Thanks for your interest in appearing in Sex, Drugs and Blueberries. This film will be shot during August 2013 in western Maine. This is a non-Equity production, but actors and crew will be paid a reasonable day rate, plus excellent meals and accommodations near a lake in the foothills. Transportation from Portland, Maine is also available.
As you might guess from the title, Sex, Drugs and Blueberries will depict nudity, sexual situations, drug use and blueberry raking. Set amid the burgeoning Oxycontin epidemic plaguing downeast Maine, the film tells the story of how quickly things can go wrong. Ben Franklin, a failed emo almost-rock star moves to poverty-stricken Washington County with his poet-school teacher wife. Desperate for cash, he signs on to rake blueberries, where he meets Richard, who offers Ben a place to stay for the duration of the harvest. From there, Ben quickly descends into a seamy world of sex and drugs that could lead to his downfall.
The film basically mirrors the plot of the novel, except for a few small but significant alterations and a new ending. That’s why we’re holding back on publicly releasing a script, offering instead a free digital download of the Sex, Drugs and Blueberries eBook. Or you can acquire a copy of the print edition at most Maine bookstores and libraries or on-line via here or Amazon.
We’re currently casting six primary characters (3 male, 3 female) and six supporting roles. Two roles have already been cast. Maine rock legend Dave Gutter (Rustic Overtones, Paranoid Social Club) will portray Ben and actor Christopher Lennon will portray Richard.
We’re excited by the opportunity to hold initial auditions on-line, since it allows us to cast a wider net for talent. The process is easy. Click here to find the descriptions of the characters. Then send an email, telling us who you’re interested in portraying, along with a link to a YouTube or Vimeo page where you will post a simple screen test.
The format for the screen-test is as follows: start by stating your real name and age, then, in character, answer the questions provided at the end of character synopsis. As you’ll see, for some of the characters, the questions have to do with sex. A “correct” answer isn’t required, but the correct attitude is important. Remember you are answering IN CHARACTER. Since the film deals with explicit sexual situations, if you’re prudish and/or have hang ups about titillating art, this isn’t the film for you.
We’re not looking for elaborate production value in these screen tests. We just want to gauge whether you have the energy, attitude and look of the character. From there, we’ll be holding call-backs in Portland during the first week of June.
The team behind this movie is very excited by the possibilities existing in this amazing era of indie filmmaking. We’re also pleased to be shooting in Maine, spending the budget locally and capturing the essence of this great state in the context of a sexy, steamy and sad story. Please feel free to email with questions or comments.
Hey pals, About 20 years ago, as a young wanna-be writer at the University of Southern Maine, I attended an awesome event featuring Bill Roorbach reading from his book "Summers with Juliet." Afterward, I met the dude and found out he was super-cool. Alas, I never saw him again. When my book Tough Islandcame out, I decided to send him a copy. (Along with Sex, Drugs and Blueberries.)
Well, the other day I heard back from Bill. He wanted to know if I'd be interested in contributing to Bill and Dave's Cocktail Hour the literary website he shares with writer Dave Gessner.
... Hell yeah. My idea? To serialize Tough Island. And Bill said "So be it." Please visit this page , read, comment, 'Like' and 'share' -- every Sunday -- so the fellas will keep me aboard. Thanks.
It's been three months since I've last blogged due to an overload of work and other life stresses. I'm re-activating The Crash Report for 2013 with a piece I wrote for the Portland Phoenix about the meeting of anti-Somali racists in Lewiston a decade ago.
The sight of a couple hundred helmeted cops in full riot gear startled me. I knew security around the Maine National Guard Armory in Lewiston would be tight, but the sheer physical presence of scores of large men in black clothes, wielding clubs and shields, was still a surprise. To see a couple dozen phalanxes of heavily armed troops — juxtaposed with the winter landscape of a Maine industrial park — was surreal.
