Monsters

I labored over the decision an excruciatingly long time. Each second wasted made deciding that much more difficult. The sun was beginning its descent. Should I go to Borders now, or save it for the weekend? What it boiled down to was: did I want to get in my car and drive.

I was going to finish my current book soon, Adbverbs by Daniel Handler. ‘This novel is about love’, it says on the back.

Love was in the air, so both of us walked through love on our way to the corner. We breathed it in, particularly me: the air was also full of smells and birds, but it was love, I was sure, that was tumbling down to my lungs, the heart’s neighbors and confidants.

I was convinced that I needed a new book to begin reading right away, a day or two could really slow me down on my quest to read a book a week over the summer.

Important thing, mind you. My quest.

What the hell, I said, or at least thought, grabbed my keys and headed into the subterranean parking garage, swung my car out of the dark and into the bright Pacific sun sitting on top of the Santa Monica Mountains to the west, shining on a gilded landscape, but blinding me.

Story of my life.

I guided the station wagon like a boat, sailing it to the damn bookstore.

I wanted to get in and out of Borders and back to my apartment — that I didn’t really want to leave in the first place — as quickly as possible. I had a book picked out already so I was sure I could grab it with little trouble and be on my merry way. As long as the Harry Potter fanatics stay out of my way.

I pulled into the parking lot and slid into a spot, hopped out with my coupon and headed for the front doors, practically whistling.

This is where the story gets interesting.

Nearing the entrance I heard a blues harmonica, instantly recognized it as the somber music of a nearby homeless man, or a beggar, or both. This I understood immediately and steeled myself for the eventual encounter. The source of the sound was hidden behind a bush that I was approaching.

I knew it was coming in 1…2…3.

“Excuse me sir, could you help me get a glass of water?”

Let me just say that I am completely sporadic when it comes to giving to the homeless. Sometimes I will give a buck, sometimes my change, sometimes I’ll lie and say I don’t have any cash — which is sometimes not a lie — and sometimes I’ll buy them a sandwich from 7-11 or somewhere, if I happen to be walking into a 7-11 or somewhere.

This time I had my mind made up not to be bothered. So although the man was respectful and wasn’t even asking for money, or anything of value (had I forgotten that for the most part, water is still free?) I gave him a stock answer, “maybe on the way out,” and proceeded into the store.

I think I might have raised my eyebrows to denote sympathy.

The image of the man, resting wearily on the step, a look of suffering on his beat face, hung with me along with the thing that he asked for, ‘water’. His voice, upon reflection, sounded parched. Perhaps this old man had just walked a few miles and was in dire need of replenishment, not a ruse for cash at all.

Did I really just tell him? “Maybe on my way out.”

I lingered around the 4 for the price of 3 table, pretending to be browsing, but rerunning the encounter in my head in a loop, in slow motion, and from all angles. Truthfully, the books might as well have been bricks sitting on the table for as much as I could concentrate on them, and as laden with heaviness they were when I picked one up.

I felt like I just seen the worst of my spirit. I looked around to see if anyone noticed. Everyone was looking at books, drinking coffee, or talking about books, or coffee. No one noticed.

Behind me I overheard a woman walking in tell her companion, “I’m going to get that man some water.”

I was jealous of her response, her humanity, and right then knew I was a monster next to her shining example. Damn stock response.

I could see myself in that Borders, wearing light blue pants, a black collared shirt, white stripes with a similar blue border running across it, a literate man looking for literature, from that vantage I looked like a decent human being.

What a heinous creature, however, I really am.

In such a hurry that I rushed pass a man in need, whose only request was I’d help him get some water. Left him sitting on the curb in despair, because I was in a hurry to buy a book.

Right now, as I write this, I look around at the hundreds of books on my wall, some I’ve never read, and the idea that I am only a monster feels like I’m letting myself off the hook, getting away too easily for the callous city creature I’ve become.

At this point I already felt completely outed as a monster. The woman was on her way upstairs to get him water. I could still give him a couple of bucks on my way out, I rationalized. A few singles to make the guilt go away. Hopefully.

