Monday, April 28, 2008
Thursday, April 24, 2008
8-Ball in the Corner Pocket
Boston Legal is changing nights. Starting next week it's on Wednesdays at 10 p.m. Past seasons are available on DVD. It's silly, in a deadly-serious way. Like a rattlesnake in a clown suit. Check it out.
Did you see that baseball fan the other day? He caught a fly ball in an upper deck, was waving it around triumphantly, then accidentally dropped it over the edge! (The one that got away.) If he'd hung on to it, he'd never have made it on the news all over the country. Sometimes tragities turn out better than what you'd had planned. Like half way to California on my motorcycle in 1966. Got ripped off for all my money. (Country boy in the big city personified.) But from New Jersey to Memphis, all I'd seen was gas stations and motels. From Memphis to Maywood in Los Angeles County, I had to stop and deal with folks and see things to be able to keep on going. Was way better. (I wasn't so expansive at the time.) I'd figured to make the trip in about eight days. Ha.
Wheels, mortgage or rent, food, utilities, appliances, lawn and pool care, lovers, sitter, clothes, cable, home security, entertainment, running errands, a dog. Each person or couple can do it all themselves, or how about a group marriage of six or eight friends? AIDS and other STDs make swinging or getting some on the side risky--and condoms are such a drag--and so much time is spent working to pay for everything folks need individually. How about getting together and splitting the payments, purchases, and chores, restrict sex to the group, and have more time and money for the fun stuff? But it's gotta be tighter than just roommates, it won't work without the open sex. (And when demanding a group marriage license, it'll make those same-sex requests seem tame.) What could such a lifestyle be called?
Now let's see if I've got this right. A growth-based economy on a finite planet. Who could predict reaching limits? Already food riots are starting in "developing" countries with the stability of some governments even being threatened. And in the U.S. food prices are rising like the price of weed did when they started the war on drugs and some stores are even rationing already. Free world-wide birth control would certainly help the planet, but one of those kids might grow up and send a dollar to the church, so the eternal-life pushers will certainly never allow that to happen. I just heard the salmon failed to show up to spawn in many streams in the West this year. Holes in the ozone. Dead sections discovered in the oceans. But TV commercials continue. Spend, spend, spend. Use, use, use. Ya gotta love it.
I have really mixed emotions about writing this blog. I'm just a single guy who's pretty much bummed around my whole life. (Judge Joe Brown would hate me.) I know there are hard-working folks out there struggling to raise kids and put them through school and all. Folks with medical problems and people needing care. Everybody can't just party away. But can't there be some kind of effort towards learning to enjoy the hours we're alive, regardless of the details? Why can't we help ourselves by using less and at the same time have a better time? LIke how about some kind of exchange stores? Trade stuff instead of everybody buying new everything. I know I embarrass myself with some of the things I say, and some of my suggestions sound corny, even to me, but if I can ruin just one life--stop one person from simply working his or her life away only to survive and avoid criticism--then it'll be worth it. And that'll be several tons less garbage in their lifetime to deal with at the same time. Win/win as they say.
Did you see that baseball fan the other day? He caught a fly ball in an upper deck, was waving it around triumphantly, then accidentally dropped it over the edge! (The one that got away.) If he'd hung on to it, he'd never have made it on the news all over the country. Sometimes tragities turn out better than what you'd had planned. Like half way to California on my motorcycle in 1966. Got ripped off for all my money. (Country boy in the big city personified.) But from New Jersey to Memphis, all I'd seen was gas stations and motels. From Memphis to Maywood in Los Angeles County, I had to stop and deal with folks and see things to be able to keep on going. Was way better. (I wasn't so expansive at the time.) I'd figured to make the trip in about eight days. Ha.
Wheels, mortgage or rent, food, utilities, appliances, lawn and pool care, lovers, sitter, clothes, cable, home security, entertainment, running errands, a dog. Each person or couple can do it all themselves, or how about a group marriage of six or eight friends? AIDS and other STDs make swinging or getting some on the side risky--and condoms are such a drag--and so much time is spent working to pay for everything folks need individually. How about getting together and splitting the payments, purchases, and chores, restrict sex to the group, and have more time and money for the fun stuff? But it's gotta be tighter than just roommates, it won't work without the open sex. (And when demanding a group marriage license, it'll make those same-sex requests seem tame.) What could such a lifestyle be called?
Now let's see if I've got this right. A growth-based economy on a finite planet. Who could predict reaching limits? Already food riots are starting in "developing" countries with the stability of some governments even being threatened. And in the U.S. food prices are rising like the price of weed did when they started the war on drugs and some stores are even rationing already. Free world-wide birth control would certainly help the planet, but one of those kids might grow up and send a dollar to the church, so the eternal-life pushers will certainly never allow that to happen. I just heard the salmon failed to show up to spawn in many streams in the West this year. Holes in the ozone. Dead sections discovered in the oceans. But TV commercials continue. Spend, spend, spend. Use, use, use. Ya gotta love it.
I have really mixed emotions about writing this blog. I'm just a single guy who's pretty much bummed around my whole life. (Judge Joe Brown would hate me.) I know there are hard-working folks out there struggling to raise kids and put them through school and all. Folks with medical problems and people needing care. Everybody can't just party away. But can't there be some kind of effort towards learning to enjoy the hours we're alive, regardless of the details? Why can't we help ourselves by using less and at the same time have a better time? LIke how about some kind of exchange stores? Trade stuff instead of everybody buying new everything. I know I embarrass myself with some of the things I say, and some of my suggestions sound corny, even to me, but if I can ruin just one life--stop one person from simply working his or her life away only to survive and avoid criticism--then it'll be worth it. And that'll be several tons less garbage in their lifetime to deal with at the same time. Win/win as they say.
