30.3.11



Where They Found Him

They found him beneath the stairs
staring at your feet, but seeing your head,
all back-masked and Beatlesque

Ordering in, ordering out:
They found him naked,
running mildly about

They found him lighter,
mightier, than the devout,
in Las Vegan, New Mexico

They found him in Las Vegas,
too, too, too, turning off the TV,
staring back at you.

They found him on a tape recorder,
after having recorded,
a mad chant to an enchantress

They found him, laying on his back
on a mattress, having failed to pay,
with coin, to breathe Fox News air

They found him everywhere:
In journals, on bathroom walls,
on the covers of novels unsold

They found him brilliant, lit,
deviated and sane: They found him
listening to Jefferson Airplane

They found him scraping ice
off some shorecraft
in British Columbia

They found him with forty eight
states of being on forty eight
motel room keys, thumbing dumb

They found him at the Ritz Carlton
chewing Wrigley's authentic
chewing gum on the run

They found him totalled
in a Thunderbird car
he called "Blue Desire"

They found him riding
the next red micro-wave wave
raiding irradiated green wire

They found him giving back,
the gift that keeps on giving ...
They found him. They found him.

They found him, finding you,
spitting blood on a white napkin,
they found him, finding you.

18.3.11




Silence is Stolen,
Technology ... AWOL

As the details roll in and over us let me take just a few moments of your time with the funniest thing I saw yesterday: A woman drove into the motel parking lot. She was a member of the U-Haul Army. Had a nice new-looking SUV loaded on a trailer on the back of the truck. It was packed full of stuff. She grabbed a 12-pack of beer from the passenger, closed the door, headed away, then the car alarm went off. It was night.

She turned around. Went click. Nothing happened. It just kept going oink ... oink ... oink ...

Mortified by the fact she was blasting the entire compound with news of her arrival, she, losing as little bit, just a little bit, of her efficiency, clicked again and again.

Still, nothing. The damn car alarm wouldn't stop blasting away.

Then she went back into the passenger side, opened the door. However, since it was packed full of stuff, she couldn't get to the steering wheel to get to whatever she needed to do to shut it off.

By now, based on the title above, "Science is Stolen," you might see where I am going with this: It's not completely unlike Jethro Tull's classic tune, "Locomotive Breath."

Not that funny, actually.

Anyhow, to complete the thought: She finally scratched her way through to the steering wheel. Clawed at that for a bit while the beeping continued. By this time, you could feel her total self-loathing and horror from fifty feet away. I felt sorry for her. Been there. Done that.

Next, she ran around the vehicle, carrying her twelve-pack of trendy beer, placed it on the side, and started fumbling. Again. This time, she worked so hard at it, her hands couldn't manage her own small motor functions. Next, the plastic handle of her vehicle broke. Still, bravely, she finally managed to get the driver side door open.

An American hero, by now.

She had become a noise pollution issue, but, was doing all she could do, based on what was the weird science of such devices, to get it turned off. Clearly, it was out of sequence. But how to get it back into the sequence?

Her kingdom for a sequence!

It still wouldn't stop. She stepped back, thought for a while. But the wind was blasting so hard that it blew the car door closed.

It was locked again.

You can't make this shit up.

She unlocked it, again.

Fumbled with the fuses.

Couldn't get that going.

I watched, in awe, at her tenacity. I wanted to help. But I didn't want to add to her misery. I was just wondering about the impacts to the motel guests. Lights were going on. Upstairs, I heard some guys from Pennsylvania yell, "What the fuck!"

The door opened again, closed again, due to the wind.

Finally, she, with great difficulty, managed to get her hood opened and disengaged the car battery. The vehicle alarm (did I mention it was an SUV on a trailer? ... I think so) had ceased.

In the night, with the world waiting for news on the nuclear disaster in tearfully torn up old mighty Japan, and millions of people crying themselves to sleep, I offered the best consolation I could when she realized I was watching the whole event.

"So," I said, across the parking lot to her, "It wasn't a completely perfect day."

...

8.3.11

The Big 'Get Over It' Dig
Bored with Obama-O-Rama dramatics? I am. What's your beef? Is he not this or that enough?
I don't think he's all that interested in party lines.  He had me at "all hands on deck" ... You?

These cats and kittens who say the world might be a better place --  if he weren't putting his best years and family on the line each day -- need to stop trying to campaign for something they will surely do no better job of, if elected, themselves. There must be something better to do.
Is he keeping his campaign promises? Who knows? 

He was looking at a completely different world in 2007-2008. And so are you.
One thing I do know is none of these candidates realize what they are running for is World Leader Pretend.
You don't think Hilary Clinton isn't freakin' about the leakin' ... do you?

