Open obituary for Cully Ewing. And his friends in the Seattle music scene. Mike Gaylord, Troy Date, Scott Wade, Eric Amrine, Paul Kay, Loren Kratzke, Mike Patterson

Troy Date <fishwithahead@yahoo.com>

To:karl_ewing@yahoo.com

Thu, Dec 1 at 8:14 AM

Hey Karl,

How are you doing?

Sorry I haven’t touched base sooner but I got COVID shortly after Cully’s passing & I am just back to feeling better.

I haven’t seen Cully in person in about five years but we corresponded through e-mail along with a group of fellow musicians at least once a week.

The other folks, Scott Wade, Eric Amrine, Paul Kay, Loren Kratzke, Mike Patterson & others were wondering if the family was going to hold a public memorial for Cully.

Are you still living in Alaska with Bun?

I’m still in Skagit.

Take care,

-Troy

---

Hey Troy,

Good to hear from you. Sorry for the delay in writing back, but I live in a stupidly remote area that has no internet access nor cell phone reception. So I type on a junker laptop, thumb drive my writing, then drive in town to the public library. I know, one look at me and Cully's parents and you can tell I'm retarded.

Also slowing my response was I had to put on my 9-year-old thinking cap, think hard on what to write about and then explain why Cully was supposed to die. I also needed a million words to explain why I had to shed my Ewing family fetal snake-skin, tunnel out of my prenatal caterpillar pupa swaddling saw out of my gestational cocoon and leave Washington to grow up. Staying in Washington was my chunky diaper playpen and leaving was the only way to get clear of my inevitably stunted root growth and truncated tree height. I bled plenty fleeing my hometown, running back in time and landing upon ancient cultures yielding fertile soils aboriginal. I'll also have to adjust my writing for an all-white audience. Now keep up.

That roster of names you detailed sure brings back uniquely bookmarked, epoch time-slots and ancient memories to me. You may recall Cully's roommate and best friend Callahan's chiding, "Shit Cully, what are you gonna do when you grow up?" Cully's response was that he was gonna be a musician. Callahan's retort was, "Cully, you gotta pick one or the other." Funny guy. Callahan referred to our pals from Edmonds as a flashback to AA. I'm lying. He actually referred to me and Cully's pals from Edmonds as an ad hoc meeting of "Homosexuals Anonymous." "Hi, I'm Loren from Hymie-Town. I'm a homosexual." Drunk Irish comic.

My parents died a couple years ago and my sibs are dysfunctional in assembling a memorial for Cully, so you boys will have to take solace in your memories of him and celebrate your continued existential retirement years as pensioners and aged, wizened oracles, folding time and space and toying with multi-dimensional mechanics. Your collection of musical peers, former drunks and druggies oughta continue composing music creating a soft spot between universes. Or soft spots in Paul Kay's head and lighten Loren Crotch-ski's loafers.

I'm not sure if Eric Amrine remembers me, but I sure remember him in my discussions with Cully. I could never forget Scott, Paul, Loren and Mike Peterson, or is it Patterson? I almost overlooked little drummer-boy Mike Gaylord, did he keep smoking and have more heart attacks? It's okay to laugh at our enviable old age and it's also perfectly acceptable to laugh at my younger brother Cully's passing. He made it farther than I expected. 59 is a good long life for a chronically stunted child, existing 50 years past his peak maturity as a drunk. For the rest of my life, I'll think of Cully as my little brother, albeit little brother forever locked at the age of 9. Channel yer Irish, imagine a wake with more humor than crying. Besides, Cully and Callahan were full of old fart drunken humor poking fun at crispy biddies and frosty niggers. Ironically, only one of 'em lived long enough to suffer their own jokes.

*At our ages, you should expect to urinate at 5:00 am, defecate at 6:00 am, finally waking at 7:00.

*If I don't see my name in the obituaries, I get up and have breakfast.

*An invitation to a gang-bang at your senior center only happens when you get a late-night phone call from yer geezer band-mate whispering, "Grandma got poopy butt. Want some?"

