typing as fast as i can — no time for the shift key —

1. my nickname in elementary school was witchie-poo.

2. i’ve run 3 marathons; during my 2nd on the streets of L.A., two native americans blew past me barefoot at the 13th mile, their long black hair blowing in the wind. they were beautiful.

3. my father is a physician at a state hospital for the criminally insane. 

4. i performed magic shows at kids’ birthday parties as a teenager and dreamt of being the next doug henning, complete with his ’70s rainbow outfit.

5. three of the women i dated now prefer women.

6. a shaman once told me that she saw a knife sticking out of my back where i was stabbed in a previous life.

7. i have a 2nd degree black belt in uechi-ryu okinawan karate (we have crane moves, just like mr. miyagi!) and i broke two of my ribs fighting in full-contact, bare-knuckle bouts.

8. i’m a conspiracy theory addict. when i’m president, my first trip will be to area 51.

9. part of my family is from vik, a settlement in southwestern norway where some viking clans originated, and i have a DNA marker indicating viking ancestry.

10. i’m addicted to coffee.

11. i have a fetish for found action figures that have been marred or damaged, are missing limbs, etc.

12. i was a computer hacker as a teen, and almost got busted by a federal agency. several hacker friends landed up in jail.

13. i’ve had two full conscious out-of-body experiences while awake and sober.

14. i’d love to live in a barn.

15. i got my start as a performance artist in L.A. in the early ’90s, and once almost electrocuted myself with butter and 2 AC electrodes.

16. my brother and i used to dress up like batman and robin, make gasoline bombs out of coke cans, and throw razor-sharp ninja stars in our fresno backyard. we also had the hots at daycare for identical blonde sisters we called “the butter twins.”

17. i took french lessons weekly as an adult for 4 years and my accent still sucks.

18. i’ve seen the movie ishtar more times than any other movie. and elaine may is a genius.

19. once while walking around in my motorcycle armor at san francisco’s union street fair, i accidentally bumped then-SF-mayor gavin newsom with my padded shoulder. he stumbled back 3 feet, and his wife jennifer siebel laughed.

20. i like listening to crunchy/cut-up electronica or anything audio that sounds homemade. give me aphex twin, blevin blectum, matmos….

21. i’ve seen every episode of the dukes of hazzard, the greatest american hero, and twin peaks.

22. if i had to watch the film or TV work of only one director for the rest of my days, i’d probably choose david lynch.

23. i’m a bibliophile. i have more books by bukowski than by any other author. next in line would be joyce and faulkner.

24. my granny hacked the heads off of chickens with a hatchet on her farm in nebraska.

25. i wasn’t a vegetarian. then i was. and now i’m not.

I work a day job in a gross carpeted cubical.

A woman with stinky perfume who works on the other side of my wall is constantly complaining. Loudly. She bitches and moans all day about her job and the coffee and the lighting and her daughter and the customers and the people in other departments with snark and venom, interrupting co-workers to yell, “IS IT ME, OR IS SO-AND-SO JUST A STUPID FUCKING IDIOT?”

Day after day after day after day after day. And so loudly my noise-cancelling headphones don’t do shit. Please lady, o please let me suffer in silence. I live for her sick days, I really do. Asthma. Poison ivy. A broken hip. Anything.

Today during her rants I couldn’t help but think: “My god, this woman sounds hysterical, and I mean that in the most politically incorrect and historical sense of the term.”

And then, right on cue:

“UHHHHH! I JUST WANT TO SCREAM!!!”

Somebody just fuck her already. Anyone.

Marley Davidskin. Photo © 2008 Louis Pepin

This weekend we lost our little friend Marley, affectionately known as “Little Kitty!” An almost-hairless black-grey Sphynx, he lived with an enlarged heart most of his four years of life, and complications led to its final failure early Sunday morning. He was in emergency care for three days and gave a great fight with his little paw dukes. We like to say he died of having too much heart.

If you were lucky to have played with him, you know he was a very sensitive and psychic cat; a stealthy mouser who liked to hide mice under our hall rug as practical jokes so we’d walk over them for days before finding them flattened; an incredible jumper who could leap from the floor to the top of our fridge in a single bound; and, a little clown who constantly made up new games for us to play.

But most of all he was a pint-sized purring cuddler. I miss you, Little Kitty.

Marley photo by photographer Louis Pepin of San Francisco. Marley liked Louis.

I grew up in Fresno. Even though it’s the 6th largest city in California, it’s always had a small town feel, which might be why it’s the butt of so many jokes by Californians. Like its cousin Bakersfield to the south, Fresno’s been the punchline to every predictable zinger about inglorious cow towns, dustbowls, trailer trash, rednecks, inbreeding….

