Author: Bukkhead

I'm the writer here.
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Carlsbad Flower, Drops (Photo of the Day)

drops on orange flower

My contribution to the Postaday Weekly Challenge: Vivid. I originally posted this on my blog on April 13th, but then I got an email today that the photo had won an “award” from Viewbug. Call me cynical, but I’m sure the “award” was more or less arbitrary and just a way to get me to come back to the site. And I will, once I overcome laziness. Nevertheless, I do like this one, and feel I was able to capture what I intended. I’ve always had a thing for water drops.

Taken at The Flower Fields in Carlsbad, CA.

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And The View Was Of a Concrete Wall

Postaday for June 8th: Blogger in a Strange Land. What’s the strangest place from which you’ve posted to your blog? When was the last time you were out and about, and suddenly thought, “I need to write about this!”?

Well I’m a wimp. I never blog from anywhere except home sweet home. Not that I am opposed to on-the-go blogging. I just don’t have my act together when I’m out and about. I suppose I could blog with my phone, but… I’m a tactile writer, I take energy and inspiration from the clickety-clack of the keyboard. Sliding my thumbs over a tiny screen, squinting with myopia the whole time, doesn’t inspire.

The closest I’ve ever come to “exotic blogging” would be the time I was in Puerto Rico in the middle of a DBTC effort on 750words.com. DBTC stands for “Don’t Break the Chain” and was inspired by advice Jerry Seinfeld offered on being productive (basically, you pick a daily task, and mark a calendar everytime you complete it. Soon you have a row of Xs, and that should motivate to keep going, so that you don’t break the chain.” 750words.com is a website where you are encouraged to write— you guess it— 750 words, a kind of daily writing warm-up. The website gives you a badge for consecutive days, and I’m a sucker for that sort of thing.

So there I was everyday in our hotel room just outside of Old and New San Juan, desperate for a wifi signal, tapping away on a small portable keyboard that was bluetoothed to my Ipad. I wasn’t blogging back then, just writing, and not anything readable, either. Yes, if it occured to me, I wrote about what we did on the trip. But I’m not one for travel-logging, usually. So moistly I just typed whatever.

I should, though. I should get into off-site blogging. Goodness knows I’ve explored the necessities. I’ve got the aforementioned portable keyboard, and another foldable keyboard, and a few tablets, and that Ipad, and another iPad Mini, and a Chromebook, as well as my work-laptop. Heck, I’m in line to upgrade my phone to one of those bigger Samsung Note behemoths, which is basically a tablet unto itself. There’s no reason not to exoto-blog!

Except, of course, that I don’t take inspiration from being elsewhere. I’m an insular writer, and I work from home, so I don’t need to be out and about, don’t need to decide if I should sacrifice blog time to get things done.

Maybe I should try anyway. On Tuesdays I got to a bar to drink beer with friends. Maybe once I get that giganto-phone I can start going an hour early and see what happens. Hey, whatever I come up with can;t be more than this sad entry! (My apologies for that, by the way).

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Home is Where The Beer Is

…and a book and a place to sit and enjoy them.

I was just going to take a picture of my house, but my wife said “That’s too easy. You should take a picture of a lawn chair with a beer and a book.” Which reminded of this photo I posted on Instagram a few years ago.

I was planning on getting all fancy with my DSLR and Lightroom- but sometimes the simple pictures are the best.

A photo posted by Jason Edwards (@bukkhead) on

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Welcome to Bukkhead

Hello! My name is Jason, also known as Bukkhead. (I wish, back then, someone had told me that my chosen web-name would follow me around for the rest of my days. I maybe would have chosen something less awkward.)

Ah, but whatayagonnado. I’ve had my website since as far back as 1995, and have “blogged” on and off since then. Mostly just personal stuff. For a long time, entries formed nothing more interesting than a daily diary. “Today I ate fish. I was not very good. Then I read the paper.” Etc. BORING!

Lately, though, I’ve been trying to get into a blogging “community.” I’m never going to be a world-famous blogger with a million anonymous followers. So why not be a locally-respected writer with a few dozen blogging friends? That’s my goal.

I’ve been at it daily for a few months now- did the Writing 101 thing in April, and loved it, and have been trying to keep up the Postaday prompts as well. This is good practice for me— my first love is fiction writing and getting into a daily habit will help me get past those slump moments when my fingers hover over the keyboard but refuse to move.