Who'd a thought we'd live this fucking long? I'm a year ahead of you chaps, pegging level 61, which means all you boys are rounding 59 and 60. Your ages imply yer trying to have sex with post-menopausal women, so you probably already disconnected the smoke alarms, purchased cases of nose-plugs and keep a quart of motor oil next to your bed. Tomorrow morning when you shower and you find a condom still wrapped around yer Johnson, peel it off and return it to your wife. It's vaginal tissue. Or intestine.

I'm damn glad your email (kudra) still worked. I knew Cully was pretty close to you guys. Sadly, I wasn't. It was too painful to watch. I've been out of contact with most of my family for almost a hunnert years because relapse triggers come in many forms. Like shitty relatives. And the horrible sounds they make with their mouths. For Washington white trash like my family, redneck foreplay means nudging the fish-biscuit next to you and asking "hey sis, you awake?"

Now time-travel back 35 years. I flew Cully up to Kotzebue in the late 80's for a winter visit and overkill exposure to Eskimo territory. Brian was an excellent tour guide driving Cully around town and the region by snow machine and doing live interviews at the KOTZ 720 am local public radio station. They'd done Q&A's about the first Neuroshima album and performing gigs in the Seattle area. The response was overwhelmingly positive, a lot of folks really liked Cully's first record. The community and a slew of native girls wanted to adopt Cully during his week-long stay. Maybe just his dick.

On that trip to Kotz, Me and Cully hopped jump seats on a freight mish aboard Ryan Air's twin prop Cessna up through the Bering Straits and up the Arctic Ocean to Point Hope. Dark as shit, frozen solid and cold, but a very interesting flight up North from Kotz. My pilot dudes gave us a guided tour over the frozen ocean, pointing out the Russian coastline and Bering Straits with a lecture on Point Hope's history: the oldest inhabited town site in all of North America-with 15,000-year-old artifacts and fossils scattered around town. Shit, 15K years ago, us white folks were porking Neanderthal butt-cheeks, spooging CroMagnon creature pussy and creating ancient cave art with our feces. Europeans got 6% DNA from our cave-man rape action. First Nation Innuits got ZERO.

Cully and I took off early in the morning, arriving in Pt. Hope 2 hours later. As the pilots unloaded, tossed and sorted boxes of freight, me and Cully wandered all over Point Hope, freezing our asses off in the -40 below crunchy temps taking pictures. On the return flight, Cully got to see a brief 1 hour twilight sunrise and sunset over the Bering Straits as we flew back South towards home. We burned up dozens rolls of film and Cully assembled a giant photo album labeled Christmas Vacation 1989.

As the 90's started Seattle's Golden Age of Heroin, Cully started "staying home in quiet desperation in the English way," as we both remember from the Dark Side Floyd album. I knew he was working at Care Medical servicing hospital equipment, doing gigs, so when me and Brian (micro-dot Higman) finished inventory at the NW Arctic School District, I covertly smuggled Cully a shit load of equipment. This included numerous overhead projectors, large amps and PA speakers and a couple electric basses (Fender Precision Bass and a Peavy Axceleator) I traded and bartered. When I mentioned a shit-pile of overhead projectors, he jumped. Hence the beginning of his experiments in light shows way above my pay grade. The tall rack of amps and effects he had in his kitchen would come later.

Then Cully went dark. Cully and I were in fairly close contact, but then he closed down and was out of reach ever since. Callahan said he was pissed off at my work with a team of native cops targeting white guys smuggling booze into the North Slope and NW Arctic Alaska Eskimo villages. You can figure out what my work entailed. After Brian moved to Minnesota, he was steamed that I'd undertaken such a Herculean endeavor to clip so many white bootleggers after Kotzebue (and all the other 280 Alaska native communities) voted to close down all the white-owned bars and liquor stores creating a booming black market for illegal and deadly liquor. Deadly to natives and sadly, my own brother.

