RDCanecutter

I feel for the former pizza delivery guy who tossed a scrawled tip code into his apartment of roommate squalor back when Bitcoin was a dollar.

I suspect anti-social people keeling over from one Jolt Cola and Dorito too many, without a thought of how their friends or family might benefit from any inheritance. This is not uncommon with a certain type of gold bug. Some dude lives his whole life in a 1960's ranch house, sitting on ammo boxes full of Gold Philharmonics. Dies. But in his case, his stash might turn up again even if inside the wall. Anything digital, I dunno.

We found out that a lot of the drug prices are imaginary retail prices-- I mean, they're pretty damn real when you're paying them-- but there is usually some way to get it knocked way down. We aren't rich but we save enough that we never had to skip a treatment for sake of money. But a lot of people who maybe don't know how to get the inside info are fuuuucked.

Richard Serra, sculptor of massive steel curves that looked like pieces of ships under construction, passed away recently. In 1981, Serra was on a flight from NYC to Madrid to oversee an installation. I was on that same flight. I was his neighbor on the starboard side. At the time I was in peak Jethro Bodine please-pass-the-jelly mode, 20-going-on-14, no doubt annoying the living shit out of a famously grumpy man. "HI I'M RDCANECUTTER FROM SOGGY BOTTOM ALABAMMY." "Yeah I'm Richard Serra." (zero knowledge of who that was.) "HI MR. SERRA THIS IS MY FIRST AIRPLANE RIDE CAN I SWAP TO THE WINDOW SEAT WHILE WE TAKE OFF?" "No." We actually got along after I settled down, and looking back, knowing how he could be, I realize he was being really nice to me. "Mr. Serra I wanna be an artist too." "Really? What kind of artist?" "I'm studying graphic design." "You're never gonna be an artist. Graphic Design isn't art. That's like studying Journalism and calling yourself a writer." "But but but I need to pay my bills..." "Pay your bills with any old job and do real art after work. Me, I drove a truck for years. I didn't do Graphic Design." That morning we were coming in low over the fields outside Madrid. He said that central Spain always reminded him of Iowa. Months later when I was back at school, I told another art professor I'd met Richard Serra. "Richard Serra! One of his pieces fell over and killed a man!"

Napoleon III was doing that kind of stuff in the mid 1800s. Guess we'll be owing repayments to Prussia before long.

Fuentes likes getting spanked by the hacienda priest.

Vote Dem, maybe get new neighbors from South America. Vote Repub, maybe get a South American political system.

Yeah, Mexico is fairly mellow for driving. Funny how multiple speed bumps knocking the bottoms out of cars for a few generations can slow a driving culture down.

Since we appear to be veering into Blame the Musician territory for the instrument being annoying, I nominate Acoustic Guitar with flat B string flailed on by Hippy Who Came to Party Alone as he eyes the crowd and sings "Love the one you're with."

Well, the first time I saw a CT with a massive tumor in it, I felt like I had been doused in ice water and went home and prepared for an early death. Then they popped it out, and my Inner Viking started to come out as I recovered quickly with clean margins. I showed up way early to get the staples popped out, just sort of being sassy after being terrified. Then two years later I got doused with mental ice water again when it turned out that a few stray tumor cells had fled to Argentina (chest and neck) before the fall of the Tumor Third Reich. I figured I was getting eaten up like an old shed full of termites. Except that Immunotherapy worked, well. Eat right, mild exercise, Inner Viking grows more. So when it turned out recently that some cells had passed the blood/brain barrier who knows when, I wasn't HAPPY, but no ice water either. Just time to go to work. A pleasant by-product of waiting til now to have brain tumors is they can treat them with less gore than getting a crown on a tooth. After zapping I'll probably get put on another immunotherapy course for a while to exterminate any unseen zingers lurking in other parts of the grey matter. I'll draw cartoons and joke with nurses. It's not so much being brave as it is adjusting to something ordinary. It helps that the tech and the chemicals are interesting. But I did flaunt my Inner Viking yesterday when the nurse offered to arrange a van to pick me up for treatment. I said, "One day, will come the day that I need the van. But that day, is not THIS day." I mean, fuck it.

Well this morning I zipped over the hill into the UAB Medical Megaplex downtown, docs think a simple zapping operation has an 8 to 9 out of ten chance of me winning the non-brain-tumor lottery. I'm gonna get a LINACC treatment, Linear Accelerator treatment. Tech said it was better than Gamma Knife. What they do is literally bolt your head immobile inside this sort of form-fitting Power Ranger mask that fits only you. We did this today. The mask melts to your face. THE MASK MELTS TO YOUR FACE. I said, th'motherfuckin MASK melts to your FACE, maaan. OK, not boiling hot, but you are aware that it is warm. Then you are bolted flat inside your cooling-and-hardening mask and they run test CT scans so they can come back after a week of calculations and zap through the mask at the precise angle. Dude said they usually swing the radiation blasts around in a circle aimed at the tumor, so most of your brain gets nothing, small strips get a minor dose, and the target at the center writhes in the wrath of 100 exploding suns. I gotta admit I found all this ghoulishly enjoyable and better than any ride at Space Mountain. It made up for the nurse getting the yips and stabbing three perfectly good veins before she could start my thingamabob for them to pump hot radioactive contrast in my body. But we who are about to receive super powers must be patient with our fellow Earthlings. After the treatment I get to keep my bespoke mask. When Day of the Dead comes around, if I am not actually dead, I plan to paint it up like some Pre-Hispanic Death God maybe with some big green feathers sprouting in a circle off the rim where they bolted it to the back half.

I generally start fancy when traveling, then after a couple of days of walking past hotels that cost half as much, I relocate to one of them and start acting more like Humphrey Bogart.

What gets me is fuckers who take Ubers in Mexico. Best cab system I've seen, like 75 cents per mile in an air-cooled VW bug, OK yeah I know they aren't mostly Bugs anymore but hell maaan-- if you're skeert get the doorman to flag you a safe cabbie from the coffee shop inside the hotel.

If you had olive oil instead of butter, I'da swam to your boat. No, keep the butter out there, Ima eat that too after I finish the olive oil. Worked up an appetite, all that swimmin.

Blinky skin disease dude.

Is autotune an instrument?

You just made the death list. Ith mo chac a charaid.

Just so you know, whenever I hear MAGA dudes in Alabama talk about RFK Jr., they love him for loving their favorite conspiracies. They don't seem to care that he's technically a Democrat. I think he'd peel off a few in an election. Extrapolate that to your own local MAGA dudes wherever you happen to be filling the air with farts.

Everything after that makes more sense now.

They probably outsourced the job to some kid in the Philippines who auto-mis-translated the instructions.

A friend was working a gig in Hawaii for about 6 months. From what he said, if you needed things that came in cargo ships, life was expensive. But if you ate whatever was local, not so much. Wonder what the DoorDash fee for Taco Bell to Oahu is.

The fix was in from the pre-game animation where both little cartoon players were in Tennessee orange.

I think if they're using modern rifles you have to call them civilized hogs.

I've got twenty rep points that says it was a random dude who didn't pay his bribe to the Chechens.

That's what I'm gonna do.