What else could I do? I went ahead with my book buying.

Because of the recent epiphany that I was some kind of sub-human scum, my brain wasn’t working lucidly, couldn’t hold on to a thought although I grasped at them — rather like trying to shift through mud to catch a slimy worm. I stared at the books in the Sociology section, trying to remember the alphabet, but couldn’t make it make sense because I kept saying to myself: “I’m a monster. I’m a monster.”

Forget my smashing good looks. My verbose prose. The charm and sophistication. My clumsy use of sarcasm.

I am a monster.

Wouldn’t be saying it if it weren’t true.

A salesgirl caught me off-guard, asked me, “can I help you find something?”

My inner-voice answered. “My soul.”

The one that speaks aloud to attractive salesgirls in Borders said, “Yeah, please. Um, I’m looking for a Chuck Klosterman book. I don’t remember the title. It had a big black cover though. If that’s any help.”

“Oh, is he the one who wrote Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs?”

“He’s the one,” I replied with a lilt, and she laughed as if I was Dave Chappelle himself gracing her with a joke.

She looked it up on the computer and we bantered back and forth. She was wearing smart looking glasses and had Buddha beads on her wrist that slipped around as she typed.

I wish I could say I forgot all about the bluesman downstairs, who quite possibly could have been dying of dehydration as I tried to remember if Klosterman was spelt with a ‘K’ or a ‘C’, but he was running through my mind through the whole conversation. Him and his harmonica.

It was like those scenes from horror movies where the cute, innocent girl naively flirts with her murderer right before he goes evil and abducts her. I felt like Christian Bale in American Psycho. I wasn’t going to go evil, but I still didn’t deserve the smile she showed me as she led me to Klosterman’s books in the musicology section. (which I find to be poor categorization for him as an author, but that’s offensively off-topic.)

I found the book with her help and acted excited, like the book still mattered.

I thanked her and she walked away, safe.

In line I processed what had occurred and was already writing the words of this story, already decided on calling it Monster. I paid for my monstrous book and then did another monstrous thing.

I had this panicked image that he was going to entrap me into getting him something else, possibly food, or else maybe he hadn’t gotten the water yet, and I’d have to treck up to the second floor and do it. I didn’t want to have to go back in the store, and was feeling pretty shitty for snubbing him on the way in.

I couldn’t face him. I exited through the side doors because I was too embarrassed to see the man again.

I was already a monster so why not just accept it, make life more comfortable for myself.

I ran like a coward.

… well, walked, because I was out in public and I may be a monster but I still had appearances to keep up. I didn’t want to look like a fool too. I took the alley back to the parking lot, on the lookout for the bluesman, hopped a small wall into the lot and then made a dash for my car.

A nervous looking lady sitting in her metallic Toyota Prius watched me with suction cup eyes, as if she could see through me, recognizing the phony that I am.

I confess this to complete strangers over the Internet in an attempt to gain some of my humanity back. Don’t know if I feel better, or worse.

If that is even the point of this.

This town is full of monsters
holding hands with other monsters
— The Boy Least Likely To

Charles Bukowski and Packer Dulce

This is who Art of Starving turns into after 4 beers and approximately 3 shots of Makers Mark:

He was a bastard and a genius. Charles Bukowski. Los Angeles’s greatest writer. More well-known in Europe than his own hometown. Wrote the movie ‘Barfly’. That sometimes gets a response.

I wanted to be him when I was a young writer.

I wrote poems like him. Tried to at least. This was one of them.

Drunk on beer
at three in the morning
the cat is in the yard
talking to the moon
and the cars come down the street
ten minutes apart
with their conical lights
piercing the dark
and the cat darts
and hides in the bushes
as I open another beer
fart and sigh

Bad… I know.

Starting out I also wrote stories about a character named Packer Dulce. He was sorta my Hank Chinaski. He was a man always causing his own bad luck but finding the meaning to keep on struggling in the most mundane, overlooked miracles.

