As I have mentioned, I love word play and messing with common sayings...

...and so this entry will be around that. I am going to have fun with it and try and pair one of my photos with each.

All photos by Wayne R. Flower unless otherwise indicated                           
Time feels all wounds.

The grass is always greener...when it's fake.

 





Distance makes the heart go wander.

~~~~~<3~~~~~





          What doesn't kill you...Will try again.

Taken after going to the eye doctor, it always trips me out what those eye drops do, so I thought I would have some fun and photograph myself with a terrified expression on my brow - and yes, I am aware that I am somewhat of a strange man, and also aware that knowing that does me no favors, but, here we are).

 ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Abstract/Fun Ones:

A bird in the hand is worth a tree full of hands.

You can lead a horse to water, but you'll never saddle a fish. ~~~>><(((((0)))<
        






A stitch in time is an endless stitch...

If at first you don't succeed...Lie, lie again 

Photo from Trump (AKA 'Individual 1' and 'God's Fail-to-the-top-experiment') Wiki page

Love to Folks and Critters,
Wayne Ray Flower II

Some reminders...

...The FBI are not our saviors nor our heroes. But it is more complicated than that. Many of them do good work, they take down child pornography rings (a huge one recently), prevent terrorist attacks. It's a huge entity, it has basically cities of workers doing different things and therefore the evil lies mostly at the top rather than the rank and file. Keep in mind that the key players in the Mueller drama all have known each other and worked with each other for many years over time. That is not 'deep state' conspiracy bullshit, just a fact to keep in mind. And let us not forget the FBI's role in going undercover and trying to subvert honorable People's Movements, like the Civil Rights movement, and have had a hand in some awful shit (it was started by freaking J Edgar Hoover, for chrissakes! His foulness cannot be washed out). 

 (no author/artists credited at source)

...And yeah, there is plenty of fodder for conspiracy theories, and sometimes they are right in the end, natch. But if that were true, and if they wanted to take Trump down, they would have done so BEFORE he was elected. That kills any argument right there. Yep. Here we are. More on this in later entries. In short, hardly anyone will read the Mueller Report. If you haven't you should. I have told myself I will not debate it with anyone if they haven't read it (even discussing it seems unproductive) and the beauty of that is, I won't be spending much time debating it as a result! (for that reason, and, that I deleted my Facebook account). The bad side of this is that, as a result of no one reading it, more will have the wool pulled over their eyes. We have seen this big infant man fail to the top before. Don't be shocked if it happens again. It's God's plan, remember? (oh Lord I hope not). 

[Not sure why, but the whole rest of this entry has an entirely different line-spacing setting, despite it looking fine when editing. Blogger sometimes does shit like this - No matter what I try: Pasting into text editor, formatting in Word, none of it works. I am pleased overall with Blogger, but shit like this drives me nuts!]

More reminders...

...Democrats are in on the take, too and yes of course we need to get God's fail-to-the-top-experiment out of power any way possible, last resort, the ballot. I just mean don't get woolly eyed and forget. Congress is mostly a self-serving and dealing group, established by slave owning, elitist wealth hoarders who tricked poor people into kicking out the British rich so they themselves could plunder their riches and land and often not pay the soldiers who won it for them (the story that may not have been told in your public school books if you are, like me, of a certain age - read Howard Zinn's education altering masterwork of history, 'A People's History of the United States') DIGRESSION ALERT: My point is that nothing has really changed. I am not a huge Bill Maher fan but he nailed it once when he said (from memory) "Republicans will just outright piss on you. Democrats will give you an umbrella first." Yes.

Admittedly, this cartoon is slightly off topic, but I may do an entry on my loathing of 'Undecided' voters who fuck everything up for all of us. If you are undecided now, after everything that has happened...WHAT THE HELL DOES IT TAKE? Ahem...Back to the thread...

My whole political existence as a voting adult has been a nose holding affair. Always a vote against rather than for. The way the Democratic establishment operated during the 2016 US presidential election was shameful in its own special way. The crime of what the Trump campaign and Russians did was so heinous that we forget what was uncovered in the leaked DNC emails; Crush the little people by any means necessary because they aren't buying our bullshit. But here we are...Held to a forced political dichotomy that is so ingrown as to be impossible to disassemble. So we must choose...

I'll take the umbrella.

But I will have my eye on them, as always. And it is wonderful what happened in the 2018 congressional elections, where women, women of color, Muslim women, and people of the LGBTQ community won seats, some of them in unlikely red states. I like, nay, love how these freshmen make the Dems taking money from big pharma and insurance companies clutch their pearls. More, please. There is a light at the end of the tunnel and it is looking more and more like it isn't a train after all. We shall see. 

And now, check some pixels...

All photos by Wayne R. Flower unless otherwise credited


Love to Folks and Critters,
Wayne Ray Flower II  

Untitled 6

Sometimes, the world

forces itself upon your eyes,

makes you know it.

A violent rainbow

spewed from the earth and

clouds, stained

with the rosy blood of stars,

boiled to steam by the sun.

I am so small here,

on this round, living thing

that waits to swallow me

and my history.

~Wayne R. Fower                              

...Wow, cheer up, bub!

I thought this one fit the entry well...
