Brigitte Bardot Ruined My Life. (Thank You, Thank You.)

Monday, the morning after. Last night's Academy Awards is the talk of the town as I drink my first cup and watch GDLA. I really love awards shows. The folks who didn't listen to all that good advice back home that they didn't stand a chance in Hollywood, or Nashville, or New York. The best nominees are the ones who understand they really aren't going to win, they're truly thrilled just to be there, and then they do win. The total shock when their name is announced. It happened a few times last night.

It's now Wednesday afternoon. I'm just getting into the swing of doing this, I figure to put up two or three posts a week once I get going, but I'm also having to deal with basic survival. (Like Kris Kristofferson sang, " . . . and he's traded in tomorrow for today." I just figured in my younger days that if I made it to now--older--then I'd cross that bridge when I got to it. Grasshoppers can, but don't always, have savings.)

Anyway, I heard it again yesterday. Predictions on the Earth's population by 2050. Another three billion souls they figure. Up to about nine or ten billion. People. I'm thinking, "Or nobody left at all." I hope I'm wrong, but I don't know. I WANT to see the party continue, but everywhere I look scares me. LOWER gas prices sure won't help us last longer, but that seems to be the goal of one and all (as they say). Any good ideas to help our precarious situation get bypassed one way or another. On every level. There's the big stink about the downer cows being tormented to get them to stand up so they're "legal" to slaughter, and ways to beat new regulations are invented by all the big companies. But even up in Canada when the restaurant where my girlfriend worked got busted for pouring cheap ketchup from large cans into Heinz bottles to put on the tables, all the manager did was have the help start pouring the cheap ketchup into large Heinz containers, and THEN pour it into the Heinz bottles to put on the tables. I was visiting a friend at a warehouse in Nashville one day. They had received a shipment of used industrial filters that had some type of toxic material inside them. The ingredient had been banned in every state except two, Tennessee and Hawaii I think it was, so the filters had been sent there to be emptied of the deadly gravel-like centers. Two men from a day-labor hall had been hired for the job, and they'd been set up in the back of a rented truck on the far side of the parking lot, downwind from everybody else, to empty the filters into a dumpster, wearing only paper masks for protection. When they'd finished and been sent away, a regular garbage truck was called in, and the driver sat in the cab with the window open, his arm resting on the sill on the hot day, as the dumpster emptied its dusty load into the truck right above his head. ("Hey, it's BUSINESS.") Logging operations, ships at sea, car washes, factories, golf courses, all do whatever it takes . . . gotta keep those stockholders happy.

I remember seeing Ghost Busters for the first time, thinking what a great way to spend energy, creating something like that movie. For a good time up in San Francisco, I used to like to take a few tokes, then go out and watch people parallel park. I just yesterday heard about a new book out, "The How Of Happiness", by Sonja Lyubomirsky. In his book "Be Here Now", and I heard the spoken word from a three-record set of a talk he'd given at a university up in British Columbia, Richard Alpert/Ram Dass told of his experiences with both success and happiness. As a Harvard professor, he'd had a fine home full of antiques, a Mercedes and a motorcycle, gave fancy parties, his parents were proud, but when there was no one around to tell him how great he was doing, like sitting alone in the bathtub, he wasn't feeling fulfilled. After he got into psychedelics, lost his job and all his possessions, and his parents "mourned him as if he were dead", he actually found joy. But hang on, I'm not saying you gotta be poor to be happy, just that having a lot doesn't necessarily make one happy, and contented people are less likely to cut corners with safety issues when it comes to their fellow man and the environment; squeezing out that last dime at any cost is no longer all important.

Back in my porn-star days, the guy who did the Golden Girls series was moving. I'd never worked for him, but I knew him from the agency I worked through. If you know the series or have any of his brochures from back then, he was moving from the ranch house with the fireplace and swimming pool to a two-story condo, both places used for his shoots. The rest of the movers were guys I knew who worked on the crew of a couple feature films I'd been in. It was a great day, lots of fun in the shared drudgery, he bought us a big lunch, and all that free exercise. But I was shocked when at the end of the day, he paid us! I'd had no idea. I was the only one who hadn't realized or given a thought to getting paid for having such a good time.

They haven't used them in years, but you might still see one around some places. The big burners at sawmills. I remember different times seeing them in operation, the sun showing orange through the thick brown smoke. It gave an eerie look to everything around. It was neat. When concerned folks wanted to pass a law against burning the scrap from the milling process, the owners said it would put them out of business, cost way too much, and make the price of lumber go up. Instead, it started a whole new industry for the mills, selling wood chips for landscaping. I'm thinking that could happen with $12.oo-a-gallon gas, too. Something better will come out of it. Cut the exhaust that's killing us and a new system will appear.

There's only two amounts of money a person can have these days: either none at all or not enough.

Good luck, Planet Earth.