You see, I was following advice from my wife Bessie, AKA bun. She'd grown up suffering the disastrous effects of invading masses of ugly white people, and their alcoholism and diseases upon Eskimo people. She encouraged me to join a rag-tag team of native village cops and torpedo the illegal booze-smuggling routes into Kotzebue and Barrow, then nuke their routes to the more remote communities. This effort lasted decades spanning massive geography across northwest Alaska, the North Slope and all the way up to the Arctic Ocean to Barrow. 15 years working Kotz, 15 years working Barrow.

Yes, my work was racist. I bagged dozens and dozens of only white guys importing illegal booze into rural Alaska native communities. We seized boats, airplanes and a shit load of guns, meth, money and liquor. Get this: I got commendations from native elder councils, native clinics and hospitals and search and rescue stations. Beat that.

I know, to all us pecker wood white-trash invading Europeans, I'm a rat, snitch, narc motherfucker with a badge and a gun, but to the native communities all over Alaska, I'm a pale stinky hero. I can't put into detail the number of narc jobs I've done, but you've known me since we were kids, I don't possess guide-posts nor guard-rails in matters legal and moral.

As 1980 rolled in, you, Brian and I were troopers and hallucinatory pioneers in the North Seattle LSD scene 40 years ago. My long-stored images of us at the hash house, tripping lab-fresh batches of blue-dot acid and hiking all over Mountlake Terrace with you, Brian (micro-dot), 3 Erics (Henderson, Bjodstrup and Bjorback) Frank Empfield, Gordy Kelly, Todd Larson and the rest of the crew are unique moments in my memories. If you drove by us, you'd know we were wasted on acid, barely keeping our shit together laughing at blinding colors and our silly voiced commentary.

Get this. Our troop of mind-altered time travelers had a significant impact on me. My choices of music and literature evolved massively since those experimental days of LSD fer brekky, beer fer lunch and bong rips fer din-din, with an evening night-cap of mushrooms, and good loud music over Stuart Shreve's giant speakers you purchased. Even today, I still trip dimensionally across the tundra listening to our space music and time-travel writing daily compositions.

When I got up to Alaska, partying wasn't fun like that. Not even close. Stupid native folks froze and died and partying tough ain't the same for Eskimos. Alcohol might be a party favor and the fifth food group for us hairy Nordic animals, but a plague on our First Nation comrades. Party till ye puke, party till you die, and in the Eskimo communities this shit totally sucked. In my first year working at the local village police department, we fetched untold numbers of kids outa overturned boats, sunken and blue, dug frozen dudes outa snow banks and raked up bits of brown humans after snow machine, 4-wheeler, plane and car crashes. And dog attacks. Eskimos are terrible party animals and got no built-in limits. With only decades exposure to alcohol, they ain't got the drinking gene. Like Callahan. Or yer momma.

Back to the dog attacks. Every home in rural Alaska has a string of dogs staked out back for dog mushing. A town of only a few hundred can have thousands of dogs chained all over the fucking place. The sick dogs, or slow dogs that have outlived their usefulness are simply unleashed and let go. This creates packs of semi-feral dogs that often kill children. My wife lost a couple of her childhood pals to dog attacks, so part of our duties was to assemble the entire police department and walk from one end of town to the other, shooting every stray and loose dog we saw. Each week we'd fill a couple pickup trucks with dead dogs, totaling over a thousand every year. Besides keeping drunken natives sober, we also had shit jobs keeping the city dump stacked with piles of rotting dead dogs. What's native and comic, is when we poured fuel over a hunnert stacks of dead dogs and burnt the piles. My first nation coworkers called it a "Gook-BBQ, grilled K-9 pussy or slant-eye steaks." In my view, it smelled like a Nazi cookout. Almost made me puke.

In one short year after Reagan signed legislation allowing natives to outlaw white man liquor, 280 native Alaska villages went totally dry, mirroring all the Indian reservations across America. Induns and Eskimos party almost as bad as Franky. Speaking of which, what ever happened to that cute girl, Miss Jemenez (Hemenez?) after she dumped Fuckered Up Franky, prone to drunken rampages. I'd heard he'd impregnated a really ugly chick and got stuck with a retarded daughter that looks just like Frank and his midget little sister George, same piglet tits and stinky wop twat. To put his sex life in comic context, Franky used to declare, "the smaller the tit, the more the monkey." I never thought dwarf-porn breeding midgets would make me barf.