Sketch by Wayne R. Flower, 2019

Hand drawn (hand self portraits are kinda my new thing)

Sketch by Wayne R. Flower, 2019

This is a train hitch for a MAX transit train in Portland, Oregon. It looks like something Jack Kirby would draw.

Here's a bit of mind blowing synchronicity: I looked up 'jack kirby machines' on Google image search (after getting only vacuum cleaners with 'kirby machines' - which I love, had a cleaning business, the best there is if an older model, fucking tanks - DIGRESSION ALERT...) and the story line made me realize I was reading this story currently in a Jack Kirby Stan Lee book on The Inhumans (not to be confused with Agents of Shield Inhumans, which are barely based on this) and I hadn't seen this, I looked in the book and I was 2 pages away from it. I love what this person did by imagining how this machine might actually move, well done.

Green screen

Magic

I found myself, for the first time in awhile...

 ...almost out of money, I am fortunate that this time was only for a short period, I am, as they say, gainfully employed, but for the first time in longer than that, I was digging into change. Again fortunate that I had about $50 in quarters, nickles and dimes. I say this in part as I took some fun photos of the change when it was on my coffee table, the Lane table that is the last thing I have of my departed mom (1927-1988 RIP) besides a chipped Rubbermaid rubber spatula from the'60s (when they made shit to last)...

...but this all got me thinking of my childhood and young adulthood...

This is 'Treep,'so named as I bought him at a Native American reservation stop (I do not remember the tribe, sorry, SE US) on one of the Treepeople reunion tours we did in 2018. It is a cat carved out of marble. Treep watched over the silver.

   ...I grew up pretty dirt poor, but was graced with a mother who had for most of her adult life the super hard job of running a house full of kids, and not having gone and gotten a job outside the home because in her generation (WWII generation) most women were expected to stay in that home and raise the children and do the tons of different jobs involved in running a household...


    ...then she found herself having to enter the workforce, after the divorce from my father - all my siblings are half blood, some a different father, some a different mother. I always reference The Brady Bunch to help understand it all, and to understand how the hell I could have nieces older than I, I could even pull a master tangential karate conversation mode move here and go into how I was the accident of a person who had already mostly raised 5 kids, a 40ish 2nd generation Irish Catholic woman who would never use contraceptives, and a dad who either didn't care or thought 'the rhythm method' worked (a shout out to the many Rhythm Method Accident People out there!)...


   ...so after the oldest kids moved out into the world, it was young me (7/8), mother, and my next in age older sister for a time, then she eventually moved out and it was just Mom and I, and she went out and worked a few jobs at one point. She kept me fed and in school. Helped me learn to fill out grant paperwork for college and I went a while, Boise State University ('87-'88) not to finish my degree until after 21 years out, here in Portland, Oregon. I was preoccupied by rock and roll semi-professionally for a time (a good thing), before the tech career ate my life for a decade... Mom, she died penniless.        

                   ...I have had a period of ten years making good money, in Seattle and Boston respectively, I won't bore you with the details of the biz, but it was tech stuff, late '90s to 2008, but other than that and the last couple years, I have been used to being poor, so when I become poor again...

...I fall easily back into old survival habits.

                             Of course the ultimate privilege is what I was born as, a white man, something I never take for granted or waste when I navigate the world and I can be an ally when I am needed to be for others and always, to listen to and learn from people who have a system stacked against them.


   ...to me, there is no 'woke,' just waking; Always learning and waking, until death, a lot of deprogramming to be done, that mirror sucks, white people. But look in it with me. I digress. But not for nothing. 

   You must...

...be the flower in the pavement...

 Everything IS made of stories, of information. That carved figure is from Germany, a gift from my older brother, who returned from the military service he had done in Kaiserslautern, Germany. I have cherished it since. I guess I am in a reminiscent mood tonight. Here we are...

  

 There is no up or down in space.

 Slow motion battle of the squares

 Violators will be removed

 How baby carts are made

Felinus Dorkus, Denni (expect many photos of this one. Deal with it!)....

"It rained today inside my head." ~ Train graffiti, SE Portland, Oregon, or it is somewhere down the line by now =={    }-[    ]-[    ]>


All photos by Wayne R. Flower

~(((([[[[{{{{}}}}]]]]))))~

An easy way to toxin-free cleaning at home...

...is what I want to write about today, because I think it is important. 

I wrote a final paper in college a few years ago, when I finished up a degree in Community Development at Portland State University, on how every American home has a toxic waste dump of cleaning products under the sink, and how to address this under the radar environmental issue. I didn't even go into yard maintenance products, in order to keep my essay focused, but that is a whole other issue. [Note that the paper covered a broader solution goal, that is, how the local government could educate the public on it and other ideas, here just focusing on a personal solution that lead to the broader scope of the essay I eventually wrote].

The issue isn't just that those toxic cleaning products are sitting there, in closed containers. It is that they are used, and that ultimately they all end up in our water, thus the soil, and in the atmosphere. Also, whenever a region floods, due to heavy rain, hurricanes, etc., those toxins are mass dumped into the water table. It is a major issue for rescuers as well as the folks who need to be rescued. Those chemicals combined with sewage spewed into the water makes for a powerful environmental concern.

