We live in the trenches out there. We fight. We try not to be killed, but sometimes we are. That's all.

Haven't posted in a week because the little movie that shouldn't came back from the grave, reached out one of its rotten paws, and hooked me for the week. Goddammit, it's the return of Shrink! The DP, a most disloyal and cowardly young fellow, called me up and lied to me about my friend to the effect that I thought he was on the movie reshoots so I got on. Turns out he then called my friend and told him I was on so he should do the movie. Nice. We both laughed when we came to the prep and figured all of this out.

The shoot was just like this summer: unorganized, confused, loud, obnoxious, and underfunded. Awesome. We ran around like imbeciles, pushed things up hills for no other reason than no one had figured out that the gear might need to be driven somewhere so maybe we should have gotten gators or something. Just amateur hour all week. At least my guys were funny and in high spirits the whole time.

I'm taking today to watch football and cut my dog's hair.

Peace out, bitches!

For what we are about to see next, we must enter quietly into the realm of genius.

Sunday: no hunting, just football and a long walk with Ghost through exciting, rural Mobridge, SD. These are some random photos. The only thing open today are the gas stations and the fast food joints. Good times. At least the Vikings won today although the Jaguars aren't much of a team these days so we'll see about the rest of our schedule. Six and five isn't the end of the world, I guess.

I can't wait to get home and out of this cold, barren wind farm. Supposedly there are some waves coming in when I get home. That'd be nice. I also have some work on tap but the first day is Thanksgiving. C'est la vie. 

Peace out, bitches!

You wanna play games? All right, I'll play your fucking games.

So here we are on Saturday and I have successfully killed a pheasant. He and his compadres were trying to sneak back into a draw where we had scarred up a ton of birds earlier. We had come back a few hours later to see if the birds were back in the draw. My plan was to hike about two miles outside of the perimeter of the area we had initially seen the mass of pheasant. I hiked. It took awhile as the terrain bordering the Missouri River in this area is a bit rough: hills and valleys and most of it covered in heavy scrub. As I made my way through my giant semi-circle four roosters tried to break away from me on my left. Three popped up first and I dropped the big slow one. The fourth rooster broke farther to my left and I snapped my spine trying to get around and drop him. I failed. The bird I shot had dropped just over the top of a slight hill I had been walking over and as I got up to the top of the hill to grab what I assumed would be a dead pheasant, he tried to run away. He had just enough life in him that he actually got out far enough that I had to shoot him again and that still didn't kill him. No, this hardy South Dakota sonofabitch had the balls to make me have to wring his neck to finally finish him off. I salute that bird, he was bold and tough and wasn't going to make it easy.

After all of that work I still needed to get into position so we could trap the rest of the birds in the draw but no such luck. The birds I had ambushed had been in the process of getting back to their roosting area so by the time Pops and I got into the draw we were too early. A few hens popped out but the roosters, the wary and willy roosters, hadn't gotten back into the spot yet. At this point, I was still in high spirits from having finally dropped one of these big-ass prairie pheasant. My mood was about to head south.

As we were walking back up to the car, me and Ghost and Pop looking all Norman Rockwell-ish, some fat bastard and his ugly wife pulled up and started riding us about hunting "his" land. Turns out that even though the area we were in is marked as public, this cock sucking Midwestern lump of shit and his equally bland pals had built a road and decided to claim the area as theirs. Now I know I'm a man of patience and reason, normally, but this time I'd had enough. Pops talked to him because I was on the verge of murdering these motherfuckers. You know what got me? When Lard Lad had the temerity to tell us "If you want to hike in from ten miles out, I can't stop you." What? What the fuck did you just say, you jumbo sized dildo? I walked away. I walked away with my dog and my very large gun and decided that this was it, this was the moment where I had had enough of all things Midwestern: the crazy/frigid women, the plastic facade of morality, the uptightness, the provincialness of it all. I am done. I am never coming here or anywhere else in the Midwest unless I am paid a princely sum of money and am there for as little amount of time as humanly possible. These people and their bullshit are intolerable. Yeah, sure, there are some cool big cities in the Midwest and I love my Vikings and a few of the people we've met here were OK, but this generalization that the coasts are fucked up and the "real" America is in the heartland is crap. Clear cut fields, fake-ass hunting guides, no access to public land, speed traps, bad food, American cheese, giant pickup trucks, and cattle. I'm done.