Regarding my brother's battle with the bottle, one statement that Cully told me in our last days of communicating was, "Fuck Karl, I'm drinking like an alcoholic. My hangovers are lasting weeks and months." My parents weren't doing him any favors by moving him into my grandma Saimi's house in Richmond Beach. Living in our grandma's house allowed him to continue destroying himself and really pissed off the neighbors. Cully trashed the place like a retarded hillbilly. After a million complaints, one neighbor hired a landscaping company to mow Cully's lawn, trim the hedges and shrubs, haul trash and debris, even towed away Cully's junker cars, then sued my dad for the expense. Cully was never prepared for adult living.

You see, our impairment is also the level we stay stuck at. You all have friends that never grew beyond their childish years, or their high school years and few beyond their college days. That line of truncation is metaphorically where drinking became partying and partying became alcoholism. I'm only using booze in this example, but with me, it was fine flake blow and tasty pine bong rips. Our partying and heavy drinking was merely the bug killer that took out my pals and girlfriends early on.

My alcoholism was like genital herpes, it doesn't matter if yer living at my crack house, yer mommy's house sucking on yer daddy's tits, homeless or in jail, my hangovers hurt like a motherfucker. Or in our case, looking at our wives and girlfriends, hurt like a grandmother-fucker. Leaving my house in Mountlake Terrace and closing down what Frank and Marto dubbed "Lem's Mortuary and Crack House" was terrifying for me. I'd hit bottom and had nowhere else to go. Making decent money selling coke was the plateau and peak of my achievement. I would've flat-lined for as long as I could stay out of jail. Or out of a pine box.

When I fled to Alaska, I was looking for another campaign, career or kick-ass business plan. That's when I saw all those fucked up natives, wasted aborigines and Fetal Alcohol Syndrome (FAS) retarded brown kids. At first I thought it funny, then it to pissed me off. Goddamn Eskimos living to be fucked up all day, drinking cleaners, hairspray and mouthwash, and thinking it was cool. It would've upset you like Ireland in the late 1800's. Or Seattle in the 90's. It also made sense why all 280 Alaska native villages voted to close down every single liquor store and bar. In the first year I didn't have to think too hard where I could put my drug-dealing skills and pent-up anger to work. For me, it was an inverse resume, backwards job application and reverse look at my short list of skills. You can see the direction I was heading. I knew I could take out whole systems of drug and alcohol delivery and whole crews of inbred hillbilly bootleggers. With just my pinky finger. It was that easy.

That's when I joined the Army. Or the French Foreign Legion. Well sort of. That's when I joined Village Public Safety that was recruiting guys just like me. I was asked only one question. Do I know anything about bootlegging and drug dealing. In the last 35 years I've traveled to almost every remote backwards native village and urban town taking out liquor smuggling routes and even stumbled into dozens of meth labs and cocaine networks. I loved it.

I was finally making a profoundly positive difference and helping out the native communities that were completely defenseless against petty white criminals. Petty criminals just like me. And boy was I on a roll. I became an overpriced garbage man and dog catcher. It suited me fine. I found what Proust declared, "our careers are what we do second best." "The career finds the man, not the other way around." I've heard every death-threat from my defendants and convicts, and it's great comedy.

Now that we're old men, nearing the long line at the worm cafeteria, holding reservations for the maggot spa and the long dirt sleep, I wouldn't have changed a thing. You see, I had a chance to play super hero to all these stupid Eskimos and Indians, and it was fun. I could do no wrong. Getting laid off from one police department sent me to another training academy. Wrapping narc job million 6, sent me to University of Alaska Fairbanks for bachelors and master's degrees. On campus, numerous young girls reported that they'd passed out and awoke raped, so you guessed it, I did a narc job buying a shit load of GHB and Rohipnol all over campus. I think those assholes should be ready for parole by now.

