Zine Scene

So as far as other strange things happening at hot springs, most of them are much more pleasant than the Cookie bandit saga anyways. Usually hot springs are pretty tranquil places, but sometimes at night there are totally wild parties. Most of the total blow out parties I experienced were at Spence Hot spring near Jemez Springs New Mexico. The strangest party was a full on cybergoth affair, almost all the people kept their clothes on, which is the opposite of what usually happens. One young hesher was sitting in the hot pools with his long padded black trench coat. Several women were wearing their goth victorian-esque hats with dayglo wigs. There were candles everywhere, including floating on the water. The candles were on top of frisbees with light sticks underneath, which created a strange underwater glow.  They were taking a lot of photos, including underwater photos, so maybe it was an artsy photo shoot. They were playing electronic music of some sort . They weren't drinking or...

There are still some Internet search results for the Love Israel cult including some video of their annual Garlic Fest. Basically they were a cult that started in Seattle Washington, and at their height they owned property and/or had communes in Washington, Alaska and Hawaii. There is a documentary called "It Takes a Cult. " They were semi-famous for having Steve Allen's son in the cult for awhile. I was a roadie for a band that played their Garlic fest in Arlington WA in 2003, and I went ahead of the band and volunteered to work the festival for a week. I didn't even know it was a cult till I got there, so that was real strange. The most distinctive thing about the cult, besides their leader, was that they had all taken new names. They all used the same last name Israel, but they all had first names which were some kind of virtue; like Honesty Israel, Compassion Israel, etc. The leader was Love Israel, and he was real amusing. As cult leaders go he wasn't real b...

I did the Food not Bombs thing in Albuquerque on and off for several years from 2001-2012. In the early years for me it was a real nice group thing with a bunch of people (~10-15 people) from the La Montanita Coop. It was a lot of fun, we usually met a someone's house and it was a house party, and then we took our food to downtown ABQ to feed ~100 people. Food Not Bombs doesn't seem real active anymore, it rarely even happens in Madison, WI anymore. In the later years there seemed to be more political drama with Food Not Bombs, and usually there were only 2-3 people, sometimes it was a solo act. So I was doing Food Not Bombs with one other person in 2011 at the UNM, and we were occasionally calling out "Free Lunch", "Food not McDonalds", "Free Food, not bad" etc; when this yuppie suit type came up and asked me, "So, What's the Catch?" I thought that was real amusing so I replied," Well, if we give y'all Free Food, then some...

Martin Stamper didn't want me at his going away party

Hitchhiking used to be common in America. I hitchhiked all though my high school dayz in the 1970s. My parents gave me $5 a week to take the bus; and eat school lunches which were 40 cents a day. I rarely spent money on either one. I wasn't opposed to taking the bus, but I would hitchhike while waiting for the bus, and almost always got a ride before the bus arrived. In good weather, like half the time in Wisconsin, I also rode my bike. It was 2 and 1/2 miles to West High school, and I would try to ride the entire way no-handed, though I only made it all the way one time out of hundreds of attempts. Everyone would pick you up hitchhiking back in the day. Once I got a ride from the Principal of West High. It was fun to get rides in classic cars, I once got to ride in the rumble seat of a Model A Ford.  After school sometimes there would be up to 30 kids hitchhiking, but it would always take less than 20 minutes for everyone to get a ride. There was this rock band called Jo Jo Gunne ...

I inadvertently made a great punk rock road tape of my own banjo playing. I was never in a band, except for a rehearsal band called Smart Cats, because there was a now defunct cat food called Smart Cat, and the 2 woman in our band were Veterinary Medicine students. Even with a band that never played a gig, there was Fleetwood Mac-like social drama. We mainly played Beatles tunes, and the other guy in the band recorded us once or twice. I thought it sounded real corny. So one time at home I set up a low-fi recording set-up but with a nice mic though, and just played as weird as I could. I also put a whammy bar on the banjo bridge, and did all sorts of tuning peg and other strange string manipulations (like scraping the strings with coins). It was really awesome, like a strange cross between Robert Johnson, and Frank Zappa playing the bicycle (video from 1963). So I would just keep this ~30 minute tape in my car, and occasionally would play it for hitchhikers and they would be blown away...

You meet a lot of crazy people when you're a vagabond, but some some reason AdventureRon was the most pleasantly memorable. I was camping at the very large San Francisco hot spring trail head area, which is about 1/4 mile off the road and Ron pulled in right next to me though the area was real empty. At first I thought he was pretty rude, but he jumped out of his car and introduced himself in a very happy manner and was all "you want a beer?". He introduced himself as AdventureRon, so I said my name was Blue, just blue. So of course he called me "Just Blue". AdventureRon talked about himself in the 3rd person a lot "There is nothing AdventureRon likes more than an adventerous Road Trip; would you like a tour of AdventureRon's vehicle?" So of course I did, though it was just a pickup truck with a camper shell. His truck was crammed with all sorts of camping gear and he had to take it all out, and show me his gear with descriptions of every item. He ...