Give me the West Coast any day. Surf, mountains, food, wine, art, music, and yes, we have our fair share of bullshit but at least there's no pretense about it. We're cunts and we all know it and if you can't hang then by all means move back to wherever the fuck it is you're from and grill yourself up a Wonderbread and American cheese sandwich and enjoy. 

Peace out, bitches!

Do not concentrate on the finger or you will miss all that heavenly glory.

Friday. You ain't got no pheasant, you ain't got shit to do! I'ma get you drunk! I wish Smokey were here, he'd find us some shootable pheasant. Yeah, that's right, I've been reduced to wishing for the salvation of fictional drug-addled drug dealers from the 'hood. Damn.

So here we are, days into it and I've shot nothing. Sure, if I were the kind of guy who shot at hens I'd have limited out ages ago. Rabbits! Don't even talk to me about the fucking rabbits I could have shot! I'm now glad I didn't as Pops shot a cottontail today and it was, wait for it, FULL OF PARASITES! South Dakota fucking sucks dog's balls, and not in a funny Sarah Silverman kind of way. SD actually sucks dog's balls every morning right after it gets out of bed, brushes its teeth, and combs its hair. It walks out the door, whistling some damn prairie song, and gets into its car to go to work and positively reeks of dog's balls. Fuck this place.

In all seriousness, fuck this place. No, I kid, I kid. I'm sure these nice people, who's state bird is the pheasant, have tons of birds when the season opens. The only problem is that once the season starts they polish off the birds and then give them nowhere to live. If, and this is a HUGE "if," I ever come back here it will be at the start of the season and I will bitch slap everyone else around me so I get to my little piece of shootable territory and get my limit. Oh, how I pine for Oregon and the sweet folds of the sleepy little valley of Cow Hollow.

Cow Hollow! The name brings tears of joy and longing to my snowblind eyes. Cow Hollow, within which lies the famous Bambiland (wherein there is a hill upon which I was shot in the chest by an alces alces), and Quail Mountain (never answer your phone in the field MITM!), and Logan's Run. If I ever get out of this foul land I shall return to Cow Hollow penitent and humbled. I shall make a sacrifice in the Field on Fire. I shall dash myself upon the thistles of Quail Mountain and proclaim at the top of my lungs, "Oh pheasant, where art thou?!"

Peace out, bitches!

Well, a gun that's unloaded and cocked ain't good for nothin'.

One shot. One bird. Good on ya, Pops! Ghost and I had absolutely nothing to do with the making of this bird moment but hey, at least Team Hate SD got a bird finally. On the move in the morning to potentially greener pastures up north in Mobridge. At least the new hotel has an indoor pool as opposed to a washer/dryer vibrating against one of our room walls. Go Pierre!

Peace out, bitches!

My friend, you have two ways to leave this establishment; immediately or dead.

Goddammit! Day two and I only got one fucking shot on one of South Dakota's "plentiful" pheasant. The sonofabitch jumped up about five feet off my left and I somehow managed to miss. I blame this on the fact that the only pheasant we've seen have been on the road or two hundred freaking yards out in front of us. Dammit! Dammit all to hell! On a side note, Ghost is trying his hardest but I think I'm going to have to send him to a trainer for a month as the bird I missed was neither noticed or chased by Ghost. He sort of scratched his balls, sat on the ground, and missed the bird noisily breaking cover, getting shot at (three fucking shots from the semi-auto!), and bailing out of range into a stand of corn. Poor dog, totally clueless.

Anywho, I hate South Dakota at this point. Most of the area allotted for free hunting is frighteningly denuded corporate farmland or wind-blasted plains with no cover and maybe, maybe a couple of rabbits. It's awful. There are birds but you need to gather an army to work the few fields with cover or you need to live here and shoot them off your back patio without hitting your neighbor. As an out of town shooter this place really blows chunks. Maybe I'll come back early in the season when the crops are still standing but right now both Pops and I are ready to get super ghetto on this place: drive-bys, shooting on fenced off land, maybe even shooting hens! We're depressed and depraved I tells ya.