So that’s blogger me. If you read my stuff, sometimes I’ll just do a rote wrecking-ball treatment of the prompt. Sometimes I’ll write fiction. Sometimes I’ll let Dale respond if I can’t think of anything personal I want to share. (Dale’s a guy I made up. He likes breaking the fourth wall.)

The real life me is early forties, married, could stand to lose a few pounds, loves running, photography, and surf guitar. That’s just a slice, but I don’t want to bog you down with detritus.

Looking forward to reading your posts, fellow 101ers. 🙂

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The Nose Knows (Dale)

Postaday for June 7th: Super Sensitive. If you were forced to give up one sense, but gain super-sensitivity in another, which senses would you choose?

How do ya mean, forced? What are you gonna do, hold a gun to me head and holler “Awright, lose the sense of smell, jerk-face, or you’ll be sleepin’ wit da fishes. Don’t worry, you’ll get better eyesight outta da deal.” Or perhaps I’m to go under the knife. “Observe, Dr. Malicious, as I sever Dale’s optic nerves and reattach them to his sense of taste. And voila! The next superior sommelier is created! Muahhaahhaaa!” Gimme a break.

Actually, thinkin’ about it, I suppose it would be awright to go blind if I got an uptick in the other senses. Like that Daredevil kid. Of course, firstly, he’s in his twenties, and on the other hand, he’s a comic book hero. But I’d sign up for that. I been around my fair share of decades, and I’ve seen plenty. Blind me if it’ll make my hearin’ better.

I’m guessing most folks won’t want to lose their sense of sight. But what is there to look at? With hearing, you still got your bands from the 70s (before music went stupid), you still got your baseball games on the radio. What else do ya need?

But Dale, you’re sayin’, this is your first post about not hittin’ the strip clubs when your wife is outta town. You’d give that up if you went blind. Well, thanks, ya jerk, for bringin’ up strippers when I wasn’t going to. And lemme tell ya, I can still go. Might be harder to get there, but I’d still know the bartender, and you don’t need eyes to enjoy properly made martini.

You don’t need ears, either, so I don’t know if I’d pick enhanced hearing if I was going to lose my eyesight. My wife makes a mean meatloaf. And I’m sayin’ mean in the sense that it calls you names to your face while you’re eating it and then maybe tries to break your car windows when you’re done. So I don’t know if having a better sense of taste would be such a good thing for me either. Who knows, maybe there’s some kinda wonderful spice down there underneath all the char. My luck it would be Turmeric. We went to Goa a few years ago on some kind of vacation and she brought back a gallon of the stuff.

And I’m not so sure what having an improved sense of touch would get me. Maybe I’m at the Dancing Bare and Carla comes by for her tip and I reach in and I can tell just by feeling if I’m grabbin’ a Washington out of my wallet or a Jackson. I mean I know Carla’s got the kid and she’s working on her Associates but I give her a twenty just once and I look like a creep tryin’ to buy somethin’. Then again, I figure blind guys got special dividers for their bills so who needs touch?

I guess I’ll go with smell, then. Yep, gouge out my eyes, and make my snout a thing of beauty. Dogs live by, all the animals do, and they been around a lot longer than we have. I told you Loretta makes a mean meatloaf but up my olfactory and now I’m picking out the perfume she puts on when we go to church but wears off by Sunday’s chicken roast. I’m smellin’ the shampoo in her hair, the metals in her lipstick, the sweat on her upper lip because I don’t care what temperature it is, putting on the AC in April just feels wrong. Global warming, am I right?

That’d be good for a laugh, anyway. I like hearin the old girl laugh. She come walztin by and I’d smell soap and I’d say something like, “Wash your hands again, Lo? You gettin’ all OCD on me, woman?” And it’s cause she’s visiting the ladies more often now but she couldn’t admit that and I’m blind so I can’t see her blush but maybe I can smell it.

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World’s Ending? You Want Fries with That?

Postaday for June 6th: Eat, Drink, and Be Merry… …for tomorrow we die. The world is ending tomorrow! Tell us about your last dinner — the food, your dining companions, the setting, the conversation.

The world is ending and all I had was some left over pork roast and quinoa with mushrooms? Are you freakin’ kidding me? Life as we know it puffed out without so much as a whimper, and my last meal was leftovers night, an Adele’s sausage on a potato bun with mustard ketchup relish? If I had know the earth was doomed to explode in a fiery ball at the hands of an evil alien race bent on dominating the galaxy, I would have washed it down with something better than a glass of filtered water followed by a Tollhouse pan cookie.