I pushed my way through the throng of several hundred anti-racists to the concrete barricades installed by the city to keep the crowd away from the Armory. The protestors were rallying against a meeting by the World Church of the Creator, a visiting group of white supremacists preaching for the expulsion of the city’s growing Somali population.
Also, I've been so busy with the Crash Report that I've been neglecting the crowd-funding efforts to publish my new book Marijuana Valley, Maine: a true story. And just a couple minutes ago, a whopping $500 donation was made by a fella, whom I don't know, named Lance who said some really nice stuff in the comments section. So that brings the total, so far, to $1,910 from readers and $1,500 from Maine bookstores. There are three days left to the fundraiser. You can make a contribution or learn more about this endeavor athttp://www.indiegogo.com/marijuanavalleymaine?a=1275732
You’d think that since the Angus King Senate campaign is heavily invested in social media – with 38,747 likes on Facebook and 1,675 followers on Twitter – they would have asked the candidate’s 22-year old son to stop making racist, homophobic, ageist and inane Tweets. Or at least get him to change his privacy settings so the whole world wouldn’t have access to his views on politics, history, old people and vaginas.
I’ve got a busy week ahead. Tonight: ’ll be presenting the live version of a “Crash Course in Medical Marijuana” at 7 p.m. at Longfellow Books in Portland. I’ll be teaching folks the basics about medical marijuana, like how to qualify and how to actually go about procuring the legal herb. Plus, I’ll be bringing some actual, live marijuana flowers with me. So it’ll be a show and tell and sniff. Plus, we're having a raffle with prizes including a free ad in the Bollard, tix to Harry Brown's Farm in Starks for this weekend's Harvest Ball, copies of Sex, Drugs and Blueberries and Tough Island and some homegrown organic garlic.
Someone passed along the code for me to join a conference call on Sept. 21 between Angus King staffers and the King campaign’s county chairs. The candidate himself was supposed to join the conversation from Washington D.C. where he was actively raising much-needed cash. Alas, King was busy meeting money-people, so he didn’t make the call, although some interesting tidbits were mentioned by the participating King-sters.
Crunching the numbers on Angus King’s financial disclosure
In 2011, Angus King, like many Mainers, strung together a series of jobs in order to make a living. Unlike us, King earned $23,500 per month. And that’s just the cash from his various consulting gigs, including $2,600 worth of “commissions” he collected every month from tending the trust fund of a dead college buddy’s son.
Those earnings don’t include the dividends from his multi-million-dollar portfolio of stocks and bonds, or King’s holdings in mutual and hedge funds that invest in tobacco, oil, beer, and numerous Chinese corporations.
Infamous Maine journalist Harry Foote died this week at age 96. Harry was my first editor and taught me a whole bunch about being a reporter. Ten years ago, when he sold the American Journal to Current Publishing, I wrote the following letter to Harry via my now-defunct media column Too Much Information for the Portland Phoenix.
Dear Harry,Aug. 1, 2002
I’m not sure I ever thanked you for my first job in journalism. It’s amazing how much has changed in the last nine years. The Westbrook paper mills stopped stinking up the city and you’ve sold your newspaper. Congrats on the deal. You’re 86 years old and have been running the American Journal since 1965. That’s longer than I’ve been alive, Harry. You deserve time off to recharge your engine.
By the way, I blame you for ruining journalism for me. You hired a 25-year-old health-food store clerk with no experience or education — who had just learned to write a complete sentence — and promised to make him into a reporter. If it weren’t for the principles and standards you taught me, it’s unlikely I’d be so disgusted with the shoddy work and questionable ethics now practiced by most of Maine’s local media.
Crunching the numbers on Angus King's financial disclosure
In 2011, Senate candidate Angus King, like many Mainers, strung together a series of jobs in order to make a living. King, however, earned $23,500 per month, almost ten times the average local wage. And that’s just the cash from his various consultancies, including a monthly $2,600 in “commissions” from tending the trust fund of a dead college buddy’s son.
