Roller Coaster For The Old

So there I am, suspended high above Valencia and inverted over the earth, riding Tatsu.

There’s a funny thing that happens to you when you’re hanging upside down, staring at the hard ground 170 feet below, with nothing in between you and a quick death other than the metal and rubber you’re trusting to hold you glued to the seat.

You think you would be considering the end of this thing called life, but all I could think about was what ridiculous lengths we go to now to entertain ourselves.

And then the roller coaster dropped and I began flying through the air, 60 mph, high above the park and only optically inches from the moon, the cool evening air rushing past my face as I tried to to scream but I’ve been screaming so much all night I didn’t make a sound, just emitted a whisper and the orgasmic thudding of my thrilled heart.

So much of our lives are spent making choices, and those choices make you you, but think about how much of our lives we waste deciding what to have for dinner. Some nights it takes my wife and I longer to decide what to eat than to actually eat it. When you’re harnessed into your seat and flying head first through the the night you really are left with no choice but to scream, or close your eyes. That feeling of choicelessness — of being in the moment, not needing to think but just to feel, even if it’s the feeling of hanging upside down above death — it’s a fleetingly beautiful thing.

Let me go back a few hours.

The wife and I went to Magic Mountain with her company. The park was only open for us and the good folks at Verizon, which seemed to consist of an awful lot of emo teenagers, from 7pm to 1am.

After battling traffic we got there about 7:30 as the sun was setting behind the tract housing of Northern Los Angeles County and the heavy brake lights on the 5, the Santa Clarita Valley looking like a freshly-picked scab, all ruddy and bleeding.

All I could think about walking around the park is what it will look like when they sell it all and build a neighborhood in its place. I kept picturing where the houses would be and where the streets will run. Will someone’s house stand where Colossus once stood?

This is Colossus in it’s glorious younger years.

We got on Goliath first, a tall, fast, sleek coaster that now dwarfs the once mighty Colossus, and as it was clicking its way up to the top of its first drop, looking down on that puny wooden coaster that used to be the pinnacle of the park, and now wasn’t even worth opening tonight, I felt very, very old.

This is Goliath dwarfing Colossus. Believe me, that little piece of shit wooden coaster on the bottom used to scare the shit out of us in 1986, 1988.

Being on Goliath, for better and for worse and accepting of all the flaws and proud of all the good, I had a real sense of who I was and where I should be in life, like I was looking at myself from outside myself; and being on that roller coaster didn’t feel like me.

And then we crested the summit and plummeted down the track and I put my hands in the air and I felt my butt leave the seat for a brief weightless second and a burst of adrenaline coursed through my body and suddenly the world didn’t seem so nit-picky anymore and I yelled and whooped and forgot all about that old man that boarded the ride.

I leaned into the curves and the G-force plastered my cheeks back and dried my eyes out so when the train pulled into the station I was wiping tears from my cheeks.

We got off the ride, laughing and smiling, and that’s what they’re designed for, to give us a minute and a half escape from ourselves.

It’s really hard to brood about your problems when you’re flying through air.

And that brings us back to Tatsu.

I recommend it for any one who wants to contemplate their life and forget it at the same time.

We rode it twice and then headed for our car shortly after midnight, joining the tired march of the masses ambulating towards the parking lot. A tramful of them passed with limbs hanging loose at their sides and their eyes, weary and tired, stared at the coming future without note.

Zombies us all.

A broken sprinkler spilled a steady stream of water down the road and I couldn’t help but think about the 3 measly inches of rain we’ve received this year. Above my head waterslides arched to the earth and, as I often do, I pondered if maybe, as a species, we’re partying ourselves to death?

I looked back at the park, full of light and machinery, and wondered what we’re going to do with all this when the water dries up and the power shuts off. All the rides will be useless. Fossils.

Superman will be nothing but a tall, useless stack of steel.

At least you will still be able to climb to the top to have a look around, but I’m guessing the view will be vastly different for my grand-kid.

Woolzee the Third.

Bird Bone Whistles

There is a bird that can now mimmick the sound of a chainsaw.

The sound of a camera shutter.

A car alarm.

The lyre bird has mastered all the other sounds of the forest and now it has learned the ones we produce, the noisy clatter of man invading its forest home.

What a beautiful tragedy.

The bird doesn’t distinguish between the melodies of other birds and the destruction of its environment.

Or maybe it does, and it’s telling an intricate story through birdsong.

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The other day I saw a dog running along the shoulder of the freeway with a chewed-up ear and that stupid look that dogs get on their faces when they’re running and their tongue is hanging out and they look like they’re smiling but it’s more likely hyperventilation.

The sight of that poor, doomed creature put pins in my heart that stung deep in my crying soul and I felt compelled to do something. I figured rescuing this suffering animal might be the one act of benevolence that tips the Wheels of Karma back in the universe’s favor. Perhaps this one gesture of mercy could reverse the downward spiral of hate and violence that is the world today? So much power rested in my hands, so much megalomania. It was up to me to save the dog, to save the world.

But then I remembered there was a law against picking up hitchhikers in this county and I kept driving.

The dog, slowing down and hobbling now, diminished in the smallness of my rear view mirror until it faded from my mind altogether.

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We’re nothing but the Ants in the Ant Empire
The Shadows of the Ants dancin’ round the Fire
The Maggots in the Flesh feeding on the Liars
God’s in the Clouds smoking Funeral Pyres
— Nanoo Nanuck 2009

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In Brazilian folklore there is a character named Saci, prounounced with a soft ‘C’. (Sa-si’)

A mischievous scamp, sorta like a leprechaun, Saci has one leg, smokes a pipe, and causes minor snafus wherever he travels. He has holes in the palms of his hands, too, which he uses to juggle charcoal.