Speaking of crops: if I ever get enough dough together to build a house I'm putting in enough space to grow my own crops. When you see horizon to horizon, for 360 degrees denuded and devoted solely to one crop it is a sobering sight. The plains have been completely destroyed, there's almost no habitat left for anything larger than a mouse, and it is depressing. Corporatized and mechanized agriculture is bad for the planet and bad for your health. When you see these vast expanses of land given over to monocultures and you see the abandoned, simple little farm houses that were once owned by the families that used to farm substantially smaller parts of this land it kills part of you. It shouldn't be this way. This is madness and can only end in disaster. If there's ever a drought here this whole fucking place will turn into a desert in a fucking heartbeat. They plow edge to edge, leaving almost no anchor for vegetation that might preserve this landscape in the event of natural disaster. The pheasant, and every other animal around here, are as hardcore as can be. They are putting up with some of the most destructive human behavior imaginable and are still plentiful and healthy. The birds live like no other pheasant I've ever seen: hard, crazy, and in hordes they stick tight to any little strip of cover and bedding they can find. You find them thickest where they can't be hunted as there is no real wild cover left around here. Pick an area along the Missouri where there are a lot of houses and you'll find a lot of pheasant. Smart little bastards, they're kicking our asses and I salute them.

As for my fellow humans out here in SD, let me just say you're only redeemed by the little semi-cool  eatery we found today: La Minestra. I had some nice veal tortellini in a journeyman's marinara with excellent homemade spicy sausages and an appetizer of garlic shrimp. Pops had the owner's special bolognese and we split a perfect bottle of Cakebread Chardonnay. Not bad, not bad at all. Personally, I was in the mood for dessert so I tried the tiramisu. Not bad, not good but the front of the house was very cordial and genuinely happy about having some exotic out of towners. Or at least that's how they acted. The restaurant is probably the most sophisticated place in town and thus the handful of homosexuals and artists and worldly types began to slowly gather as we slowly ate our meal. I love that even in a small town, the edges always manage to find each other and create a space within which to exist. All hail the human spirit.

Peace out, bitches!

Let me sleep.

I can't sleep because the damn dog woke me up an hour ago so he could piss out about fifty gallons of urine from his 8th dimension bladder. How does a dog that small have that much urine inside of him? Anyway, the video made me laugh.

Peace out, bitches!

Forecast is for "bad craziness".

The Downy commercial I did for free is over! I'm not dead! I got to South Dakota in one piece and promptly slept for a full eight hours for the first time in ages. Granted, I didn't do it on purpose, rather my body simply rebelled and I was forced to go along with the unwashed masses (i.e. moi). I must admit, though, that there's something to this whole sleeping thing. I'll try to remind myself to try it out more often.

The hunting has been spectacular. No, I'm kidding, it has been horrible. We've seen a bunch of birds, Ghost chased a rabbit down and then didn't know what to do with him, and I lost a rabbit because I was paying attention to my dog and not where Bugs was headed. D'oh! It is gorgeous out here, in a sort of post-Apocalyptic-no-ones-around sort of way. It's all rolling hills and plains of prairie grass and stark, boring little houses, and giant trucks with fat people in them, and big blue awesome never ending sky. I like it, I really like it. I'd never live here but watching the number and variety of game just cruising all over town and the countryside is breathtaking and has been feeding fantasies of buying property along the mighty Missouri so I'd always have somewhere to hunt and fish. This will probably be one of the last places in America where you can have a good time as a hunter. Cali is going the way of the dodo as the populace dumbs down into thinking that more land for ATVs and motocross is more environmentally sound than preserving the land for hiking and hunting and non-corrosive activities. Oh, the joy of the press of the crowd of idiots as they push their way into the front of the mob to shout, "Hey, I'm stupid but you should listen to me because I'm a swing voter!" Makes you wanna hollah!

