GRASSHOPPER PLANET

Still Changin' Gears.

2008-09-11T20:06:00.000-07:00

Well, I just realized my grinninsinner.com site has expired. An unknown MySpace friend set it up for me, but I had no idea for how long. It had connected to some articles and essays I'd posted on Helium.com. You can still reach them by going to Helium and searching Bob Thatcher. There was also an interview of my thoughts on the generation gap published last week on And Cream dot com Online Magazine from London, England. www.andcream.com. Issue #24. September 2008.
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I'm at: www.myspace.com/cornholewallace. (I hate that name, but it's what they called me in the credits for the adult movie, "Kate and the Indians" back in 1979. The friend who set me up on MySpace back in 2004 thought it was really cool, so he used it for my permanent URL. Grrrr . . . . .)
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I'll be starting back up here in a bit.
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Take care . . . Bob.

Help Stamp Out Reality

2008-07-29T22:45:00.000-07:00

SEE YAS IN SEPTEMBER. (How European.)

No Dogs Or Personal Checks

2008-07-28T13:27:00.000-07:00

www.storyofstuff.com

www.revbilly.com (The Church of Stop Shopping)

Global birth control. Plant hemp for fiber. Free exchange stores.

Good luck to us all.

Easter Week, 1971. A friend and I were hitchhiking up to Big Sur. In a van, cruising up Highway 1 through Malibu, we spotted three young hippie chicks thumbing alongside the road surrounded by a pack of dogs. The driver pulled over and the girls climbed in with just one dog. "All those other dogs are from around here. Whenever a car would pull over and we'd run toward it, the drivers would see all the dogs running with us and take off." Turns out they were part of a large group of folks from Long Beach on their way to a hot springs in the mountains up behind Santa Barbara. They'd loaded two cars with all the sleeping bags and food for everybody, and then the people had hitchhiked instead of taking a bunch more vehicles. Meeting up with about a dozen of their friends at State Street and 101 in Santa Barbara that night--back before the freeway ran all the way through town--I called an L.A. rock 'n' roll radio station about our location and destination, and a half-hour later two vans from a church group pulled up and, after a shot at saving our souls over hot chocolate and cookies at their lair, took us all up to the entrance to the National Forest and a few miles up the dirt road. Using what sleeping bags we had, we all slept in one large fun-filled pile on top of a moon-lit mountain, looking down on the clouds. The next day we started walking in, taking rides as occasional cars drove in. My friend and I ended up spending the week there, and then going to their big house in Long Beach to party with them there. (537 7th Street at Magnolia, by the 710 [back then the "7"] freeway on-ramp.) Several years later, my friend married one of the three girls in the first group we'd met. And I spent over a year with a girlfriend of theirs who came to visit the house from Key West with her mystical black Afghan hound dog, Hair. (I always loved when people laughed at me for hitchhiking.)

Those tomato farmers who recently lost all their crops for naught because of the salmonella scare remind me of the New York gang the Warriors from the movie by the same name. At the end when everybody realizes is wasn't a Warrior who shot Cyrus, after a night bopping their way home to Coney Island with all the other gangs after them, a radio dj says something like, oops, sorry, Warriors, but that's the way it goes sometimes in the Big City. Sorry tomato farmers, but it was hot peppers what did it. Oops.

I keep thinking: "The new [reluctant] hippies." From the bottom up, it's sinking in. Unrestrained consumerism is not turning out to be a workable long-term economic policy. Like when I was on the road having to carry everything I owned, it became glaringly obvious what was really important, and I adapted accordingly. Now with dropping incomes and rising prices, more and more folks are learning the same thing in their lives. Wise, concerned, and poor people have long known, but now the knowledge is quickly rising up the income chain. Reality is striking with a vengeance. Between the financial limitations we're facing and the doubtful continuation of life on Planet Earth, it's becoming obvious we need to start using less as a policy. Yet both major Presidential Candidates promise to "get the economy going again", guaranteed to hurry our doom. It's time to deal with what's really important to a good life, not keep Wall Street happy until we're all dead.

Yesterday the guy on the radio said that aware young people are beginning to sport thrift-store used jeans as a style, not the expensive designer jeans favored by their parents. I know that type thing has been happening in more and more ways, but what amazed me was hearing it admitted on a commercial, corporate-owned radio station. (I did only hear it once.) I'd love to see one of The Candidates show up somewhere in old jeans as a lifestyle statement instead of just always declaring their allegiance to Big Business and the Supreme Power: "The Economy." THAT's what it would take to get MY vote.

Group marriage. Six or eight or ten people living together saves the individuals from the horrors of monogamy, the dangers of STDs from just steppin' out on a partner, and helps save Planet Earth, needing only one vacuum cleaner, one big-screen TV, maybe even only one car, instead of each two people having to buy one of everything. At least it would be fun giving it a try. Saving the planet doesn't have to be boring.

Make love, not credit-card debt.

The More You Buy, The More You Save

2008-07-24T20:44:00.000-07:00

I've been writing this Grasshopper Planet blog pretty much two times a week since I started doing it in February. One woman wrote to me about a week ago on MySpace, telling me she'd taken a whole morning and read it through from the beginning. But anybody just checking it out for the first time, or only occasionally, is reading just the last chapter so far. Seems weird to me. Say I jump on a topic I've talked about earlier, it can give the wrong impression on where I stand or the point I'm trying to make to somebody just reading that latest thought on the subject. Rex Stout included all the basic info on the house and everybody in it each and every Nero Wolfe story he wrote. But that was for novels, or at least long short-stories, and he was making good money for his trouble. But every time I bring up, say, how religious people denying sex education to young people actually helps create the sex offenders they so love to persecute later, I can't go back and repeat everything I ever said on the topic each time. My predicament reminds me of a 1999 book I read by Chuck Palahnick, the author of Fight Club. It's called "Survivor: A Novel", and it's told completely backwards. I mean not only does it start at the end, but he goes all the way. It begins on page 289, and finishes on page 1, at the beginning of the story. Well that's how I feel the way this blog trip is set up. I try to keep that in mind as I write, but sometimes I just gotta live with it. So it goes . . . as they say.

The other day I spotted two bicycle cops parked near a corner by USC. I mean, they weren't waiting to cross the street or taking a break, they were both backed in and watching the street. In Portland or San Francisco I woulda probably made a remark to them as I walked by, but down here they're too quick on the trigger to joke with. I went into University Village to take care of business, then came out the other end, where I spotted two more officers of the law on bicycles doing the same trip. But here as I waited for the bus, I got a chance to see their mission. As of July 1st, California drivers can no longer use hand-held cell phones. (Might bring back the use of turn signals. I'm hoping.) These guys were zooming out on their bikes when they spotted any driver talking on the phone at the red light and giving them a ticket. Like shooting fish in a barrel.

MySpace came out with a book: "OUR PLANET Change Is Possible." About what folks can do to slow global warming. I just saw it today for the first time. Good for MySpace. I'm waiting for the Wall Street, White House, and Pentagon editions. I would sure welcome another New World to head to and explore. A place to hide. But when you're like in a boat--the Good Ship Planet Earth--and people are chipping away at it for fun and profit, and telling you, "It's okay, it's the OTHER end of the boat we're destroying. We'll be okay here," it's kind of hard to ignore. "We'd stop what we're doing, but it would be bad for the economy." And while this is okay to many folks, there's still being coverage on "the news" about a 9/16th of a second flash of a nipple during half time. And of course, that fifteen-year-old bare back hasn't been forgotten. But the ongoing clear-cutting of forests around the world and the dying oceans aren't worthy of (corporate funded) Network Mention. A dreary subject, I know, but, to quote Noah, "How long can you tread water?"

Today the Democratic candidate for President of the United States of America ("God will lead the way! God will lead the way!") gave a rousing speech in Berlin. I heard the Pie in the Sky, but was hoping for a few Nuts and Bolts. "The less you're happy with, the more fun you'll have." "Many of us on Planet Earth have been living at an unsustainable standard of living, and must learn how to be happy other than by consuming." "We need to take DRASTIC action, not just stop using plastic grocery bags." "We cannot maintain a Growth Economy on a Finite Planet." I did like the "It's all US; we gotta think together." But it's like we need to get fifty feet up to reach our goal, and we're getting a choice between a six-foot stepladder and a ten-foot stepladder. Sucking up to the folks who want to live a lifestyle that the planet can no longer support sounds great, but isn't gonna save us. There are folks who know how to live well on way, way less than the ones doing all the crying. Poor babies. But we just can't use resources up at a rate to keep them happy and continue having life on the planet. "The Economy" is the enemy. Preach the sacrilegious concepts of "enough" and "happy". THAT's what I want to hear.

Drink. Dance. Play.

Plant Your Seeds.

Highway 101 North

2008-07-21T22:03:00.000-07:00

I've been told that my posts here since I started writing this in February are "negative", "depressing", "pessimistic", but, as one person kindly added, "yet at the same time . . . funny." Well, that's kinda how I feel; I look around and I could cry . . . if I could just stop laughin'. I'm sad that so many people make life hard for themselves and each other. I think it's funny that lots of folks with so much--more than anybody ever in the history of the planet--snivel and moan about their condition, and don't seem to have a clue how to enjoy themselves. The happiest years of my life were the twenty-two I spent hitchhiking around with just a sleeping bag and a suitcase--"on the road", not "homeless"--so you can see why I'm bummed; I've learned how little it takes to have a great time, and I think more of my fellow Earthlings should be having a ball with all we've got going. But, alas, The Great Spirit--"The Economy"--rules all, and there's no such thing as "enough" or "happy" in that church. The Holy Trinity--corporations, the news media, and governments, in that order--worship and defend The Great Spirit above all other considerations. The Mindless Bottom Line is devouring all in its path, and the masses are blinded by faith in the gods of commerce. Yes, it's negative, depressing, and pessimistic, but so dumb ya gotta laugh. (They'd sell all Earth's air to Mars if there was a buyer up there.) "It's BUSINESS." Praise Wall Street!

Right now I'm taping 20/20 with the TV off. It's about SEX. I've written on the subject here some. A MySpace anti-porn site sent me a friend request a while back, and the woman and I have gone back and forth a bit with e-mails. She just thinks the world would be a better place if everybody was normal sexually, like her. I figure to watch the show over the weekend to get some facts and figures maybe, but I've long been a student of the issue. (You can read, "Other People's Sex" and "OPS Part 2" if you want at www.grinnninsinner.com, or through Helium.com, Bob Thatcher.) I'm a Veteran of the Sexual Revolution--wounded twice--so I care about the new recruits who are now entering the fray. Support The Troops.

The Democratic Presidential Candidate ("God will lead the way! God will lead the way!") is in Afghanistan as I type this. I remember reading the book Caravans: A Novel of Afghanistan by James Michener. Written in the late 1940s, it told of their concern of being invaded by the Russians, which eventually happened decades later, with the result predicted in the book. Now WE'RE there. (Suggested reading: Ed Deline's Pillow, by Me.) At least the soldiers have that excellent Afghani hash to smoke while they're there.

It's now Saturday afternoon and I just started watching that 20/20 show about sex I taped last night. My profile-page blurb on MySpace for the past few years has been, "The Morally Superior Are Dangerous", and by golly, the show is reinforcing the truth of that statement, and it's really being hard for me to watch. Those smug, self-righteous worms who know what's best for everybody. I think their problem is they think we're all as sexually squirrelly as they are, so feel justified ruining lives in the name of decency. (They give "decency" a bad name.) Normal people certainly don't care what others are doing consensually. And it all stems from that nonsensical religious "sin" crap. ("You're born in sin! Aren't you ashamed! Now you gotta suffer to make it right.") Damn, I don't know if I'll even be able to watch the rest of the show. I've seen enough of those sickos over the years. Like the creeps who take pictures of the license plates in the parking lots of strip clubs and adult book stores, then send them to the owners' homes as a post card with an invitation to attend their church on the back. I don't think there are words in the English language to describe how low I think those people are. "Despicable", not strong enough. "Loathsome", too kind. It's why I've started losing patience with the guilt pushers out there on the street, preaching their perverted superstitious nonsense. (I better change the subject before my blood-pressure pills can't do their job.) I'm just trying to point out with this blog that the less a person is happy with, the more fun they have and the better it is for Planet Earth. But it's hard to avoid the believers, "God will lead the way! God will lead the way!" And they're my greatest fear.

Monday night now. I got unexpectedly invited away yesterday and it turned into an all-day scene. (It included a long-winded prayer over the PA system at a pancake breakfast they took me to that included calling upon God to sprinkle the blood of Jesus over our food. Yum.) I've been watching more of the 20/20 "Sex" show. The tone is pretty favorable, kinda being incredulous at the anti-sex folks for their unsupported claims. But the next part just started about a guy having to register as a sex offender for the rest of his life over consensual sex with his high school girlfriend. I had to shut it off for a while again. It's like I do watch the TV show Cops when they're breaking up fights and such, but when they do their drug and prostitution stings, I can't handle that. Taking people's freedom, money, cars, and reputations, often ruining families, for the sin of wanting to feel good, out there doing the Lord's work at taxpayer expense, I just can't handle that. A pox on the suckers.

Plant your seeds.

I Thought I Was Wrong Once, But I Was Mistaken

2008-07-15T09:59:00.000-07:00

With damn little I can see to vote for that really matters, my civic duty is to write this blog. Like until there's a "None of the above", or a vote for qualities and topics other than which group of short-sighted rich folks do you want to have putting it to you, I don't much see the point of voting. It wasn't too important who ran the show until lately, but with the fate of life on the planet seriously at stake, I'm giving this a shot. I'm well along in years myself and had a ball pretty much my whole life, but I have nothing to leave my substantial progeny in the way of wealth or property, so I'm hoping something I write may do some good for their future. That's my motivation for doing this. I don't have a whole lot of hope, I feel like the prairie dog on that T-shirt, giving the finger to the eagle that's swooping down and about to snatch it. My hero.

The practice used to be, when lightning struck a house, folks would rush in and protect the neighboring homes, but let the burning house go, believing the lightning had been sent down by God, obviously to punish the inhabitants of that house for their sins. And it was death for anyone who worked on Sunday, (or Saturday, depending,) had sex with someone they weren't married to, gave their parents a hard time, or any one of a long list of other offenses that ignorant, uneducated people decided would make a god unhappy. And both the major Presidential Candidates here in 2008--in 2008!--are still into that same superstitious invisible-guy-in-the-sky crap laid down thousands of years ago.

Rock the Vote. (Yeah, right.)

It's Monday, Bastille Day, as I type this. Gas, oil, and food prices have been going up for a while now, and home foreclosures are all the rage. More evidence is being revealed every day that our life-support (Planet Earth) is dying. The U.S. of A. has the largest percentage of its citizens imprisoned than any other country in the world--even those real bad ones. And now the stock market is not only dropping like a pipe out the window of a car getting pulled over by the police, but banks are starting to go belly up while depositors nervously stand in line hoping to get their money out. Kinda bleak. It reminds me of my thoughts way back in 1992, when I first wrote "Off The Road" when I sadly realized I was getting too old to hitchhike all the time anymore. The second paragraph: "Looking around, I have to go "whew". I feel vindicated for the last twenty-five years I wasted on fun and travel. With every new wave of layoffs and failed pension funds and savings institutions, my knees go weak. I could have worked all those years and then suddenly still been in the same boat I'm in now." (If you want, you can read "Off The Road"--Parts 1 and 2--and several other articles and essays I wrote at: www.grinninsinner.com., or just: Helium.com, Bob Thatcher.)

On the bus the other day, I saw two teenage young men with their pants cuffs pulled forward and tied under their shoe laces. The first time I ever saw that and I have no idea what it means. Back when I was in 7th and 8th grades, pants had buckles across the back above the pockets. If you wore yours buckled, it meant you had a girlfriend. If unbuckled, you were looking. I remember guys saying to me, "Bob, you have a girlfriend, so why is your buckle undone?" That pretty much signaled my future: a girlfriend, but still available. (We'd later be called 'swingers'.) I would really like to learn the significance if any of the pants cuffs under the shoe laces. Just style? A serious meaning? A signal to others? Anybody know?

A well-known church, known for its celebrity members, was set up on the street the other day offering free stress tests. When asked if I'd like to take a stress test, I said that "stress" was trying to get off their mailing list, and they all suddenly just looked away. (My friend tried for over twenty years to get them to stop sending her stuff. Finally, after she retired, when she couldn't empty her small P.O. Box daily and it got filled with their junk, stopping them became a top priority. After years of letters and phone calls to please stop with their mailings, she had to do something. She saved up all that they sent her for a while and put it in a large envelope, addressed it to them with no return address, and placed a single stamp on it so they'd have to pay the remaining postage due. After twenty-three years of pleading, she suddenly stopped hearing from them.)

