Today, someone hit that button. No human could do this. The last two pallets put on the truck are in sideways. Their outside edges are past the edges of the truck door and their inside edges are touching. Go ahead and get the duct tape, open the trunk. There must be a machine. No human could be this cruel. If I'm not mistaken, this defies physics. Steven Hawking loaded this truck. They should really offer Filipino in high school. I ditch the forklift and retrieve an empty pallet. The Captain sees me doing this and comes down from his throne in the wheelhouse. He requires an explanation. I tell him I'm breaking a pallet down and rebuilding it on the ground. He says just pull it out. I tell him it will flip and fall. He says then be careful. Que Tony and Ozzy! I am agile, I am deft, I am stealthy. The pallet clears the lip of the truck, flips and falls. Please be eggs! Please be eggs! Produce. Oh well. As I am preparing an I-told-you look, he says now re-stack it. And, put a shirt on. He turns. As I look at the back of his head, only two words come to mind: Donkey Punch. I collect potatoes, I collect cantaloupe. I re-stack the pallet. By the time I've unloaded the whole truck into cargo nets, Ozzy is doing Iron Man in Spanish. “SOY HOMBRE DE METALICO!” (Yes, I know, I'm fucked up.) Does this seem too long for a blog? It's not really a good place to stop. I'll speed up. Pallets on the boat, Filipinos clear customs, We're underway. I plug in my laptop to get the attention I thrive on before going out of range. I see my wall. Now I hate Claire for telling me what to do. I go to Word, Word's gone. I go to Word Pad, Word Pad's gone. I stop hating Claire long enough to hate Vista. I am in the boat's lounge, at the moment it looks like a lounge in the Philippines. Why is everyone staring at me? I just thought, “Where the fuck is word?” And, yelled it instead, huh? A non-mullet Filipino asks me, “What wrong?” I tell him, ”nothing.” He persists and I explain. “He help you.” He points to a skinny kid in a - am I seeing this right - a Joy Division shirt? Nice. “He find.” Okay, great, please, find. The Joy Division kid takes my laptop and proceeds to go through everything on my computer . I am prepared for the laughter of 7 Filipinos when he opens a lost porn clip and they hear hams slapping. I Explain to translator dude that I like the band on the kid's shirt. This takes a while. He explains it to the kid for an inordinate amount of time to translate, say, a Bible, and I get my answer, "He didn’t know it was band.“ Just open word, dude." Eventually, I got my laptop back with the explanation, “Word gone." Perfect. Joy Division is now arguing with a mullet who pulls out one of our DVDs. They go back and forth for a while, and mullet shows me the cover. It's Transporter 3. Translator asks me, “You got #2?” How do you say this is not blockbuster in Filipino? This blog is way too long. So I'm writing this by hand and I'll type it later and by the end I will have written two blogs. Let me read it and see if I had a point……………. Nope. No point, no moral, no lesson to draw. Just me wailing on John, plugging my Facebook group, and having something to do instead of watching Transporter 3. Mission Accomplished! Thank you, Claire, now I only hate you once again. John probably just wanted me to write this to give the good blogs scale. Fuck it. Attention is attention. Fuck you, John. I'm gonna go lay in the sun and wait for the meat doughnuts to catch up with me.

REBSTOCK

Thursday, May 28, 2009

What Were You Doing 10 Years Ago?



I think this would have been the day I almost kicked a "fan" in the head. The guy was pissed because I said I felt like I was "Dying up here," after we predictably and completely fucked up one of our songs. Seems Douche had just lost a brother to suicide, was three sheets, and hallucinated that I knew this and was commenting on it in the middle of a rock show. Anthropomorphic, anyone? He started throwing lit matches at me while I was playing, so I spoke to him in a manner that was a little less equivocal. As he inflated himself and rushed the stage, off came the Les Paul and on turned Bull-John the Idiot Boy.

It worked itself out. Nobody got hit. Drunken moron apologized, hugged me, and left his genetic haze soaked into my lovely t-shirt as a parting gift of absolution.

And as for the show - it was GENIUS!

The guy who made this video approached me after the show and said he would put it on TV once he finished editing it. Obviously he took a (extremely hard to find cassette-only) recording of us and painstakingly hashed it out to make it fit, timing-wise. A labor of love, or a labor of batshit lunacy. It's open for interpretation.

