Due to the inevitable migration of my sleep schedule during times without large quantities of obligation, I happened to be awake at about 7am one morning. I felt like going for a walk, for it had just stopped raining. The rain was the first in a couple of months. The sun was just rising behind some clouds, and the light looked quite pleasant. Armed with my Chinese macro extension tube, I took pictures of leaves and water droplets, and other inane subject matter. Brilliant.

The hardest part of the job was the setup, which took two days. We were working on a barge just near Glacier Northwest Concrete in Tacoma. Pyrotechnics work is not as glamorous as it might seem, it consisting mostly of shoveling sand, stringing squib wire, and loading mortars in tubes in the right order. I had altogether too much fun doing even this, however.
And, some photographic evidence of the fireworks show itself. Officially, I got to wear a fireman’s suite and be on “fire duty,” which was supposed to consist of running around with a fire extinguisher and putting out flames that might threaten fuses that might launch the wrong shells at the wrong time, however, because 3 other people were already doing that, I ran around with cameras instead.

Also, if you are into pictures of me, and captions, check out Dave Cramton’s pictures.

Doing work with fellow film geeks, of course we ended up making a video glorifying the 10″ fireworks shell, creating a somewhat silly loading tube ceremony. This ended up being an intro to the other footage of the fireworks show, and the aftermath, that I shot.

2008 Tacoma Fireworks from badur on Vimeo.

My Grandmother Sally was coming to pick me up on her way north at 11am, and I had to finish the applications by then. Of course one of the things I hate doing more than many other things is bragging about myself and attempting to make some critical person in an office battling an ocular hernia and an intestinal ulcer, leaving to go defecate streams of blood into the garbage can every 15 minutes because the toilet is broken and he really doesn’t have a choice like me and think that I’m the ‘man’ for the job. Of course this is what I had to do, and although there was some small satisfaction to be gained from imagining the just plight of this imaginary executive, I still had to write things. Curse you things! I said to myself as the letters went out of focus on the screen and I blinked but the goo was still there. A plague of goo, and no words.

6 hours later, I had napped for 2 hours and finished one application (the one for electronic media. I rushed to upper campus to attempt to turn it in and get back in time for the Grandmother arrival and the packing of things for the trip. Of course I don’t have the slightest clue about what sort of self-agrandizing or insane psychological drivel-tangents i wrote about in my application, but one thing is certain: they will think I am not mentally stable enough to work any job, let alone their job. I also talked to the computer center slave, and they said i could turn the application for that in on monday and still get an interview, which is what most of the hiring was based on anyway. Curse you interview!

So I drove with my grandmother, who is actually quite pleasantly neat up north of seattle and eventually to Anacordis, where there is a ferry boat, which we got our car onto and rode in for an hour accross the ocean of puget sound, and between various island isles, eventually arriving at a place called Friday Harbor on the san juan island place. i’m sure this is all quite fascinating. i should probably get to the exciting things.

cut to a few hours later, after some dinner of potatoes and delicious blackberry pie. Malcolm is fiddling with a moldy 8mm projector, trying to get a very moldy old roll of film to load. I am holding a flashlight and trying to help. moments later we are watching a glorious 70s porno on a towel hanging on the door to the bathroom in the trailer where they live, fully featured with minimum poduction value, minimal stimulation of female genitals, and a very well endowed man standing with arms akimbo being laboriously sucked off, while fractal mold patterns pulsate and attempt multiple times to take over the frame completely, but never quite do. after the finish of that glorious film, (my mother’s mother having gone to bed already), we start up the next one, which appears to be in rather bad shape, despite having a cover that hadn’t disintigrated entirely, on which you could make out the letters “swedish erotica”, because each of those words is in fact its own letter. we load this film, with less trouble than the first and start it playing. of course the mold has taken over the image so much in this one that there are only abstracted shapes of the images that used to be there. Sometimes you can make out a face or arm or penis, hair white skin black wall grey. Like Brad’s direct animation, except filthily organic and fractal chaotic, as only mold goo can be. about halfway through the second film goo stuff starts piling up on the edge of the screen, and you can tall that there is all sorts of filth sloughing off and catching on the gate. sure enough, when it’s over, we open up the gate, and there is a ton of black goo inside that reminds me of tar in texture consistency and smell. it was worth it though. needless to say, i brought both the films and the projector home.

The next day we embark upon a journey to the beach to water the dog called Clause who was my dog and best friend and constant exploring companion ever so long ago in the alaska days (who sally was bringing north). On the way there we stop to see Mona, who, by birth, is a camel.

We feed Mona some apples, which is of course the only reason that an advanced creatures such as herself would tolerate us lowly human-beasts, because if she were to even desire to acquire apples by her own devices she could merely wish it and that thing would occur. Do not be fooled by her rough, un-ultra-camel appearance, for she is indeed mighty.





After this we proceed to driving, and crossing of the 12-mile accross island, to get to the park place where there is a trail to a beach place that swimming can be had. A picnic basket device is slung along in between the valery and the malcolm.