It’s the little things that allow us to get out of bed in the morning. That was the point of Packer Dulce. A plane flying overhead, leaving a jet trail. Watching children swinging at a pinata. A bird pecking at a french fry.

It took a few years, a small fortune in alcohol, and many wasted nights; it took poem after poem, story after story until I finally wrung the Bukowski out of me. There were countless road trips, and always one more beer that never seemed to end.

From Los Angeles to Boston and towns in between.

One day though I woke up and realized I had lost the Packer Dulce character out there on the road somewhere.

Now: Art of Starving. Tomorrow: who knows?

Writing is a river, I’ve just barely built my canoe.

It was a splendid day in Spring
and outside we could hear the birds
that hadn’t been killed
by the smog
– Charles Bukowski

On second thought, I lied. There’s always going to be a little Bukowski in me.

My Presidential Choice: 3 of them

Human history goes a long way back I’ve been told.

Our travels have taken us from painted caves to the Louve. From marsh fields to Marshalls. Our societies have evolved and grown and splintered into many ideologies from divine rule to the electoral college, from nation-states to desert tribes, yet the common thread linking them all is that we humans insist on selecting one and only one individual from our ranks to be the “leader”.

If someone could correct me and inform me of an example where a society was run by a group of individuals as opposed to just one dude or dudette I’d love to hear of it.

When the idea that perhaps we’d be better off with leadership by committee crossed my mind I immediately consider that attaining a consensus could be difficult and disasterous, but disregarded that by realizing that the various leaders could perside over different functions of the government.

In a sense, we already do this, except we run an election to chose one man, sorry ladies – I’d vote for ya, nevertheless, one man to then select his various cabinet advisors and such; the Brownies of the world.

What a fucking asanine system. Big Brother has a better method for awarding power. At least Head of Household changes hands every other week. We’ve been stuck with this prick for 6 years now.

I’m with Bill Maher when he says we need more elites in government, not less.

And I’m not talking your Yosemite Sam, pistol waving, oil tycoon, I-made-a-shit-load-of-money-so-now-I-think-I-own-the-world elites; but scientists, historians, economists, philosophers, professor elites.

People with experience and knowledge at what they’re in charge of.

No cronies.

Alberto Gonzalez forgetting what he had for breakfast is not what the founding fathers had in mind. A once-respectable Colin Powell selling his soul on the floor of the United Nations is not what the founding fathers had in mind. Scooter fucking Libby getting handed a get out of jail free card from George W. is certainly not what the founding fathers had in mind.

And who are these dudes, the founding fathers? and why do we still care so much what the hell they wanted?

No, I’m serious.

For the people of the United States, respect for their own heritage is undoubtedly a source of strength and stability. It helped them endure the upheaval of four dreadful years of civil war which cost the lives of three percent of the population. It also kept the United States from succumbing to darkness in its domestic affairs, even during those times that the authority of the Supreme Court was ignored.

In the 220 years of its history, the American republic has not always been a model – but it overcame break-downs like the Great Depression in the 1930s without succumbing to the temptation of totalitarianism; it overcame McCarthyism in the post-war era; and it will overcome the damage that the present President has done to its basic values and fundamental rights.

And while it is a pillar of American democracy, that healing strength that is founded in the cult of the founding fathers has a rather peculiar consequence: The intentions of these political actors of two centuries ago are the ultimate touchstone for conditions in the United States today; and to this day it is this backward-perspective that to a great extent influences America’s perceptions of the rest of the world.

Maybe the founding fathers weren’t all that great?

Maybe they actually wanted to set up a power stucture that could be contained by a few priveleged men. I mean, hell, they were more blatant about it than we are today. Remember, the founding fathers would have had Colin Powell in a collar and Hillary was permitted to be beaten as long as the stick was smaller than Bill’s thumb and couldn’t vote much less run for president.

Can’t we move pass the idea of electing a tribal chief to lead the 300 million of us, hand-picking the people in charge of our military, schools, justice department, rivers and sky, our borders, and our courts. The lucky devil even gets to light our national Christmas tree every year.

Isn’t this mindstate a little antiquated?