These earnings, however, don’t include the dividends from his multi-million dollar portfolio of stocks and bonds. Or his holdings in mutual and hedge funds that invest in tobacco, oil, beer and many different Chinese corporations.
Not to sound ghoulish, but I'd love to observe the lucky students at the University of New England as they dismember my corpse. After a lifetime of living in my body, I'd be curious to see the insides. Once I'm dead, that is, and hopefully decades from now. Alas, witnessing the blessed event will be unlikely, since when I pass on, I'm gone. Not a chance the bundle of energy formally known as "me" would hang out in a university dissection chamber for one-to-three years following my death.
“We’ve lost two wars. Wanna know why?” Danny Dalton asks rhetorically. “Incompetence,” he answers with a frown and a shake of his head. A quarter century of working for the federal government has cemented his attitude toward his former employers. “We spend eighty billion dollars a year on intelligence, yet it took ten years to find Osama bin Laden in our friend’s backyard. Because our intelligence agencies were incapable of doing their job.”
These tough words coming from the mouth of a soft-spoken shopkeeper seem out of place amid the neat piles and displays of shirts, sweaters, jackets and plush toys that make up the inventory of his store, “The Sea Hag,” in downtown Bath. The retail gig – a six-week-old family business he owns with his brothers – is a dramatic departure from the years he spent in the military or as a DEA agent in El Salvador and Pakistan. And tending the store is totally different than the couple of years he spent working in Iraq as a government contractor.
Customers buying tee-shirts from Dalton might have a hard time believing the friendly fella behind the counter is actually a former globe-trotting, gun-toting special agent with an MBA. Who also happens to be a current candidate for the U.S. Senate. If they ask about the nice-lookin’ hookah in the corner of the room, then they might hear a tale about the guard shack comrades who gave Dalton the gift when he left Iraq, which might lead to an explanation on why he’s running for Senate without taking a single campaign contribution.
I always enjoy my almost-weekly conversations with my old pal John McDonald on WGAN radio. On Sunday, we discussed Angus King's wind farm in northern Oxford County, also the subject of this week's Crash Report in the Portland Daily Sun.
The final leg to the summit of Partridge Peak, elevation 1,985 feet, in northern Oxford County, is an easy walk, thanks to the massive road built to handle the huge bulldozers, excavators, cranes and other heavy-duty construction rigs necessary to destroy a four mile ridgeline of mountain tops. To the west and below is Roxbury Pond, surrounded by miles of working forest. Hills, slopes and peaks of various heights and girth rise from the landscape, reaching for the vast Maine sky. To the east, Mount Blue. To the north, Tumbledown. To the south, Whitecap, Black and the Twin Mountains.
Partridge Peak, and the adjoining Flathead Mountain and Record Hill, offer amazing panoramas and breathtaking views of bucolic Maine countryside, provided you can ignore the constant growl and rumble of the 22 giant wind turbines atop the three linked ridgelines. These 325-foot tall white monsters are four times the height of the Portland Observatory on Munjoy Hill. Or one-and-a-half times the height of Franklin Towers, Maine’s tallest building.
The idea to blast ledge and create giant landing pads to install these behemoths amid this outdoor paradise came from Senate candidate Angus King. For the last five years, King and other industrial wind developers have been targeting rural communities in Maine. These hucksters all sing the same song, claiming wind farms create jobs and produce huge amounts of green electricity while reducing America’s dependence on foreign oil. But that’s just a sales pitch. The reality is much different. Corporate industrialists and energy speculators are green-washing the masses while they continue to milk Maine’s natural resources for every dollar and dime they can, and make the public pay for their whims and whistles.
Checking out candidate expenses, aka “disbursements” for political campaigns is always good for a couple chuckles. Angus King’s most recent Federal Elections Commission report is no exception. The numbers are huge: He’s taken in about $900,000 and spent about $400k on the Senate race. But I’m curious about the details. Like what food item – for $2.89 each -- did the campaign purchase at the Brunswick 7-11 on three separate days in late May? Or how much food does $875 get in a Greek deli in Washington D.C.?