I think you could guess which side I fall on.

All told, this is actually not bad.

If only the ten people in the crowd were listening!

Friday, May 22, 2009

I Knew Something Was Wrong

Take that, dignity.

Thursday, May 21, 2009

Thursday

For the last two-and-a-half weeks, there has been a green Buick Century parked directly outside of my work. It sat beneath a tree in our gigantic parking lot. Every time I opened the shipping doors to receive freight it sat there, silently and obtrusively, collecting dust.

Eventually my coworker asked me what was up with the car. Wondering the same thing myself I headed out to get a closer look.

I’ve learned in the past that if someone leaves a seemingly decent car parked in a private retail parking lot, there’s a good chance that this is because the car was stolen and dumped. I have seen this very scenario play out once before.

To me, the car seemed odd. It was from out of state, and from the looks of what was inside, the person driving it was on the move. There was a basket of laundry in the back seat, half-finished water bottles on the passenger seat, and a garbage bag with things like snack foods, a tube of toothpaste, and a single DVD sitting on the back seat.

I called the cops.

I knew it was probably nothing, but just in case it would be best to be sure.

The officer was in and out within less than five minutes, and when he poked his head into my door, all he had to say was that the car’s plates were, “Clear.”

I wondered.

Why would someone leave their car in a place where it was sure to be towed without any notice?

Still, with the plates coming up clean, I knew there was pretty much nothing left to do.

By yesterday afternoon, however, I decided to have another look into the car, jot down the license plate number, and look it up online myself. Three weeks was just too long. Something just seemed wrong.

Aside from a single page at Carfax which simply verified the VIN number, I found nothing.

Then, last night, as we were watching the news, a story comes on about how about three weeks ago a woman wandered in to a medical clinic right in our immediate area. She was suffering from total amnesia, and also from several seemingly non-life-threatening head injuries. She was 25 to 30, and without any ID of any kind. A near-total cipher.

A number was given to call the police with any information.

There was one overlapping coincidence: the car was in our lot almost exactly as long as the girl had been discovered.

I called the cops for a second time. It was after hours for the detective assigned the case, so I just left my story with the officer who answered the phone. She told me that she would pass it on and that I would get a call back in the morning.

Sure enough, 7:30 AM, I received a call from the detective assigned to the case. I gave him the plate number, make and model, and he told me he would call back if anything came up. I noticed that he sounded almost hopeful. Still, I figured that would be it.

But then, around noon he called back. He told me they were coming out to check out the car, and that when they arrived they wanted to talk with me if I didn’t mind. I said sure and went back to work.

Around 1:30 the detectives showed up. As I walked up, they already had the car all opened up and were going through the items inside.

I Introduced myself, and the officer looked at me smiling very wide, “It’s her! You were right. congratulations, sir, you’re a hero!”

For the record, this is the first time in my life I had ever heard a homicide detective tell me that I was a hero. Okay, it was the first time I had ever spoken knowingly with a homicide detective, period. Very surreal. Ridiculous, yes, and very surreal.

In his hand he held her bank card, and there on the card was her photo. And yes, it was indeed the girl from the news.

I can’t describe to you how happy I was to know that I had actually helped them identify this poor woman. I could tell that they were very happy too and additionally relieved as well, and I can imagine that since they were homicide detectives, they probably didn’t get too many of these somewhat happy endings.

In a sense, the whole thing is really sad. This woman, driving a car from Washington (the state) for whatever reason was in Houston, parked her car in our lot, locked it with all her important documents inside, took her dog, and was next seen wandering into an office building, injured, totally disoriented, and completely befallen by amnesia. The office, not wanting any part of her, sent her to the nearest medical clinic.

She ended up somehow finding the clinic at the end of my home street.

Her car was in my work lot.

Most likely someone got ahold of her, beat her up, maybe worse, and left her unconscious. For nearly three weeks not a soul knew who she was, including herself.

I feel incredibly lucky to have been able to help this woman get one step closer to remembering what happened, and more importantly - who she is.

