Soul mates and seasonal cycles.

Top of the morning gents,

Years ago, I was telling a friend of mine that I was heading back up to Alaska. He was a childhood pal from elementary school and wondered why I never stayed in one place fer long, especially in my hometown. A hometown where I was surrounded by good ol' boys that understood selling drugs to black, red and white trash. Life is good, when you got a herd of dirty white boys that only ask fer one thing, a place to gather and bullshit about guns and drugs. Bikers hang out at a clubhouse, cowboys converge at a bar, but us white boys meet at drug houses titled stupid like Lem's Mortuary and Crack house. The addresses change, but Lem's continues decades unwritten on non-existent shingles.

All I ask of a bar is that it be open, but drug houses are where we happily darken the porch and rejoice as our shadows cross the welcome mat. A safe haven to meet and pick up contraband weight, create new disturbing images fatal and horrific echoes repainting our failing vision and hearing. It's no different than you and I lugging old June Nelson from her leaking deathbed to a stretcher, then out the front door to the meat wagon, so Trox could drive her to the dump. Cause of death, drug overdose, welcome to Lem's.

Like Alaskans, I celebrate sickness and death. In the case of June Nelson and naming an elementary school after we fetched her from Lem's Mortuary and Crack house is something only I would do. I also named a kids' baseball field after a chronic inebriate and coke fiend, my good drinking and drugging pal, Bull Hensley. Alaskans know that the only time we suffer hangovers, is if we sober up. Similarly, old cops won't experience PTSD if y'all repeat unspeakable deeds and soil the same shovels.

How many corpses will we lug. Guilt and neurosis are components of the collective psychological ailments plaguing us. At Lem's I provided cases of syringes with the cocaine I sold. One of my friends Gary Los popped in, dropped some money, then retreated to the back room to spoon up and shoot up. Pim and I swapped and traded bindles and pistols, smoked a few bowls and downed a butt-load of beers. When it was time for Pim to book, he yelled for Gary. No Gary. He'd croaked.

I yelled at Pim that this wasn't gonna look good if the cops found all these drug packs and paraphernalia in a house decorated with deceased Gary Los. We carried Gary out and loaded him into the backseat of Pim's car and drove him to his dad's house, layed him on the sofa downstairs. I'd emptied him of his drugs and spoon and needle rigs, covered him with a blanket, closed his eyes and booked. Thinking of his dad waking his dead son evokes guilt and shame that still bothers me today. I may delete this paragraph if I can't settle my awful feelings. You boys likely have cried every last tear with similar stories.

My workplaces and workmates rotate in cycles, drugs, guns and old friends in and out of uniform, riding together just like old times. I been here before, nothing has changed. Back in Seattle, my buddies were scheming a reunion with industrial volumes of keg beer, blocks of blow and bales of bud. We only needed to work around jail and hospital schedules, and dates of release. The idea that a whole pack of grown men wanted to recreate "the house that coke built" sure brought that warm feeling glowing inside me. I couldn't ignore that nagging fear and trepidation the Seattle Syndrome handed me. Including Gary Los's overdose and death, Keely Jones blew his brains out in my front yard, I think I see a fucking pattern. When nobody was looking, I begged, "Somebody else is gonna die, get me outa here." In Alaska, I'm cutting down suicide hangers and lugging gun eaters with Mashburn, Ramoth and Moto, not hauling away byproducts of my own source of income.

I never told my drug buddies of my work with you coppers on a shit load of narc jobs all over fucking Alaska. I also never told them that I was just released from jail and the spook was still in me. Some hitches in the hoosegow are tolerable, some not so much. Most jails we fear the guards, some jails we fear the inmates, but the fear of my improbable recovery was troubling. The healing ribs and vertebra are inevitable with my careers and only focused my hindsight. We know the precise moment we shoulda dusted off our noses, folded up our dicks, spit out chewy pubic bits and lept. Without a parachute nor luggage.

When you feel yer gliding home on greased rails, and know the destination includes bullets, bruises, and funerals: jump. I learned that despite my successes working with you coppers, it wouldn't continue hanging with older, wiser and meaner crooks. Listen to me, home is shit, and returning only reminds you boys that regardless of the heartbreak and weeping you suffer on this long trail all over fucking Alaska, back home, we're losers at the top of our game. Seeing so many friends and clients croaking around us, we got lucky and our score is minus zero.