Story goes if you snag his magic cap he’ll be under your control, or if you can trap him in a bottle he’ll grant you a wish, but for a one-legged elf he’s pretty nimble so good luck.

An incorrigible prankster, Saci will not cause major harm, but there is no little harm that he won’t do. He will hide children’s toys, set farm animals loose, tease dogs, and curse chicken eggs preventing them from hatching. In a kitchen, the Saci would spill all salt, sour the milk, burn bean stew, and drop flies into the soup. If a popcorn kernel fails to pop, it is because the Saci cursed it. Given half a chance, he will dull the seamstress’s needles, hide her thimbles, and tangle her sewing threads. If he sees a nail lying on the ground, he will turn it with the point up. In short, anything that goes wrong — in the house, or outside it — may be confidently blamed on the Saci.

In other words, the Saci is a little punk.

Moving across the globe now.

There’s a great Norwegian word that’s applicable for all sorts of situations, depending on the inflection, kinda like the difference between “no, shit?” and “no shit!”

Uffda.

That’s one of those quirky things I picked up from my Minnesotan roots.

“Uff da” is often used in the Upper Midwest as a term for sensory overload. It can be used as an expression of surprise, astonishment, exhaustion, and sometimes dismay. The term can also be used when one is relieved, after a difficult or exhausting task. The term has been heard among men when a particularly attractive woman enters a room. Conversely, many Roto-rooter and septic system repair trucks have “Uff da” proudly painted on the back.

It’s an amazingly versatile word.

Stub your toe on the couch. “UFF-da!”
A beautiful sunset on the porch. “Uffda.”
Jessica Alba in a wetsuit. “Oooof-duh.”

While we’re at it, did you also know that “hey” was picked up from the Norwegian word “hei”?

You learn something new everyday.

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I’ve noticed, through my quixotic romantic adventures, and now the steady haul of marriage, that women can not wait to eat once they realize they’re hungry. They are quite incapable of concentrating on anything but their stomach once it begins to rumble. It becomes priority number #1. I’ve known some men like this too, but for the most part we’re able to carry on without breaking down over a little hunger pain.

Shit, when I’m home, lost in my writing, I’ll miss breakfast and lunch and not even really notice, sometimes I won’t eat till nine o’clock, ten o’clock, just when Lost is starting.

I’ve never thought too much about it, though I assumed there was a cultural explanation, not a biological one — a ‘men don’t cry’ type of thing. It’s not like the difference between a man being able to hold their piss and a woman needing to stop every hundred miles on a road trip to empty her bladder. There’s an anatomical explanantion for that.

Then I came across an interesting article about the history of supper.

It made me think about mealtimes through the ages.

The men spending the day hunting, farming, or trading.

The women at home preparing the meals.

It dawned on me. Women had constant access to the food supply. If a small hunger announced itself to them they could cheat and have a bite here or there. The men were away from the home and were likely not nibbling throughout the day.

By 1800 the dinner hour had been moved to six or seven. For early risers this meant a very long wait until dinner. Even those who arose at ten a.m. or noon had a wait of anywhere from six to nine hours. Ladies, tired of the wait, had established luncheon as a regular meal, not an occasional one, by about 1810. It was a light meal, of dainty sandwiches and cakes, held at noon or one or even later, but always between breakfast and dinner. And it was definitely a ladies’ meal; when the Prince of Wales established a habit of lunching with ladies, he was ridiculed for his effeminate ways, as well as his large appetite. Real men didn’t do lunch, at least not until the Victorian era.

It’s quite possible, then, that our eating habits evolved differently over time: men able to sustain longer periods without feeding; women in need of smaller, more consistent snacking throughout the day.

Thus lunch.

And thus the Luna Bar.

Just a theory.

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Some people look for love by blowing into bird bone whistles; by setting the jungle on fire; by calling on dead saints.

Some people can speak the mysterious language of the soul through paintings and music.

Some people swim with the stars; dance to the earth’s ancient melody; sing along to heaven’s harps.

Others: best they can do is belch on cue.

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I wonder if Jesus ever made jokes. And if he cracked a zinger and it truly stunk — I mean, a joke that just sat in the air, (say, a cheesy knock-knock joke) something embarrassingly lame — did the apostles razz him playfully, or did they politely chuckle for his divine benefit?

Perhaps he never told a joke that sucked.

Maybe Jesus was a funny-ass dude?

If he was bombing… it probably was a test.

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Do you remember the first time you heard a recording of your voice? Do you remember how shocked you were? How you swore it was someone else?

Maybe it was.

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Life ain’t for the innocent
who told you that was telling lies
your lungs gonna ossify
with your coin in your pocket
you’re gonna die
travel round in a circle
and you don’t know why
– Nanoo Nanuck 2012

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The laws of physics that hold the houses and the fences and the street lamps to the ground, and cause plants to grow towards the sun, and a magnet to stick to a refrigerator, and the tortures of slow decay of life as we know it in cellular form, as well as stir the blood that moves us to love, don’t apply here at ARTOFSTARVING.COM

Palm Trees

Palm trees, however emblematic of Los Angeles, are not native to the region, they really don’t belong here.

Not all palm trees are tall and glamorous.

They grow in the harshest urban environment

… like big, heavy, annoying weeds

… that property owners have to chop down and turn into stumps.

Just thought you’d like to know.

Life is an illusion. It’s a quantum-mechanical mind-fuck.