I'm bragging, but the frosting on the cake was taking more than 40 trips to Europe and Russia on the cover story I was promoting the exchange student program, but still employed by an outfit I can't remember the name of. All costing me zero dollars and 99 cents. And get this, computer training up the fucking ass and years of service into the state pension program. Money I'm enjoying today, with a comprehensive retirement package keeping me out of the hospital and out of the ground.

You can see more into Cully's childish reasons to cut off contact with me. Life back in Washington became a daycare drama and I couldn't stand to look back. All my ex-girlfriends were dying from smoking crack or drowning in liquor. It also might explain my frustration keeping my million narc jobs from my childhood pals back home. None of 'em could comprehend my mission. I was on a roll and killing it. I got paid to take out guys just like me. Or better put, the guys I took off the playing field were duplicate images of me and if I wasn't wearing guns, badges and wires, I would've likely been pals and business partners with 'em. Where ever I see an old druggy version of myself, I aim and shoot. Simple.

Now back to my alcoholic family stuck infantile and locked dysfunctional. I don't know what happened to Cully's job at Care Medical, I'm assuming he was fired for his chronic drinking and toking. I also don't know why my family hid and enabled his alcoholism instead of shoving his drunk ass into treatment. Sadly, he died from drinking and smoking climate changing bong rips and his failing liver put him in a cremation urn. Accept the fact that I, nor any of you lads could've stopped his one-way trip to the boneyard. If I'd stayed in Washington you'd see me toes-up, tits-up and dick in the dirt. I have wonderful memories of tripping on 'cid, smoking pine bud and snorting flake coke with Marto and Dennis, but my drinking would've kilt me. My drinking days and hangover years are long faded to inconsequential pains in my goat ass.

I shouldn't pick on Cully's deadly alcoholism. I suspect he was stuck on stupid and locked in a diaper dance for children lacking a mission or a direction. I had to grow up someday. I can't explain my one-man war on white trash bootleggers and drug dealers. Yet, I was doing the right thing. If I pissed off Higman, Cully, Callahan, I was on the right track and kept taking more and more narc jobs with the village cops all over Alaska, even taking gigs overseas. Fun, fun. Mind you, Brian left Kotzebue over 30 years ago and I needed a job. A guy's gotta make a living somehow.

Back to daycare drama. At the second Mountlake Terrace House around the corner, Nancy got tagged for a DUI right in my driveway but turned her partying around after getting court ordered counseling. Brian has gone stone-cold sober and recharged his lunatic religious fervor after his partying to near-death in Alaska and Kingston, Washington. He porked his friend Dan Newberry's wife, impregnating her, then marrying Elizabeth Sidoris, having their baby Cenie, then divorcing Elizabeth. He stood by with his dick out, caught a pinched head, cross-eyed disabled baby that looks just like him, then discarded the placenta bitch. Brian swore off all drinking and drugging and will be around to amuse us for decades to come. If we didn't have friends like all of us, we'd have nothing to laugh at. Callahan swears Higman will eventually start his own religious cult. "What the fuck is Micro-Dot, without the Dot?" "The micro-church for small sober gimplets!" Callahan's right you know. Puny religious people are really funny.

I get to look back on a long life tripping balls and partying with you lot and Arctic Alaska missions aplenty. Remember, Brian flew up to Kotz in 1984 and I followed him shortly thereafter. Brian's invitation allowed me to complete an Associate's degree at the local Chukchi Community College, a bachelors at University of Alaska in Fairbanks, with a masters as a nice topping. This is where I was hired to promote the college's international exchange program paying me to take more than 40 trips to Europe and Russia. I traveled to a shit load of campuses handing out Alaska University shwag, literature, software (Word 95, Office 97) and applications for free travel, lodging and tuition. And for your information, yes, I did undertake numerous narc jobs on these trips too. I'm hyperactive, multitask addicted and lack moral and ethical guide-posts and guard-rails, remember?