I felt sort of silly calling the police last night, thinking of myself as one of those people who call whenever something like this happens just so they can be a part of something that has nothing whatsoever to do with them. That was never interesting to me. I have a daughter, and furthermore my girlfriend’s daughter lives with us for half of the year. I can’t , as a parent and as someone who loves the people he loves very deeply, begin to imagine how her parents might feel wondering where the hell she was. And worse, I can’t imagine having no idea who you are. It must be horrible. Who knows where she goes from here. Hopefully with time she will regain her memory.

I could tell that the cops liked this woman, and I could tell that these two homicide detectives, guys who see the very worst of humanity on a daily basis, were moved by being able to help her.

Man, do I know the feeling.

Whatever happened to her three weeks ago, and whatever brought her to Houston, I imagine her life hasn’t been easy recently. I can only hope it improves. Maybe today can be one of the steps in that direction.

Tomorrow, another Friday.

And Saturday after that...

Monday, May 11, 2009

The Home Team

Turning 41 in about a month and a half. Whoopee fucking doo, people! What makes it more frightening? The fact that I have one foot in the grave, or the fact that I still act pretty much exactly like I did when I was 18? Yeah, sure, growing up is one of the more overrated proposals in American life; anyone denying this fact is a fucking coward. Putting all that in a box and mailing it far away, you are still left with the fact that I am a giant child.

It’s Mother’s Day. Or, you know, it was Mother’s Day. Now it’s just Monday. Way too fucking early Monday, yes, but Monday nonetheless.

I’m sucking down the 40s and basking in the afterglow of Will Arnett and Will Forte. And this in no way dispels the vision of me as an overgrown baby.

Oh, I can admit that.

Because I have no choice.

I wanna shift gears here and tack this ship in a direction that leaves you less clear on what I am trying to say, because I am tired of expressing myself clearly, all while being perceived as being opaque.

Fuck that.

It’s a graveyard, this place; full of it, full of agonizing loss and empty fucking what-have-you’s. You can stumble around on the stairs in the dark. You’ve walked them repeatedly over these many years. These years which have been so inconsiderate as to drift by in a matter of decades while you spent all of your time pretending to forget the way through.

Well, now it’s payback time, and you are all out of cash.

And that’s going to be a problem because the Home Team hires only the biggest, and the best, and these boys have come to play. They walk with very, very big sticks, and they know that though those Words hurt pretty bad, those sticks are definitely where it’s at.

Feel that? that’s what I’m talking about.

So, remember that day, the one during which you strutted in with a chip on your shoulder so big it pushed all of ours right off the edge of the table?

I mean, do ya? Muthafucka?

I do.

I remember the matching shirts that lit up the first week like a beacon towards the shores of pity. You, replete with your bacterial vapor, and your voluminously feathered coiffure. Oh, what a thing of beauty. It worked for us. How about you?

We sat in court, the stand-ins for loyal subjects milling about, on the quest for the delights of hormonal expulsion and dietary crimes. It was vast, it was temporary, but it felt like forever.

You would decorate the floors with your desperation. Await the fates that beg to swing down, terror on the wing, the red lights of tomorrow paving the way for disastrous release. There are triggers and signs. There are bright flashing lights that are set in place to guide you on your way into the great and ravenous maw. Mmmmm, you have been set down in this barbed-wire nightmare, and you have been neglected in a fashion that leaves you utterly incapable of explaining it in a way that doesn’t reek of artsy pandering, meandering, and outright nonsensical bullshit. Smell it? It grows out of the fields on the hottest, most humid days. Yours for the taking.

You think there’s a narrative, which I am extremely proud to announce is something that leaves your benefactors cheering with delight. They are simply beside themselves with the mere notion. Yeah, yeah, yeah... you think there is a motherfucking narrative, and I just have ta tell ya, the boys in the band are simply dancing the maypole with glee. It’s the most quaint of conceits, and wow how you have bought the plot, the farm, the five-year-plan, and so it is very much to be that your arrogant posturing has opened the eyes - yes, all 3 of them - that dot the faces of these hooded watchers.

Too much. Too soon.

It isn’t enough to squander yourself like a pathetic self-fulfilling prophecy.

I mean, you know, that in and of itself is pretty bad. I admit this readily.

But no, you had to go and sell it off to the highest bidder like the the gates have opened and capital is something with which you have been given the highest trust. It’s illusory at best. At best. And at worst? At worst, you are a total and complete fucking waste of carbon. And, guess what?