Have a flower.

If I Can Pick Apart This Brain I Might Be Able to Give You a Piece

In spite of the news I awoke to this morning, which we are all aware of by now I’m sure, I decided to start the week off on a good note; so on the way back from the market, after buying some coffee, I stopped and plucked a bunch of wildflowers from the curb and stuck them in an old Mexican Coke bottle when I got home.

It’s amazing what a simple display of color and texture can do to brighten a room, change a mood.

33 dead, huh?

I’m going to have to pick a lot of damn flowers.

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If I can pick apart this brain I might be able to give you a piece. If you let me love you might just see what I am thinking.

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In more Imus fallout, Obama widened his platform to include a serious discussion about…. rap.

“We’ve got to admit to ourselves, that it was not the first time that we heard the word ‘ho,’ Obama told a crowd of about 1,200 at a fundraising dinner for the South Carolina Legislative Black Caucus in Columbia. “Turn on the radio station. There are a whole lot of songs that use the same language … we’ve been permitting it in our homes, and in our schools and on iPods.”

Now, I’m not going to rush to defend rap as an altruistic artform, nor can I stomach most of the crap I hear on the radio, but I can’t stand it when a politician takes the safe road by railing against the cultural boogeyman of the moment.

Our society always feels compelled to blame our ills on a particular group, a certain subculture, most often minority-based. From Reefer Madness and Zoot Suit Riots to modern-day immigrants and rappers. Like we’d be a peace-loving, respect-for-all society if it weren’t for those darn rappers teaching a crotchety old white dude like Imus such a word as ‘ho’.

When I was younger I listened to a lot of hip-hop, scared the shit out of my parents, and generally used language I’m embarrassed of today. We tossed the ‘ho’ word around freely. It was a synonym for women, plain and simple.

“Let’s go get some hoes tonight.”
“What hoes are going to be there?”
“Dude, you get no hoes!”
It’s ugly but true.

I’d like to say we didn’t know any better, but we did, we were just young and insecure and using words and language like that was really the last resort of rebellion in America. In 1994 the president smoked pot and had sex just like us and the advertisers had won and we were willing consumerists dying to buy into the game.

From the 1960’s America had swung around 180 degrees. Peace and love was out. ‘Bitch better have my money’ was in. The new counter-culture wasn’t as much opposed to the mainstream culture as much as an extreme version of its ugliness. The materialism. The misogyny. Celebritihood.

Why that all happened is one of the tragedies of our time.

But I’ll let you in on a secret: It’s not P Diddy’s fault, although he’s not blameless in its perpetuation. It’s Reagan’s.

In the early 80’s Reagan’s shredding of publicly-funded arts forced high schools in New York to cut their music programs. This left urban youth with a hole that they filled by discovering scratching, rapping, and sampling.

You can take away their instruments and people will bang on the walls to make a beat and blow into a bottle to make sound. I’ve seen it happen. I’ve been at a party where an impromptu jam session broke out in the kitchen, we grabbed pots and pans to slam together and freestyled for over an hour; everyone joining in, singing or rapping or merely tapping on the dishwasher.

Meanwhile, back in the 80’s; urban cities were abandoned by the federal government as drugs and gangs destroyed entire communities. Crack flooded the streets and dealers became ghetto superstars, while white yuppies were consuming the fine stuff up in the hills, while Nancy preached just say no.

And we expect the youth to hold their tongues?

The Me decade did not lack for a leader. Good-old jelly bean-slurping Ronnie, with his died hair and Hollywood good looks, represented an America that functioned under one guiding principle: greed is good.

Rap is not some foreign, alien disease infecting our culture, it is a product of our culture, our politics, our mindstate.

Around 18 or so, the word ‘ho’ started to bristle my ears when I would hear a friend speak it. I started to drop it from my lexicon. It dawned on me that the reason none of us were getting any women might have a little something to do with us calling them hoes all the time. (let me clarify: I was always a gentleman, even if I called them a derogatory term, believe me – I wrote poems, opened doors, brought flowers, I was chivalrous to a fault – it was just what we used in place of the word ‘girl’. Strange, I admit.) Some of my friends from back then still haven’t learned that lesson, and they still wonder why they can’t find a girlfriend.

Like I said, I’m not defending rappers for using those terms and for taking advantage of our materialistic, misogynist culture, I think they’ll have some dark karma from it, but it’s their preogative and they will have to deal with their own conscious. It’s just that I look around at the media landscape and I could name countless examples of cheap, crass, demeaning programing that could be condemned, picking on rap seems to be nothing more than a choosing a scapegoat to score points with supposed “moderates”, one that won’t really fight back.

The point is to grow as a person, mature, and evolve so you reject this form of entertainment. That involves better public education, more funding of the arts, and a shift in the cultural zeitgeist. It involves choices a parent makes with their child, conversations.

Obama’s platitudes about rap won’t help, it’ll just make it cooler with the kids and give rappers one more thing to rhyme with drama.

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It is times like these that the world really misses the Mojave Phone Booth.

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Some people turn to prayer in time of need
I turn to ARTOFSTARVING

Notes From The Ant Empire #5

This week the Ant Empire truly lost an icon and a literary genius, Kurt Vonnegut is now enjoying his final reward, his much-deserved rest. I honor the man by refusing to say “he’s up in heaven now.” See, through Vonnegut I learned about the concept of Humanism, a fancy term for a simple thing — the idea of being good without all the saints and hell-fires.

