Up until April 1, I had a 1970 VW Bug, name of Honig.

 (  She got great gas mileage, but you couldn't haul wood in her.

Now I have a 1971 Toyota pickup, named Miss (or Miz) Blue.

If I can get this thing working, you'll see Spuds, our 18-year-old cat (yes, he's still here!) on the hood.  He can barely walk now, but somehow floats upwards in amazing leaps to the top of book cases and the hoods of vehicles.  When we let him out, which he's very pissed off we don't.

I can now haul wood in the back of the truck, and bags of salmon skeletons.  Last salmon derby, I went home with more salmon than anybody else, because a lot of guys were doing the stupid Testicle Trophy salmon cleaning — barely scraping the meat off the two sides of the salmon to form a weensy fillet, just because they didn't know how — and throwing most of the meat into the water.  Guys.  I swear.  Why WOULD you go display your ignorance and inability like that?  Not to say throw most of what you paid and worked so much to catch back into the water?

I'm not really complaining; if you're dumb or Testicle enough not to take that salmon backbone home to smoke or just grill, I'm gonna be there with my bloody bag.

If I'm NOT there, then everybody knows what you're doing, anyway.

We're terror-forming THIS planet — and look at the mess we're making of it! Multi-cellular life here is only a thin, fragile skin across all this rock and water. We are botching it dreadfully.

I say we go elsewhere, where we can mess up bare rocks we like, and the bacteria will just mutate to fit. HERE, we have to pay for our right to exist in almost every way. We already have to pay for space to live, water, food. We deserve to pay for our air, too. (Does anybody think that it will be free if somebody has to work to produce it?) It will get rid of poor or street people, though. If you can't afford air…

Come to think of it, we'll have to pay gravity taxes, too! What IS it with humans not wanting to leave alone the only space ship we've got, and forcing ourselves to replace systems so we have to pay with them? Are we just terminally silly? I say we go be silly on an asteroid. We can't hurt anything there.

Back in the Vietnam era, the 101st Airborne, basing a nickname on its open-beaked eagle shoulder patch, called itself The Puking Buzzards.  Evidently, the present-day 101st is calling itself The Screaming Chickens.

This has nothing to do with the military, or shoulders.  It's got a lot to do with the stomach.

The Screaming Chicken is a little espresso shop and cafe in Yelm, Washington.  It serves nothing unusual or unexpected.  But the dishes it does, it does right.

Friends and I, on a long survey run, were tired and hungry and needed caffeinating.  Everything else on what promises to become the Yelm strip-mall was unappetizing.  The usual McDonald clones.  But we'd passed the Screaming Chicken on the way out, and remembered it on the way in; the advantage of a nutty name.  We'll come to the reason for it later.

Two people ordered coffee, egg salad on a croissant, an omelet burrito and 1/2 an order of biscuits and gravy.

The coffee was just strong enough.  SC doesn't have quite as high an elbow as some mom & pop places we've been — they don't caffeinate constantly — but we had enough to keep us driving.

The biscuits and gravy were admittedly a shock.  I thought they'd accidentally brought me the full order.  A huge split biscuit, crisp on the bottom, brown on top, slathered — there is no other word for it — with lots of tender sausage bits in a smooth, light cream gravy.  And a crescent moon of perfectly browned buttery (I suspect flavored oil, but it tasted fine) hash browns that weren't even mentioned on the menu.  They weren't quite as good as the hash browns I enjoyed at a little hotel restaurant in San Jose, but then what is?  They came in a darn serious second, though.

We always share our orders.  The croissant, whether produced locally or ordered, was very light and high. The egg salad had just the right touch of dressing, and was chopped large.  A potato salad side didn't have too much of anything — not too much dill, not too much mustard.  The egg burrito was light and delicate, and not oily.

Ila Dawn, who owns and runs the place, passes the time with friends and customers at a table.  A cubby-hole den in the back features terra-cotta walls, a (I think) artificial fireplace and two big comfy sofas, and available toys and books.  Ila obviously has no trouble with customers sitting back and sucking coffee as her two lively waitresses keep an eye on things.

And — since we have to eat at these places — nice, clean, one-hole bathroom, too.

Oh, yes.  Ila says The Screaming Chicken is the coffee.  It'll wake you up like a very determined rooster.

Ila Dawn's Screaming Chicken Espresso & Cafe, 203 Yelm Avenue West, Yelm, WA.  360 458 966.

Baron von Richthofen's (The Red Baron's) favorite food was pancakes.

And he put mustard on everything.

His mother — who hated daylight savings time and thought it was stupid — said so in her autobiography.

I posted this because there was no google listing for "The Red Baron's Favorite Food."

