By ZOGTONE

i call my neighbor phil "hippie boy". he and his wife live out on the
coast but are building this unique home in borrego, about a mile from my place.
he and i have mutual friends in the music scene over the mountains
and just happened to run into each other "downtown". phil is a palm tree freak,
and can spout off latin names for all his exotic species like i rattle off...well...
useless drivel on brink. another damn petey mesquitey!!! he's got a great,
large plot of land and is taking his project slow and easy.
one might call his theme "neo/polynesian/industrial".
that was the classification we came up with.
his place is a big square structure with beautiful poles which make up
a cool covered porch on all four sides. inside is rustic native rocks, beautiful
exposed rough-hewn wood ceilings, and one of the biggest high-tech,
state of the art swamp-coolers i have ever seen. thats that big industrial
fan lookin thing in the wall by the rock fireplace under construction.
please note that the walls are stucco-covered on the outside but inside
its exposed composite block. i wont use the term "green" because i hate
trendy fucking buzz words like that ("closure" "baby-bump" etc fuck it).
it's recycled stuff...as i will best describe here:

EnerGrid, Techblock or Rastra Block, is a wall-construction material
made of concrete and ground-up recycled styrofoam (like millions of coffee cups).
It comes in long blocks, kinda like giant cinder blocks or legos.
the bars have holes cut at intervals, so when you stack up a wall, you
have vertical hollow channels. Steel rebar rods are placed upright in
these channels, and concrete is poured around them, creating reinforced
concrete "pillars" at intervals in the walls. The block material itself
is slightly crumbly. my buddy phil has radiused all the hard corners.
his roof is steel which has a great rust patina hue since he started his "project".

it's a great place to hang on the weekends and phil is a true desert rat,
like myself. check out the campfire surroundings complete with tiki gods
and a beautiful palapa for shade....im gonna be bummed when he finish