According to Humanism, it is up to humans to find the truth, as opposed to seeking it through revelation, mysticism, tradition, or anything else that is incompatible with the application of logic to the evidence. In demanding that humans avoid blindly accepting unsupported beliefs, it supports scientific skepticism and the scientific method, rejecting authoritarianism and extreme skepticism, and rendering faith an unacceptable basis for action. Likewise, humanism asserts that knowledge of right and wrong is based on one’s best understanding of one’s individual and joint interests, rather than stemming from a transcendental truth or an arbitrarily local source.

But through time, and my own journey-thought, I learned to not give it a name, just let it be. Plus I could never describe it better than Kurt so why try.

A purpose of human life, no matter who is controlling it, is to love whoever is around to be loved.

When I was just a wee lad of 23 I saw him give a lecture at Brentwood High School. He talked of the crush he had on the young Indian clerk at his postal center, how he made a point to only buy one envelope at a time so he would have an excuse to come back again soon, and how his wife found it to be adorable, this from the 70-something author.

Vonnegut could be profound, witty, and tender, often all at the same time.

How can someone write so deeply so entertainingly?

His prose was germaphobe-clean. Quick and concise. When it’s all over and you close the book for good you’re amazed at the result, and don’t know how he did it; like a good magician he makes it look easy.

At least we know that he was prepared for this next stage of his being, his non-being.

“I have experienced what happens when I die, and so have you. We call it sleep.”

Vonnegut was one of those cranky old men that inspired me to pick up the pen in the first place, blame him.

From Galapagos, a little lullaby about the end of the world:

Mere opinions, in fact, were as likely to govern people’s actions as hard evidence, and were subject to sudden reversals as hard evidence could never be. So the Galapagos Islands could be hell in one moment and heaven in the next, and Julius Caesar could be a statesman in one moment and a butcher in the next, and Ecuadorian paper money could be traded for food, shelter, and clothing in one moment and line the bottom of a birdcage in the next, and the universe could be created by God Almighty in one moment and by a big explosion in the next— and on and on.

Good night, Kurt, sleep well — you were a good sport.

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It’s a shame Vonnegut didn’t live to see the Marine’s new hybrid helicopter/jet in action.

It’s called the Osprey, a cute, cuddly euphemism for this godless killing machine. I’m sure he would have been impressed with man’s new efficiency at killing other men.

It will be “truly a historic day for your Marine Corps,” said the commander of the Marine Corps, General James Conway, referring to the deployment of the aircraft in Iraq.

“The quantum leap in technology that this aircraft will bring to the fight has been a road marked by some setbacks, lots of sacrifices, and the success of these Marines standing before you today.”

The Marines are planning to acquire some 360 of the aircraft, which cost more than 70 million dollars each, but which they believe can fly higher, faster and farther than their aging CH-46 helicopters which date from the Vietnam War.

My math’s a little rusty, but that’s 25 billion dollars, no?

Then again, what’s money? It’s just a concept; I’ve never seen a gold bar in my life.

Doesn’t it just make you proud to be an American?

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What is so attractive about city lights? Is it that they’re bright, and twinkly, and colorful? Or is it that we know they mask an ugly daily-struggle? they hide a brutal face behind a jewelled veil?

Lots of horrible, destructive things are beautiful.

Large waves.
Lightning.
Lindsay Lohan.

Is it the lights? or the concept behind them? The people sleeping, fucking, working, and dreaming in those lights.

So it’s my conclusion that city lights are really only pretty because they are made up of a million miserable souls.

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And since we’re talking about concepts:

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It has always been a life-long passion of mine to sing along to songs in languages I don’t speak. Japanese maybe.

Farsi?

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Ever wonder why moths look drunk at night, why they dart and zig-zag around any sort of light like tiny lunatics?

It’s because artificial light screws with their field of vision something nasty.

The reason we see them swinging around is because their guidance systems are based on a good system that didn’t take into account the invention of modern artificial lighting. These creatures have evolved over millions of years, and suddenly, in the space of less than a hundred, the environment changes radically, and now they’re ill-equipped to deal with these changes.

The eyes of moths and mantises are geared to steering by the moon or stars, with both objects set at optical infinity. Their basic rule of thumb requires them to fly at a specific angle to an optical stimulus.

Our eyes work differently so we can see depth, theirs are geared towards the stars so when a street lamp appears their whole navigation system is thrown into terrible disproportions. As they try to correct it, they slowly descend more into the light, and often their zapped-death.

It’s a modern tragedy on a very small scale.

Cue the tiny electric violins.

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I’m a sucker for a sale.

And I mean sucker. If there is a shirt on sale for $15, down from $35, in a trendy store – and it’s just okay, not my favorite, not even really my style, but I kinda dig it – I’ll probably buy it.

Put that exact same shirt at Ross or in a thrift store for $10 and I”ll probably walk away.

It’s about perception, the illusion that I’m getting a good deal.

That I’m pulling something over on them…

Like I said: Sucker.

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DON’T STARE AT THE SUN!!!

OKAY, NOW YOU CAN LOOK.

Is it me, or when you stare at the sun in the first picture it actually starts to burn your pupils a little bit?

Is the sun strong enough to hurt you in a photograph, a memory, a concept?

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They got to the part with the cattle and the creeping things
said I’m pretty sure we heard this one before
And don’t it all end up in some revelation
with 4 guys and horses and violent red visions
famine and death and pestilence and war
pretty sure I heard this one before
– The Hold Steady

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Los Angeles is a quiet city, until you get on the roads.

Then it’s like a thousand rock and rap concerts on wheels.