Ever notice that when the time changes, people are often an hour late to work, forgetting to change their clocks? . . . but nobody is ever an hour early when the change goes the other way? Hmmmmm . . .

Where might we be today if Ronald Reagan hadn't canceled the programs to research alternative energies started by President Carter?

Plant your seeds.

BARBER SHOP "We Shave Legs"

2008-07-12T12:34:00.000-07:00

Yesterday (7/11) was disastrous for many Americans. A real heart breaker. This could actually start a movement and force some meaningful protest. Finally something to unite a large number of people. Many of the new iPhones couldn't be activated. Riding on a dying planet, no biggie. A new toy won't work, people squawk. But there is a glimmer of hope for the future of humankind. Hannah Montana is going 3-D!

Though both being fine musicians, neither Kevin nor Paul are very good straight men or comic partners. Oh, they do try, but therein lies the problem. One would think that Jay and Dave would have recognized this long ago. Either spring for a talented side-kick, or just tell the band leaders to button it, that this is the big time. There are clever sixth graders doing a better job of cracking wise from the back of the room than those two music makers.

This is not the tone I try to strike as I write these posts every few days, but it's early and I'm just on my first cup of coffee. The main theme I'm shooting for is that a better life is easier on both people and the environment than everybody focusing exclusively on accumulating as much wealth as possible their whole lives. Lighten up, have some fun, give Planet Earth a break. But that message doesn't really shine through until after my second cup and a shower.

Okay, I've even got my shoes on now. I'm officially up for the day. Unlike Mr. Tony Snow, successful, popular, rich and famous, and now dead of natural causes at age fifty-three. How would he have lived differently if he had known he'd never live to retire? I know, I know, he had a family and had to provide for them if something should happen to him, but I'm thinking more like what he'd think about when he was alone in the bathtub, how he'd spend his days off, what would have been his priorities if he'd had a clue. A guy I knew in San Francisco used to tell me or anybody else who tried sniveling or being petty around him, "What's it gonna matter in a hundred years?" In other words, "You're wasting your precious time." (That guy died at age 50 by the way.)

Last night I heard about a couple very promising power sources for autos and solar electric. The discoveries had been made back during the energy crisis in the 1970s, but work on the ideas had been dropped when oil became readily available again. Who could have guessed back then that we'd ever have another problem with oil availability? ("Brilliant management, Brother Rabbit.") And right now commercials are running on TV about the drastic water shortage facing California. These spots state that 70% of SoCal's water is used outside, like for lawns and watering flowers, so they ask that people water the yard one less day a week. As hard-hitting a suggestion as the G8's non-binding proposal to cut greenhouse gases by 50% by the year 2050. Like pissin' in the wind.

My problem is I've seen too many different lifestyles in my decades on the road. I know how little it takes to be happy, and how people with so much more than most are often joyless. That would be their problem, except in the futile quest to lay their hands on enough treasure to get happy, they're killing us all. Corny or lame as what I've been writing about here since February may sound, that's the long and the short of it.

Free birth control to the world, fast-growing hemp for fiber instead of cutting down all the trees, go dancing and play volleyball more. It could happen.

FTW

2008-07-08T00:43:00.000-07:00

I just heard a couple days ago that people are not allowed to flag down a passing taxicab for a ride here in Los Angeles.

"It's not IF your pet monkey is going to attack you, but WHEN."

FTW. (Fuck The World.) I got it tattooed on my left forearm during the first half of 1968. I was twenty-two and going nuts. Everything suddenly got good toward the end of the year when a little redhead was given to me for my twenty-third birthday. She turned out to be my psychological savior. She pointed out ways of looking at life that made it not be so overwhelming, no matter what was actually happening. Ever since then, FTW has been a grinnin' attitude, not a snivelin' lament. Thank you, Gerri, wherever you are.

A fast-food executive was being interviewed on TV the other day. He was asked about a boycott of his chain of restaurants being promoted by a conservative group because his company had supported an organization they didn't like. The executive said they weren't concerned, that they would never feel such a boycott. He said if the boycott was about the environment or gay rights, then they'd be worried about it costing them business. The pendulum swings, as they say.

It's gotta be like a sick joke, right? Every night on "the news" they give yet another example of our imminent demise, followed by both candidates promising to get gas prices back down and the economy rolling again like the good old days. Today it was the death of ocean coral. The other day the story was alligators going blind. A week ago it was the disappearing salmon and the stopping of all commercial salmon fishing. Fires, record-shattering storms, rising temperatures, dead spots in the oceans. The melting ice caps and the plight of the polar bears is old news, now the stories are all about the new drilling the oil companies can do in the Arctic Circle with the ice gone. We need bees to pollinate our food, but they can't find their way home anymore, possibly because of cell phones. The Earth was a perfect life-support system for hundreds of millions of years, until the Stock Market hit town. Mindless profits know no limits.

It being summertime, I of course have been thinking a lot about "the road". Hitchhiking up and down the West Coast for twenty-two years, Daylight Savings Time was my High Holiday. Summer was the best. I could just roll out my sleeping bag and sleep anywhere. Swimming in rivers, being a guide for fun tourists, backyard volleyball, giving runaway girls from Back East a friendly California welcome, psychedelic softball in mountain meadows, concerts and gatherings and barbecues. (I found that if you have a drivers license and can cook, people are always glad to see you. And if you don't deal, steal or get rowdy drunk, the cops leave you alone. Staying clean of course helps with all of the above. That can be the hardest thing on the road, finding a shower. Way harder than sex, drugs, or food. But even that can be an adventure out there.) Now I need pills to stay alive and couldn't get up in the morning if I slept on the ground in my trusty sleeping bag. I think of my tiny hotel room as a campsite in the trees of a favorite on-ramp up north, only with a sink and a door. But try as I may, there's just no replacing all the different people I used to get to meet every day, free of knowing anybody they knew or ever expecting to see them again, so there was a real openness that most normal, day-to-day encounters can't risk. High stuff, month after month after month. (Details upon request.)

Okay, I'm calling it a day. I watched my usual Leno monologue, and tonight being Monday, "Headlines". I washed all my bedding today, so I'm looking forward to stretching out for the night. (Cheap Thrills.) They're calling for another heat wave starting tomorrow and the air conditioning is broken here in my hotel--it sure works in January and February, but never in the summer. I haven't figured that one out yet.

Plant Your Seeds.

"It's A Business Doing Pleasure With You"

2008-07-02T19:31:00.000-07:00

"Welcome Home." If you ever go to a Rainbow Family Gathering of the Tribes, that's what The Rainbow People say to everybody as they arrive. "Welcome Home." That's kinda how I feel as I watch more and more folks descend out of the clouds and land back here in the real world. Reality strikes. People have been trying to point out for decades that living beyond a certain level is fun while it lasts, but--one way or another--it can't go on forever. Surprise!

It's summertime. That sure doesn't mean the same as when I was on the road and living outside most of the time, but it still sure has a nice ring to it. Long days, no coats needed, the river. I did a lot of outside work over the years, clearing brush, cutting firewood, planting trees, caring for critters, picking apples, digging various holes in the ground, and I enjoy mowing grass. Besides getting a free work-out as I performed my duties, and making a few bucks of course, I liked up in Mendocino County where I worked sometimes, the sound of the wind through the trees. Always made me think of a 1949 or '50 black and white movie wind-through-the-mountains soundtrack. And whenever I got one of those jobs, it was always fun as I broke the people in to that I'd have one or two tall Budweisers during the day. It's never been a problem, so that is non-negotiable in any agreement to work that looks like it's going to go over a day or two. I never asked about how much the pay was, I'd leave it to the people who needed my help to bring it up. It really didn't matter to me; however much it was, after the job I'd spend it until it was gone. So any money would do. If anybody seemed too cheap, I just wouldn't work for them again. I'd bounce around an area until things to do ran out, then stick out my thumb and move on down the road. Zero overhead. Summertime. (And some winters, but that's another story.)

I heard on the radio today, I think it was Philadelphia, that there are a number of spots around town with vehicles which people can register to use as needed, like for a grocery run or to pick somebody up at the airport. But you don't have to maintain your own personal vehicle 24/7. NOW you're talkin'!

There have been some fine, funny TV commercials over the years, and some I even looked forward to. I like when I recognize actors in multiple commercials and can informally follow their careers. But many commercials have me flying for the mute button every time. I even compare the psychology of some spots to various crimes. That commercial would be a sneak thief, or a hustler, and that one just took a club to people's heads. Ones that really drive me up the wall are those that suggest to varying degrees--in a society that is trying to totally restrict a citizen's sexual options to get married, abstain, or wear an ankle bracelet until you're 90--that if you buy this product you'll get sex. Those I think of as nothing less than forcible rape.

I just got a recorded message from the library. Two items I put on hold are in. One is a DVD showing how to play Texas Hold'um. I love playing poker. Not playing more in my life is one of my few regrets. But every time I've run into a chance to play, I've loved it. One of my favorite poker books was "Poker According To Maverick", written through the eyes of Bret Maverick. "My old Pappy always used to say . . . " But I've never played this new game. I've read how to play it a couple places, but I think actually watching a few hands on DVD would be worth a thousand words. Just in case I should run into a chance to play and that's the game. And the second item is a book written in the late 1940s about Bible questions to ask children. I need some fresh facts to stump Believers who start in on me in public. It never takes long to have a religious person talking in circles, but it's more interesting for me when I find new circles to travel with them. I know I can't win--eternal life vs logic--but I gotta do SOMETHING while I'm waiting for the bus. It's an old book, but unlike science, travel, discovery, medicine, music, communication, and everything else in the world, religion is unchanged from when it was first invented by people who thought the world was flat and were always on the lookout for witches and demons, so an old children's book is just as good for finding new questions to challenge untenable convictions as a book just published last week.

Lots of folks are scrambling to come up with new ways to live on less and help save our life-support system here on Planet Earth. The reluctant new hippies. Welcome Home.

Good Help Is Hard To Find

2008-06-26T21:51:00.000-07:00

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.

You Can Leave Your Hat On

2008-06-23T11:17:00.000-07:00

I'm not a computer person, I know how to type and that's it. I just took a disc to the library with me today and it wouldn't work, it was like totally blank. It had worked just fine yesterday. I'm back in my hotel room now at my old machine and that disc cuts me back to the desktop when I try to open it.. And I just found out yesterday that my old Walkman ear plugs work for sound on computers, after all this time of surfing in silence. I had given it a shot to hear a video on that e-mail I mentioned last post, about the spiritual thing at noon today. (Saturday.) So since I couldn't do what I'd planned with what was on that disc, I watched YouTube for the first time, and enjoyed some music from a few MySpace friends. After all this time. (Duh.)

So anyway, I didn't observe the spiritual trip at noon. Even after all the psychedelics I've done, I like to deal with the real world. I've seen how little it takes to get by and be really happy, myself and others, and I think that's the secret. Until the Internet, I wasn't having any luck getting my 2-cents in on the raging debate. I wrote a story back in 1985-6 called "The Last Resort", about a middle-class couple in their early thirties whose car breaks down in central Washington State as they're taking the scenic route to California. They end up staying at out-of-the-way Twin Peaks, a row of small wooden cabins and a campground, inhabited mostly by various folks in the area for the apple-picking season. The couple is forced to see a different outlook on life, but I soon realized that it was too much of a pre-AIDS story; too much casual sex. So I shelved it and for the next four years worked on a new story in my head as I did various jobs and hitchhiked around. In 1992, I gave up hitchhiking, started tying my hair back every day, and bought a one-way bus ticket to Nashville to get away from all things familiar and write a near-future adventure novel. This story was about a 30-year-old dentist from Southern California who takes off into the wilds of Northern California looking for the granddaughter of a friend. Living without a firm schedule was very hard for the guy, he kept trying to plan ahead the whole trip. He loses his phone for a while, and that isolation/freedom was a first in his life. The whole book, Sinner's Revenge, (147,000 words) was about how dude discovered the difference between success and happiness. Now I'm doing Grasshopper Planet, comparing the hard-working Ant, and the partyin' Grasshopper, and how I think the planet would be better off with less "economy" and more "satisfaction". If I hadn't been a fugitive, I'd probably have just dug in as best I could like so many people--twenty-nine years on the assembly line--but now I've seen there's more to life than just being secure as possible and gathering all you can until you die. (They'll never tell you that on TV.) Like the couple whose car broke down at apple-picking time, and the dentist who was off doing a favor for a friend, I reluctantly realized a more genial outlook towards this here life.

Right when the movie The Hustler came out, when I was heavily into shooting pool and in high school, the only place to shoot in Flemington, New Jersey, was on the three ancient full-size tables in the back room of the barroom of the Union Hotel on Main Street. It was so full of players most of the time that I'd wanted to shoot so bad some days I'd go to a nine-ball game in progress and offer, if they'd let me in the game, to pay anybody who made a money ball, but if I made one, they didn't have to pay me for it; I just wanted to shoot pool. One day when it was really packed, people standing around waiting for a chance to get a table, I went through the alcove to the bar to get a soda. Two old guys were sitting at the bar, and one asked the other casually, "Want to shoot some pool?" Like they could just waltz back there and rack 'em up. The other guy thought a second and then said no. Totally no concept of the reality of the situation. Watching the Sunday Morning talk shows today, listening to the pundits discussing the world situation from only various corporate angles, it reminded me of those two old guys deciding whether to go shoot a game of pool. Talk about arranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. Sitting on a dying planet, surrounded by fires, floods, and fading life-sustaining resources, they talk away about which presidential candidate can lower gas prices and get us consuming more and the economy rolling again like it was 1928 or something. If those two guys at the bar had decided to go back to the pool room they would have learned something about the actual situation, but the business execs, their politicians, and the people paid good money to take them seriously, are so insulated from the real world, I'm afraid "endangered planet" and "poor people" are as curious and foreign hypothetical theories to them as the concept of "having enough".

And, sigh, the Hippie-Dippy Weatherman died last night. "There's a low over the East Coast. A low over the South. A low over the North-West. What this country really needs is a good high!" I loved his Seven Words You Can't Say On Television. " . . . and tits, tits doesn't even belong on the list!" He was getting pretty mean-spirited towards the end; I think the lack of progress after all the years of work by him and others to point things out to the rest of the world finally got to him. "And there are two-way words. You can prick your finger, but don't finger your prick. No-no."

RIP George.

I'd Give My Right Arm To Be Ambidextrous

2008-06-20T23:11:00.000-07:00

The following was written on the back of a box of tea bags I bought years ago, so long ago I don't even remember why I was buying tea of all things. But anyway, it was written by a Doctor Stanley Frager. "A lesson in 'heart' is my 10-year-old daughter, Sarah, who was born with a muscle missing in her foot and wears a brace all the time. She came home one beautiful spring day to tell me she had competed in 'field day.' My mind raced as I tried to think of encouragement for my Sarah, things I could say to her about not letting this get her down--but before I could get a word out, she said, 'Daddy, I won two of the races!" I couldn't believe it! And then Sarah said, 'I had an advantage.' Ahh. I knew it. I thought she must have been given a head start . . . But again, before I could say anything, she said, 'Daddy, I didn't get a head start . . . my advantage was I had to try harder!' That's heart. That's my Sarah."

It's Friday, June 20. Summer officially starts today. I'm in "cool" downtown L.A., but over the hills in the Valley they're predicting 113-degrees. (No, that's not DEATH Valley, the San Fernando Valley.) Flooding along the Big Muddy. Wildfires all over the West. Melting ice caps and dead areas growing in the oceans. Food shortages and the prices getting higher. Yet folks still want to see cheaper gas so they can drive more again, and they'd like the economy to pick back up. (Ya gotta love it.) The planet will hit seven billion people in 2012--it took to the 1800s to reach ONE billion--yet religious leaders still forbid birth control, which I think is criminal, especially in those parts of the world where people are starving en masse, and prognosticators ignore all the limits we're reaching and continue growth predictions at the present rate way into the future. "By 2050, there will be twenty-seven billion people living in California . . ." I'd cry---if I could just stop laughing.

(It's now 9:05 p.m.) I heard on the radio news that ten police and teenagers were killed in Mexico City when police raided a nightclub looking for underage drinkers and a stampede broke out. Yikes.

Today I walked by a shoe-shine stand, and I saw dude's glance pass over my canvas footwear and pass on like I didn't exist. It got me thinking about all the different things going on all the time, how people have a choice of what they actually notice. Like if you're hungry walking down the street, a sexy body looking in a store window doesn't even hit your radar. If you're horny, then that smell of fresh bread baking as you walk by the sandwich shop has no effect. I've heard and it makes sense that your happiness is like 10% what actually happens to you, and the other 90% is how you handle the ten. Like there are people in jail or with serious health issues who are having a better time than some rich and famous folks. So even if we all fry for Wall Street, we can know our mood up until the end was our choice. (Does that help any?) (Oh well, I'm trying.)

