#{Boontdusties.com}

Amber started her Sunday morning perusing the local listings for estate sales in the area. I was still half asleep under the covers, but as soon as she began to read one of the the ads my interest was peaked:

“CB Radios, Hunting Equipment, Leather Chaps, Leather Whip … ”

That was enough to get me to shoot up and off the bed and I was so excited I started putting on Amber’s shoes FOR HER so we could get out the door faster. She continued:

“Cattle Prod, Coyote Urine …”

I screamed in pain & ecstasy – “WE NEED TO LEAVE RIGHT NOW”.

It wasn’t until ‘Fondue Pot’ that she found her own motivation to leave, and soon we were bolting towards Ballard.

When we arrived at the house we were first struck by a small little video projector screen that the woman working the estate sale quoted at $5 bucks. I snatched it up right away.

One of the benefits of going to estate sales is that rush of getting to enter otherwise ‘forbidden’ places, digging through dresser drawers and artifacts of strangers. The story slowly unveiled of just why all these belongings were being given away: the property had been sold to an architect who wanted to fix it up. The former tenants had left everything behind. The second floor had at one time been squatted by raccoons. The inside of the house was falling apart and the walls were stained from thirty years of wear and tear. Theories went around the shoppers digging through the rubble – conjectures on whether ‘the daughter’ wanted ‘nothing to do’ with her parents place and the bad memories so she had left their belongings to the vultures.

It took a while, but I eventually found the coyote urine along with a bright orange button that said ‘Hunt Safely’. The current owners said they were glad it was going to a good home and we scored a whole slew of items for just ten dollars. Less to go to the dump, I suppose.

Just before I left, I found an old VHS camcorder in it’s original case and I pulled it out to see a tape inside. I ejected it and made it my final purchase before we left the property to revel in our good luck. Later in the afternoon as the sun set, I watched a home movie of the man I am calling ‘The Duke’ shoot his guns out in the desert with his buddies on my brand new projector screen.

Without any direct call to action, I’ve begun receiving periodic urban shaman sightings from friends. Here’s a new one:

urban shaman.mp3

I’m really enjoying how my friends are reacting to the idea of an ‘urban shaman’ – it seems to resonate with a lot of people, even if at just a surface level they just think it’s funny.

Also, I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how fun it is to sort of play with creating an identity online and to have that bounce back and reflect on what you feel comfortable experimenting w/ in your day to day life. For instance, a small thing I’ve been doing is wear this piece of leather around my head – mostly for practicality of keeping my long hair out of my eyes, but also because it feels like part of a new identity. I can’t tell if I am just being a LARP’ER (Live Action Role Player) or if it has any sort of meaning to it at all?

Part of me is disappointed that I’m not teaching myself to do anything that is actually indicative of a shaman, but I try not to beat myself up too much about it and just take things as they come. If I need to just slowly ease into this that’s okay. You know, it’s sort of like that technique of someone just learning a new musical instrument only carrying around the mouthpiece for a few months. They can blowing into that little metal tube all they want, but it takes a long time of imagining and preparing until they actually start attempting to hold and play the trumpet.

I also received this from someone in my band today (who’s been pestering me about getting a new bass):

what better bass for an urban shaman?

haha

And here’s the bass he was suggesting:Tribal Bass

DO NOT TEMPT ME. I REPEAT. DO NOT TEMPT ME.

I want to memorize this and use it as a morning prayer.

In 1946 one of the earliest references to the turbo-encabulator appeared in Time on, April 15, 1946 by Bernard Salwen, a New York lawyer working in Washington, DC. Part of Salwen’s job was to review technical manuscripts. He was amused by the jargon and wrote the classic description of a non-existent turboencabulator.

The following quote is from the Time article. “General Electric”, “Chrysler” and “Rockwell Automation” use many of the same words.[1]

“Work has been proceeding in order to bring perfection to the crudely conceived idea of a machine that would not only supply inverse reactive current for use in unilateral phase detractors, but would also be capable of automatically synchronizing cardinal grammeters. Such a machine is the ‘Turbo-Encabulator’.

“The original machine had a base-plate of prefabulated amulite, surmounted by a malleable logarithmic casing in such a way that the two spurving bearings were in a direct line with the pentametric fan. … The main winding was of the normal lotus-o-delta type placed in panendermic semi-boloid slots in the stator, every seventh conductor being connected by a nonreversible trem’e pipe to the differential girdlespring on the ‘up’ end of the grammeters.

“Forty-one manestically spaced grouting brushes were arranged to feed into the rotor slipstream a mixture of high S-value phenylhydrobenzamine and 5% reminative tetryliodohexamine. Both of these liquids have specific pericosities given by P = 2.5C.n^6-7 where n is the diathetical evolute of retrograde temperature phase disposition and C is Cholmondeley’s annular grillage coefficient. Initially, n was measured with the aid of a metapolar refractive pilfrometer … but up to the present date nothing has been found to equal the transcendental hopper dadoscope. … Undoubtedly, the turbo-encabulator has now reached a very high level of technical development. It has been successfully used for operating nofer trunnions. In addition, whenever a barescent skor motion is required, it may be employed in conjunction with a drawn reciprocating dingle arm to reduce sinusoidal depleneration.”