The Adventures of Bloggard

Been Around the Block. Got Some Stories. These are Them.

Mister Blue

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Mount Shasta, CA, January 15, 2026: This is my pal. His name is “Mister Blue” or “Blue-Blue.”

Mister Blue has been with me all of my life, and still resides at my bedside, because we’re pals, been together ever since Artelle Loony, Mama’s friend, made Mister Blue for me when I was quite small.

Every morning, when I get up, I spend a moment feeling gratitude and expressing thanks to the Universe, for all the things I’ve been given: Roof, warmth, clothes, food, body, health, love, friends, long life.

And then, every morning, I give Mister Blue a pat and sincerely thank him for sticking with me all this time.

We’re both over 80 years old!

I think of that, and, while I’m thanking him, I remember all the kindness I’ve been given by the humans in my life, and of the life-force and body given me by my ancestors. Thank you Universe. Thank you, Mister Blue.

Gratitude or Grumpy. Whichever you choose, you create more.

I’ve decided gratitude is way better.

And Mister Blue agrees completely.

Why Does Deadly Junk Food Taste Good?

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Poison Content in CocaColaMount Shasta, seen on Facebook, 6/3/2023:

A GOOD QUESTION

My friend, Tom Carterus, asks: So how does something that is so detrimental for your health taste so good? I know that chocolate-craving is a magnesium deficiency. When I supplement with the right kind of magnesium, my chocolate cravings go away and all chocolate tastes like wax to me.

Why do we like coke so much? I don’t drink the stuff now. But those adverts when I was growing up were great. The original coke bottle. Way cool.

So why does my body want to drink poison? The soda pop aisle at the grocery store has now expanded to three aisles. More and more and more.

When I was young and was mowing the grass, about the time I was [Read more…]

My Debt to Switchboards

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San Francisco, September 12, 1976: This is called a switchboard.

In Henrietta, Texas, in the upstairs (outside staircase, on the right) of the building at Bridge and Gilbert, on the corner of the courthouse square, was the phone company before dial phones were available. that was the phone company before the new building was built over by the Methodist Church, and before the time Mac McGilvray ran the phone company. [CLICK HERE TO SEE THAT BUILDING TODAY] In that upper floor were several switchboards, and that’s where the operator(s) were before the advent of dial-phones. You picked up the phone and asked Gladys to connect you to the Watson’s house.

After dial-phones, high school, and heading off to North Texas State University, I learned to operate a switchboard when I worked at Holiday Inn in Denton, and switchboards were still widely in use in the hotel/hospitality industry for inter-room and inside/outside calls for decades after that.

Years earlier, starting back east, the very first answering services had been created when some entrepreneurs obtained AT&T switchboards, and located themselves in a calling area (ie: near the “central office” where calls are switched, serving one particular neighborhood, identified by the prefix of the phone number. In Henrietta, I think it was Evergreen, but I’m not sure I’m remembering correctly, because San Francisco also had Evergreen exchange, north of Golden Gate Park.)

These first answering services worked like this: They had the phone company wire an extension of the business’s phone and the two wires were connected to ONE of the holes in the switchboard. In this way, when the business was closed, the calls were also “ringing” on the small red light beneath that hole. At the back of the console, shown above, you see the red objects which are plugs. You grab the left-side plug of any pair of plugs, shove it into the hole and now your headset (if you’re the operator) is live as you’ve just “answered” the call, like people at home do when they lift the receiver. Now the caller asks for the Watson’s house, or for room 117, and you plug the right-side plug of that pair into the Watson’s plug or room 117’s plug, and flip the small toggle switch in front of that pair of plugs. This rings the target phone at the Watson’s or room 117.

When the Watsons or room 117 answer, you flip the toggle another way, and you are removed from the conversation. You get another red light when the parties hang up.

All answering services around the country used switchboards to provide answering service to businesses right up until 1976 in San Francisco, when one day I got an advertisement falling out of my phone bill. It was for this new feature, “Call Forwarding.”

I was stoned at that moment and picked up the advertisement, and then said to myself. “I could use this to build an answering service, without the need for a switchboard.”

And … that’s what I did. The beginning of Network Answering Service.

A few years later, and 80% of the answering services in San Francisco had transitioned away from switchboards, to call-forwarding and new types of equipment.
That’s how it happened. Thank you, switchboards!
 