Tuesday, April 22, 2008
Danica Patrick Fan Club
I crossed the border into Canada on Friday the 13th, full moon, early summer of 1973. I told the border guards that I was going up for the weekend. Carrying my suitcase and sleeping bag, I searched in vain for the poor part of Vancouver. I heard of a youth hostel and spent a couple nights there. I was given a folder showing all the hostels in all the cities and towns across the country. The fee was fifty-cents per night and you got dinner and breakfast for another fifty-cents. My $200.oo American would go far as I searched for a cool town in which to spend my first winter north of the border.
It was a summer of exploration, pool, and partyin'. East to Hope--which I later recognized in the first Rambo movie--then I thumbed north up to Williams Lake. I cut west and traveled half way on a dirt road that went 300-miles to the coast and a hundred years back in time. I went dancing in Trail and Nelson, skinny-dippin' with the locals on the lake at Nakusp, bounced up and down the twisty Slocan Valley road a few times to meet people, partied for a week at the Kelowna Regatta, and sat with a bunch of folks at the bar in Vernon, where two marijuana growers were taking a break from their crop and selling big bags of leaf for $10.oo each, every other sale going for the next forty (40!) 25-cent glasses of beer for the group. This was at the height of the sexual revolution, and pretty girls who seemed to really like longhaired guys from California were waiting at every hostel, bar, and swimming hole. After deciding where I was gonna stay for the winter, I hitchhiked east across Alberta into Saskatchewan, and visited with a young couple and their two-year-old son I'd met in Vancouver. Then I went back to Vernon, B.C., and worked the winter at a rickety old sawmill on an Indian Reserve (Reservation) right on the very north end of 90-mile-long Okanagan Lake. At one point, a girlfriend and I advertised in the Vancouver Sunday Newspaper (which came out on Saturdays up there) for a cabin to caretake. We were offered a sturdy one on 200 mountain acres where the owner just wanted somebody living there to keep an eye on things, and we spent fifteen months living there, having to hitchhike home with supplies, so we got to know lots of the locals from surrounding towns. No electricity, carry the water, wood stove, shotguns. (I have picture slides of the whole time.) Anyway, I finally returned to The States in November of 1976, three-and-a-half years after going up.
After seventeen months in the Orange County Jail for being a hippie--right across from Timothy Leary for a while, also in for weed--my first winter on the road with no place to go was 1970-71. After a quick trip up from Los Angeles to the friendly little college town of Cotati in Sonoma County looking for a friend who turned out to be dead from a car wreck, I basically just hitchhiked up and down the Pacific Coast Highway between Long Beach and San Clemente making up for lost time. Thumbing up to Big Sur for Easter Week of '71, I met some folks heading to a hot springs in the mountains behind Santa Barbara and ended up spending Easter vacation with them. Visiting their house back in Long Beach, I met a girl they knew just out from Key West, and in June she and I took off thumbing north, and ended up spending five months camping in a pup tent at a nude swimming hole on the river at hippie-famous Takilma, Oregon. (Half the stores in the nearest town, Cave Junction, 12 miles away, sported signs: "We do not solicit hippie patronage.") Then up Highway 199, another forty miles or so, an easy thumb, was the much bigger Grants Pass (civilization) and I-5.
When I got back from Canada, I spent most of the next fifteen years thumbing back and forth between Portland and Santa Cruz, just seeing what presented itself, with an occasional trip to Los Angeles to be in an adult feature film. But with AIDS in the world, and my body (not me) getting older, in 1992, I decided to get off the road. I bought a one-way bus ticket from San Francisco to Nashville, where I spent the next three years, right downtown. Great place, lots of work and good people, but I couldn't handle the summer weather. In 1995, I took the bus back to California, via Portland.
Anyway, my point is, getting the economy back on track is not the answer. It doesn't take much to have a really good time. I've seen lots of lifestyles, hundreds of living situations, and talked with thousands of people. Lowering gas prices and getting the economy going again will only hasten our demise, not make anybody better off. Share the work, free up your time and have more fun. Relax. Enjoy. Have a toke. Smell the microwave popcorn.
Danica, I even love your commercials!
It was a summer of exploration, pool, and partyin'. East to Hope--which I later recognized in the first Rambo movie--then I thumbed north up to Williams Lake. I cut west and traveled half way on a dirt road that went 300-miles to the coast and a hundred years back in time. I went dancing in Trail and Nelson, skinny-dippin' with the locals on the lake at Nakusp, bounced up and down the twisty Slocan Valley road a few times to meet people, partied for a week at the Kelowna Regatta, and sat with a bunch of folks at the bar in Vernon, where two marijuana growers were taking a break from their crop and selling big bags of leaf for $10.oo each, every other sale going for the next forty (40!) 25-cent glasses of beer for the group. This was at the height of the sexual revolution, and pretty girls who seemed to really like longhaired guys from California were waiting at every hostel, bar, and swimming hole. After deciding where I was gonna stay for the winter, I hitchhiked east across Alberta into Saskatchewan, and visited with a young couple and their two-year-old son I'd met in Vancouver. Then I went back to Vernon, B.C., and worked the winter at a rickety old sawmill on an Indian Reserve (Reservation) right on the very north end of 90-mile-long Okanagan Lake. At one point, a girlfriend and I advertised in the Vancouver Sunday Newspaper (which came out on Saturdays up there) for a cabin to caretake. We were offered a sturdy one on 200 mountain acres where the owner just wanted somebody living there to keep an eye on things, and we spent fifteen months living there, having to hitchhike home with supplies, so we got to know lots of the locals from surrounding towns. No electricity, carry the water, wood stove, shotguns. (I have picture slides of the whole time.) Anyway, I finally returned to The States in November of 1976, three-and-a-half years after going up.