Although, if I’m being honest here, that cookie was pretty good.

Listen to me very carefully. If you get wind of a secret government project to create a mag-lev driven blackhole reverse polarity inducer, a fool-hardy attempt to leash the power of unlimited energy, please tell me ASAP. I am serious. We all know that the Fenning equation for mag-lev is seriously flawed, and the resulting transductive breakdown will set off a chain reaction, flipping the quark state of every atom within three hundred nanometers and annihilating covalent bonds. I need to know so I can have as many last meals as possible. Last night was leftovers. The night before? Three Jamison and gingers and a slice of pizza and a pulled pork sandwich. I was at a party.

You know as well as I do that there’s a statistical probability that Snorg the Uberdragon awakens on planet Maxifraxx, and when he does, he will fly with space wings of gossamer blacklight straight towards planet Earth, the home of his metafather Tris. They will fight, for there can be only one Uberdragon lest the worshipers of Grennel throw off their yokes and revolt. The red-hot lava breath that Snorg and Tris spit at one another as they beat their thousand-mile long wings will rip our planet to shreds. So if you see Snorg in your backyard telescope, tell me. I don’t want my last meal to have been what I had three nights ago, a cranberry and walnut salad with a vinaigrette dressing that was, in my opinion, a bit heavy on the balsamic.

Four nights ago I had fried chicken, mashed potatoes, and baked beans. That’s not a bad last meal. If you happen to know that plate tectonics under the Pacific ocean are grinding together and resonating a feedback surge that just happens by sheer coincidence to be at the same time as an upswell over the Mariana trench thanks to a phase-state-change from the heat of decayed phytoplankton, and an atmosphere-sucking tsunami is on its way to wipe out the entire Western United States seaboard, plugging up the release tubes in five major volcanic systems, causing Rainier to explode and spew a trillion metric tons of ash into the atmosphere, blotting out the sun for a thousand years, then, sure, fried chicken with all the fixings would make a fine last meal.

Just in case, though, right now, I’m heading over to a local Mexican chained called Azteca. If the Old Gods are coming back to devour the earth and we’re to burn in the hellish pit of their stomachs for a millenia, I’m going out with a Macho Burrito and a margarita as big as my head.

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My Wife and I Laugh A Lot

Postaday for June 5th: Happily Ever After. “And they lived happily ever after.” Think about this line for a few minutes. Are you living happily ever after? If not, what will it take for you to get there?

I’m told that tragedies and comedies are differentiated by whether people die in the end or get married. (Go ahead, make your jokes about marriage being a kind of death. No, really, we’ll wait). Happily ever after would seem to be the latter, then. And so, once a person is married, the chief conflict they faced (not being married) is resolved. I’m married, so I guess I’m living happily every after.

Tragedy and comedy in the sense of something bad versus something funny are two sides of the same coin: irony. If you laugh at it, it’s ironic. And didn’t Carol Burnett say comedy is tragedy plus time? I guess it’s tragic when a person’s efforts to get married are the very thing keeping him from getting married. Tell that story with the right soundtrack, and the rest of us are laughing.

I could get all pseudo-anthropological here, and say that human are animals, animals exist to procreate, but humans are civilized, and the juncture of the procreative urge and civilization is marriage. For once my genes have propagated themselves, my reason for being has been fulfilled. And marriage is the potential for procreation, so the conflict of my existence is mitigated by saying “I do.” Happiness, it would appear, is overcoming conflict.

Hooray for me, and so long, existential angst. You kept me occupied as a teenager, broody and unattractive (see dramatic irony, above) but that kept me out of the dating pool until I was older, more mature, and ready to meet the woman I married. Delicious irony indeed, good for a happy chuckle.

Of course, this is a very convenient point of view, and only a story-book one for the sake of discussion. There are lots of people out there living happy who have no intention of getting married. Lots of people out there who are “happily” married and not living happily ever after. Afterall, when the primordial soup was putting together the first few cells that would, billions of years later, become people, it didn’t give two-cents about story-books.

But telling stories evolved too. A way to justify that conflict, mentioned above, between the need to reproduce and the need to build roads and tall buildings. Marriage, in the end, is just another plot device. Make sense that in all the romance languages, romance means “novel.”