I say we elect three presidents at least, and here are my choices.

• Bill Richardson: Foreign Affairs
• Al Gore: Environment Protection
• Barak Obama: Domestic Affairs

And we should hold elections for those other positions, things like FEMA, Dept. of Education, etc..

Sure, it may sound like a clusterfuck, but could it be worse than the Bushes and the Clintons tossing the ball back and forth. I don’t know how it’s going to happening but I got a feeling we are going to have a woman president in 08′. I’m cool with that, but I just got to wonder if there isn’t something fishy in the Potomac. There’s something creepy about Bill and George Senior yucking it up these days. Something dubious in their knee slaps and warm smiles.

As if they have a secret plan to split the world.

I think the whole system is screwy, and not just ours, but all of them; all of them throughout time have been corrupted by the power they bestoy upon themselves.

The Queen won’t even take off her crown for Annie Leibovitz.

In 2007, bitch, Annie Leibovitz deserves more respect than you, she’s got talent, all you did in life was pop out of a lucky hole and stick your nose up in the air ever since. Fuck you, remove you tiara, you spoiled brat.

Wow, I really don’t know where that came from.

I don’t have anything against the Queen of England, really. I was just making a point, a rather loud point maybe, but sometimes you need to smash a window to get someone to notice the blight.

My point is: we should elect and follow those with merit, not just those who’ve merely been granted fortunate last names.

The light is coming up now, a dog is barking down the road. If I don’t shut off the computer now and go to bed I might start rambling about revolution like a drunken communist in a Dostoyevsky novel.

Are those birds I hear or the chirp of car doors being opened and alarms being set? Words start to blur on the screen as the sun, a spiked pickled fruit, obliterates my mind as I start to drifting off into another place…

I loaf and invite my soul,
I lean and loaf at my ease observing a spear of summer grass.
– Walt Whitman

“But not which niece“

Notes From the Ant Empire: Graveyard Edition

Where have you been? Everyone has been asking.

Well, not really, but I’d like to think that I’ve been missed. I have been working on a new gig, and this week I’ve had the thrill of working the 9pm to 7am shift, the dreaded graveyard shift. It’s turning me into a zombie I tell ya.

I do all right untill it hits about 4 in the morning and then my eyelids start to sag like a 60 year-old’s breasts and my thought patterns start to flatline. I’m still awake, but the brain is not moving at the speed it should.

It’s 4am right now, and I’m trying to hang in there.

There’s no work to be done at the moment, which is worse than being busy because then all that tiredness has a chance to manifest itself, to well up in my being and scold my body for still being awake. If I was busy like the white rabbit from Alice in Wonderland right now I’d have no problems, adrenaline would do the job, but instead my drowsiness is becoming unbearable. I figured I’d sit down and pound out a post to wake myself up.

WAKE UP DAMMIT!

Lack of sleep is the same as being drunk, but without any of the fun. You can’t think right, your body stumbles around when you walk, and all you want to do is go home and flop into your bed.

Anyway, the world doesn’t stop for one bleary-eyed writer to bitch and moan about it, so I will digress for the time being.

************************

In a scene straight out the Wild West guards at an iraqi bank pulled off a heist that netted them almost a quater million dollars.

The robbery, of $282 million from the Dar Es Salaam bank, a private financial institution, raised more questions than it answered, and officials were tight-lipped about the crime. The local police said two guards engineered the robbery, but an official at the Interior Ministry said three guards were involved.

Both confirmed that the stolen money was in American dollars, not Iraqi dinars. It was unclear why the bank had that much money on hand in dollars, or how the robbers managed to move such a large amount without being detected.

Several officials speculated that the robbers had connections to the militias, because it would be difficult for them to move without being searched through many checkpoints in Baghdad

That’s a caper that deserve a rousing ovation, so Iraqi crooks, I salute you. Job well done.

Not to mention that the money was in American dollars. It must be nice to have millions and millions of dollars floating around the country, hanging around in a bank for the taking. Thieves and criminals brought it over there; and the guards that were supposed to protect it stole it.

