personal hygiene

comb hair and wash hands

sink debate

Years of personal hygiene, hours bent over the bathroom sink, brush your teeth. Comb your hair. Wash your hands. Turn on the tap. Jesus turned water into wine. Imagine if wine came out of the faucet. That would likely lead to song and dance. On a personal note, I've long been fascinated by sinks and the miracle of plumbing. Food consumption and cleanliness go together. The texture of food is part of the eating experience. The color of wine adds to the enjoyment of drinking. Sit back and eat textures and colors. Drink luscious red wine, when the miracle of turning water into wine takes place.

Jack Pine tries to kill Lohbado

Jack Pine

Lohbado

Jack Pine got arrested for stealing cognac from the office of Rex Leroy, a top administrator of the OOO. They arrested Jack and dragged him down to the Regulation Room, where Lohbado did an intake assessment. It was a standard form and took about fifteen minutes to fill out. It contained a set of standardized questions to gather background information about the minor offender. The crime itself wasn't such a big deal to anyone, except Rex Leroy. Each bottle of Remy Martin cost eighty dollars. What hurt most was that Jack had an affair with Dora Leroy. In order to punish Jack, Rex accused Jack of violating top levels of security, endangering the entire OOO community and damaging the secrecy of the Secret Desert. Rex insisted that the stealing of the cognac was a decoy to hide his true mission, to steal information about the Cha Region of the Poh Valley and to sell that information to enemy. 

Lohbado and cups in the cupboard

baby clams

Lohbado woke up in the night and decided to water the plants. He went to the kitchen, flipped on the light switch and reached up to test the soil of a plant on the middle shelf. He tugged at a couple dead leaves, unaware they were attached to a vine which had grown down from above and gotten tangled up with the lower plant. When he pulled at the dead leaf, the plant from the top shelf came tumbling down and smashed the coffee pot on the counter to smithereens. Coffee sloshed into drawers and on the floor. He cursed and swore.

Lohbado becomes a hero

Lohbado sat at a small table by the wall in the Hotdog Palace Restaurant and ordered a hot dog, all dressed, from a man standing in the aisle. That was a big mistake, with fiery consequences.

Jack Graves

 

Marvin managed a funeral home. Jack dug graves. Sometimes Jack jerked coffins around. Marvin told Jack off.

“You know what happened to Jenkins, the guy who stole gold fillings from corpse teeth,” warned Marvin, “You better be careful, or you’re liable to end up locked away in a different kind of hole.”

Seagulls behind the restaurants

Seagulls at the corner, behind the strip of restaurants, food scraps, hundred of gulls screaming, whirling around in the air, gliding down, pouncing on pieces of meat. It looked like a bag of rotten chicken had spilled out the back of a truck on to the pavement of the lot. The seagulls loved it.

to get it right

When Lohbado got back to Yamaville, after six years in the Dome, he had no desire to make a splash. He’d already rocked the boat, pushed the wrong buttons, opened a can of worms, whipped up a storm and stepped into a bees nest. Stung and expelled from the hive, his only ambition was to relax and record sporadic messages and diagrams from the Great Nomroh.

During the first year of change, Lohbado wandered across the Plains of Radiation in search of a place to settle down. He stayed with whoever invited him in, or else at hotels and motels. Sometimes a person picked him up as he walked along the highway. He had to be careful to avoid sexual predators, who would hop anything that moved, no matter how young or old, no matter whether male, female, cat or dog. Usually loneliness caused a person to stop. They could tell at a glance that Lohbado was calm and didn’t smell too strong. His warm and friendly voice put the motorist at ease.