After seventeen months in the Orange County Jail for being a hippie--right across from Timothy Leary for a while, also in for weed--my first winter on the road with no place to go was 1970-71. After a quick trip up from Los Angeles to the friendly little college town of Cotati in Sonoma County looking for a friend who turned out to be dead from a car wreck, I basically just hitchhiked up and down the Pacific Coast Highway between Long Beach and San Clemente making up for lost time. Thumbing up to Big Sur for Easter Week of '71, I met some folks heading to a hot springs in the mountains behind Santa Barbara and ended up spending Easter vacation with them. Visiting their house back in Long Beach, I met a girl they knew just out from Key West, and in June she and I took off thumbing north, and ended up spending five months camping in a pup tent at a nude swimming hole on the river at hippie-famous Takilma, Oregon. (Half the stores in the nearest town, Cave Junction, 12 miles away, sported signs: "We do not solicit hippie patronage.") Then up Highway 199, another forty miles or so, an easy thumb, was the much bigger Grants Pass (civilization) and I-5.
When I got back from Canada, I spent most of the next fifteen years thumbing back and forth between Portland and Santa Cruz, just seeing what presented itself, with an occasional trip to Los Angeles to be in an adult feature film. But with AIDS in the world, and my body (not me) getting older, in 1992, I decided to get off the road. I bought a one-way bus ticket from San Francisco to Nashville, where I spent the next three years, right downtown. Great place, lots of work and good people, but I couldn't handle the summer weather. In 1995, I took the bus back to California, via Portland.
Anyway, my point is, getting the economy back on track is not the answer. It doesn't take much to have a really good time. I've seen lots of lifestyles, hundreds of living situations, and talked with thousands of people. Lowering gas prices and getting the economy going again will only hasten our demise, not make anybody better off. Share the work, free up your time and have more fun. Relax. Enjoy. Have a toke. Smell the microwave popcorn.
Danica, I even love your commercials!
Saturday, April 19, 2008
Plant Your Seeds
It was around Christmas time in Nashville in the early 1990s. I was a pot scrubber in a meat-and-three restaurant and would spend much of my time at work thinking about that hot singer, Mariah Carey. I had taken a bus to a mall all the way out at the end of the line to get a poster of her for my room, and I'd hung a little picture clipped from a newspaper record-store ad of her wearing a Santa hat over my sinks. And now she's beaten Elvis for the most #1 hits by a solo artist. She did me proud.
Hardly a week goes by that some rich and famous person younger than me doesn't die. (I'm sixty-two.) I always go, "Whoa!", and think how glad I am that I didn't spend my whole life just working and saving for my old age. Financially secure but dead doesn't make it for me. It's said there are only two amounts of money a person can have: either none at all or not enough. (Just look at Victor Newman.) There are no school classes in joy, contentment, or peace of mind. Pity. Happy people don't need so much. Life is easier.
Why in the world does God's representative on Earth need so much security protection from mere mortals? Actually, I know and so do you. It's like why do they have to advertise for the psychics convention. Why do churches need lightning rods. Sorry, I try to only goof on all religions at once, as a whole, but this guy visiting now is in the news so much this week, and the outfits and pomp are so totally over the top, I just can't help it.
Tonight on the news there was also a story about the growing number of super-rich people and the long waits they're having to endure for fancy cars and yachts. Like one guy they figured makes as much a year as eighty-one thousand regular folks. A couple weeks ago I saw a show about thousands-a-night hotel suites and $220.oo SHOTS of whiskey and such. Two thoughts: as they no longer need workers and the middle class, those disenfranchised masses will get increasingly desperate, so the rich folks will become self-imposed prisoners if they want to survive. And two: even people with lots of zeros on their bank statements need air and water and a place to stand. I'd say it'd make a bit more sense to start glamorizing how little a person can get by on, how more evenly wealth can be spread, work toward things like birth control and creating jobs restoring forests and wetlands, encourage dancing and crafts, promote backyard vegetable gardens, use fast-growing hemp wherever possible for fiber to make paper, fabrics, and home construction products while a few trees grow back. Have contests to come up with new ways to help repair the planet. Only make products that are sturdy and have interchangeable parts. But all we hear about is getting the economy going again and bringing down the price of gas. Let's get back to doing the things that are causing all the problems, yeah! More profits for the geezers.
I heard somebody say on the radio today: "The jet stream is moving farther north because of climate change. Only about a mile and a quarter a year; eighteen inches a day. No problem for the squirrels, but rough on the oak trees." Ha-ha. And they're thinking maybe it's cell phones causing all the bees to disappear. (Can ya hear me now?) "Hey, shut up, we don't need farms. We've got grocery stores."
I spent twenty-two years hitchhiking up and down the West Coast, partying--1970 through 1992--and it was great. For occasional work as needed, I used to hang hand-written signs on bulletin boards seeking "informal live-in work". Once in a while when I could afford it, I'd run an ad in SF Weekly or the Bay Guardian free weekly newspapers. And I did okay. But now look at the possibilities with the Internet. Wowzers, limitless connection potential. For anything. And the exchange of ideas and happenings can happen across national borders and even oceans, instantly and free. (The scenes from the most recent crackdown in Tibet would never have gotten out to the world before.) Boggles the mind of this old road dog, let me tell ya. Us peons are no longer at the mercy of governments and their news organizations. We just might stand a chance. What do YOU think?
Hardly a week goes by that some rich and famous person younger than me doesn't die. (I'm sixty-two.) I always go, "Whoa!", and think how glad I am that I didn't spend my whole life just working and saving for my old age. Financially secure but dead doesn't make it for me. It's said there are only two amounts of money a person can have: either none at all or not enough. (Just look at Victor Newman.) There are no school classes in joy, contentment, or peace of mind. Pity. Happy people don't need so much. Life is easier.
Why in the world does God's representative on Earth need so much security protection from mere mortals? Actually, I know and so do you. It's like why do they have to advertise for the psychics convention. Why do churches need lightning rods. Sorry, I try to only goof on all religions at once, as a whole, but this guy visiting now is in the news so much this week, and the outfits and pomp are so totally over the top, I just can't help it.