You've heard about those seventeen teeny-bopper girls in New England making a pact to all get pregnant? Heh, I'll bet their parents wish they'd only been smoking weed. (Yeah, NOW.)

I got an e-mail today from a good friend up in the Bay Area about some kind of happening tomorrow at noon. Some kind of spiritual event like the Harmonica Virgins that was billed as a big deal some years back. Kind of like praying for Whirled Peas. I'm more into the Hundredth Monkey concept. If enough people decide to get along and live a sustainable standard of living that includes most people, we might stand a chance. Like's happening with smoking cigarettes. It's simply falling out of fashion. But if say Ronnie and Nancy had declared war on cigarettes and made them illegal, we'd have another black-market controlled substance creating more gang warfare, corruption, and disrespect for the law. Same with churches; making them illegal would make them stronger. Just give them enough rope and they'll do themselves in with their own inconsistencies. The social-gathering aspect can survive just fine without all the superstition and guilt. And I think the Internet is our shot. At no time in history could folks around the world connect and share their thoughts, let alone instantly and at little or no cost to do so. I know from twenty-two years of hitchhiking that most people have a basic common sense, and that by prevailing over the few greed and power junkies who've always run everything before, they will go the way of cigarette smoking in restaurants. Or we'll all die.

Call me crazy.

"The Warriors, The Warriors Did It!"

2008-06-18T18:27:00.000-07:00

When I rode my motorcycle from New Jersey to California in 1966, back then there was no damn pussy helmet required. We didn't huddle in doorways to smoke, we had what we called "ashtrays" right inside. People worked a job and then got a pension for their years of service to the company. "Safe sex" was watching for cops or familiar cars pulling in where you were parked. You could get a ticket for speeding without having your trunk searched and the back seat pulled out. People drank and let their hair down at the office Christmas party. Toxic waste was dumped WAY out of town, all the way down by the river, so nobody worried. The good old days, when men were men, and women . . . thought it was okay.

Back in 1971, I worked for a while at Hobie Cat down in San Juan Capistrano, making catamarans. There was a sign on the wall that said, "We gratefully acknowledge the part marijuana has played in the production of Hobie Cats. Signed: The Management." I worked the second shift, and the foreman would come in every night with a couple cases of beer, his dog, and sometimes his girlfriend. It was such a nasty job with all the fiberglass and resin, the secretary in the office wouldn't even give an application to anybody applying with short hair, afraid all the surfers and hippies working there would think it was an undercover cop and quit, and they'd never get enough straight workers to fill out a crew.

In the early '90s, I worked as a driver in a car wash owned by two biker brothers. One day we did eight cars short of 1200; it was a BIG car wash. The foreman would walk around with a giant soda cup with a plastic lid with a straw running into the 16 oz can of beer inside. A couple times when guys would show up wasted, they'd just be told to go lay on the couch by the time clock until they were up to working. Just back from lunch one day, a guy pulled in driving a Volvo and told me, "You can have what's in the ashtray." (It was FULL of nice roaches!)

Working at a bed and breakfast on my first Saturday morning, the boss was making potato pancakes while his wife welcomed the guests and set up juice. The guy had a cigarette in his mouth with a long ash on it, and darn if the ash didn't fall into the bowl. When I said something about it, he told me, "It's part of the recipe."

Just starting at a resort, I got a knock on my trailer door. It was the owner. "Sorry to bother you on your first day off, but somebody left these behind in their room. Want them?" And he held out four joints.

A girlfriend and I were living in Vancouver, Canada, wanting to move to the country. We ran an ad in the Sunday paper, which came out up there on Saturday, for a semi-isolated cabin or small house we could care take. A guy who owned a hotel in North Vancouver responded and said he had a property with a cabin near a lake he'd like to have someone living in to keep an eye on things, and we stayed in it for free, on two-hundred mountain acres, for fifteen months. (I have picture slides of the whole time. Wood stove, no electricity, carry the water, shotguns. And with no vehicle, we had to hitchhike up with all our supplies so we got to meet a lot of friendly locals, so life was always hoppin'. Or should I say "swingin'"? Yes I should.)

I picked apples for two five-week seasons, five years apart. First time in Oyama, B.C., and then in Wenatchee, Washington. (The second time I'd been hitchhiking around Northern California and Oregon with a blond girlfriend for about two months, but I broke up with her on the Steel Lane on-ramp to 101 in Santa Rosa, knowing the partying that went on in those apple camps at night, I didn't want to be tied down.)

Me and another guy planted Christmas trees for a farmer/pot grower up in Oregon. At the start of each day, and every day after lunch, he'd give us each a nice joint to smoke. (He also had several acres of raspberries he told us paid the bills for the year; the Christmas trees and pot were all profit.) I also planted trees way out in the bush with B.C. Forestry for a while, but with them you had to bring your own smoke.

I was working with a cleaning crew through a day-labor place in East L.A. one time, and we went to a ten-table pool hall to wash the windows and floor. I went back after work, and a couple weeks later I was managing the place.

A good gig is cutting firewood. And house/pet sitting is bearable and you get to hang out in a lot of different neighborhoods. House painting pays well and doesn't last forever. And there's always selling plasma in a pinch. If you can make money at doing something you enjoy and would be doing anyway, more power to ya. But if you go to work and put in your time just to get paid so you can have a place to live so you can work, what's the point? You can live really well on very little when you learn to keep the overhead down. And your time stays your own.

Life is short. Might as well do some living while you're busy surviving.

Or you can make your parents proud and just hang on waiting for those three-day weekends. (Four at Thanksgiving!)

Any questions?

You Gotta Suffer If You Wanna Sing The Blues

2008-06-14T09:19:00.000-07:00

Did you hear about the aspiring writer who sued his parents for giving him such a normal upbringing that he had nothing to write about? Or is that just another ridiculous urban legend, like that smoking marijuana somehow magically makes you want to do other drugs?

I just got a million-dollar bonus, bought a bigger house with a pool, my parents are proud, I have a shiny black SUV, a red sports car and a Harley-Davidson motorcycle, I've got two girlfriends who get along together, but all life on the planet just suddenly came to an end. NOT FAIR.

That there's a big controversy about this whole same-sex marriage thing here in California is a hoot, don't ya think? It reminds me of restaurants that require men to wear a brightly colored piece of cloth around their neck or they can't eat there. "You gotta be just like US." (In MY restaurant, men and women must have nose rings if they expect to be seated. But hey, we're not snobs. If you don't have a nose ring, we'll lend you one to wear while you eat.) Corporate Rule has driven us to the brink of extinction, the effects of maintaining an unrealistic standard of living so a few folks can get super rich is taking its toll on our world. Record-breaking storms, record-breaking tornadoes, record-breaking floods, record-breaking wildfires, record-breaking drought, record-breaking crop failures, record-breaking climate change, an evaporating ozone, dying oceans, and melting ice caps all conspiring to do us in, yet The Saved Ones still somehow have time to be concerned with making everybody have sex like they (and God of course) think is the only right way. And they get to gather together tax free to come up with their pious nonsense. We're doomed I'm afraid. Though every day we're hearing more and more ways people are coming up with to save gas, use less energy and water, eat better and cover the basics for less, it's a pity we had to wait until we were going over the edge before it became a public issue and made The News, finally no longer just automatically labeling anybody daring to suggest using less as old hippies, eco nuts, or other whacko-types. Yet the Chosen Ones ignore all the mindless corporations and their bought-and-paid-for elected representatives that are doing us all in, and continue to do battle with free-will and pleasure. Wouldn't it be neat if all the Guy In The Sky people all over the planet turned their venom on the ones doing us all harm rather than only attacking anybody trying to have some fun out of life? Damn, I really hate going on about this so much, but if you'll look around, the planet is SERIOUSLY starting to fight back. She's fighting for her life, but why aren't WE? We need Planet Earth more than She needs Us.

Today I rode the bus down to the library on 48th, just the other side of Vermont, to pick up the third and final new Brigitte Bardot DVD, the one that has the fifth movie and the bonus feature. Up in San Francisco at the new library years ago, I asked for a book on Ms Bardot--it was kept in a back room, I couldn't take it out of the building and had to leave my drivers license at the desk until I returned it--that included a display of pictures of all the famous women that followed who copied BB's look. There were thirty or more of them. She was the first point of light that appeared during an exceptionally dreary time in history. She certainly opened my young eyes. And I remember from the Biography video about her, when asked about doing sexy films, if she would rather do more serious acting, she answered, "Oh, I like my kind of movies. I'll do more serious movies when I'm older." Good for her. She changed me from a potential cradle-to-grave paycheck junkie to a happy bed-to-bed rounder. Thank you, thank you, Brigitte Bardot.

Tim Russert died today. Dropped dead at age 58. And he was yet another rich and famous guy who went suddenly from natural causes who was younger and had better health care than me. I'm 62, so besides having partied all my life, by living longer I'm even farther ahead of the game, yet I'm still freaking out about the way our little speck of dust floating through space we like to call Planet Earth is being used up by and for the Lords of Wall Street. I can not for the life of me figure why so many folks with their lives ahead of them don't seem concerned about anything except lower gas prices, which will only make us all fry that much sooner. Just lame, easy shit like cutting out plastic grocery bags by the year 2020 just ain't gonna cut it. What kills me is that fun is cheap and takes so damn little, prosperity consumes all ones time, creates lots of waste and pollution, and doesn't really make anybody happy except corporate CEOs and their accountants. Save the planet, stop being a total consumer and party more. More Grasshoppers, less Ants. Win/win as they say.

Today I've been hearing that Susan Atkins might be released from prison to die. I read her book right when it came out, Child of Satan, Child of God. The part where she first got led onto death row really got to me. Remember in the book, Helter Skelter, before anybody had even heard of Charlie Manson and The Family, some guy in jail somewhere told an account of the murders so vividly that a cell mate had gone to his parole officer and said he thought the murderer might be this guy who'd told the story? I was in that cell, heard the story being told, and knew the guy who went to his PO trying to get out of being sent back to state prison. The guy's wife continued to visit me after he'd been sent back, and after the arrests, she'd told me what her husband had thought and tried. Then several years later, in a mountain cabin up in British Columbia, reading the book, I came to the part where that incident is mentioned. Small world. (Old [at that time "new"] Orange County Jail, H-tank, cell-5. And I remember both guys' names.) They were sure wild and crazy times.

So anyway, again, good luck to us all.

"I'm Okay . . . "

2008-06-10T16:12:00.000-07:00

That's what I just said out my window after knocking over a couple things with a crash. "I'm okay." I live in a hotel and there's a window well. It's 11:00 p.m.

I can't even read like some detective novels where the ex-cop or P.I. just goes around thinking clever put-downs about every person or group he encounters. It's a style but not one I like to read. You can pretty much always come up with something snide to say in most any situation, but so what. However, it's really hard not to think rude thoughts when it comes to how TV reporters are covering the prevailing economic situation. They're "Shocked, shocked I say!" that this sudden evaporation of a standard of living for so many could happen, and with absolutely no warning. And all they interview is whiners. This might be the perfect time to chart a new course, not fight to get back on the old one. (That's called "Change", isn't it?)

There's a big ad on some of the buses here in L.A. It's for two cable shows that I'm amazed and happy to see be on TV, and those large pictures about marijuana and a prostitute are just so cool. It's pretty darned hard to get any type of advertising that's favorable to weed. And with a prostitute next to all those marijuana leaves--on a big bus!--I'm thrilled. Sex and drugs. The Evil Duo. "The wars against . . . " The Righteous Gang fears these two pleasures so much, they go so far as to have police decoys do undercover sting operations to trap and cage anybody seeking them. I know, I know, it's crazy, but though misguided, they are still very rich and powerful, so super kudos to the bus company and the TV station.

I passed a house where a workman and his young helper were just finishing replacing a section of sidewalk, had just stood up from smoothing out the cement. I stopped and picked up an old popsicle stick and asked, "What's today's date?" When the kid told me, the boss slapped him on the back of the head. I grinned as I watched the helper slowly realize my plan with the stick and his near accessory-before-the-fact role, then went on my way. Cheap thrills.

It's now Saturday, and Big Brown didn't do it. Everything I heard before, during, and after the race reminded me of the Tyson/Douglas major-upset heavyweight prizefight. It was so for sure who was going to win--Tyson/Big Brown--it seemed silly to delay the presentation of the trophy with the actual contest. And not that long ago at the Oscars, "And the winner for Best Picture of this year is . . . oh!" Let's hear it for bird dogs, mad dogs, lazy dogs, corn dogs, road dogs, guard dogs, hot dogs, wild dogs, lucky dogs, show dogs and especially . . . underdogs.

When I was on the road, my motto was, "I'd rather be hungry than bored." If life wasn't being a rush, regardless of my "standard of living", I'd just take off, stick out my thumb, and see what the world presented next. I was never able to work and make enough money to have as much fun as even just the WAITING to see what came along. The anticipation standing along the highway was an adventure in itself, before anybody even stopped. It was always good. One time to get away from a work situation that was really seductive, good work and money, but out in the middle of nowhere, I bought a one-way bus ticket from San Francisco to Nashville so I'd be far enough away that I couldn't just hitchhike back to that job I didn't want when I ran out of cash. I had to give running into something new to do time to happen. (I stayed right downtown Nashville for three great years, but couldn't handle the summer weather, so I headed back West.) On the road hitchhiking I carried a sleeping bag and a suitcase and had no place to go but forward for twenty-two years. Then I hung up my thumbs and went to Nashville in 1992. I really miss sleeping under the stars.

On Janet E. Morris's planet Silistra, the surface got so uninhabitable, the people had to live underground for generations before above ground would support life again. During that time the Silistrans devised a whole civilazation that totally rejected computers or any type of machines at all. Right in the middle of a modern universe. Could it come to that here, on Planet Earth? Would there be time to get the tunnels through committee and the digging started? I always figured our End would just be--Zip!--and all the Earth's air just shoots out into space. (There's a story idea for somebody. All life on Earth comes to an instant end. Cut to the folks in the International Space Station.) (A colony on Mars or even the Moon would give a sequel a shot.)

Now tonight on the news I saw that somewhere the alligators are all starting to go blind. Fa-la, fa-la.

A Friend With Weed Is A Friend Indeed

2008-06-06T21:18:00.000-07:00

"Hey, Mister. What time is it?"
"Time for you to buy a watch."

Have you heard (or perhaps noticed first-hand) the price of gas? I was up in San Francisco years ago when gas hit $1.99 a gallon on Van Ness Avenue, and it was such a big deal I went and bought a disposable camera to take a picture of the gas station sign. Ha, huh? I've heard since back in the Sixties that whenever anybody would come up with a vehicle that ran on anything other than gasoline, the oil companies would buy the patent and bury the idea. True or false, it sounds like what any multinational corporation would do. Any unscrupulous, sleazy practice or event is simply justified by saying, "It's BUSINESS." Can't argue with that, by golly. That means there's MONEY involved. Amen.

That new TV show premiered last night. Swingtown I think it's called. I didn't need to watch it, I was there, I lived it. Without commercials. Like That '70s Show, which I've never watched either. I'm glad they're on, but it's like the difference between watching a western movie and riding a horse. And besides, it really brings me down seeing movies and shows from back in the Sixties and Seventies, back when folks in large numbers were standing up for their right to have some fun in their lives. Until Ron and Nancy and "Just Say No" somehow came into fashion. And look where we are now. We're loved around the world, have a thriving, happy citizenry, an educational system that's the envy of the world, and we're standing tall on the front lines when it comes to saving future life on the planet. Okay, I'm being facetious. But the U.S. DOES have the #1 prison population per capita in the world. We're got SOMETHING to brag about.

You've heard that a famous sidekick is facing foreclosure on his gigantic house, and actors, singers, and sports stars are more and more doing hard time or paying huge fines for tax evasion. And then there are folks living happily for a year on what these guys can't get by on A Day. Just maybe big over-the-top living isn't success after all, unAmerican as that thought might be. If a CEO is making $200,000,000.oo a year, but doesn't remember what a vacation is and hasn't had sex in years, and then some other guy with a small business or trade, an apartment, a car and a motorcycle, and there's a nearby bar where he's on the pool team and there's dancing to live music Friday and Saturday nights, which one is the richest? ("The less it takes to make you happy, the more fun you have." Me.) In 1973, when asked about weathering the great depression back in the 1930s, an old fisherman on the coast of British Columbia told my friend, "Hell, we ate fish and potatoes during the '20s, during the '30s, through The War in the '40s. We'd go hunting, had our gardens and chickens, our blackberry wine and whiskey stills, everything we needed."

Talking about all the people we have incarcerated, they just now had a piece on the national news about the U.S. Prison Population. They said it's costing 60-billion dollars a year to keep all those folks locked up. Twenty- to thirty-five-thousand dollars a year for each prisoner. There are 800,000 Americans arrested each year just for marijuana, a plant. Tens of thousands of U.S. citizens are behind bars for consensual sex. Yet make big bucks representing invisible people in the sky to the public and you don't have to pay any taxes. (I'm shaking my head.)