The Marriage Tax Bonus. When I was a semi-homeless bike touring vagabond, I spent a lot of time hiking, biking, camping, soaking at hot springs, and hanging out in the kewl towns of the West. But I would also stop at a lot of libraries, and even the smallest towns have libraries with internet access (Glenwood Springs, Stanley ID etc). It is nice to be indoors with comfy chairs and climate control. I would look up travel info, but I would also just surf the Internet randomly, and somehow I came across the concept of the Marriage Tax Benefit. If two people are married and one of them makes next to nothing (like me), then if they file together their joint taxes can be thousands less for the wealthier individual. So later when I was spending the winter in Albuquerque; Out of the blue I asked several successful women friends of mine if they would marry me and would quickly add the story of the marriage tax bonus. Well they were pretty stunned to put it mildly. One women came to tears (of j...

I probably had  a very typical childhood, but I don't remember much. The first five years of my life I lived on Old Middleton Road, but then moved to Racine Road in Madison, so that i could go to Kindergarten in Madison. So all I remember from the first 5 years of my life was that one day I slept later than my brother; an older kid nearly got hit by a car on his bike; I had a discussion with another kid down by the railroad tracks, who thought that eating candy stunted your muscles; and there was a teenage girl who lived with her grandmother who showed me a drawing trick where you draw an ice cream cone and turn it upside down and then add a face and it looks like a clown. I remember the first day we moved to Racine Road, and I was real excited and I wanted the room farthest from my parent's room, even as a 5 year old child. So here is a different kind of post: All the things I don't remember. I went to summer camp one summer at Camp Wakanda, don't remember one damn ...

I grew up very nerdy, ugly and undateable, and never improved very much.

I've lived in Wisconsin most of my life, and have not been to the vast majority of cities and towns in Wisconsin.    I lived out West for 25 years, and  I have visited every little town in New Mexico it seems. The cities and towns in Wisconsin are relatively very similar to each other, and even the supposedly very special little towns like New Glarus, Stoughton, Mineral Point, are not so different. I actually like Baraboo and even Janesville just as much as these "special towns", because I prefer their bike trail systems. Even Madison and Milwaukee don't seem that much different overall, though the locals seem to think so. People in Madison think the East Side and the West side have very different vibes, but they seem identical to me.  Albuquerque  and Santa Fe are different. 

Madison has a very nice free art space at the Main Public Library called The Bubbler. They love using the word "Bubbler" in Madison, because it is their amusing and historically interesting way to refer to drinking fountains. There are books and T-shirts even. What's even funnier to me is that in many other places, a bubbler refers to a hash pipe. If a cheesehead were out of state and asked if there were any bubblers nearby, they might get funny looks. I got a much funnier look awhile ago, because for awhile many ATMs in Wisconsin were called TYME machines, so when i asked someone in Idaho if there was a time machine nearby...... Well they acted like I was Dr. Who or something.

We used to play in the street when I was young back  in the sixties and seventies. I hear it is making a comeback in the UK, though it has usually been a thing in Scandinavia, especially Denmark and the Netherlands. NYC which wants to be more European has a Play Streets program, and that is nice but when I was young playing in the street wasn't something that had to be scheduled.

I continued to go on long bike tours 2007-2012 throughout the West, and every year I spent some time in the Jemez mountains, and each year 20007-2009 I was stopped by the cops in reference to the "Cookie Bandit", though generally the cops were all "You're the guy who looks like the Cookie Bandit, aren't you?" I would say, "I'm not a criminal, I just look like one."  I would tell them some story I heard at the hot springs about Henry and I was kind of surprised they never were able to apprehend them, they certainly had no trouble finding me. The strangest incident was a few months after the shoot out when I was town-crashing Santa Fe, and suddenly I was surrounded on my bike by a new record of police cars: 5. I threw my arms way up in the air and yelled "I'm not the Cookie bandit, he's dead, you already got him." Apparently there was a burglary in the Artist Road neighborhood, so they weren't looking for the Cookie Bandit, ...

In the future everybody will be world famous for 15 minutes. Well I was sort of famous for 2 seconds, and even then I was anonymous. I have a very brief appearance in a Warren Miller film called Freerider. All Warren Miller films are approximately the same; a bunch of extreme skiing in exotic backcountry locations, like heli-skiing in Alaska, and some comedy bits about Winter Carnivals at ski resorts like  the Dummy Downhill at Hoodoo Ski area. I have cautiously skied some double black diamond runs at Telluride and Taos, but I am really just an intermediate skier. But I went to the World Championship Shovel Races at Angel Fire Ski Resort , which is ideal for a comedy bit in a Warren Miller film. I was hanging out at the top of the head wall at Angel Fire when one of Warren Miller's camera men asked the crowd if anyone had video production experience. I chimed in and said I made Independent Videos, so he gave me a hand held camera to film myself while a rode 30 miles a hour down the...