It’s like bizzarroville over there in the Middle East.

The fact that it’s suspected that they have ties to the militas just makes you wonder what’s going to happen to that money. It’s probably not going to new playground equipment is my guess.

That place is fucked and we did the fucking.

Can we just leave already. Sheesh.

************************

In lighter news, actually not news at all, but just a bunch of silly pictures, check out these ordinary stars from the Celebrity Obssessed Giant TMZ.

I’m really not sure if the one of Angelina Jolie is her or not. And are these real people, or just some clever photoshopping. I feel like a fool for not being able to tell.

Anyway, moving on.

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The sun is coming up, its rays touch down on grass made of plastic blend. I hear snoring coming through headphones. I’m watching time code, waiting for it to hit the 7-hour mark. Life is a composite of words and pixels, editted thoughts, two-dimensional human beings in a tiny screen.

This is my life on the graveyard shift on a television show that never, ever ends… on a planet that spins, pirouettes, and wobbles.

***********************

And for no other reason than it’s five in the morning and my brain is going batty, I leave you with this entertainingly disturbing video of a man having his way with a storage room of pinatas. Male pinatas, female pinatas, and even an innocent dalmation.

Enjoy and good night, er, morning.

The Decemberists at the Bowl

In case you weren’t lucky enough to be there The Decemberist put on one hell of a show with the LA Philaharmonic this past Saturday at the Hollywood Bowl.

Have yourself a taste.

Andrew Bird was amazing too.

It was the kind of show that can keep you going for awhile. Recharge yer batteries.

243 Goats Die in Marin County: Some Things Reveal Our Humanity More Than Others

Quick post on the absurdity of our modern day, interstate dilemma.

The mechanisms of our society as it is requires the acceptance of minor horrors, but every now and then they catch up to us, the trailer tips over, our sacrificial blood spills out on the intersection while onlookers gasp and are reminded of our mundane cruelty.The necessary yet cruel reality of our dominance and economic logic.

A truck carrying 400 goats used to clear brush from Bay Area hillsides turned over on a Milpitas-to-Mill-Valley run Friday morning, killing more than 240 animals.

The 32-foot truck, from Orinda-based Goats R Us, turned over in San Rafael, when the driver pulled off the freeway to get a cup of coffee, according to San Rafael police spokeswoman Margo Rohrbacher.

I’m not a card-carrying member of PETA, nor am I blind to the need to transport livestock, eat it, use it, whatever. Life requires all the animals the do what it takes to survive. The owl needn’t consider the mouse. We’re hardly more evolved than a barn owl. However, we shouldn’t let economics override our care for the animals that give us great service. The old Native-American way of looking at things. That we don’t own the earth but it owns us in a way.

Did they need to carry 400 goats in the trailer? Doesn’t this just naturally lend itself to disaster, mistakes, and accidents?

San Rafael police Sgt. Mike Vergara said the truck may have been going too fast while making a left turn onto Kerner Boulevard. It tipped over, perhaps as the weight of goats shifted in the truck.

The animals were stacked four deep in tiered shelving units in the 13-foot-tall truck. The steel shelves separating the animals were strewn through the wreckage

That being said, once disaster struck the authorities were overprotecting drivers’ risk of accident over the goat’s welfare. They were trapping the goats underneath themselves, effectively strangling them, rather than allowing them to break free and be herded.

A certain amount of humanity is required here, an on the spot call to do the right thing, rather than make the calculation that traffic accidents and property damage were more important than hundreds of live animals we’ve just threw into carnage and death in steel trappings.

“They were screaming, screaming, screaming to get out,’ said Terri Oyarzun, owner of Goats R Us, an Orinda, California, company that rents goats for grazing brush that poses fire hazards. “They died because the police wouldn’t let them out of the trailer.”

[...]

Police at the scene were so concerned with controlling traffic and preventing another accident that they disregarded pleas by the goat’s herder to free the trapped animals, which could have been corralled away from traffic, Oyarzun said.

“Those goats didn’t have die,” she said. “It wasn’t necessary. We had herding dogs.”