Words have meanings and as an adult we dilute their impacts. Home is a famiIiar blend of drug habits, beatings, bones and teeth shattered. Like a lot of our village neighbors and rural friends, we hold fond memories of our homes and childhoods, with a full array of pleasant rewrites, modifications and revisions. These memory improvements make our adult life so much easier, until we go back, enter our old homes, and suffer a whiff of our siblings and parents. Odors trigger panic and in Alaska, and since we're all Ballot clan members from Selawik, we pop the cherries on all our sisters. All our brothers too. We never forget the smell of our first sexual experience, even in an outhouse or behind the woodpile.

I'm comfortable looking for lost girlfriends in emergency rooms and rape-relief clinics. It's like good fitting gloves, holsters and Sorel boots that hiked the shit outa south tent city and the old barge where Kelly McConnell (Netti Smith and Bill McConnell's boy) hanged himself. He didn't die, just crippled and hobbling all over Pike Place Market. Me and bun found him at the Gospel Mission 6 blocks north, told him NANA had checks awaiting him, but he was afraid of us and said, "I don't wanna go home to Kotzebue." Seattle welcomes lost and broken souls like Cripple McConnell. Seattle sure welcomed me back, I was smiling, shining, buzzing and things were looking up. Such a pretty city on Puget Sound, but I was hell-bound like Kelly and couldn't flee.

I finished my construction work on my folks' mud farm, avoided my pals and looked for a positive sign. Good news for bad people is like a curve ball, we're facing the wrong direction and its got a lot of English. Encouraging updates are disorienting but I got an email stating that I'd gotten a job in Galena as the City Finance Director. Keeping secret, I booked back up north. At the Anchorage Airport I was surprised at seeing my old boss and he asked what I was doing back in Alaska, so I shared my tales from Russia to Seattle with Kotzebue City Manager Frank McCafferty. He seemed saddened, then replied, "For us boarding school Induns, it sure as hell isn't good to be heading back to the reservation", "One big difference Karl, you're heading away from home." "I'm heading back to Kotzebue and my stress level is off the charts."

Mr. McCafferty told me that untold thousands of native boarding school students are horrified at how small, smelly, dirty and appalling their villages and homes appear once they've stepped off the plane and looked upon the place they've been away from. When I again see my family, friends and home turf, I fucking gag. This place of illiterate stinky people isn't what I've savored and held so close to my heart. We're our own worst enemy and got nobody to blame, it's nobody's fault but ours. I'm like Ann Short, a battered woman hooking back up with another drunken wife-beater just released from jail: Clifford (Bum) Short. I missed my own mistreatment.

My applying for work back in Alaska was a long shot and a prayer. The job was based on the predication that I'd work to keep the Air Force Base in Galena, land a fat grant for public/fire safety training and equipment, sweep the path for a giant boarding school, and update all the ancient paper files and junk computers. Prayers have double edged consequences. We may get what we pray for, but when you see me getting off the plane, yer fucked.

When I'm not writing, I can bullshit with the best of them. I'm a life-long liar and don't ever play poker with me. I've told grown women "chugging down sperm will give you bigger boobs." Or "I promise I won't come in your mouth." This time, my boss, City Manager Marvin Yoder was gonna have bigger boobs and burp up sperm with his acid re-flux heartburn. Come to think of it, the city council white trash old men got big ol' double D's and a tummy full of ball cheese. Wishing for a rainmaker is folly and expecting any level of care from me is a fool's errand.

I worked on the old file cabinet paperwork, computer upgrades and did the follow-through grant proposals with the state offices in Anchorage providing the extra information via personal interviews and did a tool-count inventory of Galena's ambulances, firetrucks and patrol vehicles. Pretty skimpy batch of fire and public safety equipment, but better than other micro-primate villages we've suffered.