When somebody pulls up next to me with the bass pumping and the windows rattling and I feel it through the walls of my car and it’s drowning out my own music, and I begin to feel a pissed-off rage build inside my fiber; I try to remember when I was young and carefree, with spit and vigor of my own, and had just bought Biggie’s first album Ready to Die from The Warehouse and a buddy of mine – which I called homie then – and I drove for five hours, bumping through through the endless  streets of Los Angeles as loud as the standard radio in my stick-shift Honda Civic could go.

That was one of the best nights of my life.

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Some people collect priceless artifacts
I got ARTOFSTARVING

Old Timey = Good Timey

A fun video by Benjy Ferree. Enjoy with a nice glass of rye.

Long live drinkin’ on the porch, boxing zombies, and sneaky ladies in 2nd floor windows swiping your hat with a fishing pole.

It’s a hoot!

My happy hands are in the air.

Notes From The Ant Empire #4

People that climb up to the top of tall buildings all say the same thing: that we look like ants from there.

A week ago I noticed an elderly lady in an orange vest bent over cutting weeds that were growing up through the cracked cement a couple of blocks from my house.

I wasn’t sure if she was a paid city employee, or perhaps serving community service; but I’m giving her the benefit of the doubt and assuming she’s an employee, not some klepto-granny.

Let me set the scene.

It’s a little triangle of empty, beat-up, neglected urban blight next to a typical, charmless overlook of the LA river, no more than thirty feet across at its widest, with a similiar topography to the moon, fissures and craters everywhere. It’s my wish to convince the city to plant a couple of trees there, maybe put a statue too, something to be proud of, and some benches. We should create a place where old men could gather to watch the world go by, or disaffected youth could smoke cigarettes there and talk about emo rock, I don’t know, the type of little urban space they have back east in Boston, New York, and in Europe.

The thing that stuck out about the scene was the little old lady was cutting the weeds with a normal pair of scissors, and only had a small bachelor pad-sized trashcan with her that looked like it would fill up in 10 minutes, that’s it. No one else was out there either and I didn’t see a truck with more equipment nearby. She was woefully lacking in resources I thought.

A weed-wacker would take care of that corner in 10 minutes.

A couple of days later I saw her again, still working the same patch of cement from before, a job that a normal healthy man or woman could have finished in two hours probably.

It was sad, tragic even, but a bit humorous too.

I’ve said it before, there should be a word for that type of dual feeling that’s so fucking prevalent these days, that common reaction to social situations and circumstances — initially mirthful and light but transcending into sorrow and guilt, you don’t know whether you should laugh or cry — like when you see a real crazy, flailing, animated homeless dude shoutin’ at shadows.

And just today I pass by and she’s there again!

It looks like she is finished now as the area was free of weeds. It took a whole week, but she did it. I’m not sure if I find it sweet, and I’m glad the lady has a job, or if I am mad that our tax dollars are going to pay someone to take a week to complete a job that should be done in half a day.

So I thought about a situation, a hypothetical one.

A moral conundrum if you will.

Propose the savings from eliminating the old lady’s job would save the city enough money to install some benches and some trees and give the neighborhood something to enjoy, making nothing from something. Her productivity is terrible and her employment is a form of honorable welfare. If a slacker kid worked that slow he would be fired after one week.

I’m just saying.

Bless her heart.

Now say the city would be willing to do it it too, just the old lady loses her job. And it’s up to you to decide.

The benefit to the neighborhood would reach thousands of people in a small, intangible way, however their lives will be much the same with or without the benches; yet the lady will certainly be facing real hardship, perhaps extreme poverty.

But the benches will be there for years and years, for future generations, for the multitude, and it will make the neighborhood a better place, and the old lady might be able to find another job too, who knows?

But she will definitely be out of a paycheck come next week.

What would you do?

If you go for the greatest good you build the benches. Right? Spread out over time, in tiny increments that add up, more happiness is brought to more people. It’s simple mathematics.

But if you go for the greatest need you let the old lady keep picking those weeds. She needs her job more than the residents need a bench they never had and probably had never even thought about. (except for me) And that’s real.
What do you do?

I’m just askin’?

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I believe a work of grass
is no less than the
journey-work of the stars
- Walt Whitman

Think of good-old Walt next time you enjoy a nice glass of wine — which is no less the journey-work of the sun breathing life to the vines that hang the grapes.

A good bottle of wine should reflect the region the grape was grown in: the amount of rain, the richness of the soil, the slant of the hillside, even if there were boulders scattered amid the vineyard.

Ponder that!

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The people are dying to know. They’re protesting in the streets, clamoring for word.

Who’s the baby’s daddy???

Seriously, who gives a shit?

I wonder if the same people that are outraged about Don Imus care about Anna Nicole Smith? If those demographics overlap? They must: that is all that the news focused on today.

I guess, because there is so much peace in the world, we have all this time to obsess over the words and fortunes of such insignificant little fireflies caught in the jar of celebritihood.

All they are are pixels to fill up the television screen.

The only time I come across Imus is when I’m drunk and and I’m drifting in and out of sleep and I forget the TV is on and I snap to and then suddenly there he is in my bedroom in a stupid cowboy hat looking like any minute he might fall asleep too and that’s right when I dig in the sheets for the remote and turn the damn thing off.

And since when did anyone take what he said seriously? And was that worse than what hundreds of fools say on the radio everyday? I think it has something to do with the fact that respectable people go on his show and it gives a baffoon like that too much ligitimacy.

That’s the flip-side to the dumbing down of America: as meaningful discourse is drained from the public sphere reptilian media hacks like Imus, with enough of a sizable audience up at dawn’s buttcrack, are elevated into a realm of seriousness that they certainly don’t deserve.