Speaking of food references, I was at the end of a long day and indulging in a little entertainment surfing.  Ended up sending this to the Red Baron pizza company (www.redbaron.com):

"Your pizza image is a little odd. The Red Baron didn't look like Tom Selleck.  He looked like Robin Williams.  Compare:

http://www.briggsenterprises.com/bluemax/ with http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0000245/

Am I wrong?"

Friend who reads JusticeForNone sent this:

Hi Donna

I thought this might both sicken and frighten you.  Is this truly what America has come to?  Please pass this around, as everyone needs to know about this.

<http://justicefornone.com/article.php/20060405142729820> 

My answer (also sent to my PolList):

Frighten me?  Nah.

My mother would have steamroller'd these clowns.  First thing she'd have done was call the newspapers and report the whole damn thing.

As we are doing here.

Can we all name one country that terrorized through people's children?    And another that locked dissidents up as crazy?  Remember the secret is to OVERLOAD THE SYSTEM.  IRS ginks live in fear of their supervisors — mess with them!  I once closed down the University of Washinton for blatant racism — closed it FLAT DOWN — by putting code in its hold system.  You see, I have no children — so it is my bounden duty to fight for the freedom of those who do, because their children have made them, to quote, hostages to fate.

Go ahead, arrest me, you terrorizing Neo-Con schmucks.  You do not EVEN want me in your prison system.  The US Army asked me to leave and traded me an honorable discharge and a good conduct medal if I would just go away and stop teaching the prisoners in the slammer to sing Lili Marlene.

The president gets all my pol-list messages.  Why?  Because then the administration can't claim they didn't know about something — they've got it in their computers.

Go ahead.  Send things to president@whitehouse.gov  Fill their computers up with things they claim they don't know.  Drive them in little paranoid circles.

America?  America is the country that murdered the buffalo.  I watch up here in glee as it runs in little scared circles.  May the buffalo karma stampede it off a cliff.

Until it starts to act as brave and honest as the animals it murdered, it will continue to sink into a morass of cowardice and fear.   But there's just too much pay-back waiting for it.

Canadian friend and colleague's response:

Love the idea of sending everything to the president. Fantastic.That is the thing about wiretapping everyone and spying on everything. There is MORE likelihood that real terrorists will be overlooked since there is not the manpower to watch everything. Case in point, how nightwatchmen with a dozen cameraviews to watch is usually clued out and watching tv, vs the lone person walking outside.
cheers, L.Note:I'm corresponding with an Iraqi mother right now.  She's said that we have piled up so much hate against us in her country, it will take generations to forget, if ever.  We've done this to 14 small countries, and all across our continent.  We've murdered, pillaged, imprisoned, bombed, anybody who gets in the way of Manifest Destiny and United Fruit or the sugar industry or Big Oil.  And we think we're on a crusade for God.  The buffalo stampede is turning toward us.  Watch out for the horns and hooves.

The only people in the world who sympathize with us right now are the Germans — who can understand the sins we're piling upon ourselves.  And they only did it for a couple of decades.  Oh, dear gods and spirits — forgive us our centuries. 

Or at least teach us through our suffering.  Because we certainly haven't learned from the suffering we've inflicted.

Friend Dave in Ireland just reminded me of Lina's kitten nickname:

Lina The Rotten.

Partly for being what the Germans call a Beissvogel, or Bitey-bird.  But mostly for the Armpit Fixation.

Specifically upon a Canadian friend.  He's a clean man, but he's large, and anxious (mostly because he's so smart).  We all know what anxiety sweat smells like (I get it when I'm into a heavy creative surge — and I can't stand my own, let alone somebody else's).

Cats, however, LOVE human anxiety stink.

As a kitten, Lina seemed forever to have her head in a shoe.  That human foot-stank thang was her Higher Light.  And my friend's armpits were Nirvana.

She would cling to him, shoving her head into his armpits, nuzzling and chewing.  And then she would run over to some innocent human, preferably one lying on a couch, and ram her stinky head into that human's face.

"Look!  I STINK pretty!" was invariably followed by "Oh, God, Lina, get away, you STINK!"

Embarrassed humans all around.  Very proud of herself cat.  In our house and among our friends, a Friend of Cats became someone with a heavy body odor. 

Lina the Rotten.  Look out Afterworld.

Thanks, Theresa (Comment, below).  She was a heck of a cat.  I'm hoping it helps others, too, when their cats stop eating and drinking.  They won't try to force feed or hydrate or otherwise interfere when an animal so wise is working with its own personal death project.

They can just make sure the cat is comfortable and quiet and gets to sleep where it wants, and maybe hold it a little if that's good.

(And a good dvd to watch if holding is in order — "Dead like me."  Helps us deal).