For the record, Pierre, SD pronounces it's name "Pier." Fucking dumb-ass rednecks. Besides all of the pheasant and deer and geese and ducks and grouse all over the place there really isn't much to be said for old "Pier" but we did find  a really good Mexican joint to replace our beloved hole in the wall in Oregon. It's called Guadalajara and they have two types of rojo salsa for your chips: the crappy tomato soup they give the white guys and the caliente shit they give the real cowboys and Indians. Ask for it next time you're in Pier. I mean Pierre.

Peace out, bitches!

It's Christmas time, Theo! It's the time of miracles!

I am not dead and I am mightily impressed by this little fact. For the record, drag races are dangerous places to be if you are next to the track. It is toxic and loud and filthy and occasionally the little rockets with wheels and a meat sack ensconced within explode. Ever bathe in jet fuel and rubber and fiberglass? It's great for the skin and the lungs. I am so happy not to be doing this show tomorrow. I will be wrecking what's left of my  body on my own little commercial. No pay but it just might pay dividends in the future. Who knows? Who cares? At least Die Hard is on.

Peace out, bitches!

I'm strange, all right! I'll show you just how strange I am!

Welcome on and all to the wonderful world of "Why the Fuck Are We in Pomona Shooting Drag Racing?" Six in the morning and we're shooting drag racers and going deaf from these ridiculous cars. The tracks are a quarter mile long and these things run on jet fuel or something and the whole pit area around the cars fills with a toxic mixture of who-knows-what that burns the eyes and lungs. I had to bail out several times because I quite literally couldn't breath or see. It was fun operating and the cars do haul some serious ass but after awhile it does get incredibly old. I don't really understand how people get so excited by the whole thing. Honestly, if you're not driving one of these rolling incendiary devices what the hell is the attraction? Nothing against anyone who's into drag racing but I just ain't into the whole thing. Long day, loud noises, and I'm covered in a thin layer of oil and gas and microscopic bits of rubber. Not good, not good.

Peace out, bitches!

Now, don't you worry. The saucers are up there. The graveyard is out there. But I'll be locked up safely in there.

So it's my actual birthday. Big deal. I'm not feeling it this year. I am feeling the swell new pants I bought myself at Volcom. Melah got me a couple of t-shirts. I also picked up two CDs from The International Noise Conspiracy and am listening to them AS I TYPE! Good stuff, I highly recommend them to all of you knuckleheads out there.

Here is the one strange thing about today: I made an impulse buy at Headline Records (last punk rock outpost on Melrose) of a Cramps t-shirt and a Bad Brains t-shirt. Why? I'm an old guy now, why am I buying punk rock t-shirts? Answer: senility is kicking in super early and I'm doomed. Or maybe I'm saved. Saved from the rest of adulthood by mental illness. Sweet.

OK, I need to read about the Crusades and get some sleep so I can go work tomorrow.

Peace out, bitches!

She wants to play lumberjack, she's going to have to learn to handle her end of the log.

So we put in a full day of hunting and all we have to show for it is two shots on some California Mountain Quail and no birds in the bag. Ghost Face Killer did pretty well all things considered and Melah kicked ass. Good times. It was wonderful walking around in the great outdoors of Central California but I'd be a whole hell of a lot happier if I'd bagged some fucking quail. C'est la vie. Check out these friggin' photos of some friggin' nature ya humps!

Isn't Cali the bomb?

Peace out, bitches!

No, Mr. Trumbo, the earth belongs to the men who make the law, and the law belongs to the men who can lay it down.

Ok, so the title of this post is from a totally fucked up movie, I admit, but I thought it was sort of funny and weird as I'm in a crappy Days Inn in the Central Valley of California. The girl and I are on a hunting trip and it's going slowly. No birds yet, just a long walk in some gorgeous, unspoiled California foothills. Of course Ghost had to go and get himself covered in briars. Not just briars, but briars coated with some sort of super sticky resin. Good dog. Anyway, here are some photos of odds and ends here in God's country.

OK, maybe an explanation might be in order: the first one is a wonderful panorama of a live fire range in the middle of quail country. The tank is a target. The second photo is of a herd of elk. Yeah, we got elk in Cali, wannafightaboutit? The third is of a free-range van somewhere in the Los Padres wildlife area. You can tell it's asleep because the lights are all off. Shhhh, let sleeping vans lie.