Imus is old. He’s a relic. Nothing he says matters.

Still, he should be fired. Mostly because the man can’t dress.

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Watching The US vs. John Lennon I’m impressed by Lennon’s simplification of the peace message and how he basically created the language we still use today at protests and such. He had a sage philosophy. True-Communication he called it. The bed-ins and such. The world is a simple place of love.

Give Peace a Chance.

War is over! If you want it.

Imagine there’s no religion.

While watching the documentary I was also amazed at Yoko Ono’s ability to never blink.

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One of the most difficult things for a human brain to comprehend, arguably the hardest – the question that even atheists give up on explaining – is infinity: the idea that the universe never ends.

I swear, when I think about it I get a freezing pain in my head like I just beer-bonged a slurpee.

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Some people collect time in a bottle
I collect it at ARTOFSTARVING.COM

A Cat and an Old Lady: They can do incredible things

What an interesting Monday, folks.

Something whimsical about the news I’m going to bring to you today. I want this week to start off on a positive, quirky note so I have two light-hearted stories that might make you laugh, you might sigh at the cuteness, hell, you might even get a warm glow in your heart, and unlike the usual rubbish coming out of these tubes, they won’t make you want to crawl into a hole.

The first is about a cat that rides a bus over in England a couple of times a week.

The feline, which has a purple collar, gets onto the busy Walsall to Wolverhampton bus at the same stop most mornings – he then jumps off at the next stop 400m down the road, near a fish and chip shop.

“Going out for some fast food at the old fish and chip shop, huh?”

The bloody bugger skips his fare though.

Back home in the Colonies, the second story is about a 102 year-old lady later that hit a hole in one, beating the age record by a whopping… 1 year?

“Well everybody wants a hole-in-one, and I said, ‘Why can’t I have a hole-in-one?’ I came within inches once,” McLean told television station KNVN.

McLean, who used a driver, broke the age record of 101 set by Harold Stilson in 2001 at Deerfield Country Club in Florida.

Damn, there’re some old-ass golfers out there.

Enjoy.

What’s the Big Fricken Deal About Being a Hunter?

As much attention as the Democratic race has been getting already, it seems the Republican race is picking up some steam too. Mitt Romney may be low in the polls but when it comes to the pocketbook he is flying high and we all know how important money is in the race for president.

So now he is starting to take incoming fire. In this case receiving it from Mike Huckabee, former Arkansas governor and fellow presidential candidate, who proverbially removed his glove and gave Romney a gentlemanly slap across his face with it.

For some reason it’s important to ascertain, this of a candidate who famously flipped-flopped on his abortion stance, whether or not Mitt Romney can truly call himself a life-long hunter.

This is what baffles me about politics.

For some reason being a hunter is important.

Listen to the horse’s mouth.

“I think it was a major mistake,” said Huckabee, a former Arkansas governor. “It would be like me saying I’ve been a lifelong golfer because I played putt-putt when I was 9 years old and I rode in a golf cart a couple of times.”

Really I could care less if one Republican attacks another Republican, especially over so silly a topic as if Romney can be qualified as a “true hunter”. In this case, both gentlemen are fools; one for lying and the other for giving a shit.

But it’s politics. And for some reason every four years politicians feel the need to pull phantom guns out of their past and claim some sort of exalted status as a hunter.

We all remember Kerry in his orange vest getting blasted by the press for looking not “hunterly” enough. Conventional Wisdom states it hurt his campaign. Who knows if Kerry actually lost votes from the “botched” photo-op, but it’s possible. Especially in a state like Ohio.

So, what’s the deal with being a hunter?

Why did Kerry feel the need to portray himself as one? And Romney? And why does Huckabee see gain in tearing down Romney’s claim.

“I think American people are looking for authenticity,” Huckabee added. “Match their record with their rhetoric.”

Sure, Huckabee is disguising his assault, hiding it in terms of “authenticity”, but really he just wants to spread the word that Romney hasn’t killed enough innocent animals in his life to deserve the job as Commander-in-Chief. If he couldn’t protect us from a blood-thirsty, feral deer how could he possibly protect us against terrorists, Iran, and such?

It got me to thinking about the concept of hunting in politics and I decided to go back in time a little to figure out what is really at the bottom of this obsession with hunting.

I start with the historical figure that most comes to mind for me when I think of hunting, a president I greatly admire:

Theodore Roosevelt

Theodore (Teddy) Roosevelt, Jr., (October 27, 1858 – January 6, 1919), also known as T.R. and to the public (but never to friends and intimates) as Teddy. According to Roosevelt himself, his last name is pronounced “Ro-sa-velt.”^[2] He was the 26th President of the United States, and a leader of the Republican Party and of the Progressive Movement. He served in many roles including Governor of New York, historian, naturalist, explorer, author, and soldier. Roosevelt is most famous for his personality: his energy, his vast range of interests and achievements, his model of masculinity, and his “cowboy” persona.

Teddy was the consummate tough guy president. He hunted. He was a soldier. He rode a horse. He had a mustache. But he was also a historian, a nature-lover, and a conservationist. He may have started out a Republican, but he was a progressive at heart, and if he was around today I’d be tempted to pull the lever for the Bull-Moose ticket.