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Damned Twizzler Amnesia

Postaday for June 4th: Smell You Later. Humans have very strong scent memory. Tell us about a smell that transports you.

I can tell you about a smell that should transport me but doesn’t: Twizzlers. I’m not talking any old red licorice, or Red Vines. I’m not talking about the cherry pull-strand style Twizzlers either, or the multicolored ones, or those cherry nibs. I’m not even talking about the quarter pound or the half pound bag. Heck, let’s get real specific: I’m not even talking about a one pound bag of strawberry Twizzlers unless that one pound bag of strawberry Twizzlers is on the discount shelf at Albertson’s for just a buck because they’re trying to move old stock the day before it expires.

Every time my wife goes out of town, I end up with one of those bags. Sometimes she buys them for me and hides them around the house, ’cause she knows I’ll find them. It’s too bad Jinny Hoffa wasn’t buried with a bag of Twizzlers, ’cause I would have found him a long time ago too. But as often as not my wife doesn’t buy me the bag, and I get one myself. It’s freaking surreal. We wake up, I toss her suitcase into the trunk, drive her to the airport, drop her off at departures, give her a hug, watch as she walks into the terminal, and when I turn around to get back into the car, I’m in Albertson’s, standing in front of the BOGO shelf, fat bag of Twizzlers in one hand, the other hand in my back pocket, grabbing up my wallet.

Self check-out line. I’m scanning the bar code, then swiping my credit card while tapping through instructions on the touch screen. I’m in the car and half way home and the bag is open and one Twizzler’s in my mouth and I’m chewing furiously, another Twizzler pinched between my upper lip and my nose, a candy mustache like goofy hipster nightmare porn star perverting my blood sugar and will to live.

You’d think that pungent sugary strawberry smell, that cloying noisomeness would take me back to every other time I’ve sat in front of the computer, playing some god-awful video game while masticating a waxy red mess at about a hundred calories per second. You’d think I’d remember the commiserate queasiness, that sickness that starts a sour patch in my gut and works it way up to squeeze my poor withered heart a few times before resting firmly and greenly in my forehead. How I’m ruined for days, me the next day with my Twizzlers hang-over, crumpled up in my easy chair like I’d been discarded there, a cup of tea cooling next to me and something stupid and dark on the TV.

But no, I never remember. The smell does nothing to me. I wish it would. Even now, concentrating, I can conjure up a whiff of those disgusting sucrose sticks, those corn-syrupy stomach-punchers, those red-number-five bowel-busters. And even though I know what it does to me, ruining my weekend, making me wish I was an alcoholic or a junkie instead…

…I’m thinking about how my wife has to work this weekend and maybe I’ll go get a bag.

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You Could Say I’m a Yo-Yo

Postaday for June 3rd: Blogger With a Cause. If your day to day responsibilities were taken care of and you could throw yourself completely behind a cause, what would it be?

Yep, I’m a blogger without a cause. You can find me half-drunk and nearly passed-out on the side of that yellow brick road leading to the bloggosphere. Pick me up and haul me in. Doncha know police stations are just places to make friends with criminals? Dorothy’s there in her red dress, and the cowardly lion too— later on, we’ll give him courage, and it’ll get him killed.

Me, I’m the new guy, the one you’ve known all along. Call me scarecrow. Shun me for stepping all over the mascot. How was I supposed to know that big blue-and-white W was sacred? So let’s go on up to the observatory, where the wicked witch lives, or should I say lived, since that house fell down on her. The sun’s going to go supernova someday, you know. We’ll all be dead long before then. Oz the great and terrible, expanding past all the inner planets. Maybe Jupiter will light up and Clark can write a book about it.

Wanna dance? Fine, we’ll dance. Not you, Dorothy, you had your chance. I’m talking to your old man. Gimme a knife, I don’t aim to knock your teeth in with my bloggy wit while you’re distracted by my blood on your knife. Look at how my words cut and slice! And there, your blade is gone, you dumb punk. You rusted up tin-man. What’s a metal head need chicken for anyway? I’ll show you who’s chicken. Steal us a few cars, we’ll see who lasts longest driving through the poppies.

Rev ‘em up, rev ‘em up! You want me to throw myself behind a cause? How about I throw myself out of this Porsche 550 Spyder while your tin-man parts get stuck inside your own ride. You’re dead, tin-man, and we were barely friends. How am I supposed to get a brain when your heart’s all splattered at the bottom of a cliff? At least Dorothy’s still here. The cowardly’s going up to the abandoned house; I’m going to the cops.