I think I may know why cats do this.  If you starve and dehydrate at the end, there will be nothing but skin and bones left.  Nothing really edible to rot and bring in the predators that may go for your relatives or half-grown kittens (hey, it's a theory).

Wise animals, cats.  Right down to their DNA.

We are listening to Grieg in memory of Lina. The Hall of the Mountain King exactly matches those moments when she'd whirl into the bathroom, wrap herself around Dan's bare ankles — he being trapped in a manner no one can escape — and kick and bite and claw while he howled for help, before tearing back out of the bathroom and hauling her monkey butt down the hallway to terrorize another cat. 

Dan once brought home a horrible horror film while I was off to a trade show, just to see what Hell Devil and the Machete Nights or whatever it's name was, was about.  Vietnam vet and all — perhaps because of it — he couldn't watch it.  But he had to leave it runnning for Lina while he did the dishes.  Every time he looked back into the living room, she was sitting in front of the screen, craning her neck, gleefully watching and listening to the nasty meaty sounds and the gunfire and screaming. The guy at the video shop to whom Dan told the story said, "Your cat is seriously disturbed."

A friend writes:"2 things I'll remember about her:  the Terrible 2 Inch Tongue, and the time she went after that little calico kitten that used her tummy for a trampoline on the way to the kitty tree:  that's the fastest I've ever seen a cat that size go from fully relaxed to fully locked and loaded." She means the time Lina lay on the couch, front legs extended like the Sphinx, having finished washing, her tongue protruding rigid at least an inch long, while we laughed at her and she glared at us like we were crazy.As for the kitten — found lost one afternoon, and returned to its anxious door-knocking owner by the evening — Lina was actually lying on her stomach, and the kitten caromed off her back, but if I hadn't grabbed her, that kitten would have been live-skinned mincemeat.  A National Geographic special once described housecats as "hardwired to kill."  I'd never seen the programming go into action so fast in my life.

From the time she was a tiny kitten, until she was gone, Lina never had a day's real problem or pain, and had anything she wanted, including a BIG bathroom to boss other cats around in, and all the bananas she wanted, and two humans to push around. She got the Lotto in life.

She was originally found when a friend returned to work on a Saturday and heard mewing in a warehouse wall.  He literally had to dig a hole in the wall to find the tiny four-week-old.  He thought he'd discovered a kitten.  What he'd found was a little striped savage. When she discovered her own tail, she bit it so badly that she reared back in pain and patted it to comfort it. She tore out onto the back porch at eight weeks old, glaring at the world, then realized how big it was, and tore back into the house. She rolled down from the second floor, her round head sounding like a large rock thumping down the stairs.  Didn't seem to hurt her any. She helped people move furniture.

She tattled on workmen who opened the walls to replace plumbing or put up tiles.  We think she might have thought they were mining for kittens.  Well, where else would kittens come from, in her mind? She didn't like meat or fish.  She adored bananas.   And nectarines and watermelon juice and avacadoes.  She insisted on black olives to play with and chew into little salty bits. If you blew on her head, she bashed it against you.

With her huge heart tumor - discovered while x-raying for other problems, and bringing the vet nearly to tears — and her very bad kidneys, we'd always feared a bad death. We were so lucky.  She had a very good passing. Right to the end, she insisted on being in the room she wanted, and JUST the towel to lie on she wanted, even if it meant staggering down the hall leaning against the wall ("Don't pick me up, damnit!!  I'm trying to die, here!  You people must think I'm helpless."). She was sleeping on a rug in the small bathroom.  She'd insisted on a cold room for the last two and a half years.  We realize now she must have had a fever, due to her chronic conditions.  She was tired of all food, and not even milk tempted her.  She lay comfortably; all cats should be able to sleep quietly away in a nice safe warm room, on a soft rug or cushion. That same friend reminded us of the cat chemical levels.  As a cat dies, seratonin and dopamine flood the system.  They slip into a state of euphoria.  Gradually, they feel as though they've eaten and drunk, no matter how long they've gone without.  

Cats are cool.  They even do death right. In her last hours of a good old age, we were watching the dvd of Lost and there was a meaty CSI moment, with squishy noises and shots fired.  Sleeping deeply in my arms, worn nearly to a skeleton on her last night, Lina's poor skinny skeletal head wavered and held upright, shaking, her fading eyes pinched open so she could watch the nasty bits. The cat was a gore freak to the end. As she slowly sank out of the world, deeply asleep on the couch, her breathing became slower and slower.  Her heart, that had beat too fast, thumped slower, until it was no faster than a human's, and then even slower than that. I petted her, and stepped away, and came back and put my hands on her and kissed her, and the breath went out of her.

She owned her own death.  We should all get that chance.