“Have a good evening, folks.” Joe stood, stretched and looked at his watch. It was 2:30 a.m. For the last hour-and-a-half, he’d been sitting at the high stakes blackjack table. “Thanks,” he said, tossing the dealer a $25 chip. “See you again real soon.” He smiled and sauntered over to the cashier’s window.
“That guy really knows how to play,” the dealer told the rest of the players once Joe was out of earshot. “He wins a certain amount, then leaves.” The dealer nodded. “And he almost never loses.”
Outside, Joe (not his real name) and I discuss gambling. An affable 26-year-old born and raised in Auburn, he now lives in the next town over from the casino. He usually plays blackjack twice a week at the Oxford, and wins, on average, about $600. On the rare occasion he gets a bad run of luck, he’ll go home after losing a couple hundred.
“There’s a basic mathematical strategy to blackjack. Tons of info on the ‘net about it,” he said. “Doesn’t mean you’ll always win. But a good player can do well.” He shook his head. “Smart players don’t lose big. Big losers don’t play smart.”
He’s been gambling since he was 16, starting on-line and playing with his pals. He also makes frequent trips to Foxwoods for real poker. So he was pumped when the casino opened in early June, practically in his veritable ‘hood. And he hasn’t been shy about teaching his friends how to play and win since the game came to town.
“It’s been awesome because there’s nothing to do around here. Plus, the casino has created tons of jobs.” He smiled widely. “And for western Maine, that’s big.”
As for the relatively easy money?
“I feel kinda bad. ‘Cuz lots of my family and friends have to work pretty friggin’ hard to make twelve hundred bucks.” He shrugged. “But gambling isn’t for everyone. You gotta have some discipline, or you’re always gonna lose. A couple weeks ago, I watched a guy dump five grand.” He shook his head. “I hoped he learned a lesson.”
I had walked through the Oxford’s doors earlier in the evening as a skeptic, mostly due to my distrust of the corporate nature of the industry. Plus, I’ve always been instinctively reluctant to consider games-of-chance as a part of economic development. But after spending a full night anonymously observing the gambling parlor, my tune changed. Casinos in Maine, with some sensible limits, have the potential to pay off big.
I'm getting ready to head out to cool little city of Bath, Maine and the Patten Free Library for tonight's performance of Tough Island: Live which is a 45-minute monologue based upon my book of true stories from Matinicus. Here's a retelling of one of the tales, the story of Captain Vance Bunker and the sinking of the Tugboat Harkness in the frigid January waters.
The Crash Report appears Saturdays in the Portland Daily Sun.
Try to picture a turnpike that cuts across the interior of Maine. A four-lane super-highway built through woodlands and bogs. A completely fenced-in, 220-mile private toll road, running along rivers, lakes and farms, then over mountains and ridgelines. Starting in Calais and ending at the Quebec border at Coburn Gore, the so-called “east-west corridor” is being pushed by Peter Vigue, head of Cianbro, the construction wing of Maine’s energy-speculation industrial complex.
The Crash Report appears every Saturday in the Portland Daily Sun.
Since 2009, Maine law has allowed farmers to grow industrial hemp, but the federal Drug Enforcement Agency will lock ‘em up if they try. Even though everyone agrees you can’t get high from smoking the stuff. It’s just another example of government-sponsored reefer madness stigmatizing anything cannabis-related. Doesn’t matter that industrial hemp has the potential to bring much needed cash to Maine’s agricultural sector and new manufacturing jobs to unemployed workers across the state. To the feds, the harmless plant needs to stay on the “bad” drug list, along with heroin, cocaine, crystal meth and opium. The irony, of course, is that the U.S. annually imports about $400 million worth of hemp products, mostly from China and Canada. And yet if Maine farmers decided to sow a field with industrial hemp, they’d face 5 to 20 years behind bars for growing a plant with such low THC levels, you’d pass out from smoke inhalation long before catching a buzz.