This is noteworthy, but I flew up almost half our pals to Alaska. You visited me in Anchorage. Cully flew up twice. Marty Hall came up for one summer and Scott Wade came up the next. I flew up Dale Campbell for a spell, then had Harley Bronson come up afterward. Marto, Scott, Dale and Harley all helped me renovate houses in measure to offset airfare, lodging etc. Harley stayed his whole life and had a batch of kids here in Alaska. Some even look like him. I'm not sure if you know all these Edmonds folks, okay, maybe a few from Continuation High School, non-binary gender post-surgery counseling and rehab for sniffing glue.

As far as post-retirement hobbies, I've continued my weight-lifting and subsistence hunting. I volunteer for my wife's family whaling crews and help out with polar bear, walrus and seal harvests too. They're hobbies I started a million years ago and haven't stopped. I'll look for some killer photos and attach them. I still compose stupid shit and send them out to my former coworkers and pals. A few remaining pals still amongst the living cuz most have croaked after getting fitted for wooden jackets, tipping or climbing out of their wheelchairs and crawling into furnaces. Cigarettes and alcohol are the bitches of the bunch.

I remember when you tossed your last pack of fags, stomped the pack and swore off cigs ever since. When I told Cully that you'd quit cigarettes, he was pleasantly surprised. He knew the powerful addiction nicotine can hold on a soul. Then he asked if Troy still has blue lips. Of course, Higman (micro-dot) would fire up one of his Marlboro 100's and toke so deep he was eating the fucker, then declare "ever since I lost one of my lungs, I cut my smoking in half." For a bunch of dirty white boys emerging out of poverty, we were funny fuckers. We ain't so dumb, though, if we hadn't quit our smoking habits, our COVD-19 respiratory plague would've left us boxed lunches of dirt with a side-order of fine aged 30-year-old hash-rich booger-phlegm. Yer not gonna swallow that are ye?

Funny, marijuana is legal in Washington and Alaska now, but I no longer smoke the stuff. Coffee and bong hits were my favorite recipe in the am. Wake and bake nigger! Or tea and toke in the evening. My drinking took a nose-dive living in bone-dry native communities, so I can't take credit for devotion or dedication in my efforts towards sobriety. It just happened. The decision was made for me. Of course if I'd stayed behind and malingered in Edmonds, I'd look just like Franky, Marto, Paul, Scott or Cully. Toasted, tired. neutered, gaped or dead.

If you see Paul and Scott, tell them I dropped off their cassettes and CD's of music they sent, or left me on their trips, at the local radio station. Daniel Ryder is the evening DJ and pounds the shit outa those recordings. Even your recordings you sent me ended up in Daniel's tight grip. He LOVED all the outside music and blasted the stuff at KOTZ 720 am with 10,000 watts all over remote Alaska and even across to Russia where our station is listened to in Siberia. Sort of like Radio Free America, but with space toons or destructive rock all 3 of you sent over the many, many years. To preserve them all, Daniel Ryder digitized them and still takes over the broadcast airwaves from 6pm till midnight.

It's funny, but Lena Henry still asks how Scott is. Those two had a torrid affair during his summer visit. Her heavenly large breasts swell when she talks about Scott and she seems to hold a flame for him. And his fucking. Maybe it was his guitar playing and not his dick. He did an interview and live performance over at KOTZ 720 am blasting the Star Spangled Banner Hendrix song and sure got a lot of Eskimos asking who that fucking white guy was. And who fathered all these shrunken-head mongoloid mud-colored children.

Okay, in summation, I lived in Kotzebue, then Willow a couple years doing dirty work. Then we lived in Barrow, then Nome, and now we're just goofing off on the Kenai Peninsula, south of Anchorage. My tenure in Fairbanks was for the 5 years doing the BBA and MBA mish. I've exhausted numerous passports flying overseas and I've also added serious density to my arrest records in numerous languages. What the fuck, I was born to be incarcerated and pounded on.