Police could have established a traffic perimeter and a pen and allowed the dogs to do what they do, and saved dozens, perhaps hundreds of goats. Instead they took the simple route of sending the goats to their death.

I would have took the human in the 2-ton cars’ chances over the unlucky goat that escaped only to get in its way.

As a final reckoning I say we let the 150 remaining goats free to graze somewhere on a grassy hill far away from any interstates for the rest of their days.

A Quick Trip to The Kwik-E-Mart in Burbank

Folks, it’s a strange sign of the times, and proof that capitalism is a whore that can blow itself, when a company that is mocked weekly by a television show agrees to transform their stores into the fictionalized one depicted by said television show.

Thus is the case this month of twelve 7-11 stores that have become Kwik-E-Marts.

Burbank, California. 3:30am. July 2nd.

There were three other customers inside, all of them with cameras snapping pictures. The workers were busy hauling in boxes from a truck into the store while talking about how busy, busy, busy, crazy, crazy tomorrow will be.

I saw Marge walking in.

From a business standpoint I admire their decision to have a little fun with it, and believe me, it will attract attention and business. One of the men was telling his co-workers that all the cameras are coming tomorrow, all day long, he said. I’m sure it will be on all the local newscasts. It’s right down the street from NBC and Extra. Can’t get anymore convenient than that. And the Simpsons fans will certainly flock.This and the Transformers in the same week. Nerds are squirting ectoplasma in their pants.

It really didn’t look like they went through much effort.

A new sign, a couple of plastic figures of the cast, renamed their slushee machine Squishee.

Still, it’s a nice example of two corporations coming together and saying ‘we have nothing to lose. You work with us and we’ll work with you and we’ll all make money. Money is good. People will literally eat it up.’

Plus the joke is old.

• The fact that junk food is making America fat and slowly killing us.
• That night clerks often get robbed at gunpoint by hardened criminals named Snake.
• That immigrants have to deal with easily prejudiced populations and have to work hard at shit jobs to provide for their families, and in the process, often, love and appreciate America more than those born here sucking at the teet of the slurpee machine, excuse me, Squishee.

Everybody knows these obvious facts about 7-11, but we’re not going to change our habits. Where else will we go at 4 in the morning for a calling card, Superglue, and a gallon of milk when we’re in a hurry? How can we pass up that excellent savings of the Big Gulp? And nachos are gooood. That’s the real joke, and 7-11 gets it.

Oh look, there’s Homer double-fisting some hot dogs.

I tried to talk to the the man behind the counter, nametag read Golam. Another photographer in there told him he should sell his shirt on E-Bay. He kinda shrugged off the suggestion. I don’t think he realizes the potential, if I were him I would request a dozen more.

I noticed a security guard and asked Golam about it. He told me that they were expecting 600 people at a time tomorrow. I shook my head in disbelief then bought some milk that I needed and wondered if there was anything else to it.

The relabeling of a few products. A couple of rows of merchandise ready to be swooped up. A fancy new TV screen set up with Simpson trivia.

I really had to wonder what Golam thought of the whole enterprise. He seemed cheerful enough, hopefully he’s going to make a few extra bucks from the deal somehow. At the very least I hope he sells his shirt as memorabilia. Still, I wonder if he feels like he is being made into a human cartoon, like a Native-American in the old days paid to stand out front of businesses so tourists could take their picture.

Reminds me of a time I was catering weddings. The regular DJ had a routine at the end of the night. Some funny clips he would play. It was a pleasant wedding filled with very nice folks. I’m sure it didn’t cross his mind, and he certainly wasn’t intending any offense for he was one of the nicest persons I’ve ever met, but after all the music stopped right when the room grew quiet after hours of dancing and music and laughing, he played a sound clip of Apu saying ‘thank you, come again’.

Normally I wouldn’t have thought about it, but considering the wedding was 90% Indian I held my breath. I heard some chuckles but mostly it was silent. I’m not even sure the DJ caught what transpired as he does 2 or 3 weddings a weekend and the responses are always different. But I caught it, and it was a different ‘different’.