This morning’s Truth Test, the Portland Press Herald’s critique of political campaign messages and advertising, takes Senate candidate Angus King to task for claiming “73,608 pages of federal tax code is too much.”
THE CRASH REPORT NOW APPEARS IN PRINT ON SATURDAYS IN THE PORTLAND DAILY SUN.
If Angus King wins the Senate race, will he commute to Washington, D.C. in his brand-newMercedes Benz RV? It would be wasteful to leave the custom-built $130,000 24-footer in his Brunswick dooryard. But driving 11 hours — one way — would get old quick, no matter how deluxe the accommodations. Or maybe King intends to use the rig as a campaign bus, though the image of a suit-wearing millionaire stepping out of a luxury RV runs counter to the populist pose the former Governor is trying to cultivate. Perhaps King's good-judgment was blinded by the RV's model name: the Unity. After all, that's what King preaches: unifying different socio-economic groups and political persuasions in order to fix Congress while checking out the walnut-faced curved cabinetry and the 26-inch LED TV on a swing-out arm that come standard in his pimped-out ride.
There’s some irony in the short-lived Angus King proposal to keep super-PACs out of the Maine senate race. After all, as I reported the other day, he’s the sole candidate currently benefiting from a super-PAC’s anonymous largesse. His latest campaign gambit was just more grandstanding by an egomaniacal one percenter feeling left out of the primary-day media circus. The timing of his attempt to dictate the rules of the game – the morning after the primary – was obviously intended to draw attention from his major-party opponents in their moments of victory while injecting himself into the news cycle.
I’m starting to think Angus King is running scared.
Nobody seems to be talking about the $27,000 that billionaire venture capitalist Ted Waitt’s super-PAC has devoted, so far, for advertisements supporting Angus King. The cash makes Waitt currently the largest financial backer of the former governor’s bid for the Senate, besides Angus King himself. Here’s a link to the ad, but if you wanna save 30 seconds of your life, here’s the premise. A bunch of multicultural kids argue over the color of a tree house. Some want it blue. Some red. And the smart -- smart ‘cuz he’s wearing glasses -- white kid in the middle decides it should be purple. Get it? Mix the blue paint and the red paint and you get... a friggin’ mess. Hence the PAC’s name, icPurple. And the ads promoting Angus King are from a boiler-plate that icPurple ran in support of five so-called moderate candidates across the country with the local indie savior’s name plugged in at the end of the spot. (The icPurple roster is now down to two candidates, Angus King and a fella named Chad Walsh, running for state assembly in California. Three previously purple candidates were defeated in recent primaries.)
The so-called centrist rhetoric spouted by one-percenters like Waitt and Angus King is starting to give me headaches. To keep on blithely promising that ruling from the so-called middle will fix the problems of America is naïve and insulting. These dudes sing songs of alleged independence to the dissatisfied masses, but the reality is that they are corporatists who don’t give a damn about the middle class and the working poor. Otherwise, they’d be clamoring to repeal the Bush tax breaks for the rich, they’d be pushing to raise the minimum wage to a living wage and encouraging more regulation and scrutiny for the world of high finance and banks.
Yesterday, I blogged that pseudo-environmentalist Angus King’s Senate campaign received a $1,000 gift from the PAC for Plum Creek, the mega-land developer and lumber corporation intent on ruining the Moosehead Lake region. This morning, after a quick perusal of the latest individual donor reports, I noticed all sorts of interesting folks giving money to Angus King for Senate. (I’ll revisit the list in the near future.) But one name stuck out: Plum Creek president Rick Holley, who gave King $2,500.
Actually, I’m surprised that's all the dude gave King. After all, as CEO of the largest private land ownership company in America, Holley made $7.7 million in 2011. And it would be handy for Plum Creek to have Senator named Angus King.