The fire/safety grant was for only one off-the-road-system village and Galena was in competition with numerous other mud-midget grovels of similar remoteness. My boss Marvin Yoder believed this grant was a way for his village, Galena, to float through a dry spell best described as bankruptcy. We were hoping to fatten up our accounts, pay off some angry construction companies that had built a new city hall and a new swimming pool. Companies that had done the work on a promise to pay with future revenues fat and shiny. A promise that was vaporous as a popcorn fart in a hurricane and silly as waiting for a biker to pull his dick outa yer ass, then asking for Vaseline after the fucking.

These small firms did a shit load of work, materials and transport to site, and with little or nothing up front. Then Galena went broke. Meaning the dreams of holding regional swim meets, boarding schools and a flight/ground school program never really materialized and the Air Force Base pulled up tents and tarps, and headed east. There I was, stuck playing tiddly winks with Roger Dube, his ruski runt whiff and a bunch of Injuns. Make me puke.

Three things went to shit in a brief period: the swimming pool wasn't the right measurements to meet swimming specs needed for the Alaska Student Swimming Association's compliance requirements. The width wasn't right and length of the pool was too short. The boarding school grants were awarded to another education entity in another state, the fire/public safety grant went to another vil and the fucking Air Force left town in a fucking hurry. To visualize the Air Force's speedy exit, you may recall Tommy Sharp (fart hammer), Ray Meyers (no-teefer wigger) and Mike Spisak (Ram Air crack-baby) scared shitless booking to Alaska Airlines. Yup, the Air Force ditched Galena faster'n Kotzebue's cocaine cowboys fleeing Tony Richardson's arrest and investigation, running scared pushing in Teflon suppositories and pulling up Kevlar diapers.

Tommy Sharp was the first to book. He borrowed money from everybody he could: the Capones and a friend of mine, Todd Armstrong, then fled town dumping his girlfriend: loose stool anal pump Ramona Nichols. Ray Meyers abandoned his airplane out at the gravel runway and ditched his cross-eyed dim-bulb girlfriend owing rents, bills and big dollar drug fronts. Spisak had a date with the IRS in Fairbanks, and a 9 year stretch in the Federal Pen. Whenever a defunct Air Force Base promises not to fold up and book, just take a look at Kotzebue. When all was said and done, we got a bigger city dump. "Monkeys always look. Psyche" (Robert Evak 1988).

The Galena swimming pool project was a fiasco that left me dumbfounded. Being a swimmer for most of my life, I don't know how cement and fixtures were assembled and poured without proper oversight. My guess? Village assholes with money and refusing to listen to the requirements of the swim association dudes. The pool was still an excellent resource for water safety programs and a good preventative idea behind the astronomical drowning rates of First Alaskans, but not worthy of reimbursement from the state.

The boarding school fiasco and failure was blamed on white teachers and fat administrators that took work with the competing teaching organization and left the Galena City Schools with only regular local educational duties. Dreams of recreating the old system of boarding schools long gone. Alaska has long feared and experienced declining student enrollment so setting up a giant regional boarding school was the notion panacea. If Galena could poach students away from barely viable village schools all over rural Alaska suffering insufficient enrollment, a boarding school could harvest big buxsh from the JewNo budgetary Base Student Allocation. "Too bad, so sad" (Clyde Shagloak 1990).

Up until the 1970's, all the villages in Alaska sent their children to Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) facilities that provided transportation, instruction, housing, better nutrition, new glasses, medical and dental care and even new clothing. It was an old study at BIA schools that determined poor eyesight and damaged hearing in Native Americans resulted in stereo-typically poor school results. Besides, without BIA boarding schools, natives across America would have to wait until we voted Nixon into the White House and comprehensive IHS health care would be available. The federal schools were noteworthy and legendary for excellent environments for native students badly needing a setting resembling a university campus and private school academies.

A few examples that were lauded as top shelf were Chemowa, Haskell, Chilocco. If you ask your in-laws and parents, they'll smile and tell ye of wonderful friendships and native networks they enjoy to this day. Plus, BIA boarding school children returned home WAY taller. Loads of fresh dairy, produce and high-grade meats are non-existent in rural native village diets, historically, and even today. Any BIA boarding school student escaping the villages from more beatings and rapes, returned way taller than the retarded local yocals that stayed behind. "Nigger is as a nigger does. Right Cory?" (Willie Hailstone 1990).