The ‘Line Seizer’

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3304 Geary Boulevard, San Francisco 1980’ish — When we opened Network Answering Service in my studio apartment in 1976, it was because I’d realized that the phone company’s new “Call Forwarding” service would enable me to build an answering service without the need to buy a switchboard, which also needs a LOT of costly wiring. The downside of my method was that when our phone rang, the incoming call could be for ANY of our clients. But who?

So we’d answer, “Network Answering Service, who are you calling please?”

Oddly enough, this worked rather well, and so we grew.

But when we outgrew my studio apartment at 3rd and Anza, north of Golden Gate park, we had to [Read more…]

Koko Taylor in Paris

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Paris, Summer 2001: On the way to teach a class at the Belgian E-Tap Seminar, my flight paused in Paris, and so did I.

In the Montparnasse district (“arrondissement”), I had a narrow hotel, whose view of the street below my second-floor room revealed a hustling little shop of fresh produce, several ambiguous doorways, and a musical trio busking for money in colorful costumes. It was all so colorful I could just spit in a delirium of foreignicity.

In the morning I would carry my Megatar over to Le Bass Shoppe, where the proprietor would express quiet interest, on which I would later fail to follow up most completely.

Last night, arriving late, I’d had a late supper at the nearest cafe, and it could have been the same place where Hemingway and Picaso and Satie and Coco Chanel and Kay Boyle created the world of art once upon a time.

Last night, jet lag fagged and flattened me, but tonight? What to do tonight?

And so it was that, in the little newspaper I’d picked up, and pretended I could read, when I found the notice for Koko Taylor playing at a club just up the main drag, I yelped with pleasure, and almost dropped my teeny-weeny little cup of coffee, and altogether lost my cool and artistic demeanor, right there at the teeny-weeny table on the sidewalk beside the cobblestones of the arty little street. Oh, it was precious!

I wandered around during the day, viewing many olde and beautiful things, tired feet unable to stop me, with Les this and Le that. Even my map grew tired, so after a resty nap I woke and found the day’s light fading. Over a daring and bohemian snack from the shops up and down, it was showtime!

Koko Taylor is a blues and rock legend. Her music was introduced to me by a pal back in Dallas, who would listen to nothing else when smoking green hand-rolled cigarettes, and he was always smoking them. I can no longer remember his name, in fact find it difficult to remember much about those days except for two things.

One was that he confessed to me that as a child he’d been terrified of the destroying robot in “The Day the Earth Stood Still”, a movie where Michael Rennie, dying, tells Patricia Neal certain words to speak to the robot, Gort, so that Gort would stop blowing up the earth. My friend said that he was so terrified of Gort that he memorized the words. We repeated these words, and I can now remember them, too.

And just in case you ever run into this situation, here are the words you will need:

“Gort. Klatu baratu. Klatu baratu.“

Get it? Got it? Good!

Now we won’t need to worry about that.

The other thing that I remember is the Koko Taylor song “Wing Dang Doodle.” In case you haven’t heard it, it’s a romping stomping kind of song, a pushy and relentless rocking rhythm, and the words go like this:

“We goinna kick out all the windows!
“We goinna knock down all the doors!
“We goinna romp and stomp till midnight!
“We goinna fuss and fight till dawn!
“We goinna have us a WING DANG DOODLE
“All night long!”

There’s more, but you get the picture.

TKokoTaylor-BluesJazPlayershe club was dark, smoky, and the narrow lobby hadn’t prepared me for the long bar behind, and huge floor, covered with tables, and full curtained stage beyond. I had whisky. It wasn’t long before the curtains were drawn back … and the show was rocking! Koko was belting out the songs.

The French love blues. It’s a natchul fact.

Before long, the whisky took more and more effect. I was yelling and hooting. So was the rest of the crowd. It was a lot of yelling and hooting. A whole lot of yelling and hooting. The entire room was shaking. The band was weaving back and forth, and the sound bouncing from the walls and ceiling in the absurdest manner.

Everything became funny. Funny, funny, funny.

Everyone around me was talking. I was talking. We were all talking. We were all laughing. Was I speaking French? Talking now! Did they speak English? Couldn’t say. Didn’t matter much. Talking, talking, talking.

I recall, much later, weaving my way in the chill night air. These streets stay open late, bright blinking neon, though the little shops were dark, shut up tight.