I am holding on to the leash that is holding on to the dog, who does not wished to be held on to, and I sprint to keep up, and then come to a sudden stop as an interesting smell is reached, cycling and repeating. Clause is not used to being tied to a human, and a robust human indeed it must be to be tied to him.

Soon, the dog is left the leash, and dissapeared in search of smells around the corner, and the hill that leads to the beach is gandered upon, its vista being sucked up by the putrid sponges of our collective eye.

No sooner than we’ve reached the bottom of the hill, and a small sandy beach tucked between two rocky outcroppings … of cork, with driftwood littering the area like bodies in a tanning salon that cought fire and exploded, we viddie like vultchures sitting on a log not a throw of a baby away.

This of course reminds me of the time a few days ago when I was thinking about past happenings, and how when you asked me if I knew any jokes during the first time that I had accompanied you out to a bar type place, and I thought and thought, and of course was panicing so that I couldn’t think at all, and eventually said no, I didn’t know any. I actually knew a whole bunch of jokes! But all of them were dead baby jokes. Because I went through a phase. A glorious phase. I never really told them to anyone though, because there wasn’t anyone to tell them to back in 2000-2001, I would just read them online and laugh in my mind.

So anyway, we walk laboriously over, of course thinking constantly about how much easier it would have been to just throw a baby with a javelin through its torso vertically so that it would stick in the sand, and pull ourselves accross the distance, but no! Walking had to be be had. We discovered this in the sand.


Unsure at first as to what it might be, we poked at those things that look like teeth a bit, and I had a small amount of closer looks.

Eventually we decided that it was most likely a seal… that had died. in the past. and was no longer living. I of course remained sitting on my heels by the corpse half buried in sand and threatened to be awash with seawater at any moment, the vultures now eyeing us from their perches further up on the hill, the gusty ocean wind from the straights of wan de fuco rifling their feathers an amount just small enough so that they weren’t compelled to take control of that force that controlls with wind and bring it crashing down with mighty gusto, (because vultures will do that when they are preturbed), considering us as possible sources of sustanence, now that their previous meal was certainly being consumed by ourselves. The only reason I did this strange and possibly considered by some morbid thing was to get a long look at the interior of the creatures thorax, it appearing to be undergoing a process of decomposition much altered from that of a typical land-based process. There were no maggots, and no particular smell that would be considered exceedingly foul, just a soupy red mass of seawater, blood, organ-pulp, and bursted tissues, with a smattering of sand-fleas leaping around inside with a glee unmatched by a squadron of mimes.

Eventually I desisted my morbid staring and went and threw the stick for the dog into the water, which is where he really wanted to be of course. reminding of old times.


Then I obligatorily grabbed the sand in an innappropriate fashion, ha! I showed it who was the creature more respectable with regard to libido!

Though seemingly quite unintuitive a proposition indeed, this picture does not end my story. Nay! There are even more things that happened, which deserve narration. For then we left that horrible beach place, and on our way back, where did we happen to end up but an Alpaca farm and store! As you can see in this picture, I tried on a number of hats greater than one simultaniously.


I thought of you and how you probably wouldn’t be able to try on any of them or even touch them for all the nasty lanolin that was probably dripping out of everything in that store, and had feelings of empathy. EMPATHY! i say. See the Alpacas? See how they laugh at you and your inability to touch their delicious soft furry pelts of warmth and softness? I hate them so much. this much.


Then I saw a manequin without a head, and I laughed! and took a picture with myself pointing at it. Which you could now see, even now, if you looked below this line of text, which mocks you with these words, and says “i’m sorry”, but isn’t really sorry at all, because it told you.

Of course at that point I was obliged to venture out into the outside regions of the farm and see what devious things the living Alpacas were up to. I was quite surprised to discover, as this educational animation might inform you:



This particular frame exemplifying just how devious these creatures are deserves a still image and a larger resolution, just because.

See?!? Do you see what I’m talking about!!!?? Just imagine what he’s thinking about that other poor unsuspecting alpaca’s nether regions of waste-disposal! not things involving fuzzy bunnies, that’s what! … or … maybe it is. …. …….

After this, we went to this Mausoleum that was built for a family involved with the masons and the Knights Templar who all died for some odd reason or a different one. There’s no telling which one. It was pretty, at least.

There was also a field full of sculptures and statues.

I wish I was a woman with a Frog’s head. This concludes the photographical portions of my story, The rest will certainly be continued at this current point in time, but in email form.

As you can see, this presented somewhat of a dilemma, which I did not solve until today, with the help of my roommate’s hatchet. After a good 20 minutes of pounding on the floor of N-308, which probably did not make our vertically inferior neighbors like us any more, I was able to destroy it enough to get the wire out.

This resulted in a large coil of what I think is aluminum wire (with a copper coating), with some remnants of epoxy.

As well as a coil of very much smaller guage wire, which could easily be made to writhe and envelope puppets.

Ah, glorious technology….