Good Help Is Hard To Find

I saw in an aside in a story about a famous scientist on Yahoo!'s home page yesterday that there are people in England chaining themselves to construction sites to slow the building of new coal-burning plants, the reported #1 cause of global warming. I have not heard anything about this on "the news". I did see a story three times this afternoon about a 90-year-old woman who went skydiving, and twice saw one about "fur shui"--attaching various colored objects--ribbons and such--to pet's collars and cages to add to their psychological well-being.

Last night I heard on TV that the higher fuel prices are bringing a lot of jobs back to the U.S., that it's no longer cheaper for corporations to ship products from Asia and South America. People are carpooling to and from work and doing errands on a route rather than making separate trips. Thousands are changing to higher-mileage cars. And there's a big push for the immediate development of alternative power sources. Both Presidential candidates promise to do all they can to lower gas prices again.

(Everybody who wears clothes is naked underneath.)

It's summertime. When I was on the road hitchhiking--often with no destination--Daylight Savings Time was my High Holiday. Just up and down the West Coast, and for a few years, back and forth across Canada. I have never been happier or able to afford to have a better time any other way. Locals and tourists and truck drivers and cops and delivery drivers and once I even got a ride in a hearse with a body in the back. I could sleep in my sleeping bag just about anywhere. I had no overhead. And once I quit smoking cigarettes, I was totally free of panic situations. Early-on in my 22-years of hitchhiking, I had learned what's really important and carried everything I needed. I never had to think of anything to buy, just replace what I had as it ran/wore out. Seven months of summer vacation every year. Then winters I'd find something different to do to get me through to the next spring. But even if that failed some years, I could always find a house-sitting gig for over the Christmas/New Year's holidays when everybody is busy with family and plans and nothing much is happening. But the rest of the year was always wide open. People have always told me, "It's not like it used to be." I have always answered, "It never was." Hitchhiking is like sifting through people and getting just the best and most interesting. Twenty-two years, and boy do I miss it. (Right now my worn-out body is sitting in a hotel room in downtown L.A. taking blood-pressure pills, but my mind is standing along Highway 199 up in the redwoods after a few days at a spot I know on the Smith River. Traffic is slow, so I'm thumbing both ways, whichever way a car is going. Doesn't really matter.)


Okay, it's Thursday night. I wrote the above last night. After listening to "the news" tonight, I got a flash of The (All-Mighty) Economy as a jilted lover, just can't grasp that it is no longer in the picture. (The stock market went down over 300 points today--whatever that means I have no idea--and now folks are predicting gas hitting $7.oo a gallon, and the floods aren't just receding, they're leaving behind toxic waste, and over a thousand lightning fires in Northern California, and it's all only just begun.) But The Economy, and the holy trinity: big corporations, politicians, and the news media, refuse to realize that it's over, keep waiting for things in the relationship to get back to normal. Have no clue that we've reached some major limits and the affair is over. It's soon gonna be time to get a restraining order to keep those fools away. (End of analogy.) There are limits. You can't have a growth economy on a finite planet. Especially a small one like ours. There is plenty for everybody to live really well, but not if some folks are never satisfied. (There's only two amounts of money some folks can have. Either none at all, or not enough.) Look at these multi-millionaires going bankrupt and losing their homes for god's sake, while much of the world has to walk a couple miles just for water and there ain't no grocery stores in town. Jeesh.

Time to think: survival, long-lasting, sturdy, satisfied, enough, happy. Not: growth, consume, more, next year's model, desire.

Good luck to us all.