It's strange how Senate candidate Angus King loves to portray himself as an environmentalist, despite all facts pointing in the other direction. The latest being the King campaign acceptance of a thousand bucks from Plum Creek's PAC.
I’m guessing Senate candidate Angus King won’t be attending the screening of Windfall tomorrow night at the Nickelodeon Theater in Portland at 7 p.m. Unless he wants to be lynched by an angry mob.
There are lots of excuses why I haven’t been blogging, but mostly because the weather has been great. Here in western Maine we had a week-long stretch of amazing temps that gave us the opportunity to get ahead in the game of land clearing. Sweetgrass and I have decided to bring a cow out to Dreamstead in the autumn, so we need to recover more pasture.
"Already ... some bozo set up a Twitter feed purporting to be me – Angus King – with my picture, with all these crappy twitters. I mean, what kind of world is this?" King said.
With all the hub-bub connected to Olympia Snowe’s departure from the Senate, I almost forgot about Olympia’s appearance in a documentary concerning the censorship of my brother Bang-Bangs’ anti-war art. The Senator appears at about 4:15 into the film.
Sam Smith has always been one of my favorite leftist-progressive muckrakers who writes with wit and substance on the national scene. These days, the fella has retired to an undisclosed location on the Maine coast, where he steers the Progressive Review via the internet. This is what he has to say about “The Moderate Myth” in light of Angus King’s bid for the Senate.
With Angus King running as an independent for Maine [Senate], we will continue to be inundated with disingenuous talk of "moderation." In fact, those called moderates - like King and Olympia Snowe - are actually on the right, just not as far as some.
According to the Bangor Daily News, Senator-wannabe Angus King doesn't like that people view him as an elitist:
The Dartmouth College graduate and Bowdoin College lecturer also took umbrage at criticisms that he is an “elitist,” volunteering that he came from an unassuming family in which his grandparents quit schooling after the eighth grade.
“I don’t drink wine, I don’t know what brie is, I bowl every Thursday night and my idea of fun is to go RVing,” he said. “If that’s an elitist, this country is in trouble.”
Here it is, a half hour before Angus King's big speech at Bowdoin about the Bay of Pigs invasion (and his possible Senate run) and i suddenly had a flash... What if all this talk by Angus King is just part of his guerilla marketing campaign to sell more copies of his book about driving an RV across America and becoming inspired by Cali wind farms to bring invasive and industrial wind to western Maine? I mean, seriously, why would a rich dude his age wanna throw his hat into the ring for a battle to become Senator, only to become the low-dude on the Capitol totem poll. That's not the Angus King I know. His ego would be too big to fit in a junior senator's office.
Or maybe he'll suddenly realize that he'd be in over his big head. After all, his extensive experience with laptop initiatives and the Bay of Pigs invasion won't be too helpful during most Senate debates.
So it’s official, at tomorrow’s convention of the Maine Writers Party, I’m gonna endorse and throw my support behind the only real Mainer who I think could make a difference representing us down in Washington D.C.
There are millions of reasons why former governor Angus King shouldn’t be the next senator from the great state of Maine. For starters, he’s an out-of-touch, multi-millionaire one-percenter. Just another plutocrat pretending to be a moderate populist. And Mainers don’t need another millionaire representing them in Washington D.C. That’s why I purchased both the AngusforSenate.com and AngusKingforSenate.com domain names. Because if the former guv decides to run for Olympia Snowe’s seat, I’m gonna have a ton of fun with the Internet. And no, Angus, the domains are not for sale.
Usually the petro-industrial complex waits until the summer travel months to gouge the general public. But for some reason, the speculators have decided to start getting their profits early. Usually I don't notice the gasoline prices, since I rarely leave my house. I'm hitting the road later this week, so I was trying to come up with a budget for the trip. Yikes.
Reminds me of a film I made of my brother Bang-Bangs back in 2006 when gas prices in Washington County, Maine shot through the roof. Bang wanted to create a product that would become valuable after all the oil ran out... The Urban Yolk.