I went to college in the 70s and it had changed really drastically just before I went. The Vietnam Peace Treaty had been signed in January 1973, and I didn't start College at the University of Wisconsin until September 1973. I had went to campus a few times as a high school student and participted a protest march or two, and thought they were kind of dumb. There was always some control freak college kid who was angry and in charge, the cops were getting paid double overtime, and sometimes we would get beatup or teargassed, personally I can run away real fast, and only

I love public libraries. I've went on numerous road trips, and sometimes a have a general theme, like a National Park tour or a Cool Towns ( e.g. Moab, Taos, Durango, Mammoth Lakes, Portland, Eugene) tour or a Microbrewery tour, but I always go to public libraries (Salt Lake City has an awesome library), sometimes even libraries in National Parks.

So eventually they gave up on torturing me, and it was near dark when they drove me back to the Jemez National Forest. I decided to camp at San Antonio Hot spring, which gets a lot more campers than McCauley Warm Spring even though it is 4 miles from the paved road, but there is a very rough Forest Road that goes back there, and it was real nice that I ran into my hot spring friend David Eley, one of the hot spring regulars. As usual he had some beers and some weed and it was just awesome being high and free, and not dead. David Eley was a wannabe writer, who had a large well stocked camp, and he was spending the summer writing a book about the strange things that happen at hot springs, working title: In Hot Water. So he was thrilled to hear about my "near death" experience and said he was going to include it in his book. I've talked to other vagabonds who had similar ideas, one guy said he could fill a book with all the strange things that happen at Deep Creek Hot Spring...

The strangest thing that ever happened to me was my 3 year peripheral involvement with the "cookie bandit", who terrorized the New Mexico forest for at least 10 years. If you do a google search for "cookie bandit New Mexico" you'll get all the sad details of a serial killer who hid out in the forests of the West for 40 years. I never heard of the "cookie bandit" until May 2006 when I was just starting a 5 month bike tour of the West. On my second night I was camping at McCauley Warm Spring, 2 miles from the road. I often left my bike and backpacked into the forests of the West, sometimes I hid my bike for a week, and did a backpacking loop. Bike touring is real nice, but sometimes you get tired of the Road.  Early the next morning a young couple showed up at the Warm Springs, and started asking me a bunch of questions. The last questions were; "Don't you get scared up here all alone? Wouldn't you feel safer with a gun?" I said; "...

Mormon Girls are easy. As a touring bicyclist I talked with hundreds of people maybe thousands. I was pretty unkempt most of the time, but i bathed fairly regularly at hot springs so I probably didn't smell real bad. But still I was real amused when a women would flirt with me. I've almost never went on a date that didn't involve a car, though i hear that happens more nowadays, probably a real hipster thing to do. So I was real struck by how assertive some Mormon Women were toward me.

Amanita Muscaria is the most iconic toadstool, the Orange-with-White-spots-Alice-in-Wonderland -mushroom. The first time I considered consuming Amanita Muscaria was when I was town-crashing Forest Park in Portland, and I was spending a rainy day at a nearby library and I happened to read a mushroom guide book that described Amanita Muscaria  as the "Soma" of ancient times, and also said it wasn't all that toxic, and also said that Amanita Muscaria that bloomed in early summer was far less toxic than Amanita muscaria that bloomed in late summer. So a few weeks later in early July 2002, I was camping at San Antonio Hot spring in Backcountry New Mexico when a teenager hiked through my camp with the biggest Amanita I had ever seen, like the size of a Frisbee. I asked him if he was considering consuming said mushroom, and he informed me that he and his friends were considering it and had already collected numerous specimens and they were drying them on a line back at his camp....

The Year 50,000 AD is coming. Are you going to be remembered? No. And it probably wouldn't be a good thing to be remembered. We would probably be considered to be very barbaric. My friend Mike and I took this supposedly very alternative class back in college, where we studied Free Schools and other alternative education possibilities, but the professor who was teaching the class wasn't at all sympathetic, and really questioned the value of any education which wasn't accredited, and as part of a liberal arts University, he was probably half right at least. Still it was boring to listen to him drone on in his cynical manner. He had this catch phrase about how most of us are just "cogs in the machine". Sometimes we were easily replaceable "cogs in the machine". sometimes we were oppressed "cogs in the machine", sometimes we were all meaningless "cogs in the machine". So one day my friend mike passed me a note. It was a fake Help Wanted...