Planet Earth, love it or leave it.

The Lord Is Your Shepherd . . . Or Else.

2008-06-04T12:42:00.000-07:00

A long-time friend e-mailed me recently that I should keep quiet about religion so I don't make people mad at me. But then now it's being reported that the California Supreme Court ruling that allows same-sex marriages is being challenged by The Saved Ones. ("God hates fags" is how one very vocal Christian group likes to put it. Most religious people are more subtle, but the message is the same.) It's not like you can leave believers alone and they let you be, they're big on making everybody live by their rules. For centuries they have fought science, sex, and pleasure on every front. Freedom of religion, how about freedom FROM religion? It's easier to ignore scabies. I know, I know, the thought of dying is scary, but if you're going to create a Supreme Being that grants eternal life, can't ya make one that likes fun and progress? Why's He always gotta be such a mean-spirited prude? "But God is all about LOVE." Like "Everybody is born in sin"? There's a big self-esteem builder for ya. How about "Work shall be done for six days, but the seventh is the Sabbath of rest, holy to the Lord. Whoever does any work on the Sabbath day, he shall surely be put to death." (Exodus 31:15.) It's the same for cursing either of your parents. Death. Having sex if you're not married. Death. (gulp.) How many folks were stoned or burned to death for blasphemy, for saying that the earth goes around the sun? God hates that, too? Nowadays it's strip clubs and massage parlors and drugs and teenage sex and skateboarders and birth control and rap music, but it's the same old story. Now tell me, which Presidential candidate doesn't belong to this group that gets its orders from somebody not a single person has ever seen or heard speak but we're told hates our sinful bodies and sinful joy and glee? Oh, the leaders of both parties think this way? All the politicians go for this. Yikes. But don't forget to vote, kids!

"In the beginning, God created the Heavens and the Earth . . . " Okay, page 1, dude doesn't know what the stars are or that the world is round. He has no idea there are Eskimos or a Pacific Ocean. It's God's Word, just God didn't seem to know any more than that peasant in a little village thousands of years ago did. Anybody have a problem with that? I grew up going to Baptist Sunday School every week. I knew Christians sent missionaries around the world to spread The Word, but I was amazed, totally incredulous, when I heard that other religions sent missionaries to us! How silly. All those other phony religions are crazy, just going through the motions. Except now I realize that all religions think of themselves as the only way, and all the others are way wrong and only piss God off. Thus the call to SMITE those not God's true believers. Each and every group is The One, and since God is a soup stone, a symbol open to each religion's and person's imagination, there's a lot of SMITING going on. I'll be honest with you, I couldn't tell the difference between a Sunni and a Shiite and a Kurd if they were standing right in front of me. There's never been a religion that hasn't been persecuted by another religion. Isn't it getting a bit ridiculous in this day and age? Especially with all the problems we're facing as a planet, isn't it time we put a little effort into getting along? "God Bless America." i.e. "God Bless This Part Of The Planet." i.e. "God Bless This End Of The Boat." (Why don't Baptists make love standing up? Because somebody might think they're dancing.)

There's getting to be a lot of folks living like hippies these days. Reluctant hippies, where the real ones were looking ahead at a planet reaching its limits and trying to do something about it. Wearing old clothes, sharing rides, saving water, thinking about what they're using and getting by on less. The real ones were wiped out by corporate misinformation and brutal force, but now there's no choice, the lifestyle is being forced on people. The new hippies would like to see things get back to "normal", limitless growth on a finite planet, but it ain't gonna happen. It can't. And now they just about can't give SUVs away and they're talking about discontinuing Hummers. Ten, fifteen years ago, people were torching SUV dealerships seeing the destruction the manufacture and use of these large gas guzzling (to coin a phrase) vehicles were doing to the planet. NOW it's getting unavoidable. But is it too late? Think how fast we'd come up with better ways to get around if gas hit $30.oo a gallon, and how fast we'll all fry if the price goes down as promised by all the oil company supported politicians. Our dog-eat-dog, every-man-for-himself economy only worked if there was anything left. I'm forced to use a poetry word: things look bleak.

The sad part from a lot of people's point of view is how little it takes to be happy and live really well, but we helplessly watch as a relatively few people destroy our world in their mad quest for . . . for what? Power? Control? Security? Confidence? It's certainly not for any basic needs, they already each personally have more than plenty. As I've said before, the only reason they seem to want to consume everything in site as fast as they can is to see more zeros on their bank statements. It's certainly not for anything tangible. (Like Estri when she was locked in the cubes, just thoughtlessly consuming her limited resources.)

I'm 62, and there are people younger than me dying every day of natural causes. Some rich and famous people even. I'm not real, real old, but I've had a good time over the years and I consider myself way ahead of the game, no matter what happens to me now, and yet I'm still I'm freaking out about how things are going. But I'd really be in a panic if I hadn't lived a life yet. I don't get why there's not a bit more of an uproar--not over the bad economy--but over why they're wanting to fix it. I think it's criminal the way churches can put on their elaborate entertainments while denying birth control around the world as they watch kids starving to death by the thousands, fa-la fa-la. Sex education geared toward a healthy understanding of our sex drive is totally forbidden to young people, as women and children pay the price when guilt and shame instilled over otherwise natural urges result in men growing up squirrelly and unable to relate on a healthy basis when it comes to sex. All the planet's forests are being destroyed when fast-growing hemp could be used for fiber for clothing, paper products, building materials, and as a cash crop anywhere it will grow. Etc. Time for some stone cold logic.

Religions and unchecked greed are no longer up for intellectual debate, we're down to the wire. Should we have ludicrous social restrictions and new models of cars every year, nice green lawns, disposable plastic packaging and such, or continue to have life on Planet Earth? I guess we'll soon see, by golly.

The Fire Down Below

2008-05-31T10:12:00.000-07:00

This morning there was a filming notice on the front door of the hotel. One or more helicopters will be flying around and landing nearby today between 2 and 10 p.m. I think it was. A while ago they landed a couple on the roof of the hotel here, first having evacuated us all to a portable building a couple blocks away where they fed us the worst pizza I ever had. There's often filming going on around L.A., and on weekends there are different projects going on all over the place. It was much the same up in San Francisco when I was living up there. I don't stop and look for famous people every time I see a film shoot like some tourist, but I've caught sight of a few familiar faces over the years. When I first got back to L.A. to get legal in 2003, I was staying down by USC for a while. Just up the street and around the corner I'd for the longest time see a major production in progress with like-new 1950s cars and fancy clothes from the times. I had no idea what they were doing in there. Then like way later I saw S. Epatha Merkerson win an Emmy for the role she played in an HBO movie called Lackawanna Blues. When I spotted that DVD at the library I decided to check it out. I recognized the old unpainted house they'd been filming in that I'd passed by so many times. Now I look at the house as a kind of shrine, that movie is so special. (I was by there last week and it's still the same.) (On Adams just west of Hoover.)

This morning while I was having my first cup of coffee and checking my e-mails, a story came on the radio news about all the formerly middle-class folks up in Santa Barbara who, because either they or their landlords were foreclosed upon, are now living in their cars. California law says that nobody can sleep in a vehicle parked on the street, so the city has opened special parking lots to overnight sleeping. Then the commercial comes on with a guy saying he loves his big gas guzzler "dripping with chrome" so much that if it had a bathroom, he'd live in it.

Another story was about a climate report the White House has been refusing to release since it was completed in 2004. A court finally ordered it be made public. Though it paints a bleak future, the corporate folks really running the show are putting as many zeros on their bank balances as they can before the general public takes its collective heads out of the sand and finally admits what's happening and decides to seriously do something about it. Many folks figure it's already too late, but at least the multi-billionaires' kids and grandkids are all gonna fry just like the progeny of us regular folks. But men and women who've felt it necessary to accumulate that much wealth don't think past the next quarter, so there's really no stopping them I'm afraid.

Today I also heard a neat phrase. "Consensual crimes." Where people are doing something they want to, not involving or hurting anyone else, but other folks have decided that this whatever-it-is shouldn't be allowed. The arrogance of making such rules for others should be the crime. "No, I don't want anybody doing THAT! Who do they think they are!" Only vicious, despicable, self-righteous folks think like that if you ask me, but there are hundreds of thousands of their victims in prisons, like it or not. (Don't get me started.)

Wow, talk about kicking the hive . . . now they're going to evict gang members AND THEIR FAMILIES out of their houses and apartments here in Los Angeles. THAT should certainly put an end to the violence, kick some heavily-armed criminal's mother and little sister out of their home. (Where do they FIND these mental giants who come up with these ideas?) I look at the gangs out there now just like the ones back in the 1920s. Imagine the chaos if they'd started putting Al Capone's and Dutch Schlutz's men's families out of their homes in an attempt to get them to stop shooting at each other over the illicit profits from the alcohol prohibition. I predict they're biting off more than they can chew in their quest to get the entire population to live like family hour on TV. The only thing that stopped the shooting in the '20s was legalizing beer again. They know that. (Remember the words of Brigham Young I recently quoted? Without his constant watch, his people started PLAYING CHECKERS! and PLAYING CARDS! Ol' Jehovah musta been shittin' his drawers when He saw that! People actually enjoying themselves! Sinners all. No wonder they lock people up for oral sex and making hash brownies!) (Or I guess the other way around.)

Teach people how to relax and enjoy, smoke a little weed and make love, go swimming, everybody work three days a week and share vehicles and appliances. We might stand a chance if nobody now running gets to be President and "gets the economy rolling again", which will only fry us all that much faster. Jeesh.

Well, it's now Saturday morning--where does the time go? I'm almost afraid to turn on the radio again.

Good luck to us all.

Nostalgia Isn't What It Used To Be

2008-05-26T22:44:00.000-07:00

This young guy was telling us a story as we kicked back by the river. One time he'd been hitchhiking in Santa Barbara before the freeway passed through town, back when 101 hit the city streets for about ten blocks or so, traffic lights and all. He, a couple heading up to San Luis Obispo, an old hitchhiker, and a Navy guy going back to San Francisco, all got picked up in a big American car by a guy in his forties. Soon as he had the car full and they were on their way north, the driver asked for gas money. Up the road a ways when they were away from civilization, the guy pulled a pistol from under the seat and started waving it around, not pointing it at anybody and making no threats, but it freaked everybody out. I asked what the old road dog did then, and the storyteller said that oh, he'd asked to get out right when the guy asked for gas money. In my over twenty years on the road, whenever anybody asked for money for gas, if I had any cash I'd give it to them, but then I'd get out of the car. Or if I couldn't spare any cash, I'd still get out. I had lots of jobs on the road, but paying for the gas wasn't one of them. Drivers didn't get gas money AND my company. They hadn't stopped for me because they wanted to be alone. I've several times had drivers tell me of times they had to sit by an on-ramp until a hitchhiker with money for gas showed up because they were out and broke. That I can understand, I know it takes a lot of money to drag a car around with you every place you go. But unless it's prearranged that a passenger share the expenses--which I have done a time or two, and I'm sure there's a lot of that going on these days especially--the idea is the drivers were going where they're going anyway, and they have their own reasons for stopping for somebody standing along the way. And right now I'm thinking the higher gas prices go, the better. It'll mean less exhaust being released into the air, and the sooner alternatives to gasoline and diesel fuel will be found. Necessity is the mother(s) of invention. (Who said that? Somebody said that, right?)

It's not easy being a rebel anymore when grandmothers sport tattoos and ten-year-old boys have long hair and a pierced ear or two. And really, there's not much new to do to test yourself. I heard on the radio yesterday that there were 75 people on the top of Mount Everest at that time; might as well be at Wally World. You can hack your way up the Amazon for a week, then get a cell phone call from your mother or a helicopter can drop in with pizza and beer. But they did just land on Mars, now THAT's something nobody's gonna do again anytime soon. (I remember seeing President Nixon talking on the phone to the first men on the moon--Imagine, on the MOON!--and there he was reading a prepared statement to them. How pathetic was that?) For laughs, there's still the presidential campaign. Multi-millionaires running around acting like they're one of us is amusing enough--just folks--but now their preachers are talking in public. How embarrassing for the candidates. It's a fine line to walk: "My preacher makes his living representing invisible people in the sky, but I always thought he was totally sane. Honest. I don't know how I could have been fooled all these years. Honest. And yes, I myself talk to invisible people in the sky every night, but only in the most rational and sensible way, not all crazy like him. Nothing for you to be concerned about when you go to vote. We all do it." (Hey, I could be a preacher. "All the tornadoes and the high gas prices are because God is punishing this country for its war on drugs. Repent!") (Eat your heart out, Jerry.)

I really like those new TV commercials that have strong, confident women walking along talking following a moving camera. Good stuff. The phone one is the hottest. Then the one telling us how her oil company is the solution to global warming. And I do like the car one, too, but we only get a couple flashes of her. I sure hope they do more.

Talking about the war on drugs, have you been hearing about all the shooting going on--yeah, right here in L.A., too--but down on the Mexican border? Just like the Twenties with beer and whiskey! Hot times. Innocent folks get blown away in the crossfire, just like then, and the heavily-armed gangs, and all the justifiable reasons for the police to go around kicking in doors. It's great. And people die from bad drugs, just like they did from bathtub gin and abortions when they were illegal. And just like there's less opposition having a war without the draft, not near as many people squawk about drugs as they did alcohol, so it's way better. Cigarettes would have been great to outlaw if the drugs slowed down, but folks are just stopping that with public opinion so they're out now as a potential controlled product, but hey, how about coffee--no, too much like alcohol, everybody does it--but how about . . . skateboards!! By golly, talk about job security for the criminal justice system! And nobody likes them punks anyway, and they'll keep it up no matter what the penalty is. I'm a genius.

Today as I type is Memorial Day. Many have died to keep us free to openly write blogs like this, and I don't take that lightly; I hear about all the places in the world where it's not allowed. We're free to move and travel and read and pretty much say what we want. But we're not so free if you like to smoke a little weed, or are gay and want a legal relationship, or would rather simply pay for sex than get married, or want a President who doesn't answer to invisible people in the sky.

If You Get Stung By A Bee, You Don't Go Kick The Hive

2008-05-22T08:35:00.000-07:00

Well, he did it again today. The oldest judge on TV has a big problem with people of different ages being friends. Especially women with a guy a couple years younger. "Robbing the cradle" he always accuses, sex involved or not. Today she was 33 and the guy 29, only neighbors and friends, yet he went on and on about them hanging out. One time I remember the woman was really irate, saying how she's only three years older than her boyfriend, but his honor just ignored her, giving a sermon against their relationship right over her incredulous reactions to his tirade. This from an old man who every day has his court packed with young could-be Victoria's Secret models. I've never seen a woman in his court even close to half his age. I think it's maybe like those politicians and preachers who lead campaigns against homosexuals, then get caught themselves having sex with other men. Why else would it be such a big deal to him? I sure don't give a darn how old two other people together are; it's their business. People used to freak about couples from different races, different religions, different countries, even different heights. Yet you still hear, "Wow, he's old enough to be her father!" and, "Look, she's got a boy toy." (I even saw it happen with two women once at a resort. Showing up at the dining area, one of the staff asked, "Oh, is this your daughter?" One look at their reactions and it was obvious that wasn't the case.) Hmmm . . . which would be easier, get everybody in the world to think totally alike about what's a proper couple, or encourage folks to cut each other some slack?

Last night Leno said that Prince Charles gives us Earthlings eighteen months to change our ways if we're going to stop global warming in time to save life on the planet. Of course The Powers That Be would totally agree, if darn it, it wouldn't be so bad for the economy. Death before lower profits. Our "Last Day Of Life On The Planet" Sale. Doors open at 7. Ya gotta love it. (Unless, of course, you have your whole life ahead of you. Then it might be a bit of a drag.)

I don't know how it is everywhere else, but here in California, there's "registered sex offenders" hysteria. Every newscast has a story or two, often followed by reports of some prostitution sting. We could use the same brilliant logic for teenage drivers. Let's make driving lessons illegal for anybody too young to drive. Anybody under the driving age can't even legally watch somebody else drive a car or truck, not even a video or pictures of somebody driving. There's a driver in a movie, it gets an "R" rating. Anybody caught showing minors how to drive would be subject to arrest for contributing. Then when each young person turns fourteen, they're automatically given a drivers license and a car. Any one of them that has an accident or hits something will be ruled totally at fault and be labeled a "registered driving offender" forced to wear an ankle bracelet for the rest of their lives, and they can never again live within a thousand yards of a freeway on-ramp or four-way stop. Yeah, that makes about as much sense. Pity the poor women and children who have to pay the price for the religious lobby and their propaganda that prevents any and all sex education, and sex itself for anyone of any age not meeting their personal requirements. (A license, just like for driving.) God's will, they say. Jeesh, I say. (Sex education and prostitution should be legalized until God Himself says "no" to it OUT LOUD, not just inside some zealot's head.) Meanwhile, women get raped and kids get molested by guys who'd been forbidden any training or understanding about the powerful natural feelings that they experienced at a young age but were taught to feel only guilt and shame about. THAT's what's sick.