100 years ago I could see the love affair with a man like Roosevelt. The country was still unsettled in parts of the West and the wild idea that politics was another form of adventure, instead of a pragmatic scheme for the benefit of the whole, might have seemed more apt back then, reasonable even. Teddy was a real-life cowboy, not like all-hat-and-no-cattle W. It was a vastly different time, we were still settling vast lands and many people probably hunted for survival back then. Needless to say, much, much more than now. To a young country that literally shot our way coast to coast to gain the lands we were now civilizing, a hunter-type personality symbolized the pioneering spirit, manifest-destiny wrapped up in a musket, and it’s reasonable to see why the country adopted that spirit.

But do we really still need Daniel Boone up in the White House? Why is that idea still stuck in our national conscious?

Maybe it has something to do with our history?

So I went a little further back in my time machine. To the beginning of Americanism. At least the critical analysis of such.

Alexis de Tocqueville.

The uniquely American mores and opinions, Tocqueville argued, lay in the origins of American society and derived from the peculiar social conditions that had welcomed colonists in prior centuries. Unlike Europe, venturers to America found a vast expanse of open land. Any and all who arrived could own their own land and cultivate an independent life. Sparse elites and a number of landed aristocrats existed, but, according to Tocqueville, these few stood no chance against the rapidly developing values bred by such vast land ownership. With such an open society, layered with so much opportunity, men of all sorts began working their way up in the world: industriousness became a dominant ethic, and “middling” values began taking root.

Out West that sense of American Individualism still dominates politics. Ideas and concepts don’t breath without symbols, however, and thus the hunter theme is still alive and vibrant in American politics, even though the land has long been tamed and settled and some of that settling is now coming back to bite us in the butt in the form of Global Warming.

It’s a sad remnant of an antiquated mindstate.

Hunting represents the idea that nature is ours to subdue and do what we want and that this is an American right. Our presidents, therefore, must shoot animals for sport to prove this idea, and we also want our symbols to be genuine, thus Kerry came off as fake and Huckabee is calling out Romney, but we’re not stupid enough to elect a true wild-ass hunter like the “Nooge”, so it’s about image mostly.

Think about it: Reagan was a cowboy. Bush the first squeaked by on fighter pilot cred. Clinton was a sex star by birth. And Bush the second tried to imitate both jet pilot and cowboy.

What Hillary knows, and will seek to prove, is for her to win the top office she will have to convince America that she has bigger balls than the other candidates.

But back to hunting.

This sense of entitlement that the hunter meme represents is the albatross around our neck: the idea that the land is ours to plunder, the animals ours to kill, the streams ours to divert, pollute, destroy, and so and so on. It might have spurred the fastest economic expansion the world has ever seen but the long-term effects of that expansion are yet to be weighed, they’re, literally, at least in the form of carbon emissions and such, still up in the air.

But does it go even further back.

Is it more than an American anomaly?

Does it go back to our hunting and gathering roots? Is there a connection between John Kerry donning camouflage and early man, foraging and hunting animals for survival. Are we still, basically, electing the alpha male to lead our little tribe?

To be leader of the free world you have to display you’re the most proficient caveman of the bunch.

Okay, I can see why we followed the best hunters and they became chiefs of the tribe and shit like that 1000s of years ago, it’s what’s kept us alive, how one tribe survived over the other, the ability to hunt game and, if necessary, kill other humans.

In that day and age, it certainly made sense to follow the guy with the most accurate spear, the dude who could probably rip your head off with his bare hands. 6 ‘5, drinks blood, and beats his chest like a gorilla, yeah that’s the guy I’d probably vote for back when foreign policy meant how to stop a saber-tooth tiger from eating my child.

A little tidbit to chew on from Wikipedia: Hunting and gathering was presumably the only subsistence strategy employed by human societies for more than two million years, until the end of the Mesolithic period.

That’s a long time hunting was our major means of survival, it’s still in our bones. It’s hard to lose. But with a suburbanized, agri-business dependent, Wal-Mart society, hunting as a political meme is as obsolete as our tonsils, and should be considered outrageously silly to discuss among adults.

Yet it’s inevitable with the pundits.

They seem to think that Hunting still makes the cloth of the king. Subconsciously they favor the pissing contest, biggest ape takes the crown mindstate that led to the tarring of Kerry in 04. It’s simple and sexy.

I’ve got news for them.

The problems facing the planet are no longer solvable by outcompeting the other tribe.

We are in an age where reason is required over brawn. Where the major challenges are not overcoming nature, but repairing the damage we cause nature.

We should be following the guy with the smartest brain, not the biggest gun.

Which brings us to those two knuckleheads, Mitt and Mike.

Balls in your court, Mitt.

How many animals have you killed with a gun? Or you bare hands? What kind of man are you?

Someone out there, I think, gives a shit.

Notes From The Ant Empire #3

You know how they offer toys for guns around the holidays to get you to turn over your 44 in exchange for a Barbie or a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle for your kid?

Why not something similar for cars? A tax break for sneakers or something?

Cars kill more people per year than guns do, by far, and are much more destructive to the overall health of our environment. Shouldn’t we all have keys to safes where we keep the keys to our cars, lest someone should accidentally drive one? (and no, this isn’t a pro-gun metaphor!)

It seems to me, if one were willing to forgo their ownership of such a calamitous machine they ought to receive some financial compensation for doing their part in ridding the world of a nuisance. The automobile.

But that’s not how America works.

Here, you only get rewarded for owning something. A house. A SUV. Stocks. Shouldn’t the ethos be the other way around? You’re rewarded for sharing. For conserving. For not burning oil. For not creating Greenhouse Gasses. For not being another dick in the neighborhood with a Lincoln Navigator.

We could fight Obesity, Global Warming, and Terrorists in one act: get out of our cars.

I know I say it over and over so much that I must sound like a broken record but it’s the easiest way any of us could chip in to cut down our energy usage.