Look at the shit our locally schooled children eat. Porky Pig sent a memo: village children are so fucking fat, he wouldn't even touch them with YOUR dick. Our children look more like Gumby than us stupid parents. Back in the BIA boarding school days, our locally schooled chimplets seemed so short and fat: more like north Koreans than tall BIA schooled (freshly cleaned and dressed) students. One common insult returning boarding school students sufferd from locally schooled mongoloids was "Try be white." White's alright, if you sound less retarded. Rachel Craig declared that if a native speaks poorly in English, he speaks poorly in Inupiaq. "Does anybody understand the words that are coming outa my mouth?" (Chris Tucker-Shanghai Nights) Dig me?

You oughta see the Alaska Federation of Natives convention back when it wasn't a politically correct Broke Back Gay-tive fuck-fest. I advised Bun to put on her water-proof make-up, cuz she was going solo and that I'd hang back and watch her hug, laugh and cry with her classmates from the old BIA school systems. You'd get pretty choked up and well watered eyes just seeing elder Alaska Natives light up and go crazy recognizing Bun and her sober recollections of their wonderful times at out of state campuses. Ya see, the best part of AFN is all the chatter, cackling and hub-bub out in the lobby, not those moron delegates harping poverty, abuse, and traditional neglect. Ye can't fix stupid, and stupid is forever. At least 10,000 years.

BIA campuses enforced safety from cultural archetypes like wife beating, incest and child sexual abuse haunting native communities and reservations for fucking centuries (Reggie Joule UAF 1995). As with all things native, stories end with a good cry and Bun's girlfriends remember awaiting planes back home for summer break, nervously smoking and sobbing at the prospect of the abuses still occurring in their homes and villages back home. Home is a native village comfortable, familiar, deadly, smelly, small and dirty. The most valuable lesson boarding school student can ever learn: there ain't no homecoming and all seasons of village life end in decay and death.

Contrary to stupid claims from bigoted old fart native men, the feds did a really good job of providing safe-havens for Alaska's and America's native students: with a huge priority for female native student safety. The tales of 1 bad apple from the religious schools will never equal the 99 other wonderful success stories natives experienced on BIA campuses across the country. NW Arctic mayor Chuck Greene, a confederate of mine and higher education advocate lectured me that boarding school students often left Alaska for more rewarding careers but those that graduated and returned to the vil were hoisted to leadership positions in their respective native corporations and local and state governments.

Mr. Greene also explained that schooling outside yer home village and home state expanded a native kid's horizons, awareness and provided boarding school students a second outsider view of rural Alaska. In a moment of candor, Chuck stated that Alaska Natives that don't travel outside for their education are simple, superstitious, ignorant racists. Seeing my work history working fer cops all over Alaska, Chuck Greene encouraged me to follow up on my education insofar as to write solid recommendations for my scholarships and was guest speaker at my graduation.

Ya see, there were three different systems, the church schools/orphanges like White Mountain, the inept state boarding schools such as Nome Beltz and the nationwide federal Indian schools. The federal system was an escape from abject poverty, cultural sexual abuse and tribal values of domestic violence that still plague our church based religious and in-state schools here in Alaska. The only years bun was safe from institutional and cultural mistreatment of native girls was the years she attended the BIA structured, safe and insulated academies. "Fuck Brian, if yer bitch wife looks and sounds dumber'n a stump (Blanch Jones-BJ Criss/Higman), you been porking a locally schooled salmon cruncher" (Dan Newberry 1989).

The state schools could never send a native child home for engaging in pre-adolescent sexuality, alcoholism, bullying and fighting, but the BIA sent a lot of permiscuous drunk midgets back home. Just ask Herman Reich and his wife Della. They were fucking like white rabbits, got pregnant and sent home. Betty Sage, Skeeter Jepson, Bertha Karmun (Helen's mom) and her pals were practicing drunks and got the boot. The list of natives that were sent home because they were drinking, fucking, swapping STD's and making herpe babies is best described as a trail of tears. It a family tradition dudes (Hank WIlliams Jr): old enough to bleed, old enough to breed. Indigenous communities retain the most destructive aspects of the pre-contact cultures, absorbing the least desirable and most horrific aspects of the invading races. Like home for all of us, it's wrecked and never coming back.

