Rear-Wheel Drive

Thieves are stealing man-hole covers, copper piping and wires from construction sites and rental units, and catalytic converters from cars for the value of the metal. (The platinum from the smog devices goes for $2500.oo an ounce.) Gas is being taken from cars in rental and sales lots, as well as private vehicles, and fill-up-and-take-off-without-paying is becoming worth the risk. How long before there are rushes by groups of people on the meat, produce, and liquor departments of grocery stores? Time to arm those security guards at your friendly neighborhood market? Just when the super rich thought they owned it all and had cleverly shipped all the jobs they could to Latin America and Asia, totally not needing the average folks anymore. With the jails all full and way more desperate people than there are cops, the homeless are getting restless and starting to wander. Wow, and what's gonna happen when the police themselves can't afford to feed their families? Let "the haves and the have mores" beat back the masses with their stocks and bonds I guess. Stun gun and pepper spray skirmishes at ATMs, stopped-at-red-light smash and grab attacks, waylaid cars and trucks on lonely stretches of freeway, churches sacked for their riches, more home invasions. Darn disenfranchised folks want to eat, too. Not very nice of them.

Who doesn't know that smoking marijuana stimulates the appetite? People getting chemo therapy and who have AIDS suffer from a loss of appetite. Yet medicinal marijuana "needs more study". The self-righteous religious freaks think more of a made-up guy in the sky than their fellow man. Everybody knows that the prohibition exists only because somebody might get some fun out of a toke and that's why relief is denied to suffering people. God hates pleasure. Everybody should suffer like Jesus. We're all born in sin, and have to pay for that sin. What despicable creatures. Sex and drugs are bad. Let those sick people suffer, it's God's will.

I love how it's been a year since the tornado hit Greensburg, Kansas--the Prez even gave a talk there the other day--but everybody seems to have forgotten how all nine churches in the town got leveled by the storm and the only bar was untouched. Imagine the "message from God" if the bar had been wrecked and the churches spared, but the way it actually happened is conveniently ignored now.

Did you see the Philly cops kicking the shit out of those three guys? Yet another isolated incident that just happened to occur when a camera was rolling. Amazing coincidence.

A new TV show is scheduled to premier next month. "Swingtown" on CBS. Thursdays at 9 p.m. starting June 5th. I was there in the '70s when that swinging lifestyle was happening, but I'm afraid the show might bum me out. Like watching the movie "Woodstock" brings tears to my eyes, how a bunch of folks had actually tried to make a better world, but through misinformation and brutality, the movement was stopped cold. Now folks are having to embrace the hippie-type lifestyle out of necessity, forty years later. All that time of caring for the environment and learning to get by on less has been wasted. And swinging certainly isn't the same these days with AIDS in the world now. But back then in the mid-1970s, a guy couldn't walk around the block without meeting some young woman eager to celebrate her newfound liberation. Nowadays I don't want to use a condom, but I don't want to not use a condom either. I'm suggesting group marriages to solve that sexual conundrum.

Jeesh, what a world. Huh?