Thank you, come again.

Oh Apu, this just feels so wrong.

SiCKO, Chris Benoit, and the Monkeysphere

What’s wrong with us?

The propaganda pounding by free market warriors over the last 40 years have left us beaten and withering in the streets. Literally sick and dying. Lady Liberty is bleeding to death in the hospital waiting room. The numbers are familiar and huge, 50 million Americans don’t have health insurance. The numbers are so large, they almost cease to have meaning. To those who are insured, what’s another 10, 20, or 40 million people?

As documented in Moore’s SiCKO, private health care in this country is an immoral, inefficient mess.

That 50 million don’t have it, and those who do are often screwed by the companies, excuse the pun, bleeding them dry, is an awful mark against this nation, a sad indictment of our values.

We are taught, perhaps brainwashed, that private health care is better than “socialized” care, even if it leaves most of us without any insurance or those that are lucky to have it experiencing headaches they thought they having the insurance was going to avoid. Our national health is not something that should be affected by the bottom line. It’s a travesty that profit is put before patients, a crime in my book.

In simple terms, our system is fucked.

The free market warriors have scared us into believing that the way 24 out of the 25 industrial nations do it is a worse way, and that our broken, overpriced system is the best. Why? Because we’re America. And apparently, we can do no wrong.

Love it or leave it, right?

That always made no sense to me, love it or leave it. You don’t use that philosophy towards your kids when they’ve been bad, or yourself when you make mistakes; but we’re supposed to show more unconditional affection for this (really undefined) idea of America than we offer much more intimate and real connections in our life? And these are the same trilobites that rant and rail against Hollywood, secularists, activist judges non-stop. You’d think, if they loved America so much, they’d shut up.

I digress.

The problem, as if with many of our modern dilemmas, is the monkeysphere.

Yes, the Monkeysphere. That’s the group of people who each of us, using our monkeyish brains, are able to conceptualize as people. If the monkey scientists are monkey right, it’s physically impossible for this to be a number larger than 150. Most of us do not have room inour Monkeysphere for our friendly neighborhood Sanitation Worker. So, we don’t think of him as a person. We think of him The Thing That Makes The Trash Go Away.

Basically our brains can only rationalize a limited number of existences, and the rest are rather incidental — in the way mostly — they’re the ones that are making traffic so bad, the often referenced-to, ubiquitous ‘they’. Like George Carlin said about other drivers, “those going faster than you are idiots, those going slower are morons.”

It’s a rather simple idea: there’s a finite number of humans we accept into our reality, placed at around 150, although I’m sure Buddhist monks have improved upon that number, and those outside of your own group are treated with a less degree of empathy, consideration, and understanding.

Road rage. Mistrust. Social Deviancy. Littering. Obnoxious sound systems. Yelling at a liquor store clerk over the rising cost of cigarettes. All symptoms of the monkeysphere. Once you meet your neighbor and they have a name and a job and a personality, they break into your monkeysphere and you’re less likely to blast your music at 3 in the morning and leave cigarette butts on their doorstep.

Is it any wonder that with more and more strangers around us that would make us more apprehensive and skittish monkeys? And that’s why in small towns people feel safer. It’s not that bad things don’t ever happen there, it’s that you walk around most of the time running into monkeys that you can conceptualize, and thus save yourself a ton of monkey-worry that the big city can cause. That old man down the street you wave to pleasantly everyday could turn out as evil as a stranger in the city. Heck, the stranger in the city might hop on the tracks to save your life.

The monkeysphere has gotten me off track.

This is about SiCKO, and why America has left so many of its fellow citizens to rot away alive. They just don’t care as much until it happens to them. A bout with the health insurance companies has probably turned many a conservative to Moore’s side on this issue. Until your loved one is battling with faceless insurance employees over life and death matters it’s easy to believe it happens to people who somehow deserve it.

Because either you say, if someone can’t afford proper insurance than they deserve to receive third world care in the world’s richest country, or you fucking give them health care, somehow, someway, anything. If you don’t believe it’s right for them to suffer just because they don’t have a job that offers it or the means to acquire it otherwise, than you have a moral obligation to seek a different way. This is quite the life or death issue if ever there was one, it is not right to throw up your hands.