Peace out, bitches!

Cat named Shaft ain't gonna be bad with a stick.

So the first day of the black presidency and what the fuck happens to me? I get up early, cuddle with my lady and walk my dog. Everything is fine at this point. On the way to work I tear up as I listen to a 74 year old woman describe how she can now tell her grandchildren to do better because she has Obama as an example of what black Americans can achieve. I think the stress of last night finally caught up with me but it was also just really amazing. I get to work, happy as hell, wearing a t-shirt with a picture of McCain with the word "Nope" underneath the image. Good times. Everything was going great until I ate my healthy breakfast and three hours later felt like death. Yeah, food poisoning! At work! So fucking great to be at work. So happy that a black man finally became president of this bitch. So unhappy to pissing water all day while trying to work on what should have been a very easy commercial for Crown Royal. Ugh. I finally got my hand on some Immodium AD and began to feel a bit better near the end of the day. I'm going to crash now and hopefully tomorrow will bring some relief. Right now my stomach feels like I've spent the day doing crunches while being kicked in the dick. 

Peace out, bitches!

What did he say? He said the sheriff is near.

The Santa Anas are blowing, the sky is clear, a shooting star crossed a half-moon and a black man is going to be President of these here United States. As John McCain's idiot supporters chant against and boo Obama's name I can't help but feel that quite possibly the reign of the white supremacist is finally drawing to a close. The weight of the evil and venal acts and beliefs of one of the most subsidized and coddle people in all of human history may finally be lifted from the shoulders of what has always been a potentially great country. For the first time in all of my thirty six (soon to be thirty seven) years I feel proud of my country. ¡Si, se puede, pendejos! In the sense that I am actually capable of any real human emotion, I'm very close to crying tears of patriotic joy. Seriously, can everyone just get a fucking day off tomorrow?

As an aside, how the fuck is William Bennett on CNN being asked questions and taken seriously? He's a fucking totem for the cycle of idiocy, hypocrisy, and venality that we just, as a country, voted out of office! I hope the chickens finally have come home to roost and I hope we can all stop listening to, reporting on, or even vaguely entertaining the ideas or opinions of people like Bill O'Reilly or Rush Limbaugh, or Bill "I Loves To Gamble" Bennett.

Peace out, bitches!

Ain't so funny meow is it?

Night shoot turned into a half-night shoot and a quick beer at Bar 107. Too bad it was the night before Halloween and all of the desperately cool dip shits from downtown were infesting the joint. I like Bar 107 it's an old bar that had gone to hell for a loooonnng time and a couple of years ago some punkers bought the place and spruced it up. It pretty much looks like it used to but it don't stink so bad anymore. Good times. Anyway, too many tragically cool people always spoil a good time in my opinion: bad manners, pushing and shoving and acting like their soooo cool you couldn't possibly pop 'em in the jaw for breathing too hard on you. There was a minor scuffle as this drunk jackass pushed his way into the crowd at the bar. I got shoved and the douche tried to say something to me so I kinda sort of punched him in the crotch. It was very discreet, and I think people just thought he fell over. He was really, very, stupidly drunk and I was very tired and that's my story and I'm sticking to it. Fuck that guy. My friend and I left shortly after that as we realized that it was getting hard to tell if the patrons were male or female. That's right, Halloween in downtown LA and the trannys are out in force! I love Halloween.

Today was so nice. A little overcast a little chilly and absolutely perfect. Went surfing with Melah, visited with Crille and his wife and kids, ate at Bay City Delis, which is one of the greatest delis on this side of the country. Absolutely brilliant and great prices and we're all stuffed and sort of watching bullshit movies and whatnot. Good times! I surfed like shit but had a good time doing it and Melah always looks so cute when she's Super Surfer Girl. Yeah! My girl surfs!

Tomorrow is football Sunday and I need to get ready for a week of work and then a two day hunting trip. I am going to chill chill chill and I can't wait to do so. Hope everyone else is gearing up for a recuperative Sunday.

Peace out, bitches!