Tonight on the news there was also a story about the growing number of super-rich people and the long waits they're having to endure for fancy cars and yachts. Like one guy they figured makes as much a year as eighty-one thousand regular folks. A couple weeks ago I saw a show about thousands-a-night hotel suites and $220.oo SHOTS of whiskey and such. Two thoughts: as they no longer need workers and the middle class, those disenfranchised masses will get increasingly desperate, so the rich folks will become self-imposed prisoners if they want to survive. And two: even people with lots of zeros on their bank statements need air and water and a place to stand. I'd say it'd make a bit more sense to start glamorizing how little a person can get by on, how more evenly wealth can be spread, work toward things like birth control and creating jobs restoring forests and wetlands, encourage dancing and crafts, promote backyard vegetable gardens, use fast-growing hemp wherever possible for fiber to make paper, fabrics, and home construction products while a few trees grow back. Have contests to come up with new ways to help repair the planet. Only make products that are sturdy and have interchangeable parts. But all we hear about is getting the economy going again and bringing down the price of gas. Let's get back to doing the things that are causing all the problems, yeah! More profits for the geezers.
I heard somebody say on the radio today: "The jet stream is moving farther north because of climate change. Only about a mile and a quarter a year; eighteen inches a day. No problem for the squirrels, but rough on the oak trees." Ha-ha. And they're thinking maybe it's cell phones causing all the bees to disappear. (Can ya hear me now?) "Hey, shut up, we don't need farms. We've got grocery stores."
I spent twenty-two years hitchhiking up and down the West Coast, partying--1970 through 1992--and it was great. For occasional work as needed, I used to hang hand-written signs on bulletin boards seeking "informal live-in work". Once in a while when I could afford it, I'd run an ad in SF Weekly or the Bay Guardian free weekly newspapers. And I did okay. But now look at the possibilities with the Internet. Wowzers, limitless connection potential. For anything. And the exchange of ideas and happenings can happen across national borders and even oceans, instantly and free. (The scenes from the most recent crackdown in Tibet would never have gotten out to the world before.) Boggles the mind of this old road dog, let me tell ya. Us peons are no longer at the mercy of governments and their news organizations. We just might stand a chance. What do YOU think?
Thursday, April 17, 2008
Lights and Sirens
Today was a big day for screamers here in L.A. All the way from my residential hotel to the Central Library and back, a record number of shirtless yellers were open for business. An angry day. Sure, there're a few howlers whenever I walk around anywhere downtown, but today was special. Made me homesick for Herb Caen's San Francisco, where normals were turned back at the city limits if they didn't have a return ticket home. Talking about the City by the Bay on this day when the Pope is in the U.S., I was in S.F. when the last Pope was there. The authorities' dire warnings of complete Bay Area gridlock for the visit worked, and nobody showed up. I crossed the Golden Gate Bridge while the Pontiff was right there checking it out, and we whizzed right across, only slowed by the drivers wondering at all the cops on the walkway for no apparent reason. Pictures in the newspapers and on TV showed the Popemobile driving down empty streets, just a normal day. The police said that if their prediction of the mother of all traffic jams failed to materialize, then they'd done their job. Makes sense, crowd control is easier without the crowd.
Leno with his "Headlines" the other night had a quote from some high school gal from one of those newspaper trips where people answer the question of the day. Asked about texting or talking on her cell phone while behind the wheel, she said, "Sure, there's nothing else to do while you're driving."
And today the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that lethal injection is not cruel and unusual punishment. Remember in Lonesome Dove when Woodrow and Gus, the two retired Texas Rangers, were discussing whether to move from South Texas to Montana? A deciding factor was, "Well, we might as well move north. We hung all the interesting folks around here." I worked briefly with a guy whose mother had been executed by the state back in the early 1950s; yikes. I remember a video of a convicted mass-murderer doing life without parole, doing a pile of cocaine and having sex in his cell. He'd said if people saw how much fun he was having in prison, maybe they'd kick him out. Now I see on the news that there is a brain-scan machine that can tell if you're telling the truth or not, 100%, but I don't know if they'd let it count in court. Even with all the wrongly-convicted people getting released after decades behind bars after witnesses change their stories, or it's learned that the cops tampered with evidence, and especially now with DNA proving hundreds of people didn't do the deed, so we know innocent people have been put to death, yet capital punishment is still a touchy subject. Killing somebody for doing a bad thing: killing somebody. Hmmm.......
The library finally put out their computer class schedule for the next quarter. Having taken library computer classes up in Portland in '01 for my own start on the Internet, I always carry a few brochures with me to give to anybody I run into who says they don't go online, and I scatter them around my hotel for people to discover. Well, after years of producing hard-paper four-color schedules, a sudden city budget crunch has caused the city to cut back, and this latest schedule is simply printed on both sides of a piece of colored paper. It doesn't change giving the public the information, it simply saves on printing fees and paper. How many other of our daily use/spending on all levels could be cut with no effect on the actual purpose? Like how about the same concept with cars and trucks? Functional, basic, with interchangeable parts? Do we really need new models every year with personal climate control for each individual passenger and such? Forty years ago we might have gotten away with phasing in reductions in waste and pollution, but now it's kinda urgent, wouldn't you say? Families and households are being forced to deal with such limits, while for years many folks have done it on their own. It doesn't change anything really except cut waste and added debt. And the whole world has to see a leveling of standard of living for it to work. But I don't think international corporations and fat cats will let it happen, so we're done for I'm afraid. Oh well. We all better hope I'm wrong.
Leno with his "Headlines" the other night had a quote from some high school gal from one of those newspaper trips where people answer the question of the day. Asked about texting or talking on her cell phone while behind the wheel, she said, "Sure, there's nothing else to do while you're driving."