The Catholic, Russian Orthodox, Episcopal, Presbyterian, Baptist and Friends Church schools get a bad rap because they were church sponsored K-12 orphanage programs where pedophile clergy rapists were sent way up north and relocated to a church near you. These hellish religion based orphanages aren't even in the same league as the federal boarding school system. Separating children from everything Alaskan also separated pedophiles from your children like shipping baby butt fuckers up to Camp Siv. You remember now, don't you. Old school pedo-native banishment, and for good reason. If you were a naked 4 year old boy, you'd totally fear religious K-12 orphanages.

I didn't have much faith in Galena accomplishing anything close to BIA achievements. The Galena Interior Learning Academy is similar to the Tec Ctr back in Krotchebue. A voc-tech school, but not K-12 campus. BIA schools had everything for children of all ages in one place: dorms, classrooms, gymnasiums, orchestra and band auditoriums, theaters and cafeterias like a University of Alaska Fairbanks campus. I attended UAF and loved the campus for its insulation from Fairbanks (Shitbanks), the military and ugly white folks just hanging around looking to poach really pretty, classy educated women from all over the world. At UAF we called the University of Alaska Anchorage (UAA), the University for African Americans, or the University of All I could Afford.

The Air Force leaving Galena was no surprise. BRAC stands for Base Re-Alignment and Closure and they are the federal oversight committee that evaluates all the bases around the world and Eilsen was the other candidate for closure: Galena wasn't needed fer shit. It just was a big strip of pavement with old buildings leaning crooked on one side of a giant old runway. You coppers remember when Kotzebue Air Force Base was closed down, and then later all the demolition scrabble buried in the old Kotzebue City Dump. Galena thought themselves a higher class o' nigger and didn't think the Air Force would pull the same shit. Think again, clooch lick.

All my jobs put me at the old playground, the Kotzebue city dump. I grew up shooting dogs with Octuck, Garoutte, Byrd and Blanchard experimenting with Hornady XTP and Hydro-Shok ammo. I still laugh at Nush's story about trying to kill a shit-ass stray dog with full metal jacket ball ammo. That stupid dog got shot with a whole magazine of bullets and still wagged its now shorter tail, jumped around bleeding happy as shit, before Patrick blasted it across the garbage field with 12 gauge double-aught buck. I also visited the old Crotch dump working for KIC, NANA and School District dumping truckloads of sno-go crates, old NANA desks and broken chairs and mountains of paper from the School District. I was a major contributor to the scenic and giant heap of trash, and a favorite arsonist.

I bought black powder and fuse from Neal Sager, pipe sections from AC hardware and lumber (Tupik Hardware), and seriously blew some shit up. Some days I'd go to the Kotzebue K-Mart to pukkuk goodies, start fires and toss in propane tanks and tires. Good fun. Some fires we started really did a good job of reducing the mountains of garbage and dead dogs, burning for weeks while Werneke pushed the trash into larger burn piles with city bucket loaders. Werneke did good job of keeping the stinking refuse ablaze and roaring like a canine funeral pyre and tire blast furnace, eventually leaving an empty lot. Room fer more shit.

On a few occasions, me and Sara or Brian Tikik Jr. (BJ) would run away from my explosive charges I set, booked to the end of the tundra trail on the back edge of Davis Lake and Kramer Sewage Lagoon, hopped on our bikes and pedaled home. My fucking ears would be ringing like a motherfucker, unable to hear the firetrucks responding to the explosions heard at FAA and back in town. Me and Sara would look like support actor chimney sweeps on Mary Poppins, covered in soot and deaf as shit fer the rest of the day. I'd be hungover too. Chugging 151 rum and bong hits of homegrown death bud ain't fer pussies.