If I had my druthers, I'd rather be writing about livelier things, like the joys of skinny-dipping and the health benefits of chocolate chip cookies and beer. But forgive me, with the end of all life on Earth looming, and all we hear from the presidential candidates, congress, and on "the news" is about lowering gas prices and getting the economy going--the very causes of our peril--I'm kinda terrified. Silly me. People working to get along better, wind and solar energy, electric cars, stopping the clear-cutting of forests, having more fun while using less, was all a big thrust of the continually-discredited hippie movement. The planet was doing okay for millions of years, until the industrial revolution. Forty years wasted in reversing the damage could have done the trick. Now, well, I'm afraid we'll just have to see. But I'm sure glad I'm old and my body is worn out and I just partied my life away. All those pretty girls and dancing to live music and psychedelic softball and swimming in rivers and one-way travel and drunk volleyball and sleeping outside and shooting pool and concerts big and small and just working jobs I could see the end of, all with no student loans to repay. Shame on me.

But heck, there's lots of other planets . . . we got to THIS one, didn't we?

50% Off everything. Go shop.

Amen.

"When Ya Ain't Got Nothin', Ya Got Nothin' To Lose"

2008-05-19T12:09:00.000-07:00

The Academy of Country Music Awards were on CBS last night from Las Vegas. I like awards shows, showcasing folks who ignored all that good advice from well-meaning family and friends back home and just went for it anyway. Besides 18-year-old Taylor Swift's breathtaking wet and wild number, after which, when they cut to Brooks and Dunn to go on with the show, poor Ronnie Dunn was so dazed that he looked like he probably couldn't recall his own name there for a bit, fourth-time Entertainer of the Year winner Kenny Chesney immediately criticized the new system of Internet voting for his award, saying it devalues the prize and was like a sweepstakes gimmick. Good for him. I was living in downtown Nashville in the early 1990s during the transition from a real town with character to an extension of Disneyland, a squeaky-clean tourist trap, as I've seen happen to so many other formerly-interesting places. (Big Sur, the Haight Ashbury, downtown Portland, Oregon, Santa Cruz, etc.) (Hollywood it's okay.) Corporate Rule has its price. It's refreshing to see somebody at that big-time of a level speak out against the sanitizing and watered-down bottom-line-above-all-else marketing of our world.

The grasshopper and the ant. (Come winter, they both froze to death.) On top of failed savings institutions, embezzled pension funds, huge credit card debt, a catastrophic disease that wipes out savings, fire or natural disaster, or simply an early death, now prospective retirees are additionally facing a floundering economy (a growth-based economy on a finite planet, who could have foreseen it ever reaching limits?) with energy prices shooting up, diminished investment returns, and sinking real estate values. I'm 62, and if I'd worked my whole life up until now, I'd be pissed. Many of those no-good bums (grasshoppers) may be just as broke and unprepared for retirement and living on the same over-exploited planet as the good folks who worked for the man their whole lives, but they've got no debts, and have traveled and partied and had lots of great guilt-free sex. (Undercover hippies. They managed to quietly stay out of debt and have a great time on way less income without incurring the punishing wrath of Corporate America like happened when people tried to share the secret with the world back in the Sixties.) And lots of folks did make a satisfactory living by doing things they enjoy, while still managing to keep their time mostly their own. Imagine.

Our only hope is to get in the head space that we're all Earthlings. Period. Everybody. Nothing else matters. We've got a shot at bypassing official channels and getting the word out over the Internet, and what THINKING person could argue with the concept? Of course there'll always be politicians and religious leaders standing in the way of everybody getting along--heck, we wouldn't need THEM anymore--but when folks start looking at our precarious situation and then look at their kids . . . I don't know, anybody got any better ideas?

Illegal immigration. Like so many other issues of the day, I pretty much agree 100%, with both sides. The only real problem I have with illegals is I've wasted a lot of extremely witty remarks on people who don't understand English. I'd like to see folks in poorer countries be helped, but then again, if people come here to pick lettuce and strawberries and not take good-paying jobs away by working for lower wages, why do they wait to get hired outside paint stores? I'd hate to see the U.S. become as prosperous and well run as a third-world country from all the illegals flooding public services, but I sure don't like the idea of building a wall. I was an illegal immigrant in Canada for over three years, so I can't squawk. It's like abortion, gun control, the death penalty, just a lot of angles and points of view to consider. I think there's plenty enough of the basics to go around, if only it was allowed to go around. ("Let them eat cake!")

Hey, what if Mexican, Central American, and even U.S. farmers were allowed to plant fast-growing hemp for fiber for clothing, building materials, paper, and such. We could stop cutting down all the slow-growing trees, help filter the lousy air much faster, and give employment. It's not like our standard of living is sustainable for much longer as it's going anyway, much less being spread to "developing countries", too. Maybe if the Earth was the size of Jupiter, but our little planet is like a small pony carrying a 400-pound man. Either the guy has got to get off RIGHT NOW, or the pony will collapse any minute. We need drastic. And smart. And unbiased. And immediate. Cheaper gas will kill us that much faster. We need some new way to get around. (No driving allowed. Everybody should have to hitchhike.) Don't like it? Then come up with a better idea.

People learning how to have a good time while using less can save us. A strong economy will finish us off. All the presidential candidates seemed hell bent on doing us in, and proud of it. Crazy.

"It's Okay, I'm Not Like The Others"

2008-05-16T19:57:00.000-07:00

Poor Nick and Phyllis, started a business (a fashion magazine) with partners, Jack and Sharon. The thought makes me shudder. I started a business (indoor archery lanes) when I was nineteen, with two partners, both in their thirties. It was hell being the kid in the deal. The couples' trip is just daytime TV, but it still brings back the horrors of my experiences. For peace of mind, I suggest sink or swim on your own.

Finally, I got my hot little hands on the new Brigitte Bardot 5-movie boxed set. Last night I watched the first one, "Naughty Girl" (1956). It was hokey and low budget, but the big fight scene at the end had me roaring. Can't wait to watch the rest of them. (Back in those dreary days of the 1950s, Ike and Dick and all that dull energy, I fully credit Brigitte Bardot and [the early] Elvis Presley with awakening my young soul. They'd both be pretty tame these days, but it was a whole different world back then, until they started shaking things up.)

Wow, it just came on the news as I type here on May 15th, the California Supreme Court has ruled in favor of same-sex marriage. I think the former ban will soon look as silly as not allowing interracial marriages, oral sex being totally illegal, and the entire war on sex that's been raging since the first insecure control freak looked up at the night sky, invented God, and then needed the concept of sin to justify his new career. Some folks are still vowing to fight today's ruling and make everybody live just like them by law, because they know how God wants us all to live. Holy folks love to torture other people to death for doing sex wrong, thereby gaining brownie points with the Lord. "Stone them sinners! Hallelujah!"

There's been a big uproar since yesterday when Mr. President made a statement in Israel about talking to the enemy. I made a comment about it last night on a MySpace bulletin, but it's gotten way bigger today than I thought it would. I wrote a piece on the subject over a year ago called "Ed Deline's Pillow" and posted it on my MySpace blog on February 23, 2007. It's also with my Helium.com articles and essays. Being a marijuana fugitive for over thirty years, I had to learn to settle squabbles and challenges without the law getting called. Violence, win or lose, just wasn't an option. I'd sure like to see some of that philosophy used in international politics instead of the little-kids-in-a-sandbox policies we've had up to now. "It all started when he hit me back."

The less you're happy with, the more fun you have.

Drink. Play. Dance.

"The Truth Isn't Always Kind"

2008-05-12T15:36:00.001-07:00

Background checks for ice-cream-truck drivers now. Driving a yellow and white striped ice cream van was the first job I did after I gave up twenty-two years of hitchhiking and bought a one-way bus ticket from San Francisco to Nashville in 1992. Best job I ever had: women and children running at me all day, waving money. You'd think it would drive a body nuts, but I swear, I grew to love that jingle playing out over the speakers all day. I decided if I ever won the lottery, I'd buy an ice cream truck and drive it around summers. I'd also used the van to explore, get to know my new area some, so my route was always totally random. It felt good when I'd turn down a street and see some little kid standing at the curb start bouncing with joy as I came into sight, but knowing I'd just picked the turn at the last second, I wondered what if I'd turned the other way at the intersection. I remember when Fonzi tried doing an ice cream gig supposed to be back in the 1950s on Happy Days. He told how he'd just get the rig rolling good, and then there'd be some kid holding up a lousy dime and he'd have to stop. I remember one house I stopped at four times. Out would come six or eight kids, the oldest one a girl about 11, holding an infant. The next youngest was another girl about 9, also carrying a baby, and then three or four more really little kids with them. The first two times the oldest one took charge and made sure everybody got what they wanted, all top of the line selections, and then, juggling the baby in her arms, she'd count out my money from a wad of bills. I was never sure how I got to that house and a few other spots on my rounds, just suddenly there I'd be again. So after a couple days of missing it, as if by magic I found myself there again, turned down the cul-de-sac and coming back out the kids were there waiting for me on the corner in front of their house like before. Except this time the oldest girl wasn't with the group, and the eight or nine year old was in charge. Also taking care of everybody and herself, she held out a bowl full of quarters, ones and fives. "Is this enough?" I took what I had coming and went on my way, feeling really good about dealing with such confident, polite, happy kids. The next time I was there was on a Saturday and a man came out of the house with them. Barking orders at the kids, watching me like a hawk, double-checking the money the girl gave me and the change I gave her back. What a different experience. (A guy like that would never in a million years pull over to give me a ride hitchhiking, so by being out there on the road the previous decades, my life had been spared having to deal with clowns like him.) Another time I was out in the country exploring, didn't have the music playing, there were no houses around. I was driving up a dirt road when I came to an abrupt dead end. Half-way through a back and forth 18-point turn to get back around, being like the top of a T in the middle of the narrow road, I looked up just as a scruffy guy in his thirties with a full beard stepped out of the trees carrying a shotgun. I'm thinking, "Tennessee". I can't go front or back more than a couple inches at that point, when he comes up and asks for an ice cream. As I'm counting out his change, he says, "Looks like somebody needs a drink this morning." I looked down. My hands were shaking like crazy. I grinned like that was it. Another time I was pulled over by three police cars for being by the lake at some National Park. "Can I see your federal vendor's permit?" "Say what?" "I warn you guys every year about slipping in here." I was still selling ice cream out the side window as they were running their check on me. Back at the place I asked the boss why he hadn't warned me about going by the lake. He said, "Well, you just played dumb, didn't you?" But for the most part, I only dealt with smiling people all day long. So anyway, now they want all the ice cream sellers to get checked out and probably pee in a bottle on a regular basis. The frenzy continues to build.

Tom ("We'll leave the light on for you.") Bodett has a video series out, "America's Historic Trails". On the one, "The Mormon Trail", he reads a quote Brigham Young gave his followers on their way to their promised land in Utah. "I have let the brethren dance and fiddle night after night to see what they will do. Well, they will play cards. They will play checkers. And if they could get whiskey they'd be drunk half the time. Do you suppose that we're going to look for a home for the saints, a place of peace where they can build up the kingdom with a low, mean wicked spirit dwelling in our bosoms?" And I say, "So what's your point?" Can't be having folks enjoying themselves and feeling good. Then they wouldn't need YOU, Mr. Young. You're just another one of those Guilt Pushers, selling your poison. All that born-in-sin crap. I say, "Let my people play."

Estri Hadrath diet Estrazi. The Silistra Series by Janet E. Morris. The High Couch of Silistra. The Golden Sword. Wind From The Abyss. The Carnelian Throne. (Then she rewrote the first one and called it Returning Creation.) Check 'em out. Brutal but really cool.

Summer is here again and I do miss rolling up my sleeping bag and sticking my thumb out over fabled Highway 101. April through October, just bouncing up and down the West Coast, partying. 1970-1992. Then every winter I'd do something different. Some winters I failed to run into anything to do and just continued to bounce. But during daylight savings was the best. Go anywhere, find a bush to sleep behind at night, people on vacation and locals and truck drivers keeping me amused and moving. April until October. For twenty-two years. (All one needs is a sleeping bag . . . you're going to get tired, and a flashlight . . . it's going to get dark. Most everything else just appears as needed.) "It's not like it used to be." Actually, it never was.

I wrote the above last night. Today, Monday, I woke up and the first thing I hear on the radio is a new plan for getting rid of prostitution on a popular street corner here in L.A. The joys of life have been brutally punished by religious people for thousands of years. Who first decided that God doesn't like a good time? They stone people to death and burn them at the stake for having sex. Many religions claim music, dancing, card playing, even laughter are all sins. It's okay to lock yourself up in a bare room for life for God, beat yourself bloody, or slowly torture others to death for not living like you and God think is right . . . but just don't have any fun. Where's the sense? Now the big evil is "registered sex offenders". Today we have thousands of little Joe McCarthys running around chasing commies again. Deny any sex education, pile on the guilt and shame for natural sexual urges, then vilify porn and strip clubs, outlaw massage parlors and prostitution, then come down with the wrath of the Lord of Lords on anybody who seeks a way to have sex. Now even teens are getting ankle bracelets and being registered for life for consensual sex because they're under the age the law has decreed is the age when the young people themselves have any control over their own bodies. Who are the sickos here? Tax money is being spent to fight the pleasure of sex and drugs for the Lord. Where's the separation? Who is this guy God anyway? Has He ever spoken to anyone who is sane? I think He was just created by guys who couldn't get it up and needed a good excuse for not having to try anymore. "Oh, sex is a SIN! I'm just being holy."

Give me a break.

Rear-Wheel Drive

2008-05-09T13:15:00.000-07:00

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?

Dirty Old Man (It's okay, I'm a professional.)

2008-05-06T16:09:00.000-07:00

The Presidential Campaign is the magician's hand that shows.

Yesterday at the store 18 Budweisers cost a dollar less than 12 Budweisers. God did that.

I've had a babe jones since my uncle played high school football and I saw my first cheerleader. Today at the grocery store I saw the prettiest girl I ever saw in my life. It never stops.

I hate that singing-puppy commercial so much, every time it comes on I kick my dog.

Planet Earth has survived plagues, floods, dictators, wars, religious rule, the ice age, disco, asteroids, and volcanoes, but it's being done in now by that mindless Wall Street Bottom Line. Let's lower gas prices, get the economy rolling, and save the planet is backwards. I feel so old-hippie talking like this, but everything I think of comes back to we're killing ourselves for nothing. And even the thought of joining a band of merry bandits roaming the countryside eating the rich doesn't sound any good if there's no water to drink anywhere or air to breathe. So I continue to sound the fool, because I can't really think of anything else that matters.

People take an average of forty seconds longer to leave a parking space if somebody else is waiting for it.

That picture of Hannah Montana's back continues to be displayed every time I turn on the TV. The dust still hasn't completely settled from Janet Jackson's oft-replayed one second nipple shot. Light-weight scandals these days. Back in livelier times we had Traci Lords. Now there was a worthy scandal. None of that lame TV sitcom nonsense or the soft porn of some of those reality shows. Traci did it. Actually did it. Just like in real life. Imagine.

"I lied last night. I'm not really eighteen."
"Damn. I'm sure glad I'm not a rich and famous sports star or something. Or your teacher."
"Was that somebody knocking on your door? Just kidding."

Katrina has hit Burma, one of those "repressive regimes". But we Americans still hold the record for the most citizens behind bars. We're #1! U-S-A! U-S-A!

" . . . and it's happening a lot faster than scientists had predicted."

So it goes.

"Who ARE Those Guys?"

2008-05-03T12:03:00.000-07:00

Wasn't it the movie "Mr. Roberts", where the World War II U.S. Navy guys were at anchor somewhere, bored and frustrated, when they realized that a newly-constructed building on shore had just started housing nurses? And they could see the new arrivals taking showers through uncovered windows. A woman Naval Officer came aboard and spotted the exposed women and took off for shore to have curtains installed. Jack Lemmon, the ship's officer who had brought the woman aboard, said to the disheartened men, "Well you can still look until she gets back there." The men said it just wasn't the same, knowing their enjoyment was going to come to an end. Yesterday I heard someone on the radio say that the population of the U.S. would triple by the end of this century. Yeah, but . . . Next story was about food riots beginning to break out in different places. Next story was about all the inventive new ways desperate people are coming up with to steal gas. Next story was about our crappy air. Next was a computer-generated picture of all the space junk floating above us. Next story told of a second U.S. aircraft carrier moving into the Persian Gulf. Next story reported that somebody at the U.N. called bio-fuel a crime against humanity. Next story told of the resurgence of terrorist groups along the Pakistani border. Next story told us that CEO salaries in 1980 were about 40 times the average worker's pay, and now they are many hundreds of times more. Next story let us know about the increase in home-invasion robberies. Next story told of a new ban on salmon fishing to try to save the vanishing fish population. Next story was that many Americans are outraged by the picture of Hannah Montana's uncovered back. Well it's good to know people can still get outraged about something.