Gotta admit, I was surprised by the announcement by Gov. Paul LePage of the formation of a new prescription pill abuse task force. Actually, pissed is more like it. First of all, took him long enough. We’ve all known, for years, that Maine is in the midst of an epidemic. But my bigger problem was that Gov. LePage promised to name me the chair of the friggin’ thing. Liar. He didn’t even appoint me to the committee.
Of course the Roman Catholic Diocese of Portland, as an American corporation, has every right to express its views, no matter how nutty, hateful or bigoted. As Bishop Dick Malone and his hench-folk prepare to wage war against a citizen initiative to legalize gay marriage in Maine, they've upped the ante by proclaiming that gay Catholics are totally welcome to hang out in the diocese's tax-free clubhouses, provided they don't have sex. At all. At any place or any time. Gay is okay, as long as the person remains celibate.
It's good news, I guess, that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention believe the multi-state salmonella outbreak potentially connected to ground meat sold at Hannaford stores is over. Not like anyone died from the Salmonella Typhimurium, but what interests me is the multi-state aspect of the incident, coupled with the fact that the feds, using Hannaford's own tracking system, were unable to pinpoint the source of the bacteria. Why? Probably because ground beef sold via corporate supermarket chains often times comes from multiple animals raised at multiple industrial farms, usually only meeting and mixing for the first time in the final feed-lot or processing facility. Just another reason, if you live in Maine, to buy your meat directly from the farmer. But whenever I suggest a meat CSA, people yell and scream that organic local meat is too expensive. I've had arguments with chef/owners who claim they can't get local meats the way they want 'em. All myths.
Gotta admit, I did a quick double take when I walked on stage for last week’s Brown Bag lecture at the awesome Portland Public Library. Biggest crowd, so far, for a Tough Island reading. Gonna be a friendly audience, I could tell from the start, because of the laughs and giggles I heard while taking an eye dropper full of tincture as a way to demonstrate to the audience a discreet technique of attaining the wondrous benefits of Maine grown weed. That, in combination with the bowl of organic blueberry ganja I had inhaled just prior to the event, provided me with the wonderful feeling of being both intellectually relaxed and artistically energized simultaneously.
After learning that some Mainers were paying from $3.52 to $3.89 per gallon for home heating oil, I couldn't help but shudder. Again, I'm thankful for wood heat. It's becoming more and more obvious that fossil fuels ain't the heat of the future. And, gauging what's happening around here in the western part of the state, huge industrial wind farms aren't gonna be the answer, either. Myself, I'm pushing for solar electric and using wood to keep Mainers warm.
I have to wonder why the price of oil is up so much? Most likely it's the friggin' speculators playing get-rich-quick off the backs of the elderly and poor. No wonder some oldsters are selling their Oxy scripts just to make ends meet.
I'm having a hard time understanding the sweetheart deal for convicted thief Paul Violette, former top fella at the Maine Turnpike Authority. Apparently he "faces as many as five years" in the slammer for stealing an almost half million bucks that we know about. And while he's in the pokey, and then until he dies, he's gonna get $5,288 a month in a state pension. And his legal beagle insists that he's entitled. Because restitution has been paid.
I feel sorry for the workers over the Portland Press Herald. Their former boss allegedly squandered the company's remaining equity, and stiffed the newsprint supplier, so now the vultures are circling the rented newsroom, trying to get employees to agree to ill-advised concessions. Thankfully, the union seems to be holding strong. They rejected the latest nickel-and-dimer, but it's gotta suck, trying to focus on reporting while worrying if your desk will even exist at the end of the week.
Been wicked busy getting ready for the Brown Bag Lecture in Portland this week, only to be distracted by the scandalous goings on in the Republican presidential race. Never would have thought that Newt's open marriage and Mitten Romney's funny underpants would play so central a role in politics. What's next? Rick Santorum is gay and Ron Paul slept with his horse? Leave it the Republicats to make sex so unsexy.