And today the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that lethal injection is not cruel and unusual punishment. Remember in Lonesome Dove when Woodrow and Gus, the two retired Texas Rangers, were discussing whether to move from South Texas to Montana? A deciding factor was, "Well, we might as well move north. We hung all the interesting folks around here." I worked briefly with a guy whose mother had been executed by the state back in the early 1950s; yikes. I remember a video of a convicted mass-murderer doing life without parole, doing a pile of cocaine and having sex in his cell. He'd said if people saw how much fun he was having in prison, maybe they'd kick him out. Now I see on the news that there is a brain-scan machine that can tell if you're telling the truth or not, 100%, but I don't know if they'd let it count in court. Even with all the wrongly-convicted people getting released after decades behind bars after witnesses change their stories, or it's learned that the cops tampered with evidence, and especially now with DNA proving hundreds of people didn't do the deed, so we know innocent people have been put to death, yet capital punishment is still a touchy subject. Killing somebody for doing a bad thing: killing somebody. Hmmm.......
The library finally put out their computer class schedule for the next quarter. Having taken library computer classes up in Portland in '01 for my own start on the Internet, I always carry a few brochures with me to give to anybody I run into who says they don't go online, and I scatter them around my hotel for people to discover. Well, after years of producing hard-paper four-color schedules, a sudden city budget crunch has caused the city to cut back, and this latest schedule is simply printed on both sides of a piece of colored paper. It doesn't change giving the public the information, it simply saves on printing fees and paper. How many other of our daily use/spending on all levels could be cut with no effect on the actual purpose? Like how about the same concept with cars and trucks? Functional, basic, with interchangeable parts? Do we really need new models every year with personal climate control for each individual passenger and such? Forty years ago we might have gotten away with phasing in reductions in waste and pollution, but now it's kinda urgent, wouldn't you say? Families and households are being forced to deal with such limits, while for years many folks have done it on their own. It doesn't change anything really except cut waste and added debt. And the whole world has to see a leveling of standard of living for it to work. But I don't think international corporations and fat cats will let it happen, so we're done for I'm afraid. Oh well. We all better hope I'm wrong.
Sunday, April 13, 2008
Is This The Last Generation?
Thumbing south way up north in California. Nothing but trees for miles around. Hardly any traffic. Dude driving is moving right along, the road not needing a lot of attention. We're sailing uphill on a warm, sunny Highway 101, when a couple "this lane ends" signs flash by. A slow-moving truck in the middle lane appears on a long, slow turn to the right as we continue to climb. My driver casually cuts over to the fast lane to pass the big semi. I just catch a glimpse of an angled barrier blocking the fast lane as we move into the shadow of the big rig. "This lane ends," I say. "Yeah." "I mean it ends right ahead." "Okay." "HIT THE BRAKES NOW!!!!!" I scream, and dude just starts to hit them when HE sees the barricade, and he mashes down and the tires burn as we start to slide. We're almost stopped when we hit the barricade and ricochet off it into the next lane, just clipping the back tire of the trailer. The truck never even stopped, but we sure took a break and got out for a while, right there. If we'd kept going at that speed and hit the barricade, we'd have been flung right under the heavy trailer right about in front of the back wheels.
From the start, this blog is my way of screaming "Hit the brakes!" about the planet. There are more and more other folks screaming it too, but the drivers are still going, "Yeah, yeah, okay," but not really slowing down. Most of the claims sound corny and the solutions lame and old-fashioned, but cutting the amount of plastic in small water bottles, and calling everything "green" like they did for a while with "natural", isn't going to save any planets. I don't think it's gonna happen, we're all too spoiled, but it's kinda like McMurphy in Cuckoo's Nest, betting everybody that he could lift the big tub-room control panel that was connected with pipes and bolted to the floor. He huffed and he puffed, he strained and lifted, his muscles and veins bulged, but he couldn't budge it. After he admitted defeat and was paying everybody off and they were laughing at him, he said, "Well, at least I tried." Saving the planet isn't being cool like having lots of electronics, but there ain't no cell phones or video games on a dead planet. No Internet, music, sports, movies, skateboards, favorite meals, fancy clothes, hot cars, puppies, sex, bongs, or beer. It's too late for me to lose personally, I had no ties and lived a lifetime of Saturdays and I'm already older than a lot of people ever get. I'd just like to see life go on, just on general principles. It'd be nice.
In early 1969, I went from Southern California about 400 miles north to San Jose with a new girlfriend (Oh, Gerri) for a music festival. (This was months before Woodstock.) When we got up there, we learned there were no tickets available, but that an alternative free concert was being held nearby. So that's where we went. The bands would play the pay concert, then come--sometimes at 3 or 4 a.m.--and play the free one. There were fights and arrests at the pay concert, not a bit of violence at the free one except when a Hell's Angel went up on stage and flung a member of the Jefferson Airplane off the stage and then announced over the microphone, "Happy Birthday, [somebody]." Late the second night there was an almost fight near us. A guy started the ol' barroom-attitude challenge, when his friend said, "Hey, man. These people just won't go for that action around here," and the rowdy guy seemed to realize that it was true, and just stopped. It's the attitude needed to stop all the for-profit nonsense that's killing us. They gotta realize that people just will no longer stand for it.
Eat the rich. I said that to a woman I was working for one time, and she said, "Well maybe somebody just having a sleeping bag is enough for some folks to think that person is rich." Owning a sleeping bag, that shut me up. But today as I type, there are already reports of food riots starting in the poorer countries. (Due to climate change, using grains for fuel, and rising prices, according to reports.) And it's just the beginning. I predict it won't be long in this country before vehicles will have to form a caravan for safety to travel isolated stretches of Interstate highways; lone vehicles will be run off the road and the people robbed. Some people will commit crimes to go to jail to be fed. Home invasions are already happening, but it'll soon be impossible to live in a lone house anywhere in the country with groups of desperate folks wandering around just looking to survive. Group grab-and-run robberies at grocery stores will be happening. All people have a thing about eating, whether the super wealthy feel they got all the riches to themselves now and don't need the rest of us anymore or not. LookOut!