One thing that happens in a capitalist system is that companies are always trying to come up with new products, and that becomes a priority over any other concern, because of course in a capitalist system, money, and specifically profit, is king of all. So in the case of toxic cleaning products, there are a ridiculous amount of them, all with some added gimmick to them, multiplying profit, and thus, more and more of this shite is put into our atmosphere. 

As I covered in my college paper, I had a cleaning business in Seattle in the mid '90s through the late '90s, at the peak 8 accounts, lived on it, did the work myself (with a very short period having some folks work for me) and I used the traditional set up for cleaning bathrooms in the US; Clorox and Windex. Windex is straight up ammonia, and I don't think I have to convince you how nasty the stuff is, you have breathed in Windex or straight ammonia at some point, I am sure, and there are those unfortunate souls who didn't know that mixing ammonia and bleach cause a compound that releases a toxic gas which in turn causes lung damage (there are many documented cases, I found in the research for my paper.) 

I was cleaning offices and recording studios exclusively, I didn't at all like the idea of going into house cleaning and into people's lives directly, and offices are way easier to clean, and I cleaned recording studios as I am/was a musician and knew what not to touch in a recording studio, and, they were studios where I had recorded, so one new recording studio account led to another. I digress, a little, but all to say these places I cleaned had small bathrooms, and I thought about how I was in these small spaces, inhaling ammonia (yes, in retrospect I could have got some masking, but I was younger, yada, yada...) and how fucking awful that was. And later I thought of how so many people were doing the same, radiating out from any given block where I was cleaning an account, all that ammonia, multiplied into the atmosphere. Then all the bleach, the Clorox (an interesting fact about bleach is compared to many other toxic substances, it is at the very least, broken down to a basic form chemically, hard to explain...) Nasty! : 0

I did some (pre-internet) research and came up with two basic products I need that were completely natural and did all the same jobs all the other swill of awful, harmful chemical compounds I had always had under my sink since moving out on my own (and after of course growing up with it) and having carted it all around to my cleaning accounts for a number of years, until this revelation. It is so simple, it seems deceiving, but, it is these two things: Bon Ami cleaner, which is just made of corn starch, and white vinegar diluted in water in a spray bottle (to replace the Windex.)

'Vinegar to replace Windex?' you scoff at me, 'what on Earth are you talking about?' Yeah, try it. You can vary the ratio of water (cold tap water, and let it run to clear the sitting water from the pipe) to vinegar until you get a good compound (you want to smell that vinegar to know it is strong enough to be antiseptic.) I feel it cleans glass and mirrors specifically way better than Windex (sorry Windex, the truth is out!...Please don't kill me...it was bad enough you were killing me slowly!)

 

'Ok,' you sigh, 'But cornstarch to replace Clorox bleach? COME ON!'
After I ask you to stop yelling, I tell you that starch that is as concentrated as Bon Ami is powerful, more so if you get the surface to be cleaned wet, sprinkle it on, and let the starch do its work over 10 or 15 minutes, you can spray some vinegar water compound on - This is good for cutting boards and counters (especially white ones, it will remove pretty much any stain, wine, whatever.) Just scrub and rinse. Bon Ami also works wonders on chrome, it won't scratch it, get chrome wet, sprinkle it on, scrub off with rag or paper towel, rinse.

[Addendum: After writing this I realized I left out a crucial home cleaning product: Dish soap! I use the brand in the photo below, but any legitamately natural dish soap will work, there are many effective ones out there (beware ones from large soap companies labeled 'green' or 'natural', they are merely trying to catch that market and use clever wording to get around the fact that it ain't natural, ain't green, no way, no how! And even if it is natural, in my view, I would still be supporting a company that was part of the problem - when companies go to all natural, environmentally safe solutions, they will have my ear and maybe my money...Anyhow, always check ingredients!)]  

Also, as an ex girlfriend of mine will tell you (she taught me this) most drain clogs can be cleared with baking soda (another powerful natural cleaner) and white vinegar (again, play with ratios.) I do concede though, that for really, really tough drain clogs, nothing works as good as the old nasty toxic shit. And you are left with a choice. In my case, I am too broke to call a plumber, so sometimes my plumber is first name 'Liquid'  : ( - If anyone knows of a strong natural solution, let me know. I have not yet found it (also holding out for vegetarian bacon as good as bacon, but that one may never come...sigh)

I don't want to beat this one to death or anything, but I am here to tell you these two (well three if you include baking soda) things are all you need to clean everything in your house, and they are completely environmentally friendly. You see, there are millions of us. I could get nihilistic and say that we as humans are really just a parasite of Earth, but my take is, if that is true, we should strive for our best hope; Becoming a mutually beneficial symbiotic parasite.

I will leave it there. Here are some photos to 


wander through. Have a swell rest of wherever 


you find yourself in your day, I hope it was/is a 


day that feels/felt good.




Love to folks and critters,


Wayne Ray Flower II
 



All photos by Wayne R. Flower

Train and train-yard as art

Human machinations

Unintentional art

The morning after

Toxic beauty