Just a few months ago, I sat in the Soldotna Midas Auto Repair shop getting new tires. Me and bun were chatting with an overly tattooed gal that asked me why my mailing address was Barrow, Alaska. I told her that was my home base for years and all my mail was sent there. An older white dude, looked at me and Bun, then asked with a buzz box if I knew Mike and Arlene Zagars, and we said yes, we did. He had a stoma-hole in the front of his neck and was using those weird throat cancer buzzy talking assistance tools and told me that Mike was his brother and his name was Chris Zagars. I told him the stories we knew of Mike and Arlene, her death, and a detailed story how Mike was shot and killed in Wasilla.

I told Chris how I met Zagars at his dog-lot out by the FAA towers loading a truck with slow dogs and sick puppies. Me and Higman rode along with Mike down to the dump, where I thought Mike was gonna just let the dogs loose. Nup, he put a 22 rifle to each and every dog's head and shot them. We tossed them out onto a pile of refuse and drove back. I like this place. I continued lecturing Chris about my watching Mike receive a red lantern award at the Lions Club in a dog race that was won by Susan Butcher, while he was dropping off pouches of green bud and picking up cash on all his village checkpoints. 1988 isn't that far back. Keep up.

When it came to Arlene and Mike Zagars causes of death, I just rolled on with my story explaining the alcoholics don't die from the alcohol, they die from malnutrition and starvation: like Arlene. I then proceeded to explain to Chris that since Mike was busted with a cut-down shotgun during one of his many drug raids, he was a convicted felon and couldn't have any firearms in any house he entered. His neighbor in Wasilla developed a feud with Mike over fences and boundaries, and Mike's loose dogs. His neighbor blasted one of his dogs only inches from their two boys and Mike went next door to chat, or stomp ass. MIke knocked on this neighbor's door, it swung open and he shot Mike point-blank, center mass in the chest. The angry old drunkard neighbor kept the cops and rescue crews away by popping rounds their direction until Mike leaked out and croaked. Then the neighbor opened the door and shot himself in the head, with cops as witnesses.

Chris asked me about Mike's new wife and I told him that after Arlene died, Mike inherited the Sampson lot with mom's old HUD model #500 shit box house, Calvin's unnuk shack grovel and the 2-story cabin package he'd built. Mike also inherited the odd number of remodeled old HUD crap houses further south on 2nd avenue closer to Rotman's. Chris asked me who Mike remarried and I told him that I didn't know of her, just that Caroline Sampson and Pete Jorgenson simply referred to her as that white bitch that inherited all the NANA shares and the old house from mom and Arlene (Panhandle Bar 2012). After Mike was shot and killed, his new wife sold everything in Kotzebue and took the boys back home, somewhere in the lesser 48. Chris was stunned.

He sat and digested this tale me and bun layed on him, then asked how we knew so much about Mike and Arlene. Instead of telling him that my last and best friends were cops, bun interjected that Alaska is one big dysfunctional village and their are no secrets (except these postings). Chris Zagars pondered this data overload, then told us that the little Mexican village he lived in, south of Arizona, was just the same. Cheap booze, cigarettes and blow. Like he needed any more of these items.

Back in Seattle, my elementary school friends was ribbing me fer ditching farm-fresh family blown out white pussy from the farms and trailer parks surrounding Edmonds and Mountlake Terrace, flying way up north to Alaska and marrying native trim. In a white moron explanation, my brother Cully described my relationship with Bun as two old women. We're smarter together, protective and I hate to say this, soul mates.

Don't tell anybody, but the only woman I married was a survivor of horrific upbringing, Indian Res alcoholism, and wiser than her years: just like me. I've run all over the planet looking for her replacement. Older women, younger women, non-English speaking women and to this day, haven't found a companion that asks me daily, "Got yer guns?" She reminds me that we should go shopping at gun sales, so a more apt description of my bunnik, is she's my brother from a darker mother. We both are survivors of childhood violence and we both keep eyes roving and heads rotating, looking for people to shoot. With a native wife psyched to shoot white people, I've got a true fucking partner in crime. And real estate.