It's hard to add up and itemize a life of stupid shit that I've undertaken since we were room mates at the Mountlake Terrace Hash House 40 fucking years ago. Bun retired in 2005 and I pulled the pin 6 years ago at age 55, both of us drawing public employees pensions. It's a comfortable existence with Cadillac health care and top-shelf Long Term Care. 9 out of 10 retirees will require assisted living, rest-home care or in-home nursing from busty babes with big boobs. For our own nursing enjoyment of course. Don't procrastinate, get ready for crispiness. If you'd put on your spectacles and looked next to you this morning, you likely found a crispy shrunken old naked woman in bed next to you. An old woman that still gives you kick-stands and tents. Which brings us back to drunken Irish wisdom. Callahan oft scolded us, "Never sleep with women yer own age. They look just like yer fucking grandma."

When you turn 65, purchase all the Medicare packages. Part B, C and D and supplemental coverage. The Medicare insurances only cover roughly 80% of yer chronic care, ass vacuum and commercial sink disposal. Showing up at any hospital without complete coverage will result in the hospital taking yer house and leaving yer ass sleeping on the beach with Baird. Or with Paul in his Dodge Dart that had the hood scoop made out of a bent cookie sheet. Or worse, left to sleep in a dorky old FIAT still registered to some Wade goofball we met in rehab after gender reassignment.

Baird and Renee are alcoholics in the classic sense, locked in childhood and candidates likely to preceed or follow Cully to the bone yard. Or ovens made in Germany. If you ever hung around Baird, Renee, Cully and Callahan, you'd hear some funny shit out their mouths. Baird like to raz Callahan for letting Bill Pace cut his hair like Bozo the Clown and Callahan ribbed Baird for not knowing the difference between an alcoholic and a drunk: a drunk don't gotta go to all them fucking meetings. Marto told me a while back he'd not seen or heard about Baird's DUI snags, but Renee's sister Teal and Roger Potter told him she has pulled numerous spin dry cycles and rotating recovery vacations at the Sedro Woolley Mental Institution. Oh fuck. I forgot Toby too. And I forgot to include Scott Wade. They'd scored a string of DUI arrests and were court ordered into treatment, lengthening their lives by a gray cunt hair. Wait, I'll get to Nancy later.

You see, I'm retarded. Nobody fucks up as good as me. I had to to leave home and exile in dry native villages in the most remote parts of Alaska, working for a hunnert police departments and narc squads statewide and overseas before my shit sobered up. Scott and Nancy got DUI court ordered treatment. My brother Toby got the same experience: DUI mandated treatment after rolling his truck and 6-horse trailer all over the highway up in Snoqualmie Pass-fucked up. The horse trailer was empty, so the horses didn't become Spic and Spanish taco filling nor Methican Hamburger Helper.

My sister Moira Ann drove over a handicapped mini-limber gimper-dude in a giant semi-truck and trailer loaded with huge landscaping rock. Poor gimp got smashed flatter'n a pancake and Moira Ann tested positive fer trace blow, weed and booze. No DUI conviction, but a serious involuntary manslaughter conviction, pled down from negligent homicide. Some shit runs in families and I come from a long line of liquor soaked uterus pickling and rectal discharged airborne fetal loose stool projectiles. Be careful, next time you pass gas, it might be me.

Some times sobriety comes by accident. Some times by force. From my perspective of limited information and even less intelligence, Cully cleverly slid through the cracks, avoiding car crashes and DUI legal hassles, court ordered treatments and survived long enough and smart enough to kill himself swimming laps in a bottle. I may be wrong, I often am. Like Cully, I'm a mental midget and suffer only minimal brain dysfunction. Okay, maybe maximal. Liquor and smokes take our best friends faster'n shit. In this case, my own brother.

In closing, I've not gone to be with the worms quite yet, so I'll keep in touch. Knowing you and our troop of musicians, comedians and hallucination hikers has given me a fount of fertile memories, good laughs and life lessons.

Till dirt do us part.

Karl.

*Spread the fudge and forward this self-deprecating update and informational correspondence. We all speak retard. We're from Washington.