You, as I do, support the Wikileaks effort as a planetary citizen, but for my nationalist leanings, barbaric as they might be, well, you'd be hard-pressed to find an authoritative Democrat in Congress with access to national security directives who won't feel the same way.
This is a nation at war, after all. 
For example, we got our asses kicked by BP in a chemical attack ... then the corporate internationalists started to zero in for the kill ... and if you haven't happened to notice, there's a string of awkwardly self-inflicted historical creation myth demigods basically stretching across areas just to the north of the Equator, from South America to Pakistan, who have drawn their lines against the West ... Meanwhile, back at the ranch ... all sides of my so-called family can barely speak to each other due to the civil war of disunion raging in our subdividing minds ... 
Who's a Republican? Who's a real Democrat? Was that microbe on a meteorite really a Martian?
WTF!
Is there anything I need to vote on today!
‎... And Ronald Reagan. Get over it. He helped to cause this disaster. Nice old guy as he was.
We just had a guy from the CIA go on The Colbert Show and tell us our national policy across the planet is to blame for 9/11 ... and I think we all knew that ... after four decades of Plutocratic zeal and shadowy lies and deception ... Obama only looks like a Republican now to some because the center is maybe, just maybe, a kind of Goldwater-era conservatism mixed in with Kennedy-era sentimentality.
Which is why we have no idea which way each tea partier will swing, from one day to the next. Libertarians will always be a mixed bag of nuts, anyway. But I saw some talking head on TV dressed in a waistcoast looking thing that appeared as though she was going to try out to become the first lead singer for the 1960s counter-culture hit, Paul Revere and the Raiders.

And it gave me some actual hope. Remember that fleeting thing?

Hope.
Sure, my generation (I'm 51 now, a late baby boomer) danced away the 1980s to the antithetical tune of religious hypocrisy and political fakery, with the youth culture, and only the youth culture, seeming to be moving with enough mass-media savvy, through music channels, to pick up on the restoration of an alternative, via the agitprop bands from U2 to REM to Guadalcanal Diary to Nirvana to Pearl Jam.
Then came the meatspace money years of the Internet Era: The late 1990s. Especially 1996. When the FCC rules were pretty much set in motion and Al Gore worked with Congress to, in fact, "invent the internet." Actually, it was a government project going back to the 1960s to create a fail-safe plan to keep communications afloat in case of nuclear war. Then we turned it into a shopping mall. A parking lot for a war of words.

But it was hijacked, basically, by a bunch of Dungeons and Dragons gamers at MIT and Berkeley and Beyond!

Much to the consternation of Zeus, Prometheus gave man all the fire it ever needed: But was it enough?

Nope.

Look now: If you drew a line slightly curved across the planet from Venezuela, slightly turning downward, then heading back up toward North Korea, with China grinning in the middle, you would have a Smiley Face with very big teeth. 
How did this happen? WTF? 
We ffffeeed up bad after World War II, real bad. We blew it before we were even born, you and I and many of us, right down the unsuspecting river. 
We sold our farms. 
Then our grandparents and parents went out and spent their winnings on fast cars, fast food, supported a methane-dispensing meat industry to feed that demon, guns and tanks and missiles galore, to make sure we could gobble it all up, falling prey to the only winners who can afford taxes anymore, the oil companies and floating digital seas of international money storms called banks, all made fidgety by a tactile-neurotic e-trade sell-out, time-is-money mentality open to everyone with a electricity greedy little hand-operated devices, then traded our heritage for the empire dreams of the Skull of the Crossbones suicide cult for four decades, exploding our national surplus on a fireworks display in the Mideast, paying off handsomely for Haliburton this and Blackwater that, with pallets of cash guarded by under-supported National Guard kids driving Hummers down the unsafe narrow streets of Baghdad ... only to phock up the entire food chain and earthly delight called, interestingly, weather ... while that human-inspired climate change as experiment situation remains, deathly so, on the back burner.
Why won't these Republicans declare to get in a race to beat a guy who, from all appearances, is able to handle this crap. I can't imagine how they might want all of the drama? Can you?

The cult of personality is partially to blame.


Let's go to the movies. Let's talk about heroes.


Since I was old enough to visualize a screen, I have been absorbing stories about Lone Gunmen. They are the types of heroes who, like Robin Hood, attempt to defeat pure evil by themselves.


They are rebels without causes. They are Zoros, marked. They are Lone Rangers. Sometimes they have sidekicks. Tontoes. Robbins. Robots for Will Robinsons. They are Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. They are Bonnie and Clyde.


And guess what, they all fought the law, and the law wins. Or, at least, next week's episode is needed to resolve the inherent issues of battling pure evil. Or, at least, a sequel is necessary.

The fact is, two people can't do it alone. One won't, obviously. Too many fuckheads. Too many minions of hell. They have been way too organized for way too long and, basically, too many people, also minions of hell, find it way to profitable to keep it that way.


Go to "Democracy in America," by Alexis DeTocqueville, who observed that the best way to disassemble any opposition to the forces of tyranny and over-reaching authority is to divide and conquer. 
This was before most labor unions in the U.S. came about. Before the revolutions, more evolved than those of the 18th and 19th centuries, came about.

But today we see whole sweeps of people, connected via technologies for communications burning away whole seemingly intractable regimes within a few years, months, days. Hour by hour.

How do you recognize the I want to keep my own pudding heads, then?


Well, follow the money. That always helps. But also check into this: Who is trying to split up the opposition with shadow games, deception? Also, who isn't being heard from, although they seem to be responsible (such as Dick Cheney during the BP oil spill fiasco). 
The rat will always go into hiding when confronted with someone who wants to speak truth to power.


Also: People won't look you in the eye.

How else? God knows, doesn't care.
We decide. We. Decide. 
Nobody else around, really.
It's plain as this: All hands on deck! 
Sink, or swim.
We may not be able to save the world, 
but we can save each other.
That could be a lot of people,
or just you, your family, your community,
your people, your planet.

"We" decide while "you" do not.
Dig?