Three times more people than there are now. Good luck with that.

I've been watching "The History of Rock 'n' Roll" on DVD from the library. I remember first hand. And I remember how blown away I was the first time I heard two songs actually say something unrelated to boy/girl love. "Positively 4th Street" and "Eve of Destruction". I hadn't realized it was even possible for songs to make you think above the waist. (Well, I was young.) And when it happened with the Beatles, I hadn't realized that it was Bob Dylan flat-out telling John Lennon that Beatles music was lame (or however he put it), and that had been when the Fab Four passed on the bubble-gum tunes for more pertinent lyrics. Social and political comment was the thing in music for a while there, and a few TV shows went for it (one of them actually ordered off the air by then President Nixon), and even a couple politicians and public figures tried, (but they got shot).

Heh, I spoke too soon. I shut off the monitor to watch Criminal Minds just as I finished the last paragraph, and lo and behold, the show was about a gay guy so filled with self-hate and guilt by his real religious prison-guard father that he went off the deep end. A hint of rational thought in prime time; who'd'a thunk? And an added kicker at the end, the arresting officer was, and the guy getting handcuffed is, from the cast of the Young and the Restless. (Not that I watch it.) (Well okay, I watch it, but I could quit any time.) (I do miss Bobby and Britney, the only outlaws I've seen on the show.) (Oh sure, they've had plenty of criminals, but darn few outlaws.) (Maybe Carmen if she'd lived longer.) So anyway, kudos to Criminal Minds for risking the wrath of the pious.

Two upcoming topics on one of those entertainment shows. "Celebrity Virgins" and "Greensburg Rising". That's that small town where the tornado hit, leveling all nine churches, and leaving the town's only bar untouched. For once we were spared giving God credit for something on the news.

She was such a rebel, she didn't even have a tattoo.

The DC Madame hung herself today they're saying. You have to admit that the world is a better place since her arrest, knowing that her sin-obsessed clients can't have sex anymore just anytime they want. But I wonder what they'll do now.

I started this on Wednesday and now it's Saturday. I've been having major computer problems, the First of the Month hit and I had a bunch of business to take care of, and it's been warm temperatures here in Southern California which makes it great for walking around checking out the eye candy. Yowzers. I'll be heading up to the library to post this in a while.

Two worthy movies if you haven't seen . . . "Lackawanna Blues" and "Dangerous Beauty".

Peace.

MAD DOG 20/20

2008-04-28T14:16:00.000-07:00

A house burned down around here a few days ago because thieves ("the vandals") had absconded with the brass cap off the fire hydrant ("took the handle") and firefighters couldn't turn the water on.

It'll be interesting to see how attitudes change as prices continue to rise and food becomes increasingly scarce. Somebody smoking a joint in their back yard or getting a hand job at a massage parlor suddenly won't seem so earth-shaking anymore. But for now the well-fed morally superior will continue to wreck righteous havoc on peaceful lives for fun and profit. The War on Sin continues as the planet fades around us. A robust economy, nobody getting high, and total sexual repression until the very end will make our last days all worth it, right?
They just had a story on the TV about a new gene therapy restoring sight in blind people. Back in the late 1980s, I started working for an old man who was pushing 80 when I first met him. When I'd asked what the plan was for tomorrow he'd say, "Well at my age, the first thing I have to do is wake up." And he often wondered aloud, "What will go first, the mind or the body?" Among several businesses, he dealt in used restaurant equipment. As we'd be struggling to move some heavy piece of equipment, he'd say, "Next life it's gonna be jewelry." It turned out to be Macular Degeneration that got him first. As he lost his sight, he fought it every step of the way. He told me that when he was driving, the hardest part was passing through construction zones where the painted lines on the street he relied on to make his way around town were out of service. He said he could make it all the way home to Mendocino County from San Francisco, except through the tunnel just up the hill from the north end of the Golden Gate Bridge. He'd park on Lombard Street and wait until a white truck passed by, then he'd take off and follow it until it lead him through the tunnel. Up the twisty unpaved mountain road to his place, if it got to be late in the day and getting dark before he got there, he'd pick up a hitchhiker and pay him to copilot up the road to his place. ("No! Quick! More to the left!") Anyway, this new eye procedure would be good for his disease, too. Helping blind folks to see, a worthy undertaking for sure. "Full report tomorrow morning by Diane Sawyer." (Who was born the same day and year as me, though I think she's younger.) Some folks deal with such things as giving sight to the blind, others are more worried about unworthy people having a good time and concentrate on putting a stop to it. Just doing God's will.

And now there's a bit of an uproar over Hannah Montana showing her bare back during a photo shoot. That's as hot as TV shows ever get, the ol' bare back of an actual female woman. Wowzers. And now a real live teenage girl showing her bare back. The hell with the ice caps melting, we're talking about SEX! Hide your eyes, God, we know you can't stand to look at skin. If young people had comprehensive sex education and were allowed to develop a mature, comfortable attitude towards nudity and sex, where would we get our supply of registered sex offenders to torment for their sins? Jeesh, Hannah, cover up.

The Christian Children's Fund. Only $24.oo a month can save a starving child. ("Come on, somebody. Get the flies on her face for the close-up.") The Pope's visit to the U.S. cost between 15 and 20 million dollars. "I'm inspired. Let's do a tour of the Great Cathedrals this summer." There's a new leader on the billionaire list! (Etc. You get my point.)

Gonna be needing to keep a lot better watch on those handles, I fear.

8-Ball in the Corner Pocket

2008-04-24T23:02:00.000-07:00

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.

Danica Patrick Fan Club

2008-04-22T03:17:00.000-07:00

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!

Plant Your Seeds

2008-04-19T21:20:00.000-07:00

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?

Lights and Sirens

2008-04-17T13:41:00.000-07:00

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.

Is This The Last Generation?

2008-04-13T13:46:00.000-07:00

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.

God Bless This End Of The Boat

2008-04-09T22:32:00.000-07:00

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.

"I'd Rather Have A Bottle In Front Of Me Than A Frontal Lobotomy."

2008-04-05T14:35:00.000-07:00

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!

I Just Can't Help Myself. Again.

2008-03-31T16:21:00.000-07:00

It happened again at the Kids Awards over the weekend. I saw a clip this morning of a hot young second-generation singer giving the old "I'm Blessed" speech. I just heard her, I don't know if anybody else did it too, but I've gotta repost this piece from the last music awards show I watched. I won't make a habit out of doing this, but it's this or do like Elvis and shoot my TV. My apologies to you who've read this on another site.

Those Music Award Winners are certainly inspirational.

"First, of course, I want to thank God for this award." (He chose ME to give this talent to, over all those other wanna-be singers and musicians out there.) "And I'd like to thank Him, also, for touching the hearts of the academy members who voted for me and for inspiring the fans to buy my music, taking His precious time away from . . . well, whatever else He does besides pick music awards winners." (He doesn't seem to get personally involved with wars, mass starvation, disease, the total destruction of the planet for profit, millions of people locked up in prisons, the lopsided distribution of wealth and such, but He sure is into music careers.) "I'm just SO thankful He has blessed ME here tonight. Thank you again, God!!!!
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"And my manager."
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**Postscript: Several folks who've read the above have reminded me that besides singers and musicians, sports people are big for claiming that God is rooting for them personally, too. I have to agree, though I was inspired to write on this subject after watching yet another God-thanking marathon on a music-awards show, not a sports contest. [I do always think it's presumptuous, pointing to the sky after hitting a home run, kneeling in prayer in the end zone after a touchdown, making the sign of the cross before attempting a foul shot--though I fully understand when those bull riders give thanks after living though their event each time.] I've heard a number of times after a fire or tornado passes through a neighborhood leaving only one house untouched, the home owner saying on the TV news, "Now I KNOW there's a God." I guess that's true, all the gods ever created by man have been personal: me, our family, this group, etc. I myself, after thirty-two years as a marijuana fugitive, would like to thank God for keeping me out of the misguided clutches of the law all those years. Amen.
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So, in review, though God may not be concerned with ending pain and suffering, He does appear to enjoy music, sports, and weed.
.............
Cool.

Rehab Is For Quitters

2008-03-29T13:15:00.000-07:00

The Young And The Restless soap opera has been on television for thirty-five years. It's been the #1 daytime show for a thousand weeks. I first got into watching it while visiting an older woman friend up in Portland back in 2000. I get frustrated with the show sometimes because most of the big hassles the characters run into are their own darn fault. Like real life, sure, but on the show they never seem to learn. Sometimes real people get a clue. I've heard it said that the only way for the human brain to contemplate infinity is to think how stupid we people can be. (What were they [was I] thinking?) So maybe that's part of the appeal of Y&R. But that aside, I'd still like to see somebody on that show, young or old, who doesn't think like a prude when it comes to sex. When Nick was still married to Sharon and started having the affair with Phyllis, when it came out, not one person said, "Hey, Nick, way to go! That Phyllis is hot." And if I'd been Nick, I'd sure have given moving Phyllis in with me and Sharon a shot. At least considered it or talked about it with one or both of them. But even the young folks on the show are totally shocked by unmarried sex. Despite the show's edgy name, it sure seems pretty 1950s to me. They were off to a good start with Bobby and Britney, could have done a lot with that situation, but that happening storyline just came to a screeching halt and it looks like the strip-club owner and his young dancer have been written out of the Genoa City population forever and ever amen. Pity.

There's always a lot of talk about "cheating" and "affairs" on TV cuz of the ongoing high-profile sex controversies of politicians and religious leaders, the two main vocations that still for some reason feel required to adhere to rules of conduct established back when people lived their whole lives in a small village and died at thirty or thirty-five. It's hysterical when they get discovered and squirm, I agree, but it's really just sad when you think about it. Why do they apologize? "Oh, I'm sorry for having had such a great time. It was so good, I'll never let it happen again." Break out the scarlet letters. Jeesh. Join the hookers' union in San Francisco: COYOTE. "Call Off Your Old Tired Ethics". You're big time politicos and God's guilt pushers, show some gumption. That new gov of NY freely admits to having lived a life. Hats off to him and the Mrs. both. Very refreshing.

"Hey, Johnny. What's 'B.R.M.C.' stand for?"
"Black Rebel Motorcycle Club."
"What are you rebelling against?"
"What've ya got?"

I woke up yesterday morning and turned on the radio and just caught the news on the hour. It was mostly stories about the little-kids-in-a-sandbox mentality of world leaders in action. Then I turned on the computer to check my e-mails. On Yahoo! News, I see an 11-year-old girl died because her parents only prayed over her instead of taking her to a doctor. Politicians and religious folks, the same people who seem to have all the guilt and shame when it comes to sex. Coincidence? Why is it that the ones with the most hang-ups always want to tell everybody else how to live? People who party and enjoy life don't give a dang what other people are up to, it's the miserable joyless citizens who are afraid somebody next door or even across town might be having sex or smoking a joint. And because the morally superior are so dangerous, the happy people gotta lie and sneak for fear of losing their jobs or getting arrested. And just look at where it's gotten us.

Rolling blackouts are happening tonight to help point out the need to conserve energy around the world. It's certainly more civilized than torching SUV dealerships, as much as I do understand the fear and urgency that would lead some folks to such action. We'll certainly never become a planet of monks, but we can sure learn ways to have a good life while using lots less. I used to hitchhike on the freeway way up north here in California, overlooking a lumber mill that was the main employer of two small towns and the surrounding area. It was a fourth-generation operation, actually had more timber growing than they harvested each year, and could have gone on indefinitely. But then some Wall Street type looked on their computer and realized that this company owned all this standing timber and initiated a hostile take-over, moved in and clear-cut everything the law would allow, and then moved on, leaving the area to get by on Food Stamps and growing pot. But boy were the stock holders happy that quarter! More zeros to look at. That's our enemy, our downfall I'm afraid. People who need more zeros.

Thought Pong

2008-03-25T14:13:00.000-07:00

Okay, here's what you'll do if you're smart. Work your whole life and give us the money. Then when you get old and really need it, we'll give it back to you. We're here to help. Now get busy.

Wow, how'd you like to be the top public-relations rep for the Chinese Olympics? Those damn cell phones and the Internet! Since Rodney King, censorship and propaganda just haven't been the same. I know I've seen events with my own eyes, then heard the sanitized reports about them on the news. And I've watched initial TV news stories, then been amazed as the facts evolve to the official version, with anything that contradicts the desired truth having been edited out. But, ah-ha!, that's not gonna be so easy anymore. It'll be fun to watch as our Corporate Rulers and Law Enforcement have to scramble as employees and witnesses can record AND INSTANTLY BROADCAST uncensored versions of nefarious business practices, crowd control tactics, arrests, and other events. Those sick cows in the slaughterhouse and the "crackdown" on protesters in Tibet are just the beginning. Reality TV with no commercials. Break out the popcorn!

With crime leveling off across the country, prison guard and police unions are considering new avenues for expansion. Hey, caffeine can be harmful. How about a prohibition on coffee? It would be better for business than marijuana and prostitution combined, and talk about job security! Get a few preachers and media moguls fired up, and there'll be promotions for everybody! And we can start spraying South America again! It's all good!

The beauty of distance is gone these days. You can fly to Africa for lunch and be home in time for dinner. Or work your way up the Amazon for two weeks, yet your mother can still call to check on you whenever she wants. Local customs have been reduced to dressing up for the tourists. Even just a couple hundred years ago, anywhere you happened to be on the planet, you were THERE. And if you went elsewhere, you knew it. It had its pros and cons, but it must've been nice to travel when you didn't know what to expect when you got there, and the new place was totally different than where you'd been. Life wasn't as long perhaps, but it could be so much wider. I know, I know, there's nothing we can do about it, but it's still a trip to imagine those times. Set out to sea, cross the mountains, see what's down that mysterious road. It would be cool. Nowadays for adventure we can watch Survivor, risk driving alone in the car pool lane, or drink a bottle of cough medicine. Too bad other planets are so darn far away, don't ya think?

Hey, one of those cop shows has returned after the writers' strike. Every week they hire a bunch of hot half-naked folks to be having a lot of fun that the regular cast can work around acting superior. What a concept. Skin without the sin. There're quite a few writers who do that with their novels, too, I've noticed. Have much of the action take place in strip clubs and around prostitutes and people getting high, then the good guy can be disgusted all the way through the investigation. Cashing in on the sensual pleasures without condoning them. (Isn't there a word for that?)

Last week I caught something on the news I didn't really zoom in on, but I haven't been able to get it out of my head since. Seems it's some annual religious rite here in L.A. A gaudily dressed spiritual leader dips like a toilet brush into a bucket and flings water on people and their pets as they walk by on the street. The blessing of the animals or something. This productive practice brought to us by the folks who oppose sex education, stem cell research, and birth control. We're doomed.

Woodrow. Ya Gotta Start Havin' More Fun. Gus.

2008-03-23T20:34:00.000-07:00

"Let's get some cough medicine after school, okay?"

"Grandma, may I use your bathroom?"

"Let's look in the garage and see what we can find."

"Hey, mister, will you buy us some beer?"

Ah, spring.

Along the Russian River, up above Cloverdale, there's a wide spot between the river and Highway 101 where folks hang out and party. I spent the night there many times over the years when I was on the road. I thumbed up there one time to kill a couple days swimming and partyin' with whoever happened to be there until the next week when I had a painting gig in San Francisco. I had a few bucks, a little weed, a box of granola bars, and a couple tall Budweisers. When I got let off, I was strolling down toward some trees to get out of the sun and kick back with a beer and my book I was reading when I spotted an old twenty amongst the smooth rocks. Heh. Suddenly I could use a couple more beers. I left my stuff and took off upstream. A couple guys were cooking up near the highway with a van and camper and a motorcycle. No, they didn't have any beer. Up three more campsites, nobody had any cold brew for sale or trade. Oh well, I'd get a few more tomorrow when I went a few miles one way or the other for breakfast. I'm in sight of my stuff when the first folks I'd talked to gave a holler, said they'd found a beer I could have. When I walked into their campsite, the older of the two guys opened a cooler and there were about twenty cans of Bud on ice. I grinned, "Wanna smoke a joint?"