It doesn’t help that the city is culturally torn between San Francisco to the north and L.A. to the south, with generous helpings of Mexico, Tucson, and 1970s ticky-tacky thrown in. Or that the approach on highway 99 is met with the aroma of cow manure. Or that summer temperatures regularly climb to 110 degrees. Or that you’ll see trucks, cars, motorcycles, and horses with gun racks. Or that K-Fed lived there—and Jeffrey Dahmer’s mom. Or that local radio stations play music that’s 15 years behind the times. Or that smog hangs low in the sky—the county’s air quality is ranked as the third worst in the nation by the American Lung Association, with 16% of Fresno children suffering chronic asthma; I still remember coughing up brown specks of blood as a kid.

But come on. Really. Fresno’s more than the sum of its punchlines. First, it’s not a small town—it has 10 high schools, 450,000 residents, and nearly a million people in the greater metropolitan area that serves as the gateway to 1200 majestic square miles of Yosemite national park. Fresno’s ag economy was worth $4.8 billion in 2006, making it the largest in the nation. The town’s produced a long list of stunning writers (William Saroyan, Gary Soto, Philip Levine, Deborah Blum), film stars (director Sam Peckinpah, singer-actress Cher), scholars, and yes, even athletes—can you guess which cow town clinched the 2008 NCAA national baseball title? That’s right. But best of all, Fresno’s the birthplace of Popping, which every dorky-cool 70s/80s kid has tried; I still remember pop-offs in my high school parking lot where a pair of poppers would clear a space between a Pinto and a low-rider Ford and get busy on the 200-degree asphalt; hell, you had to dance or your shoes would melt.

So in my hometown’s defense, here are my favorite Fresno memories of the 70s and 80s, abbreviated for your pleasure: jumping dirt hills in the surrounding fields on my banana seat bike while listening to “I Can’t Go for That (No Can Do)” by Hall and Oates; dumpster-diving behind St. Agnes hospital at 4 a.m. where my brother and I would find used medical syringes, fill them with water, and spray each other while giggling; playing Marco Polo in blistering heat with my sister and the occasional frog in our pool; pretending to be a mannequin in the display window at Macy’s department store; running from the cops through the grape vineyards north of Fresno State; purloining beers at rich kid Alex’s house, and accidentally setting off his alarm system that caused steel riot shades to come sliding down over all the windows; Me ‘n Eds pizza at the corner of First and Bullard—best in the whole damn world, and I’ve tried them all from L.A. to Florence; KKDJ playing Depeche Mode, David Bowie, Sex Pistols, AC/DC, and all the rest; years of Karate at Way of Japan, where Sensei Robert Halliburton let me slug him in his rock-hard gut as hard as I wanted till my 12-year-old knuckles bled; eating so many cinnamon rolls at the Fresno Fair that I puked in the Arts and Crafts building; using a computer war dialer to get toll-free phone calls, then lying low when my older hacker friends got busted by the FBI; seeing Fleetwood Mac for the first time with my sister on a hot summer night; road-tripping to Berkeley’s hookeresque Flamingo Motel with my debate team pals where we caught roaches in our rooms, danced to New Order, and watched the underwearless ladies stroll by outside; breaking into a car, then getting chased down and wrestled to the ground by its owner, which turned out to be a female probation officer; dodging the ever-present school bullies; skipping through a dirt field with my brother and coming upon a sign that read WARNING: SOIL MAY CONTAIN RADIOACTIVE CONTAMINANTS; staying up late to watch kung fu films, then reenacting the moves in my backyard at 2 a.m. in pitch black 90-degree weather with my dad till one of us got socked in the dark; breaking windows and getting chased by dogs along my newspaper route; laughing so hard at the dinner table that milk came out my nose; getting so pissed at my sister’s eavesdropping that I threw her phone through her bedroom’s glass window; crawling under the house to collect little skeletons of insects and rats; dodging my granny Elda’s stink eye; and best of all, peeing into a plastic Spiderman cup in front of my brother as a joke…then watching his horror when my unknowing mom filled it with milk and set it down in front of him at dinner. He’s avoided Spiderman cups ever since.

Here it is, blog entry number one. Is it just me, or does writing into the ether feel like talking to air?

So, air: by way of introductions my name’s Scotch Wichmann, I’m a writer, a recovering L.A. performance artist, and a starving San Francisco stand-up comic clawing his way up the funny wall. I’ve spent 5 years writing a comedy novel that’s been rejected by 60 agents so far, my corporate job is killing me, and it’s rough being a yankee free marketeer in a socialist town. I like performance art, writing, stand-up, improv, circus freaks, art manifestos, Surrealism, Libertarianism, freedom, crunchy-sounding electronica, film, design, architecture, sleight of hand, UFOs, chemistry sets, extra-sensory perception, shamanism, mediums, espionage, the criminal mind, abnormal psychology, nuclear weaponry, the 1970s, the 1980s, French, Okinawan karate, knives, running, computer programming, encryption, motorcycles, tatouage, beer, and barflies.

And so all of *that* is what I’ll be talking about. I mean writing about.