A sci-fi/fantasy series I really like is the Silistra Series by Janet E. Morris. On her planet, after a major world war caused generations to live underground until the planet surface became inhabitable again, the survivors and their descendants devised a new social order. They concentrated on improving the power of their minds, and machines and computers were no longer allowed anywhere on their planet. I don't have these stories listed under "books" on my MySpace profile, but I've long had the heroine, Estri, as one of my heroes, and I used her name for a character in a near-future adventure novel I wrote back in the 1990s. (Unpublished.) "The High Couch of Silistra." "The Golden Sword." "Wind from the Abyss." "The Carnelian Throne." And then she rewrote the first book and called it, "Returning Creation." The sex is a bit brutal for my taste, but it's a harsh world they live on, like Earth maybe a thousand years ago.
And as I write on this Sunday the 13th of April, there's a big to-do about Jimmy Carter planning to visit Hamas, and the candidates are squabbling over if they should or shouldn't meet with this or that world leader. I was working off-and-on in a typical, very small, logging and pot growing town in Northern California. One night I was at a friends cabin when a huge man with casts on both his legs came bursting through the door, very drunk, a short-necked bottle of Bud in hand, and he saw long-haired me standing there with a can of Bud in hand, and he hobbled straight at me, got in my face, and said, "I go out to the reservation and fight! What do YOU do?" Seems he'd been falling a tree and it'd kicked back on him breaking both legs. I'd been around and through the town for many years, but never saw this guy before. Suddenly he was everywhere, always snarling at me and making threats. One day I was thumbing south for a trip to civilization, standing alongside the two-lane blacktop road, when he comes driving his big old boat of a car going into town. He swerves over towards me like he's going to hit me, then just stays in the south lane and with a roaring laugh lobs an empty beer bottle at me. This had to stop. Next time I was in town, I found out he lived in a trailer on a hillside up a dirt road, overlooking the valley. I bought a six-pack of short-necked Budweiser, and on Sunday afternoon when the Forty-Niners were playing, I drove up to his place in a borrowed truck. I knocked on his door, and when he opened it I held up the six-pack and told him I was here to watch the game with him. Turned out there was another guy there who I knew a bit, and we each drank two beers as I sat in Big Man's living room and watched one quarter of the game. Then I said I had to get back to town and left. Live or die, I couldn't live in fear all the time. Sucker never liked me still after that, but I didn't have to worry about running into him anymore, he'd had his shot. Especially with the state of the planet, it's about time these tit-for-tat petty world leaders we all live under get over their silly differences and learn to deal with each other, like it or not. And if getting face to face and bringing things to a head is what it takes, I say do it.
Once people start to get along some, there are lots of ways to enjoy life and have fun without ruining the planet to do it. Details upon request.
From the start, this blog is my way of screaming "Hit the brakes!" about the planet. There are more and more other folks screaming it too, but the drivers are still going, "Yeah, yeah, okay," but not really slowing down. Most of the claims sound corny and the solutions lame and old-fashioned, but cutting the amount of plastic in small water bottles, and calling everything "green" like they did for a while with "natural", isn't going to save any planets. I don't think it's gonna happen, we're all too spoiled, but it's kinda like McMurphy in Cuckoo's Nest, betting everybody that he could lift the big tub-room control panel that was connected with pipes and bolted to the floor. He huffed and he puffed, he strained and lifted, his muscles and veins bulged, but he couldn't budge it. After he admitted defeat and was paying everybody off and they were laughing at him, he said, "Well, at least I tried." Saving the planet isn't being cool like having lots of electronics, but there ain't no cell phones or video games on a dead planet. No Internet, music, sports, movies, skateboards, favorite meals, fancy clothes, hot cars, puppies, sex, bongs, or beer. It's too late for me to lose personally, I had no ties and lived a lifetime of Saturdays and I'm already older than a lot of people ever get. I'd just like to see life go on, just on general principles. It'd be nice.
In early 1969, I went from Southern California about 400 miles north to San Jose with a new girlfriend (Oh, Gerri) for a music festival. (This was months before Woodstock.) When we got up there, we learned there were no tickets available, but that an alternative free concert was being held nearby. So that's where we went. The bands would play the pay concert, then come--sometimes at 3 or 4 a.m.--and play the free one. There were fights and arrests at the pay concert, not a bit of violence at the free one except when a Hell's Angel went up on stage and flung a member of the Jefferson Airplane off the stage and then announced over the microphone, "Happy Birthday, [somebody]." Late the second night there was an almost fight near us. A guy started the ol' barroom-attitude challenge, when his friend said, "Hey, man. These people just won't go for that action around here," and the rowdy guy seemed to realize that it was true, and just stopped. It's the attitude needed to stop all the for-profit nonsense that's killing us. They gotta realize that people just will no longer stand for it.
Eat the rich. I said that to a woman I was working for one time, and she said, "Well maybe somebody just having a sleeping bag is enough for some folks to think that person is rich." Owning a sleeping bag, that shut me up. But today as I type, there are already reports of food riots starting in the poorer countries. (Due to climate change, using grains for fuel, and rising prices, according to reports.) And it's just the beginning. I predict it won't be long in this country before vehicles will have to form a caravan for safety to travel isolated stretches of Interstate highways; lone vehicles will be run off the road and the people robbed. Some people will commit crimes to go to jail to be fed. Home invasions are already happening, but it'll soon be impossible to live in a lone house anywhere in the country with groups of desperate folks wandering around just looking to survive. Group grab-and-run robberies at grocery stores will be happening. All people have a thing about eating, whether the super wealthy feel they got all the riches to themselves now and don't need the rest of us anymore or not. LookOut!