So that fall, several months later, I'd thumbed down to San Francisco after spending a few days at Wilbur Hot Springs deciding if I wanted to work there for the winter. (No. Nice refurbished pool table brought in by mule-back in 1910--possibly the best table I ever shot on--but the place was way too isolated for my taste.) I checked my mail service downtown by Union Square, then took a bus out to the Haight. I stepped off the bus and ran right into the guys I'd met on the river last summer. An invitation to spend a couple days at their apartment while I looked around for something to do turned into seven months after they'd had a sample of my cooking. I would take occasional three-day hitchhiking trips 200 miles north to Garberville and back for my road fix as needed, but the rest of the time I lived in a room behind the garage in their Ashbury Street building, less than a block off Haight Street. I'd go up to Happy Donuts on Haight for coffee in the morning, then about nine or ten, let myself into the apartment and fix breakfast, take some cash out of a drawer to buy dinner later, then head out for the day. About four or five o'clock, depending on what I was making, I'd pick up what I needed at Cala, walk back and cook. On only two occasions in that seven months were there not two or three street people joining us for dinner. Those guys would meet people in their daily travels, and at the very least invite them to eat, take a shower, and give them a couple packs of cigarettes if they smoked. Beside their pensions, they dealt nickel bags of weed to finance their philanthropy. I was never asked to present a receipt for the groceries or account for the change. The older guy had like thirty feet of surgery scars on his upper torso and an oxygen tank next to his bed. He said he'd been a POW in Korea at a place so flat that , "You could escape at the crack of dawn with a bicycle, and just before dark they could look out and say, 'There he goes there'." He told me that if he should collapse any time while his friend was out of town, that I should call the fire department, not an ambulance. "Like security guards are frustrated cops, ambulance drivers are frustrated doctors, and they'll want to practice on me." And if he just dropped dead, he said to just grab the cash and walk away. "They'll find me when the rent's due." (His ashes were spread over the headlands overlooking the Golden Gate Bridge.)

One of my several jobs on the road was hitchhiking with girls to where they were going if they wanted. I was thumbing from Los Angeles to Portland with Cotati, my Ridgeback dog. It was January. In Santa Rosa, we got a ride with a bunch of folks in the back of an old pickup truck. It had been raining and was still threatening, but the ride was dry. When we hit Hopland, they stopped to let us off on 101 before turning east on 127 through the wine vines. Of all the folks in the back, the only other two to get out were two teenage girls. Going to Eugene they said. I asked if they wanted to thumb together, I was going to Portland. "With a dog?" "It's up to you." We got to Eureka in Northern California just as it was getting dark. They started back and forth, "You tell him." "No, you tell him." I figured I was gonna hear I was slowing them down and they wanted to get going. But they said, "We sure are glad you're with us." Then it started to rain. A teenage boy picked us up, only going a ways. Up past civilization he was going to turn into a cabin on the beach owned by his parents. He was really nervous, but he just couldn't bring himself to let us out there in the middle of nowhere. He said we could stay at the cabin, but all the way in the bumpy driveway he kept saying, "I can't believe I'm doing this. I can't believe I'm doing this." The girls and I unrolled our sleeping bags in the living room, smiling when we heard the boy sliding a heavy dresser it sounded like against the bedroom door. In the morning, watching the ocean breakers maybe fifty foggy yards away through the cabin windows, the dude emerged, a bit sheepishly, and drove us back to 101 and up to a coffee shop where we could all eat, and then the girls and I continued on our way.

I'll tell you what happened. I wrote a piece to post here--An Old Guy On MySpace--but then at the last minute I just went ahead and posted it on MySpace. (I'm 'Grinnin' Sinner'.) I figured it was fair. I've been working hard at not going off on a religious tangent because of the holiday today, so I wrote what I did. I don't want to be insensitive to folks clinging to ancient superstitions for comfort, but they do worry me a lot. 'Thou shalt not . . .' and 'Sin' and 'Hell' and 'The Only Way' and all that. Not very friendly. Anyway, I'll write something more pertinent next time. Take care.

I'd Rather Be Hungry Than Bored

2008-03-20T11:14:00.000-07:00

Hats and head scarves seem to be very important to God. I don't know, but I think of the big ol' universe out there, the hundreds of millions of years that passed before the first potential worshiper walked the Earth--no matter how we first got here--and I picture an all-powerful creator of black holes and billions of stars and hurricanes and jungles and redheaded cheerleaders, and I can't quite see this Super Being getting upset over whether some tiny individual on a virtual speck of dust floating through the vastness of space, is or isn't wearing a head covering. Yet people kill and die over this. Ya gotta love it.

I was hoofing it back from the liquor store over the Shelby Street Bridge in downtown Nashville. Two well-dressed late-twenties black men were coming toward me on the walkway. As we grew near, just as one spit in my path, the other one said howdy to me. Then they both looked at each other, shocked by the others action, as they went on past. "How could you?" We're all individuals.

The Hell's Angels are going to be celebrating the founding San Berdoo chapter's sixtieth anniversary this weekend in Yucaipa, California. Some folks thought this was rather insensitive of them, it being Easter weekend. Reminds me of the time a woman on a bus told off a guy across the aisle from her for reading a girlie magazine, " . . . and on a Sunday, too!" Would be nice if nobody died or got cancer on Sundays or religious holidays, don't you think? But it seems to be only no pleasure allowed on holy days. Pain and suffering is cool all week.

Can anybody think of a hot topic that might one day be resolved to everyones satisfaction? Abortion, armed conflict, immigration, gun control, religion, pornography, the war on drugs, sex education, how we got here. The thing is, it's not hard to see the point and understand the thinking on both sides. So how then can these differences ever be resolved? I don't think they can be. So now, with that in mind, what might we do about them?

You can't buy happiness. (Though you can rent it.) Happiness isn't a destination, it's a mode of travel. I'm sixty-two-years-old right now. I lived through the scandalous dawning of rock and roll in the 1950s, from doo-wop and slow dancing through Elvis, Chuck Berry, Jerry Lee Lewis, the Everly Brothers, and the Coasters. The Beatles and Dylan hit when I was in high school. Then the British Invasion and Vietnam started getting in the news. In 1966, I rode my Norton motorcycle (with those sassy ape-hanger handlebars) from New Jersey to Los Angeles, where I ran into that big party just starting up. Marijuana, LSD, psychedelic music, war protests, free speech, the sexual revolution, (I became an officer), hitchhiking the West Coast and Canada. Truly the sex, drugs, and rock and roll lifestyle during the prime of my life. (Now it hurts me to get out of bed.) Anyway, what I'm trying to say is, I ain't concerned so much on my own account, but I know how little it takes to get by and have a great life, yet just look around. The billionaires list and the homeless and starving of the world both grow. And now that the ice has melted above Canada, ships for the first time ever can pass that way between Europe and Asia, and it's now free for oil drilling. That's either making lemonade when life gives you lemons, or fiddling while Rome burns. We'll sure see. I think the unrestricted contact between people on the Internet is the last best shot we have at saving this here planet, but it's gonna have to pick up the pace a bit pretty darn soon. ("Cutting plastic grocery bag use by 30% by 2020," just ain't gonna make it.) "I just made my first million and paid off my school loans, I put money down on the house of my dreams, my parents are proud, I've got two lovers who get along really well together, and all life on the planet just ended. Not fair."

It's all "Us" riding on this ball. We can no longer afford the luxury of a "Them".

It All Started When He Hit Me Back

2008-03-17T13:23:00.000-07:00

I'm hearing on the radio today that there's a big sting operation in progress "all over Southern California". Under-age people are asking passersby to please buy them a beer. Then police jump out and bust them for it. Making drinking be a crime below a certain age and not allowing any sex training between different ages are both working so well, how about we use the same strategy with driving? Any driver training (or "education") to a juvenile by an adult before a given age is illegal. ("Contributing To The Delinquency of a Minor.") Then at that set age, at midnight, every person is given a drivers license and a car, and any time they mess up, we can come down on them hard.

The economy is big on the news. I remember Bernard Mickey Wrangle saying something like: "If they make it a thousand dollars to get into a movie, we'll figure out how to get the money. And if we can't, then we'll sneak in." Like it or not, there's not really much else we can do. Might as well make it have been the plan all along, our own idea. But I'm afraid the game is gonna change levels real soon. (" . . . and it's happening a lot faster than scientists had predicted . . . ") We all need some air and a place to stand, no matter what else.

It's now Sunday, and I've been hearing more about that hey-mister-can-ya-buy-a-beer-for-me sting operation yesterday. It was a four-county coordinated effort. I reckon with manual labor becoming scarce, hey, it's springtime, the local governments had to harvest some community-service sentences to get some work done. I'm sure none of those decoys ever had a beer from any other source before in their lives.

"The troubled pop star."

Two young gangsters, ages twelve and fourteen, walked up to the receptionist and said it's a robbery and that they had a gun. She was the receptionist at a police station. This was on the news this morning. Now I am looking forward to reading their book when it comes out. Like which one did the planning.

I was hitchhiking north and got a ride with an eclectic group of nine followers of Abbie Hoffman in various degrees of hats, boots, scarves, guitars, hair, leather, feathers, belt knives, shades, and reading material, (as was I), riding in a pretty new regular yellow school bus with a great sound system not being wasted by these guys. From scenic Highway 101 in Northern California, up Route 199 from Crescent City, California, to Grants Pass, Oregon, up through the redwoods along the twisting Smith River, the drive always enhanced by close calls on hairpin turns with log trucks, RVs, bicycles, cop Jeeps, and tourists stopped in unlikely places. Soon after passing the fruit inspection station for folks heading south, the state border, the road straightens and the first little town you'd hit back then was O'Brian, Oregon. After a stop for refreshments in O'Brian, we traveled on. Up to Grants Pass, then the 5-Freeway north. At a stop at an official Rest Area for the night, I took my sleeping bag to one of the picnic tables and unrolled it. In the morning after another hundred miles or so, the anarchists were going to pull into a picture-book western town and wait for more money to be wired to them from the owner of the bus back in New York City. I got off at the off-ramp as they left the freeway. (A few months later I ran into one of the guys from the bus in the park down in Santa Cruz. Yes, they'd gotten the bus all the way to Seattle as planned. And yes, as a matter of fact, they had spent the night in the jail in that town, I had been lucky to get off when I did.) Anyway, back in O'Brian, there wasn't really much of a town in those days. I haven't been through that way lately, and things have a way of changing. There had been a store with a covered wooden sidewalk across the front and an old post office inside. Across the hot dusty street, ol' 199, stood a small restaurant on the far side of a large unpaved parking lot, and two or three houses. A road cut off to the east, going the few miles to world famous Takilma. When a guy climbed back aboard, one of the others who'd seen him checking out the bulletin board on the outside wall of the store asked, "What's on the board?" "Oh, just like a tractor for sale, and somebody looking for firewood." "Wasn't there anti-anything?"

Tibet.

So now it's Monday. Groundhog Day. Not really, it just gets to feeling like it some mornings. But actually it's Saint Patrick's Day. I don't do holidays, but I am aware when they strike. I know virtually nothing of my heritage, so I don't feel a connection to any place like that, but like when the nurse in San Francisco asked my religious preference while filling out a pre-surgery form, I said, "All." She glanced up to get my meaning, then went on to the next question. On the old TV western show, Maverick, he came riding up to a saloon out in the middle of nowhere just as two guys were flinging a patron out the swinging doors and into the street. Maverick asked, "What'd he do?" One of the two bouncers turned back and answered, "Today's Saint Patrick's Day, and he ain't Irish." He gave Bret a sudden hard look. "And what be your name, stranger?" Big smile. "Hi. I'm Bret O'Maverick."

Savage Truth

2008-03-14T10:43:00.000-07:00

Terry and I got married on Friday the 13th, March of 1964. Today as I type this would be our 44th Anniversary, if we'd been two completely different people who'd gotten hitched that day. WE didn't stand a chance.

Scientists have discovered the gene that determines the shape of tomatoes. I'm not making this up. Is nothing sacred?

Jeesh, now they're saying that one in four American teenage girls has a sexually transmitted disease. As many exciting illicit images as that statistic might conjure in the carnal mind--not yours or mine of course--there is a down side. (A biggie: any one of those diseases might get back to ME! Help!) Total abstinence with teens stands about as much chance as with priests. Monogamous relationships only work if neither partner GETS CAUGHT getting some elsewhere. Condoms are a drag. I guess legal, sanctioned, everybody-gets-tested-first group marriage is the only answer. Certainly it would be easier to remain faithful to the sexual and intellectual variety of a group, a group that could even grow as needed. End of STD problem. (Maybe not. But it would sure be fun giving it a shot.)

In my twenty-two years on the road hitchhiking, I don't think I ever met a normal person, nobody is really the way everybody is expected to pretend they are. Most people feel they have to play a role around their family to protect feelings, at work to save the job, and in their public lives so they're not burned at the stake. But when somebody is heading home from Seattle and pick up a hitchhiker to talk to on the long drive, a person who doesn't know anybody they know, who they'll never see again, it's a rare chance for them to be totally honest. I've heard thousands of confessions and desires and regrets from folks. I'd blown my own cover early on--my parents said I was beyond shocking them, and I took that as a challenge--so I've always been pretty-much free to tell the whole story. It magically nullifies the fear of being discovered. I do understand why so many folks are reluctant to be out front with everything in their lives, but it sure feels better when you just be real. Young people are being warned about posting their true feelings and lives on the Internet, but I figure it'll just free them from a life of bullshit and fear. (Guilt sucks.)

I put in a friend request for Ms. Ashley Alexandra Dupre on MySpace this morning, but I'll bet she's got a million or two ahead of me already. I was so pleased to see that she not only hadn't abandoned her page, but had added pics of The Gov (#9)! Good for her. Instead of a typical lame excuse for what she was doing, she's gonna make lemonade. Reminds me of an actor I heard about. After getting suddenly famous, some people tried to blackmail him with a porn movie he'd been in years before. Instead of paying them off or making excuses, he said, "Hell, give me ten grand and I'll make another one!" Like the picture on the T-shirt: about to be snatched by a swooping eagle, the prairie dog is standing there giving it the finger. My hero.

Duh.

2008-03-12T16:25:00.000-07:00

I'm not a computer guy, I simply know how to type. I just learned last night from a MySpace friend that she'd attempted to leave a comment here but had been rejected. I think it's set now where anyone may add their thoughts. Looking forward to feedback. I'm shooting for two or three posts a week for starters, depending on events. Take care.

Spring Forward

2008-03-09T16:15:00.000-07:00

I guess I shoulda bought a lottery ticket, but instead I went to the library and checked out two old classic mysteries. When I got back to my room and looked over the first few pages of each to figure out which one to read first, both had early-on action taking place on my birthday, three days before Christmas. What are the odds? ("And Four To Go", a Nero Wolfe mystery by Rex Stout, and "The Long Goodbye" by Raymond Chandler.) A cheap thrill, perhaps, but I'm a big fan of thrills.

And talking about thrills, of course by now you know about the new Brigitte Bardot five-film box set that's out. I first heard about this upcoming event on the news last year, that movies she's in that have never been available in the U.S. before will be here on DVD. I've been waiting to check them out at the library, but they've been "being processed" for several months now. (I take that to mean being watched by library employees before they hit the shelves.) I've had a babe jones of biblical proportions since my uncle played high-school football and I saw my first cheerleader, but I give a lot of credit to Brigitte Bardot and her exploits back in the Eisenhower years for giving me a clue that sex is fun and okay; I certainly wasn't getting that message anywhere else. I of course was too young to see any of her movies back then, and my mother used a razor blade to attack some pictures of her I had innocently taped to my bedroom wall, but what little I saw and heard of her I'm sure helped me to a healthier outlook on sex than the rest of the world was conspiring to allow. She was way beyond being just a hot movie star, she was a "sex kitten". She walked the walk.

And lucky me, I turned fifteen the year the birth-control pill hit the scene. (1960.) So I witnessed the dawn of the sexual revolution when I'd be paying the most attention, and before I'd had a chance to get too messed up by the standard-issue shame and guilt over my natural urges. Between Ms. Bardot, the early-Elvis/rock 'n' roll uproar, The Playboy Philosophy, and school dances, wasteful sexual abstinence or embarrassed hang-ups never stood a chance during those fabulous years ahead. I'm a sinner, and like so many others, a damn happy, satisfied one.

So it really seems so unnecessary when I hear every day of all the sexually abused little kids, the raped women, the thousands of "isolated instances" of clergy abuse, the legions of "registered sex offenders", most all caused by a failure of the righteous to allow a healthful channeling of a strong natural desire. Then the good folks blame their victims for the predictable results of their Puritanical restrictions. I know, I know, if everybody was sexually satisfied, then all the "buy this and you'll get laid" commercials wouldn't work, and horny people wouldn't be flocking to churches for forgiveness of their imaginary sin, but there would likely be a lot fewer little kids raped and murdered by folks who were taught that their natural need is shameful and bad, so don't know how to express it in an open, harmless way. I do realize that the economy and the offering plate must come first, I just wish the guilt-ridden didn't have to kill the women and kids so often. But I understand that a moral society can't just allow joyful, unrestricted sex to happen. What would God think?