Walk!

It’s better for ya’ too.

Next time you’re yelling to your spouse or your kids that you’re just going to run down to the store to pick something up, while reaching for your car keys – stop, think of me and ask yourself: if possible, might it not just be better to walk down to the store?

Who knows?

There might be a nice breeze out, the twittering of song birds, or the smell of a fireplace to delight your senses. You might even enjoy it.

You may even thank me.

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Once you remove all the fancy arguments, the main difference between Capitalism and Communism, is the difference between owning and sharing.

Entire economic structures sprouted from those simple concepts.

Except they both fall apart in practice because in Communism, not everyone shares. And in Capitalism, not everyone owns.

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Last night my wife, myself, and a friend were watching Lost when there was a short scene featuring Kate and Juliet running through the jungle. The thing that stood out and grabbed our attention was Kate’s boobs. Both the girls noticed that one was bigger than the other, while I just noticed them.

We were all so distracted by the sight of her boobs that we missed what Kate had even said. We had to rewind to catch it. It does turn out, on a second viewing, that the left one was a little smaller than the right.

It was an amusing moment, the three of us realizing that we were all distracted by her breasts, but mostly because it perfectly encapsulated the difference between a male and a female’s reactions to said mammalian body part.

On a more emperical level, it also shows just how attached we are to a person’s physical properties. Their body parts and such.

Boobs. A crotch. Asses.

And such.

There’s some kind of animal defense mechanism that causes both men and women to check out a female’s breasts as she’s tramping through a jungle in a tight-fitting, sopping wet t-shirt.

I eyed them like a predator, while they eyed them like competitors.

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If you reach blindly into a trashcan and your hand clenches around a crumpled, sticky, mucous-filled ball of tissue paper; could you tell the difference between a snotrag and a cumrag?

Just asking.

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There was a man who lived in the country, in a small blip-of-a-town barely on the map. This man used to swear, cross his heart, that he was abducted by aliens at the age of 23. That was his local claim to fame. Of course he was drunk at the time, and often drunk while sharing this story, although not always, however, he always told the story with solemnity and suspense.

He also swore that his dog drank whiskey, but didn’t know where the dog got it since he kept a close eye on his own stash, but his dog’s breath reeked of rye all the time.

Years later the man recanted. Now he swears that it was the light of God that abducted him that night. That it was God, not aliens, in that space ship that hovered over the pines, that cast a purple light that, once it grabbed him and entered him, our hero describes as the power of 20 Novocains. “It made all the pain just drift away,” he likes to say, gesturing levitation, “that’s how come I know it was God, not aliens.”

He still claims that his dog used to drink whisky when he wasn’t looking, though.

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What is it about a woman in a flowing sundress riding an old beachcomber bike that is extrememly romantic, that reminds me of a Sam Beam song?

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The one solace that I take from living through this administration is that one day all their heinous deeds will be written in a history book.
My one satisfaction is that despite all the power and wealth and ego he possesses Bush does not possess a time machine, nor any sort of immortality device that I know of, so, like me, his cells will start to decay and turn on him and he will be lying in a small room somewhere and angels will be there playing their harps, but they won’t be singing and he won’t be able to hear the harps, and in fact there are no harps, and he will be gone.

Not to be redundant but it’s my one consolation, when his cells finally quit on him, George Bush will reckon for all he’s done.

And for those that death is too merciful for, there is infamy.

Imagine the day…

Our kids will only know of George W. Bush through tales of his failures.

His name will be a scourge upon all future politicians. (pulling a Bush will be like pulling a Homer – “d’oh!”) Our children will learn in poly-sci class how the country turned against him. They will read about the 2006 election and how the country began to defend itself from a corrupt, power-hungry administration. They will see, through this discussion, just how wise the founders were when they set up the checks and balance system. (even if it took a while to kick in)

And, oh blessed day, my children won’t know what it was like in 2004, watching half of my fellow citizens vote this guy back for another 4 years, after the lies, and the inepitude, and the coarseness.

And they won’t recognize the sound of Limbaugh’s, O’Reily’s, or Hannity’s voice cheering on the war and the destruction of our civil liberties, espousing lies while cowering in ergonomic chairs, in a cool air-conditioned studio, back home, ensconced in their corporate-funded punditocracy.

Still, there may be a whole new slew of demigods on the right that my future child might have to contend with, enabling more destructive foolishness with even more vitriolic rhetoric.

But I hope not.

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Honeybees are disappearing and it’s a mystery why.

I’m not sure what this means for the price of honey on the world market, but it effects more than just honey as bees help the whole ecosystem out by pollination.

Bees help spread life.

From MSNBC: Moving from flower to flower, the bees help produce $15 billion of seeds and crops each year — everything from the alfalfa in cattle feed to the pears in Hirsch’s orchard.

[...]

So far, no one knows why the bees are disappearing. It might be three or four or five different things intersecting all at the same time and affecting the honeybees’ health dramatically.

As scientists try to solve this mystery of nature, the laws of supply and demand are already at work in the grocery aisle. If there are fewer bees to pollinate, farmers could see smaller harvests and that could mean higher prices at the supermarket.

This is just another reminder how connected everything is, how elegantly interwoven nature is, how vital even a thing like the honeybee is.

Next time a bee lands on you and you reach to swat it, stop – ask yourself – am I killing one of the last bees in America?

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(Once) When I was little someone pointed out to me/
some constellations, but the Big Dipper was all I could see

– Doug Martsch

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Some people collect their thoughts in a journal
I collect mine online at ARTOFSTARVING.COM