There was a late dinner of coffee and mussels, at a bright shop on the corner. The proprietor was Belgian. The mussels from Brussels.

Somehow I made it to my room. The circling night faded slowly away. I slept.

Creation and Destruction, and Everything In-Between

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Safeway parking lot, Balboa Avenue, San Francisco, February 1975 — 

“You must face annihilation over and over again to discover what is indistructable in yourself.”
— Pema Chodron

This quote started me thinking (years later in 2018), because actually, creation, persistence (survival), and destruction are in a way all parts of the same thing.

It is the cycle of all things in the physical universe. Like you are born, you live for a time, and then you pass away. As does your car, a banana, a city, a mountain, or the Earth.

This universal cycle of action was first described in the Upanishads, and we still refer to the three ‘gods’ Brahma (the creator), Vishnu (the preserver), and Shiva (the destroyer).

And it is good when you have all three in your skillset, because when you can at will create something, mutate and change it and preserve it, and then destroy it, then in fact you are in control of [Read more…]

Jules Pfeiffer and the San Francisco Experience

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Specs Bar in North Beach, San Francisco, September 1975 — It was because I was dating a writer named Barbara Austin, whom I’d picked up at San Francisco State using a fancy pick-up women technique.

And Barbara had a pal named Suzie.

A Ritzy Hideaway in the Woods

At that time there was a fancy fellowship to a woodsy place all scenic as hell back east, perhaps Connecticut. And if you applied, and if they accepted you as a proper artiste, then they’d put you up for several weeks in a cabin in the scenic woods and while you worked on your art. Now Suzie was a painter who specialized in pictures of Navajo blankets draped on chairs, and Barbara wrote poignant novels. Since both of them were accepted at this ritzy fellowship this summer, worked on their respective art, and became friends.

Now it seems that Suzie and her boyfriend, Jules Pfeiffer, whose cartoons adorned the New Yorker, and newspapers, and Playboy magazine which me and my friends often read because we liked the articles so darn much.

And that’s how it was that [Read more…]

The Morgan Motor Car

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North Texas University, Denton, Texas, 1965. Heartbroken, after running off my high-school sweetheart, envious met her new flame, a boisterous trumpet player driving a red MGB.

Shortly thereafter when crazy Becky Jarvis said, “You ought to get a Morgan.” I said huh? And then …

I bought a Morgan Motor Car in Dallas from a garage guy named Big John, who imported them and raced them. This one was blue, with tan upholstery and black top. Three thousand dollars.

Built with a wooden frame atop a steel z-frame, whatever that might be. The whole car flexed. Weighted 1400 pounds and had a 1.5 liter engine, hopped-up Ford Cortina with Lotus modifications, Jaguar trannasaurus, ran like hell, whining high-pitched, a redline at 9000. About four inches from the ground. That would be your butt, flying above your asphalt.

Morgan Motor Car

The first night, driving it home, in the dark, was terrifying. It was so fast. Seemed like piloting the bolt from a crossbow, rocketing down that dark backwoods highway. Later discovered it had the wrong speedometer; and my highway trip at 65 was really around 90. It did seem sprightly.

The jack arrangement was to insert the jack through a hole in the floor. This hole normally was covered by the rubber floor mat. However, on rainy Dallas days I have seen the puddle splash up through the hole, lifting the floor mat, to spash against the windshield, on the passenger side. Kind of a defroster system.

Paul Miner drew up cartoons of our gang at that time. Mine was ‘Richard, the sports car nut’. It showed me in riding pants, saying “Of course, she won’t start on cold mornings, but at $2999, she can afford to be a little temperamental.”

Paul was right on the money. One of my proudest moments at that time was during an astounding snowstorm. On Dallas freeway and headed back to Denton, I let the air out of the tires down to about 15 pounds. Then, my 1400 pound car could walk up the icy hills where the big sedans just skidded and spun. Got me through. Good thing. That heater. I probably would have died out there.

A year or so later, living in Dallas in an apartment rented from Dunia Bean, which had a swimming pool, driving to work at the Cabana. And a fool oncoming lost it and bent my car. That was the end of the Morgan.

Regarding that swimming pool. It had an underwater light. Have you ever, at night, on LSD, opened your eyes underwater to look at a light? No?

Well, that Morgan was something.

 
 

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