A sci-fi/fantasy series I really like is the Silistra Series by Janet E. Morris. On her planet, after a major world war caused generations to live underground until the planet surface became inhabitable again, the survivors and their descendants devised a new social order. They concentrated on improving the power of their minds, and machines and computers were no longer allowed anywhere on their planet. I don't have these stories listed under "books" on my MySpace profile, but I've long had the heroine, Estri, as one of my heroes, and I used her name for a character in a near-future adventure novel I wrote back in the 1990s. (Unpublished.) "The High Couch of Silistra." "The Golden Sword." "Wind from the Abyss." "The Carnelian Throne." And then she rewrote the first book and called it, "Returning Creation." The sex is a bit brutal for my taste, but it's a harsh world they live on, like Earth maybe a thousand years ago.
And as I write on this Sunday the 13th of April, there's a big to-do about Jimmy Carter planning to visit Hamas, and the candidates are squabbling over if they should or shouldn't meet with this or that world leader. I was working off-and-on in a typical, very small, logging and pot growing town in Northern California. One night I was at a friends cabin when a huge man with casts on both his legs came bursting through the door, very drunk, a short-necked bottle of Bud in hand, and he saw long-haired me standing there with a can of Bud in hand, and he hobbled straight at me, got in my face, and said, "I go out to the reservation and fight! What do YOU do?" Seems he'd been falling a tree and it'd kicked back on him breaking both legs. I'd been around and through the town for many years, but never saw this guy before. Suddenly he was everywhere, always snarling at me and making threats. One day I was thumbing south for a trip to civilization, standing alongside the two-lane blacktop road, when he comes driving his big old boat of a car going into town. He swerves over towards me like he's going to hit me, then just stays in the south lane and with a roaring laugh lobs an empty beer bottle at me. This had to stop. Next time I was in town, I found out he lived in a trailer on a hillside up a dirt road, overlooking the valley. I bought a six-pack of short-necked Budweiser, and on Sunday afternoon when the Forty-Niners were playing, I drove up to his place in a borrowed truck. I knocked on his door, and when he opened it I held up the six-pack and told him I was here to watch the game with him. Turned out there was another guy there who I knew a bit, and we each drank two beers as I sat in Big Man's living room and watched one quarter of the game. Then I said I had to get back to town and left. Live or die, I couldn't live in fear all the time. Sucker never liked me still after that, but I didn't have to worry about running into him anymore, he'd had his shot. Especially with the state of the planet, it's about time these tit-for-tat petty world leaders we all live under get over their silly differences and learn to deal with each other, like it or not. And if getting face to face and bringing things to a head is what it takes, I say do it.
Once people start to get along some, there are lots of ways to enjoy life and have fun without ruining the planet to do it. Details upon request.
Wednesday, April 9, 2008
God Bless This End Of The Boat
The 30th Anniversary of the Summer of Love. 1967-1997. San Francisco. Golden Gate Park. Hoping to run into a long-lost friend or two. I smiled when a saw a guy walking around with a framed 5x7 picture showing how he looked back then. Off to a good start. I was early and nothing was happening on the stage yet. I walked to a fence surrounding a stack of speakers blaring recorded hippie music and stood with my back to it to check out the people walking around. A fat teenager with a "Security" T-shirt charged over and told me I couldn't stand there. As I headed toward the shade of a tree, I saw two uniformed cops walk up behind a bearded man sitting on the grass in front of the stage holding a single can of beer in a paper bag. Protecting and Serving, the cops made the guy empty the beer onto the ground. I went the hell home.
The Olympic Torch is being secreted around San Francisco today in an attempt to avoid human-rights protesters. (The L.A. radio announcer just told the S.F. reporter covering the relay that he won't be getting paid for the day if he can't find where the torch is to do his report.) The frustration of us all from having little choice than to buy products made by prisoners and low-paid labor in China, the torch being sent around the world is a rare opportunity for folks to show their true feelings for the world business/political leaders who insist on dealing with such a harsh government. It ain't ONLY about Tibet. The Olympians themselves seem to think that the best way to protest Chinese Government censorship and brutality is to let The Games go on without incident. Hope those athletes watch what they say in their hotel rooms. They'll probably be okay.
Now that I'm legal and have the Internet, I've been searching out children I lost touch with back in the Seventies. Their poor mothers, after all those years, to have the other side of the story show up. Must be frightening.
What is it about religion and sex? It's almost as bad as politics and sex. Here we go again down in Texas, all those little teeny-boppers and the church elders. Like since 1950, the fourteen-thousand isolated instances of alter boys getting nailed by their priests. And that guy a few years ago, David something, who wouldn't allow any of the women in his church to have sex with anyone except him; not even wives with their husbands. Back a few years ago when Jimmy and Jim both got caught and lost their TV ministries, they both tried a second shot, Jimmy cried famously and apologized all over the Penthouse spread of his woman, and Jim told his new TV audience during a standard donation-for-salvation plea that if he and his wife only had a money machine, all their problems would be solved. (Both of these guys had had millions of brilliant followers.) I remember a very pretty very religious girl down in Orange County. ("The OC.") (Cool.) She was spending nights with a friend of mine, and explained to me one time that God understood that she truly loved my friend and He was okay with them sleeping together. I never met a single person who God didn't understand, totally agree with, and fully support.
The honey bees are disappearing. Gorillas are dying off. The polar ice caps are melting much faster than ever predicted. The hole in the ozone is old news, but now large dead areas are being discovered in the oceans. Yet our corporate Presidential Candidates all talk of lowering gas prices, building the economy, and continually ask a spirit in the sky to bless just our little part of the planet. Don't forget to vote.
