On The Bus
Working the Recycle Crew at the Oregon Country Fair
Saturday is Ass-Out Day
Hippies Love Mud
It’s Saturday night at The Ritz and Reggie Watts is playing, which is like saying it’s a Saturday night at Studio 54 and Prince is playing. The lucky few hundred folks who also made it through the door are stark naked and squeezed buttcheek to buttcheek around the fire pit in front of an intimate stage, having earlier sweat all over each other in the barn-sized sauna and rinsed off in the communal, open-air showers. It is open season for Pacific Northwest hippies.
Reggie is the Oregon Country Fair’s favorite famous person. Outside the sauna, he’s gazing over a sea of fleshy jiggling bits from under his huge head of hair while doing his funny beatboxing improv thing that made him a household name in weirder neighborhoods. He plays the Fair every year.
The sauna is becoming a bit of a pressure cooker. A long-haired brunette man with tribal tattoos is playing a six-foot-long didgeridoo. Another man of …
Buddy the Gravedigger
Everybody wants something better. It’s just a matter of getting it.
Born with a shovel in his hands
The only undertaker he trusts is his daughter.
Buddy scooped the rainwater out of the fresh grave with the same excavator bucket he used to dig the hole. It’d been raining for days and the grave was at the bottom of a hill, so the hole kept flooding. He and his employee, George, had a few hours to keep the water out of the grave before the funeral. This was at the far edge of the cemetery, near the house with the pig in the yard that gets aggressive whenever he hears George come through with the mower.
Buddy is a third-generation gravedigger in the panhandle of West Virginia.
“I was born with a shovel in my hands,” he said.
I typically sit by Buddy in church. When he’s not digging graves, he likes to work on the church. It’s an old church, and he takes pride in its care. There are a few gravestones in the yard, and he’s dug one of those as well.
Our small congregation has breakfast together in the church kitchen after service on the …
A Cattleman's Feast
Bitcoiners weep bitter tears while learning lessons about scarcity, market forces, and the power of adaptive multi-paddock grazing
Texas Slim vs. the Big Four
Johnny Ochoa works with gravity to break down an entire cow using only a knife and a small hatchet. Spoiler: It’s delicious.
Arriving in Nashville to cover July’s 2024 Bitcoin Conference — a celebration of digital currency — my first order of business was to check in at the Music City Center to fetch my press pass. A press pass, like money, used to be a tangible commodity. One could fidget with them on a lanyard or tuck them neatly into the ribbon of a fedora. It said: I am a man of the press, which, like this pass, is made of paper. At the Bitcoin conference, the press pass is a digitally linked bracelet that you receive by scanning a QR code sent to your email. Incredibly, I somehow missed a link in this chain when applying, and the support staff are now staring at me blankly as I attempt to retrieve my pass the old-fashioned way: by stating my name.
“We do not have that identity,” reports a blond man with an efficient buzz cut.
“The identity is not in our system,” a slender woman pinched into a form-fitting dress …