We've bought a couple properties in Kotzebue, an empty lot in Wasilla, a house in Willow, 3 empty lots up Hatcher Pass, a duplex in Barrow that we rented to ASRC for $4K a month fer years, finally buying a cabin and shop on Quintin Lake here in Kasilof. The all got the Jewish tune-ups: clean-ups, paint jobs and sold for a few bucks more than we paid for them. I doubt we cleared our labor and materials, but subsequent owners kept up the home improvement momentum and these properties are now pretty fucking sweet. As you walk down 2nd avenue, look at Harold Lambert's house (369). He finished the work we started and was almost chasing us off the property just to get started with siding, heating and interior finishing touches.

I never bought property in Galena, sick ass Indun dump, and not even my $65K salary kept me there. I phoned bun up in Barrow at pert near my 6 month eval, and she chided me fer living with such Yukon river rat niggers. See, she knows a lot of my Galena neighbors and even they hate paying such high living costs fer a drunken fish barf pile. Bun told me to finish up my projects, get the fuck away from them asshole stink Induns and meet her at the Barrow Airport.

During my 6 month eval, I interrupted Marvin Yoder and told him I had opportunities in Barrow I'd like to pursue. Red faced, mad as a Mennonite (Amish) in-breed, which he was, he fired me on the spot. Shucks, I miss Doyon Induns. Galena never got the fire/public safety equipment and training grant, the boarding school idea took a shit, and the Air Force left Galena with 2 large dumps of garbage leaking fuel, oil and chemicals leaking into the Yukon River, leaving the State of Alaska with a giant airport, and stopped all subsidies to the Galena power plant. Now electricity is 10 times Anchorage's kilowatt price. Just like Krotchebue. The outward stampede preceded the inevitable million dollar heating and power bills. Katy bar the door.

The fire/public safety equipment and training grant was awarded to Aniak. You might remember their all female fire fighting crew that arose from this grant, they called themselves, "The Aniak Half-Breeds." I still smile thinking that Aniak couldn't have been a better place to award that grant. Galena has since seen a drop in population of 50%. The Air Force Base ain't coming back, the boarding school idea is a flop, the fire hall needs duct tape and the police department is non-existence. Galena can suck my ass, and the hole in Ethan Cooley's head. "Fucking Indians" (Jack Nicholson-Easy Rider).

Laugh it up faggots. I know I'm an idiot. I took a shitty no-win job as a bridge from Seattle all the way up to Barrow, following phantoms that govern my life. Barrow has winters that make a soul wonder why warmer climes are harder to endure. I haven't bitched one iota about cold weather in Alaska, you coppers should've called bullshit on me. You fuckers knew that I'd return after so many years in Helsinki, and Russia.

Seasons are a working man's menstrual cycle and dysfunctional affective drinking disorder we all partake. You fuckers could never live without extreme arctic seasons, its in your brain, your eating habits, and especially, its in yer shit. If any of ye crap in a Colo-Guard box, it'll immediately indicate a 907 butt sniff. We aren't gifted enough to make a notable contribution to any art, science, or music nor medicine in the outside civilized world. By remaining in Alaska to suffer and chuckle at remote retardation, you fuckers are part of a dialogue and shitty language artwork that reflects your existence.

I make fun of our dull kids and duller grandchildren, but you see through my bullshit. I point foible as we age with jokes unkind and in poor taste. Jokes that leave graying coworkers knowing better than the rest of rural Alaska. You look at your families and see existential cycles like timesheets, dying parents and evermore children born in and around your homes.

I'll not speak of maturity cuz I can't, I'm deformed and broken, blistered and scabbed, and unhealed, but I can sure as shit scribble prose of crime scenes and death investigations. I may be just a fucking Niff, but I hope to elicit conceptual glimpses of life-cycle decline and decay at a cerebral, cellular and stool level.

My historical references pull hard on your feelings from a long time ago. I'll quote names, methods of suicide, childhoods, shit achieved and burial. But never forget that endless life may not include us. These postings alter yer attitude as yer sorry asses grow older and Alaska's winters take a greater toll on yer wrinkled butts, reminding you dusty public soldiers of your rapidly approaching mortality.

If I don't offend you fuckers with names, dates and locations every goddamned day, you'll eventually separate from the rest of us and lose count of our years together.

Leaving me alone with voices from the squad room and dispatch stilled.

Karl.