Living In A Phone Booth

2008-03-05T20:37:00.000-08:00

Well, it's over. Ron Paul's hidden campaign didn't get off the ground. Whumping up wild enthusiasm on YouTube and MySpace, while playing the timid mouse during the Republican Debates, and on other nationally televised appearances like This Week With George Stephanopoulos and The Tonight Show with Jay Leno, failed to get him the nomination. He sure could have used a loud, outrageous campaign manager to get some media attention to his plan to end the war on drugs and the rest of his platform. (Too bad Abbie Hoffman wasn't around for the job.) Instead of the campaign's outlaw, Mr. Paul became its punch line.

Defense contractors and career military types learned the hard way with Viet Nam that if you want to have a free hand at making war, having a military draft creates too much public opposition to unlimited financial success and personal advancement. If it's all volunteers doing the fighting, and citizens aren't being dragged off against their will to participate, who back home can object without easily being labeled "unpatriotic". Okay, I have no problem with that. I just think about the poor Soldiers and Marines these days. Viet Nam was a party for a lot of the troops back then. I've had veterans tell me, "Bob, I wish you coulda been there with us. It was great. The day you arrived, they'd set you in this special chair and stick a pipe in your mouth with a bowl so big they'd light it with a blowtorch! Then . . . " But now in treeless countries, it doesn't seem like there's any place to get out of sight to kick back and unwind. The basics for down time, women, music, and beer, are also scarce in these places. So now that things are heating up again in South America, I think it will be a far better environment for serving than Afghanistan and Iraq. (Though Afghani hash[ish] was always my favorite, that distinctive flat hard black sheet with the slightly lighter, softer center. Mmmmm.....mmmmmm. Unlike the crumbly baby-poop yellow Pakistani product--but which was okay in a pinch.) Now in South America, besides the trees and rivers and warm weather, there's those other God-sent pleasures that made Columbia famous and I'm not talking coffee. (Sign me up when the shooting starts.)

Oh, and other big news today. The California Supreme Court is hearing arguments for and against same-sex marriage. A tough choice for political types: God or Voters. Though I've never heard of anyone He's told personally, there seems to be a long list of actions The Lord doesn't like. He has no problem with fatal diseases and natural disasters, but He's really down on any form of hanky-panky! (Sorry, Big Guy. I'll take a roll in the hay over a kidney stone any day.) It's legal in this country to have sex if you meet the strict criteria of the various state legislatures, and buy a license, but anybody else who dares be horny is subject to wearing an ankle bracelet for the duration. (I think after being spoiled by the freedom of the sexual revolution, the years between The Pill and HIV/AIDS, it's time to legalize group marriage). "The six of us love each other and we want all the rights and privileges of everybody else." Why not?

Hang up and drive!

Time Off For Bad Behavior

2008-03-02T13:05:00.000-08:00

There's no way around it. The only way to end identity theft is to totally give in. Eyeball scan, DNA, at least a thumb print, something so people are positive it's you they're dealing with for all transactions in your name, or there's no stopping the rip-offs. Privacy is gone now anyway, so folks are free to use that fact to protect themselves. Unless Planet Earth does like they did on Janet E. Morris's planet Silistra and outlaw all computers and machines, I can't think of a better way to protect savings and credit ratings. It could be voluntary, but I'd sure do it. If one has a drivers license, Social Security number, credit rating, job, phone, vehicle(s), children, cable, Internet access, what the heck information is left to protect? (They can steal your password with a computer, but not your eyeball.) Just a thought.

So the Pew Report just came out with the incarceration statistics for the Land of the Free. (2,319,258 Americans behind bars as of 01/01/08.) And the where-to-house-the-registered-sex-offenders debate continues to rage. Public massacres and drive-by shootings are a hot fad. Everybody and their kids are getting fat. The planet is dying around us. But by golly, our government is out there protecting us from prostitutes and marijuana. Whew. Let's set up a few more sting operations and get those filthy pleasure-seekers off our streets. (We'll all be dead, but God will be happy.)

No, really, did you hear about that report? There's one person in jail or prison for every 99.1 Americans. (We're #1!) One out of every 36 Hispanics in this country is locked up. And one of every 15 African-American adults is behind bars. In Kentucky, the crime rate is up 3% over the last 30 years, but their prison population has increased 600%. ("What? He had a BEER after work! Violate him! He's going back in for another year!")

It's not working. And it's getting worse. There's just no way to make the entire country like downtown Disneyland. Sorry. I've long looked at society as an elk herd. The wolves that follow the herd around are like people's bad habits. So the wolves get killed off, so everything is hunky-dory with the herd, right? No, the herd suffers. Turns out the wolves, though scary, keep the herd strong and healthy. They cull the sick and old and slow. They keep the herd moving so it doesn't stay in one place and over-graze an area. Society needs some bad habits, just like the elk need the wolves. (Did we learn nothing from One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest? Trying to be normal drives ya crazy!) I remember a quote from a snooty private-school teacher on The Beverly Hillbillies. "We don't prepare our students for life. We prepare them for Princeton."

From the first week of June 1969, to the first week of November 1970, I was locked in a county jail cell. (Right across from Timothy Leary for a while, also in there for being a fun-loving hippie.) Nothing to read except the Bible. No books, newspapers, magazines. I just sat there, for seventeen months, with nothing to do but miss music and read the mad hallucinations of guys who didn't even know the world is round or what the stars are. Totally wiped out all the national pride instilled in me after having grown up in Revolutionary War country, and my years in the Cub Scouts, Boy Scouts, the school band, Sunday school, the gun club, and watching John Wayne movies. But to the law's chagrin, other than despising the futility of the whole concept, I had a pretty good time. (And now I know way more about The Word than most of the people who tell me, "God loves you. He's going to send you to Hell for the way you live, but He loves you." "Yeah, okay. What's a Corinthian?" "Huh?" "You know, like First Corinthians, Second Corinthians . . . " "Wasn't that one of the disciples?") There are a few dangerous folks who need to be isolated to protect civilized people, but at the rate we're going, it might just save time and money to extend that border fence they're building right around the whole country and we can all be in custody.

I've heard a bunch of times how Americans don't get near as much time off work as folks do in most other countries. They're even often afraid to take what little vacation time is due them. And I'd add to that, that when many folks DO take some time off, they really don't know how to relax and play. I, like the proverbial grasshopper, spent most of the summers of my life out on the road traveling around, swimming in rivers, playing volleyball and softball, enjoying Bud and bud while listening to live music, meeting pretty girls on that last fling before they go back to school or head home to settle down. But I would always get the heck out of the way for the three big summer weekends: Memorial Day, 4th of July, and Labor Day. There would be all those inexperienced people out there trying to have some fun, but not having a clue how. Being loud and obnoxious at public camp grounds, fighting, throwing beer bottles at bicycle riders from their passing cars, swerving their SUVs pulling boats to make hitchhikers standing on the shoulder of the road scramble out of the way. Whoopie!! (But at least by golly they're not smoking pot, dancing, and having sex! Their mothers, God, and the President can be proud.)

If more Ants don't start finding their Inner Grasshopper and getting a bit more pleasure out of life than adding to their credit card debt and watching reality TV--take some time off for bad behavior, let a few wolves run loose--then I reckon I'll just buy some stock in a one of those for-profit, privately owned prisons, and maybe even a pepper-spray company. Business will continue to boom.

(The title of this is from the insightful song by Confederate Railroad. Thanks, guys.)

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

2008-02-28T12:58:00.001-08:00

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.

Illegal Smiles

2008-02-23T19:20:00.000-08:00

How many times have you heard somebody say, "I wish I could just go live on a deserted island. Just me and all my friends."? It's a great thought, everybody having fun without all the bull. But short of being on your own secret island, there always seems to be a gang ready to bust up your good times with guns drawn and God on its side. The Sin Squad. No sex and drugs. No drinking by the river. Turn that music down. Put your clothes back on. Kill those plants.

It amazes me, all the things people claim that God is against. All the different religions make this Supreme Being, who has never once spoken a word in public, have all these specific rules against pleasure. There are rules against eating certain foods and doing certain activities, even some days set down that one may or may not work. But the biggie in all religions is sex. Flesh, especially women's flesh, is sinful. Having women wear a burka and protesting a strip club is the same nonsense, just to a varying degree. A baby blown apart with a bomb is PG, a naked breast being touched is rated X. Ya gotta love it. If it feels good--unless it's that you're getting 50% off the price of something--chances are it's illegal or immoral. Uptight people have conspired to stamp out joy since the beginning of civilization.

What frustrates me is, it takes so little to be happy. Once a person gets it, the basics are all they need. The touch of others, music, enough to eat, the accessories of their interests, a place to live. In my decades of hitchhiking I saw a lot of different lifestyles and attitudes. It often seemed that the very happiest folks were shunned by their families and even subject to arrest. And the normal people who aren't miserable had to keep the best parts of their lives secret. It's crazy.

Happy people have put up with this reality throughout history, hiding and sneaking and lying to avoid offending the other people in their lives who were also many times hiding and sneaking and lying to avoid offending them. But if life is gonna continue on this planet, people are just going to have to stand up in defense of good times. All the shame and guilt is killing us. Happy people use less. Have some fun, pass it on.

My girlfriend and I were at a free music festival up by San Jose in early 1969. We'd heard about the publicized event being held nearby and rode up with friends from Orange County, but before we got there and bought tickets, we'd heard about this satellite festival. Groups would play at the pay event, then come to the free show and play there. The hippie organizer held up the local newspaper with the headline telling that he was being sued for like a million bucks by the producers of the other show. He reached into his pocket and pulled out his change. "Well, I've got about eighty cents. They're welcome to it." There were reports of riot conditions at the pay concert, with arrests and fights. The only trouble where we were that I saw was when a guy started a hassle with someone near him, but his friend said, "Hey, these people won't stand for you acting like that. Look around." And the uptight dude backed off and let whatever had bugged him pass. Laws and armed police can't keep the peace as well as prevailing opinion, like cigarette smoking is being drastically reduced by social pressure. You know the hell we'd be dealing with if cigarettes had been made illegal fifteen or twenty years ago. Just like Prohibition in the Twenties and the War On Drugs now, only worse. Imagine the concept on a worldwide stage.

Happy folks don't have as much time to hate and worry about what other people are up to. Be a Guerrilla Grasshopper and encourage an Ant to call in well to work. "I feel much too good to come in today." We've all only got so many hours to be alive. Save the planet; fun-loving folks are good for the environment.

God, Sex, The Candidates, and Heath Ledger.

2008-02-18T15:13:00.000-08:00

I was walking up the left side of 7th Street in Downtown L.A. the other day, when up ahead I spotted this blond-haired young woman in a short black dress, wearing those in-style boots that make legs look so good, waiting for somebody to come out of the drug store on the corner of Hope Street. I'd just passed her and was waiting to cross Hope, when a fire truck came roaring up 7th from behind me with lights and siren and that molar-jarring horn they blast at cross streets. I thought they were moving pretty darned fast, and people were holding their ears against the echoes off the buildings. As the fire truck sped through the red light, swerving to miss the cars that had been stopped there, even under those conditions the driver had to look back over his shoulder to check out the gal in the short dress. We can't help it.

The Presidential Campaign is continuing to dominate the news. I'd be more excited about the election if we had more of a choice. I mean an actual choice. Nobody running doesn't believe in the Lord and the power of prayer. They all promise to get consumers consuming (users using) more stuff sooner than the other candidates. They all promise to show those people living on the other side of the planet who's boss. They're all claiming to be sexual normals, strictly do nothing other than what's required to procreate, but I have my doubts. What is it with politicians and religious leaders that they can't say, "Hey, I get horny and have fantasies just like everybody else"? Who do they think they're fooling? I saw some back-East big-city mayor on TV just last week sitting with his forgiving wife doing that same old song and dance. "I want to apologize to everybody in the world. I'm soooooo sorry. I don't know what came over me." (Hey, I do.) So let's see if I have this straight: "I firmly believe there are invisible people living in the sky and sex is illegal unless you have a license (like for fishing) and I'll get people using our dwindling resources faster. Vote for me." (Help, where's the exit?)

Who are these people who don't want anybody to have sex that isn't a man and a woman saying they're going to stay together forever? I saw a nude dancer being interviewed on TV the other day discussing the six-inch law, customers and dancers must keep at least six inches of empty air between them. People on the other side of town dictate that two adults they don't even know can't touch, and even pay undercover cops to go watch and make sure. Amazing. But then on the news a little later the reporter told of people whipping themselves bloody in some kind of religious rite, but nobody raised a stink about that. Where's the sense? I just heard that there was a big police sweep in the Valley, a string of massage parlors charged with prostitution. Now where do their customers go for release? (A dark street near a grocery store? The local school?) What provision does society make for unmarried men to have sex? If dying their beard doesn't get them a girlfriend as promised on TV, then what? (Every candidate supports this nonsense.) Could God really not like sex?

There have always been gods. But in any culture or society, whatever name they used for their gods, all names for God translate into, "I'm not gonna die!" Beyond that, people don't want to hear; talking logic to believers is like trying to tackle smoke. Who cares no sign has ever been given. Who will admit that nothing they believe in makes a lick of sense if they gave it any thought? "I'm not gonna die and that's it so shut up." Wouldn't be so bad if they didn't feel the need to impose their beliefs on everybody else. "What? You say the EARTH goes around the SUN? That's blasphemy! Burn him at the stake!" "What? You want to have sex with someone of the same sex as you? God hates that! Burn him at the stake!" "That woman is a witch! We can't have her casting spells on our innocent children. Burn her at the stake!" "What? That man tried to hire a prostitute! In OUR town? Confiscate his car and call his wife and tell her! Pity we can't burn him at the stake anymore like he deserves." "We're saved and going to heaven and you're going to hell if you don't think like us." ("Except through me . . . ") I ask the candidates, how many people praying does it take to light a candle?

Yesterday's headline told of "dead zones" forming in the oceans, likely caused by global warming--(possibly to match the holes in the atmosphere?) Couldn't a single candidate offer some kind of plan to start a world movement with strong incentives to save the planet instead of arming friendly oil producing countries, promising to get the economy moving, and offering heartfelt prayers to disaster victims? How about a campaign to get folks seeing how much fun they can have when using as little as possible? (Hey, like the proverbial grasshopper!) Sewing and transforming old clothes as patriotic style. Living in small groups and sharing space and appliances to save. Use fast-growing hemp for fiber to make paper and building materials instead of clear-cutting forests. Government financed product- and clothing-exchange stores. Encourage the drinking of tap water instead of water that's been bottled and transported in manufactured plastic bottles. I know, no chance anything like these ideas will ever make it into any political platform.

Heath Ledger died from an accidental overdose of prescription pills. At least he died doing what he loved. What? I can only say that if it happened while he was sky diving or mountain climbing? Oh, sorry.

PBI--At Your Service

2008-02-12T16:27:00.000-08:00

"The Grasshopper and the Ant"--Aesop's Fables--My version. "So there was this grasshopper, spent all summer playin' his fiddle hot down by the river, drinking beer, playing volleyball, and entertaining various young women on vacation from out of town. Near the spot he got on and off the bus each day on his trips to the river--he'd rather drink than drive--he'd often run into an ant about his own age, always busy stocking his house with food. Grasshopper had pretty much given up on talking the hard-working ant into taking a day off and going to the river with him. Ant had always told him that ha-ha, winter was a-comin' and HE by golly wasn't going to be hungry when the snow was blowin'. All summer, the ant worked while the grasshopper played. Then winter came, and they both froze to death." (Thanks and apologies to Mr. Aesop.)

Ever see that movie, "Griffin and Phoenix, A Love Story" (1976) with Columbo and Jill Clayburgh? They met in their forties, yet both partied and laughed and enjoyed life like teenagers. Then it turns out they both had cancer and only months to live, so started appreciating every minute. What if they'd just acted like that anyway? For no reason? All their lives?

I just watched a 60 Minutes segment about the happiest people in the world. The people of Denmark are #1, and apparently not for the first time. (Americans are #23 happiest.) Though Danes have ambition, the basic secret to their good attitude is contentment. 94% of American college students, according to the show, are under extreme stress throughout their school years. Not good.

All the radio and TV shows a few days ago were reporting about some study just out that said depressed people shop more than folks enjoying themselves. One point I found interesting, that unhappy folks will pay up to four times more for something than others will.

My suggestion for saving the planet: we're going to have to spend more time swimming at the river and dancing, and less time rote shopping; it's better for the environment. We need all the Grasshoppers we can get and fewer Ants if the Planet is going to survive. (Get it? Grasshopper Planet?) Additional fun, less debt. You got a problem with that?

A couple worthy reads:
"Stranger In A Strange Land" (1961) by Robert A. Heinlein.
"Another Roadside Attraction" (1971) by Tom Robbins.

To be continued . . . by Bob, Professional Bad Influence.