Since I've been obsessing about lettuce, I thought it would be a good time to show the docu-film I made about my brother, Bang-Bangs, Island Conceptual Artist, and his chicken, Buddy, and the importance of local food and art. Sensitive viewers be warned, the chicken does die.
The proposed lettuce factory and greenhouse aquaculture industrial complex being discussed for Windham smelled bad to me from the very start. As someone with a fundamental understanding of how food is produced, both on farms and at sea, I'm always wary of anyone who proposes an easy-to-maintain, perpetual food machine. I'm skeptical because growing food requires either lots of chemicals and poisons (the agri-business model) or countless hours of hard, labor-intensive work by humans and animals working together in conjunction with nature. So when the follow-up story to the Windham proposal appeared in the Press Herald, I read it carefully, to see if I could learn anything that would lessen my skepticism. Then I spent 14 minutes on Google and discovered that the company behind the company proposing this mammoth project is... nothing. A digital shell company with no apparent real world experience. The mumbo jumbo is here. A shell company that is, according to the PPH, on the "fast track" for approval, with help from local and state officials.
Every day, it seems, there is another reference in the Maine media about the scourge of all drugs: BATH SALTS. So much so, some have started calling the Bangor Daily News the Bath Salt Daily News. Constantly, it seems, someone in Maine going nuts on the stuff, either trying to eat their own faces or ranting and ravin’ about how Governor Paul Lapage is trying to eat their face. The salts even turned up in a buried in a story about Rev. Bob Carlson, the well-respected Bangor area religious leader who turned out to be a child-molester with fraudulent credentials. Truly scary stuff. I mean, I’ve done lots of mind altering substances over the years, and never once was I tempted to light the car on fire while it was still moving and I was a passenger. The salts phenomena doesn’t seem to have taken over Portland, yet. But this past October, I was Bangor for less than 24 hours before an encounter with someone under the influence of Methylenedioxypyrovalerone.
Two decades ago today, on the stormy night of January 16, 1992, the tugboat Harkness went down in the deep waters off Matinicus, Maine’s most remote inhabited island. The tug’s three-man crew abandoned ship and bobbed in the frigid North Atlantic, thinking they were about to die. But they didn’t know Captain Vance Bunker and two of his island friends were looking for them. I re-tell this story in my book Tough Island. But, today, in honor of the 20th anniversary of this dramatic rescue, I've recorded an audio version of the tale. (click here to listen vance.mp3) I hope you enjoy a story with a happy ending.
These days, Sweetgrass and I are trying to raise as much of our own food as possible while re-claiming an old farmstead in the foothills of western Maine. This winter has been amazingly mild, conveniently allowing me to finish lots of projects ignored for far too long 'cuz I've been wicked busy. Cut and stacked seven cord. Winterized the chicken shack. Burned brush piles. And the day before yesterday, I removed the plastic cover from our 20 foot long hoop house. The New Year's cold snap finally killed the kale. Wilted and sad, I ate a last couple leaves before the roaming gang of a dozen hens discovered the bounty and took over, scratching and pecking in joy. Winter greens. Such a luxury.
According to the Press Herald, the suspect was holding about a 1,000 oxycontin. I wonder how many different dealers -- I mean Doctors -- the Oxy came from? Or how many bottles are needed to store that many pills? Or do you keep 'em in baggies? But most importantly, how does someone hold on to that many pills? Often, people learn of a pill bust and write to me to say "it's just like in Sex, Drugs and Blueberries." Well, in my novel, Ben and Richard and Ganeesh cruise around Washington County, visiting poverty-stricken friends and relatives, buying pills at wholesale black market prices with the plan to re-sell to dealers in southern Maine.
In real life, there are parts of Maine where people will keep a cancer diagnosis secret from loved ones, 'cuz they don't want anyone to know they have pain meds in the medicine cabinet...