The Olympic Torch is being secreted around San Francisco today in an attempt to avoid human-rights protesters. (The L.A. radio announcer just told the S.F. reporter covering the relay that he won't be getting paid for the day if he can't find where the torch is to do his report.) The frustration of us all from having little choice than to buy products made by prisoners and low-paid labor in China, the torch being sent around the world is a rare opportunity for folks to show their true feelings for the world business/political leaders who insist on dealing with such a harsh government. It ain't ONLY about Tibet. The Olympians themselves seem to think that the best way to protest Chinese Government censorship and brutality is to let The Games go on without incident. Hope those athletes watch what they say in their hotel rooms. They'll probably be okay.
Now that I'm legal and have the Internet, I've been searching out children I lost touch with back in the Seventies. Their poor mothers, after all those years, to have the other side of the story show up. Must be frightening.
What is it about religion and sex? It's almost as bad as politics and sex. Here we go again down in Texas, all those little teeny-boppers and the church elders. Like since 1950, the fourteen-thousand isolated instances of alter boys getting nailed by their priests. And that guy a few years ago, David something, who wouldn't allow any of the women in his church to have sex with anyone except him; not even wives with their husbands. Back a few years ago when Jimmy and Jim both got caught and lost their TV ministries, they both tried a second shot, Jimmy cried famously and apologized all over the Penthouse spread of his woman, and Jim told his new TV audience during a standard donation-for-salvation plea that if he and his wife only had a money machine, all their problems would be solved. (Both of these guys had had millions of brilliant followers.) I remember a very pretty very religious girl down in Orange County. ("The OC.") (Cool.) She was spending nights with a friend of mine, and explained to me one time that God understood that she truly loved my friend and He was okay with them sleeping together. I never met a single person who God didn't understand, totally agree with, and fully support.
The honey bees are disappearing. Gorillas are dying off. The polar ice caps are melting much faster than ever predicted. The hole in the ozone is old news, but now large dead areas are being discovered in the oceans. Yet our corporate Presidential Candidates all talk of lowering gas prices, building the economy, and continually ask a spirit in the sky to bless just our little part of the planet. Don't forget to vote.
Saturday, April 5, 2008
"I'd Rather Have A Bottle In Front Of Me Than A Frontal Lobotomy."
The Grasshopper and the Ant. "Come winter, they both froze to death."
China.
"Ignorance is bliss." Somebody said that a long time ago. I don't know if it's 'bliss' or not, but it can sure help.
I always thought a great bumper-sticker would be: "I'd Rather Be Driving".
Today as I type is 40 years since Doctor Martin Luther King Jr. was shot. (Notice? They always seem to shoot the friendly ones.) I remember that year well, 1968. (I was 22.) Back then global warming was at least a hundred years away. (Imagine.) Cigarettes were cool, war was patriotic, and bikers, surfers, and hippies were bad news. Ask anybody.
There's a plan here in L.A. to go 40 hours this weekend without a murder in honor of the late MLK. 40 years--40 hours. I get that part of it, but I don't know if it'll be anybody's top thought when one of those "I'm gonna plug his ass" moments strike. Maybe 40 minutes. It's us and them out there. Us and them. Grrrrr . . .
I'm sixty-two years old right now. I have never in my life felt better than standing alongside a road hitchhiking, carrying everything I needed, nobody to answer to, no schedule, just open for whatever might present itself. For over twenty years. You shoulda been there. I always figured that it would take a lifetime to create and develop most all of the situations I got to check out for a while. And not knowing the who or when of your next ride, there's not a lot of time wasted planning ahead, it's all 'right now', just like a dog. Sometimes I'd have a house to paint somewhere next week, or a house-sitting gig, or helping somebody move. But it was always jobs I could see the end of.
I wish women wouldn't wear T-shirts that say anything on the front of them. It's so awkward if you try to read what it says.
" . . . and he was the richest man in our village and therefore the stingiest, for God punishes the stingy by exposing them to the temptations of wealth, just as He protects the generous by keeping them in the safe haven of poverty." Trevanian, 5/2000.
Talking about God, is there any record of Him talking to two people at once? I didn't think so.
Us and them. And they're not like us! LookOut!
China.
"Ignorance is bliss." Somebody said that a long time ago. I don't know if it's 'bliss' or not, but it can sure help.
I always thought a great bumper-sticker would be: "I'd Rather Be Driving".
Today as I type is 40 years since Doctor Martin Luther King Jr. was shot. (Notice? They always seem to shoot the friendly ones.) I remember that year well, 1968. (I was 22.) Back then global warming was at least a hundred years away. (Imagine.) Cigarettes were cool, war was patriotic, and bikers, surfers, and hippies were bad news. Ask anybody.
There's a plan here in L.A. to go 40 hours this weekend without a murder in honor of the late MLK. 40 years--40 hours. I get that part of it, but I don't know if it'll be anybody's top thought when one of those "I'm gonna plug his ass" moments strike. Maybe 40 minutes. It's us and them out there. Us and them. Grrrrr . . .
I'm sixty-two years old right now. I have never in my life felt better than standing alongside a road hitchhiking, carrying everything I needed, nobody to answer to, no schedule, just open for whatever might present itself. For over twenty years. You shoulda been there. I always figured that it would take a lifetime to create and develop most all of the situations I got to check out for a while. And not knowing the who or when of your next ride, there's not a lot of time wasted planning ahead, it's all 'right now', just like a dog. Sometimes I'd have a house to paint somewhere next week, or a house-sitting gig, or helping somebody move. But it was always jobs I could see the end of.
I wish women wouldn't wear T-shirts that say anything on the front of them. It's so awkward if you try to read what it says.
" . . . and he was the richest man in our village and therefore the stingiest, for God punishes the stingy by exposing them to the temptations of wealth, just as He protects the generous by keeping them in the safe haven of poverty." Trevanian, 5/2000.
Talking about God, is there any record of Him talking to two people at once? I didn't think so.
Us and them. And they're not like us! LookOut!
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