While hard to believe, I must simply face the fact that after all these years, it broke. It no longer functions. There is no movement. There is no life, where once there was. Caput.

Approximately twenty three minutes ago, the Bullshitometer in my secret mancave died. I watched as its perfectly balanced sphere, tilted at the angle of the earth and suspended invisibly as if by an other worldly force, a sphere which had turned first one way and then back, powered by nothing and always returning to the same point, a sphere that had never failed, Failed.

All at once the turning radius began to diminish as this dip stick to the nether world lost the beat. Howwwww Coooooood this Happen? On its final turn a whisp of greyish blue smoke, looking for a passing moment like the profile of Richard M. Nixon, belched skyward.

It began last century when, in a small Austrian village, Hans von Heffle-verfen dreamed his dream. It was a dream in which truth inspired trust and trust engendered compassion and compassion healed the oppression. He had a more than passing knowledge of physics and was deeply spiritual in outlook. This inspired his understanding of the works of the great Serbian wildman, Nicola Tesla, and his fascination with Mahatma Gandi.

"If only I could fuse the essence of clear selfless compassion of the Mahatma with the ubiquitous energy proven to be circulating in the tropospere", he would muse. "That would be an environment so transparent in its goodness as to tolerate no bullshit", he thought. The seed for what would grow to become the bullshitometer was planted in fertile soil. The soil of the soul. He saw it as his dharma to bring this creation to life. And so he did.

The full story is as long as it is horrific and time forbids its telling, but suffice to say he was drawn and quartered in the Vatican courtyard for posing a "foundational risk" to all we have been told to hold sacred.

A total of four spheres were manufactured in all, and each placed on the planetary cardinal points so as to be complete in their full spectrum bullshit data mining capability, utilizing the unified field energy to form a perfect holographic representation of each and every instance of bullshit, worldwide. Stunning.

Up until now, while the poops have been on the rise, all appeared to be within the acceptable limits. The only anomalous downward trending behavior being Bernie Sanders.

The entirely covert Dept. of Bullshit (D.O.B.) employs more people worldwide than all the intelligence agencies combined. In fact it is those agencies that keep the D.O.B. busiest.

How, you might ask did i come to own such an exotic object and why does its demise bode ill? It is rumored that after being drawn and quartered, the body parts were taken to the local zoo to provide feast for the carnivores. Several people reported that the disembodied head blinked with regularity, as if to say, "ask me a yes or no question". After an exhaustive night  of simple questions, Von Heffle-verfen's plan was made plain and put into action by a small but dedicated group.

A charming and mesmerizing beauty known only as Clarissa was rumored to have had an affair with the "Heff", as he came to be known, and later took possession of one of the spheres. Turns out that she was the triple great grandma of this pot head friend who had inherited the sphere and traded it to me for some of the bukkbukk stickyicky. I said, "where does one put the batteries"? He said, "ahdunno".

Turns out this sphere had been displaced. Also turns out that my place is one of the cardinal points, so the darn thing found its way back home. Well, as you can imagine, when it commenced to rotating and giving off this slight glow and tingly feeling, I repaired to my mancave for further investigation. That's when it happened. Something like what happens to that x man guy in the wheelchair with the helmet thingy that sees all the other mutants. The room became lit up and i found myself sitting in the center of a sphere. A sphere in which each and every instance of bullshit happening worldwide was creating a firestorm of projections. The system was once again functional and providing data crucial to the evaluation of this Shit Show.

So, for many many years now i have been doing this work. This work of the D.O.B.. Keeping it all from overflowing. Turning shit to compost and growing, well nothing that i would eat.

Why is it a bad sign? Because when a Bullshitometer craps out it means that the flow of bullshit is so constant and unrelenting that it cannot be distinguished from any other reality. It has become the reality. No big surprise here. It's kinda like the 350 ppm Co2 thing. It was really bound to happen. Sad, nonetheless.

I'm sure there are those among you who may find this all a bit far fetched, nay even fantastical.  You're probably the same people who thought the opening line of this blog was going to be a dick joke. Sorry to disappoint. Wrong on both counts.

So, some of the Americaunas out by the pond have been pissing me off lately. Three or four of them have been roosting atop the watering contraptions that Ty and I put together years ago allowing the birds an abundant supply of clean water with minimal hassle.

It is the normal habit of chooks to poop upon awakening, leading to water container lids crusted over with it and the water in the containers fouled by it. So, o.k., not much fun, but i can dump the water and try to tighten the lids better to keep their droppings out, but the day i went out there and found an egg half broke, floating in the water, meaning that the feathered creep show was too bloody lazy to move twelve feet to a nest box to drop one,  something inside of me snapped.

If ever you feel the need to take revenge for such an act of outright rude, I found, that evening, that denying them access to the lids by standing vigil and knocking them back with a focused burst of water as the light rapidly fades makes them totally crazy and is super fun to watch. They hop up on the normal roost, but move back and forth like a parakeet waiting for an opportunity to make a break for familiar ground. And so they do, over and over until sleep wins out and they settle soaked, into the decidedly less comfortable digs of a bamboo pole.

Normally I do not resort to torture of any kind when it comes to the feather-goats, but a man has his Yes and he has his No.

The more you show, the more we'll grow. Peace out. Jp