Because there’s justice, there’s fighting for what’s right, there’s standing up to the tornado— but first you got to fix yourself. Here’s my cause: me. I need fixing. Both me and the whole planet, burned up when Oz goes boom— I can only fix one, might as well be the one who wastes his talents not writing all day. (How many words I got so far, now? 400? It’s stll nothin’.) But the cops, they won’t listen. I tried. I’ll take Dorothy to the abandoned house instead. Maybe Cowardly will be there.

He is. Let the wicked witch’s flying monkeys harass my parents, what do I care. Coupla munchkins, hobbits on the run, Sauren and George RR fill bookshelves, sure, but library stacks don’t stop bullets like they used to. Me and Dorothy and Cowardly, we’ll pretend this abandoned house is the Emerald City. That’s easy, see. Didja know cats sleep 20 hours a day? Cowardly dozes like a good kitty. Me and Dorothy go exploring. I don’t know what that’s a metaphor for.

Oh but here comes Cheetah the Moose. Did you know there’s a whole Wikipedia page on flying monkeys? Cowardly, brave now, shoots one of them. Everything’s all messed up. Stop shooting at me, Lion! Everything’s animals. We’re all running back to where we learned about Oz exploding. Here’s the cause I’d blog for: annihilating angst. A worthless cause, so I’m without. But for now I can trade my own red jacket for Lion’s ammo. Dumb cat.

We go outside. Oh, NOW the cops pay attention. “I got the bullets! Look!” Cowardly’s dead. He stood his ground. I’m not going to take up that cause though. Dorothy clicks her heels together. Nothing happens. Because that was a terrible way to end a story.

You think it’s a coincidence that James Dean and Albert Camus both died in car crashes?

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Keeps the Roads in Good Repair. And Listen.

Postaday for June 2nd: Dear Leader. If your government (local or national) accomplishes one thing this year, what would you like that to be?

One thing? They better get a heck of a lot more done than one thing. I got roads I need to drive on, water I need coming out of the taps. Heck, just keeping the lights on would be great. For my money (i.e. taxes) that’s what government is for. Chase down the criminals, keep the schools open, pick up the trash, approve zoning so we can build a new basketball arena downtown.

I know there are a lot of social issues, and those need to be addressed to. But that’s will-of-the-people stuff, and it’s up to us, the people, to take care of it. Do we want a better living wage? We need to get out there and do something about. We can’t sit around waiting for the government to do the right thing. And don’t get me wrong— I’m not preaching “less government” here. I’m not trying to say we need to get rid of regulations and hooray for laissez faire. I’m saying that government’s job is to do what we tell them to do, and they’re not mind readers.

I demand social justice, of course. My own politics lean left, sometimes way left, but I’m not here to tell people who disagree with me to shut up. Indeed, I want everybody out there yammering away until the boys and girls on the hill hear us.

But enough about my philosophical approach to politics. You want me to talk about an issue, don’t you? You want me to bring up gay marriage, or legalizing marijuana, or $15/hour, or banning assault rifles, or progressive taxes, or a woman’s right to choose, or stand your ground, or deflate gate, or Hastert, the Duggers, or Baltimore, or global climate change, or immigration reform, or that idiot in Wisconsin, or that idiot in Kansas, or Snowden and the NSA, or maybe you would even find it amusing if I were to opine on the TPP, which has me so confused I assume jokes about toiler paper perfume are in order.

But to what end? So you know whether to respect or hate me? Please. I’m am an artist. I’m an intellectual. I am tax payer and a citizen. I am NOT a talking head, a pundit, any kind of leader, or, unless I let myself get lazy, a hypocrite.

Our government is corrupt, because all governments are corrupt, because that’s the nature of willful leadership. No one who wants power deserves it. Call me a cynic. Call me complacent. But I go with the will of the people. If, free of the corrupting influences of big business, the will of the people chooses to outlaw cargo shorts, I’ll start wearing chinos, okay?

But its up to us to tell them what are will IS. Its up to us to shout as loud as possible over the deafening roar of that corruption.

And, frankly, spending all our time shouting at the people who disagree with us gets nothing done.

Keeps the roads in good repair. And listen to us when we’re talking to you.