this week i

launched laika post whale tail. north of the island tour noted distinction between buddhist and daoist temples: buddhist roofs bare. my feeling of counterculture mirrors marcia angell's of alternative medicine. if something works, incorporate, prescribe it. otherwise, continue to make fun of it










sketched in class, a pretty city.  how does a spanish cat say omg?  dios meow.  what do paleontologists say upon species discovery? new bone who dis



read the hound of the baskervilles by sir arthur conan doyle.  it was phosphorous the whole time

he won't cause any trouble.  in a few days he will catch a boat for south america.  please don't tell the police about him

no human eye had ever seen a hound like this one.  fire came from its open mouth.  its eyes were burning.  flames covered its head and body

 

read great plains by ian frazier.  not mentioned but jefferson (not franklin) in paris at the storming of the bastille

two knives, a pair of leggings, a blanket, a gun, a horse, and a tipi might be the price of one wife

henry bogsti - had $10 and a saddle horse when he came here.  he sold out, went to wildrose, and worked in an elevator.  his son was killed in a flax bin

clyde had on his right arm the tattoo of a girl and the name "grace."  bonnie had on the inside of her right thigh a tattoo of two hearts joined by an arrow, with "bonnie" in one heart and "roy" in the other.  they kept a white rabbit, and took it with them on their travels.  clyde also brought along his saxophone and sheet music.  bonnie read true-romance magazines, painted her toenails pink, and dyed her hair red to match her hats, dresses, and shoes.  when frank hamer and other texas and louisiana lawmen shot them to pieces on a road near gibsland, louisiana, bonnie was wearing two diamond rings, one gold wedding ring, a small wristwatch, a three-acorn brooch, and a chain with a cross around her neck.  congress passed a resolution thanking frank hamer for his part in ending bonnie and clyde's career.  he was also awarded their guns.  both bonnie's mother and clyde's mother wrote indignant letters to frank hamer, demanding that he turn over their children's guns to them

i told him that i hoped someday to learn how to speak sioux.  he took my right wrist and pressed his thumb tightly against my pulse then spoke a sentence.  the sound of sioux is soft and rippling, like something you might hear through a bead curtain.  i asked him what he had said.  "i said, 'if your pulse speeds up, then i will know that you are lying, and then i will have the right to kill and scalp you'"

a hunkpapa sioux woman named doreet.  i picked her up hitchhiking with another woman and two men.  doreet sat in the front seat and told me that her brother recently found a stone serpent head while diving in the river, that she had a young son named eagle on his journey, that a medicine man had predicted that journey (his nickname) would be born either retarded or dead, that the medicine man was wrong.  in the back, jason, derek, and i didn't get the other woman's name, talked in sioux and sometimes asked me questions like, "so, bro, what do you think of the sioux people?"  of a nearby butte, doreet said, "that's devil butte.  high-school kids go up there and try to arrange these white rocks to spell out their initials, but by morning the rocks always rearrange themselves into the shape of a devil's head."  doreet was big, pretty, with scars up both arms.  she was wearing a cornell t-shirt.  i asked her, "did you go to cornell?"  she said, "where's that?"  i pointed to the name on her shirt.  she said, "oh, probably - i've been all over the country"

new mexico is like the vermont of the west

tipis take on color from the wood you burn in your fire.  cottonwoods make poor firewood - they turn tipis a kind of smutty brown.  willow gives 'em a nice soft yellow color.  pine burns pitchy and turns 'em black.  quaking aspen hardly smokes at all.  the crows liked willow because they took great pride in how light-colored their tipis were

identified by the census taker as a "concubine"

 


 shooting buffalo from the windows of the moving train

on the plains, from the point of view of humans, the tumbleweed's main function is poetic

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