YOU KNOW IT!

So, where does all of this leave us?

Well, I don’t know. Where does it?

Sunday, May 10, 2009

I Hope You Die Alone, Slowly, and in Agonizing Pain

Five of you follow this. That is to say that five of you are willing to openly admit to following this blog. Why? I mean, why?

Today we took our children to the Houston Art Car Parade. Me, I’ve never been a real big fan of the Art Car parade. To me, prettying up your car, a machine that I tend to regard as something that simply exists because, here in this country, we spring boners at the thought of having our own giant machine, employed to take us hither and yon, espousing without words our greatest slant towards the tenets of “freedom” we so dualistically enjoy.

Yeah, yeah, we love being free, so long as it doesn’t impinge on our need to control the freedom of the motherfucker next door. That brown bitch worships a different god than me! Can you imagine that? FUCK THAT.

Sure, genuine creativity goes into many art cars. I can admit that and still think of art cars as a general waste of time.

Still, with kids you do what you can to keep them entertained so you aren’t spending the balance of your time with them diffusing wars over who owns what, who must have Gatorade before they apparently die of madness, who can most exploit their underdeveloped talents to their personal advantage, and who can ask the most useless questions in a 24 hour period.

If you weigh your options, on a weekend like this one the Art Car Parade seems like a no-brainer way to keep the spawn at bay.

You’d be wrong on that one.

If you are fortunate enough to not be familiar with Houston, this cesspool of hillbilly inbreeding, christian-traditional backwards ignorance, and heat and humidity levels suited more for slime moulds than people, then this is the state for you.

Today if you so much as moved your chest as you drew in oxygen you would start to sweat. If you were to, say, carry your 40 lb child about a mile to the parade grounds because they openly displayed a lack of desire to get anywhere within our lifetimes, and were furthermore intent on complaining in an awe-inspiring display of incessant irritation, you would pretty much walk away from today’s parade soaked in your own brine like a fucking lobster.

You’d look like one too if you were, say, lucky enough to have your sunblock wipe off during the dreamfest of the parade proper.

So imagine my excitement upon returning to our parking lot only to discover that, in the place of our car, the family Griswold had the pleasure of discovering that our car was gone! Oh yes, towed it was! In the 96 degree heat, with the 85% humidity, with three children, all under 6, one just 2!

Imagine that? Imagine the upswell of joy and emotional warmth that filled me from the inside out.

I would like, maybe as an aside, to tell my side, since, it turns out, it ended up costing me $200 just to get the fucking car out of an impound lot.

We parked in a pay lot. The towcunt sat immediately behind us as we unloaded the brood. This fat fucking piece of human shit sat there, directly behind us, and watched me as I shoved a fiver in the slot for our appropriate parking spot. HE FUCKING WATCHED ME PAY FOR OUR SPOT.

And then, as we were enduring the parade, he towed our fucking car!

Returning to the scene of the, let’s face it, crime, I died a little inside. I made my angry phone calls, found the number of the towing company, and demanded the tow-truck cock return and sort this out.

When the fat fuck arrived it was immediately apparent that this guy would never relent without the risk of imminent bodily harm. I considered it, oh how I considered it. But ultimately, I knew that was not an option. Okay, it was not a viable option. Let’s put it that way.

He argued wit me, showed me a photo he took of the money box, opened, with no money in the slot for our spot, as if this somehow triggered my idiot button allowing me to suddenly disregard reason and instantly turn into a total and unyielding imbecile.

Oddly enough this didn’t work at all.

This poor, fat, air-conditioned, greying, coronary impending dickrider had the nerve to tell me that as I was being less than cordial with him he was going to leave and stop trying to help me.

Figuring how this cunt was helping me would haunt me ‘til death were I dumb enough to ponder such useless things.

I had no reasonable choice. I had no graphic proof I paid these criminals.

Still, I called the pigs out ‘cause I wanted them to talk sense into the whale-man. Unfortunately, the pigs were too busy not giving a shit, thus leaving us in this lawless shithole of Houston, fucked and powerless.

god, how I love feeling powerless. ‘Cause you know, I don’t get enough of that in other venues, eh?

The price to retrieve our illegally towed vehicle, you ask? A mere $200, that’s all. $200 to repair the damage done to us from a fat asshole, from an inbred town, and from the pathetic idea I fostered that we wouldn’t get fucked parking in a pay lot.

I hate humanity in case you didn’t know.

It’s not a new development, it’s archetypal. It’s in my DNA. I am genetically programmed to see the ailment of humanity that parades before us like painted, crippled whores as little more than an open display of declining horror. We are an ever increasing equation of diminishing return.

Thankfully, one day, our blight will be wiped away. I would never have the strength to do it, to make it happen as it were. I am a coward.

I am prone to see the aesthetic in this well of dark. I am inclined to regard the ugly, the horrible, the mundane, and the outright idiotic, and somehow manage to pluck a single, beautiful hair from the rotting corpse. It is the only thing that makes me survive. Otherwise, I would be in the news, and you on your high horse could revel in telling your vapid half-acquaintances and empty-eyed others about how you knew me before I “really lost it.”

Don’t hold your breath.

Unless you happen to be a fat fucking lowlife predator that lies in wait, burrito in hand, ready at a moment’s notice, to fuck the day of a family struggling against all the odds to carve a tiny niche for ourselves so that we might be able to live this life, love each other the way we deserve to be loved, and keep the hounds of ignorant, blind, fanged bloodlust at bay so that we might be able to rot away with something under our nails that reeks ever-so-subtly of dignity, of strength, then maybe there’s hope that you aren’t part of this indicative wave of dickheadism that seems to be so rampant across this toilet of a country.

It’s a thought.

Friday, May 8, 2009

Go Fcuk Yrlouesf

Hlelo, I am the Blnid Bchuter. Prapehs yuv'oe hraed of me. Wilhe it is cmoomn to tpye nrmalloy, uisng stdraand rleus of snlipleg, waht if I were to, say, splel aomslt etnrhiyevg alomst ttlloay wnorg, making srue only to keep the fisrt and last lteetr of eevry wrod crreoct? Tihs mhgit, and in fact is, the rsluet. Are you hanvig turbloe rdianeg this? I'll bet it ceoms rhaetr elsaiy wtih lttile to no erofft. Wlmocee to the sottihrsm taht is the hamun bairn. Hvae a nice day, and as the cutsaromy Buecthr gtnereig goes - go fcuk yrlouesf.

Tuesday, May 5, 2009

Daycare bitches.

I drop my kid off at a daycare facility. I get in my Jeep and suffer immediate anxiety (as I make my way to work in Downtown Houston on 59 or I-10 ) because I understand my child, know how brutally destructive the world can be, and can only operate in a daily grind that just gets us by as a family... wanting more than all of this.

Today my daughter was in a chaotic room full of children waiting to be picked up by their parents and was told she couldn't have candy like everyone else if she didn't stop talking. Apparently, she didn't stop talking and was singled out, embarrassed and given no candy.

I can't tell you how angry I am about this set up...

Do I believe that children should be rewarded with candy? No. Do I believe that children should be punished for talking by denying them a treat that everyone else is getting? No. She's four years old. If you want to address the fact that she isn't being mindful and behaving quietly.. fine. Address it the way someone who knows how to fucking handle children would. If you knew how to handle children, you would know that EVERYONE gets candy if you're going to be the kind of Christian based program that offers that horrible shit to your prayer indoctrinated babes as a treat.

I've put up with the whole "God is great" grace at dinner that you sent her home with. I tolerate the overt christian suggestive seasonal bulletin boards with decorations from children who are forced into believing that GOD IS WATCHING THEM-while getting them into their ancient dark car full of puppies and candies and colorful eggs and pretty pictures- which is child abuse if I ever saw it.

What kind of jerk has a room full of children and gives all of them candy, but one? Might be Christian. Might be fucking retarded.. Either way, they are The kind of jerk that gets to meet me tomorrow.

I won't be shaking hands.

Saturday, May 2, 2009

Hi

                                               Hi my name is Brett. I live in Idaho. This photo is 
                                                 beautiful but you cant really see the disease on the
                                                     trees.
                                                 They are supposed to burn every once in a while.
                                                 We wont let them.
                                                 And they are supposed to be Ponderosa pine not
                                                 Douglas Fir.  
                                                  We did that.
                                                  I would like to think we could get this right. 
                                                   Nice to meet you.
                                                  
                                                           Brett.