We have to realize that the masses are composed of mothers and sons, lovers and comedians, they’re people like us, seeking connections and fearing the unconnected. When 50 million is reduced to one heart-wrenching true story, it moves the heart more than hearing shear numbers. Life is uncanny that way.

That’s why the monkeysphere is a growing problem. Every day more and more monkeys are born into this world and we’re going to have to share it with them. We have to find a way to open up our minds, not by singing Kumbaya, but by recognizing civil intolerance as a disorder. I’ve seen good people go all Hannibal Lecter on an old lady, somebody’s grandmother probably, over a minor roadway infraction. I’ve seen rational people crying over the death of someone they have never met, who’s only gift to the world was being able to wrestle.

Another example of the monkeysphere in action.

My buddy was emotionally moved by the recent tragedy of Chris Benoit. My foolish reply was that he was a wrestler, and it was expected, so who really cares? My friend corrected me with tales of him being known as a professional, a class-act; the way the man wrestled appealed to him, it spoke of hard work and the traditional ways of the sport. Supposedly Benoit was the last wrestler any fan expected this to happen to. Chris Benoit, although they’ve never met, WAS in my friend’s monkeysphere, but not mine, so I hadn’t thought about it once since our conversation until now, definitely didn’t shed a tear. Now when Hunter S. Thompson committed suicide on my birthday…

But thinking about wrestling, that’s another baffling case of money trumping ethics.

The death of Chris Benoit and Owen Heart, the blatant rampant abuse of steroids, including by the owner, and the racial, sexual, and violent undertones of their “product” makes one wonder why the WWE isn’t more closely regulated.

If wrestling was a reality show and a contestant falls to their death in a stunt, another goes batshit crazy, possibly roid-rage induced, and kills their kid and wife, and legends of overworked actors pushed to the brink and fed drugs to keep them going were common,that reality show would have been cancelled by now.

The wrestling industry is barbaric, in both operation and content.

When Korey Stringer died of heat exhaustion during a NFL practice the league rushed to improve conditions and take measures to ensure it didn’t happen again. Think of baseball’s treatment of Barry Bonds compared to McMahon’s glorification of roided-out megawrestlers, starting with America’s favorite tank top tearing golden boy, Hulk Hogan.

With wrestling, it seems these incidents lead to juvenile credibility, adds to the myth of the sport. You wonder if Vince McMahon isn’t in private rubbing his hands together, uttering “exx-celent” with dollar signs in his eyes.

Part of the reason these workplace conditions are allowed to perpetuate is that the public isn’t concerned with the exploits and tragedies of wrestlers like they would if it were the case that a certain movie producer had an unfortunate habit of causing his actors’ deaths and destruction, either directly or through the rigorous demands of his business. The other reason is the WWE is a huge publicly traded company that has a bit of power in Connecticut.

The former governor himself, Lowell P. Weicker, is on the board of directors.

Okay, we’ve drifted again. Back to SiCKO, I’ll save the monkey-wrestlers for another day.

We need to open our minds to the fact that the world is literally drowning in masses, and despite increasing prosperity we’re increasingly scared and depressed, because the monkeysphere limits our minds’ ability to deal with the crowds. We need to find our gills and learn how to swim and float and breath among so many people, or we will continue to fail at the major issues of the day.

War. Health Care. Environmental Destruction.

All these issues affect everyone of us, but most often too far down the monkey chain for us to realize it. The first act of war is turn your enemy into a dog. The propagandist knows this. It allows us to sit on the couch 1000s of miles away and casually comment on the images we see without realizing the utter horrors those bombs emblazoned with the red, white, and blue really cause. When someone is shot in your town they have a scroll with the victim’s name and show the weeping parents standing on the street staring at the makeshift vigil on the sidewalk. When a soldier dies in Iraq they show a a map of Iraq with a star where the IED went off killing the soldier. If he or she is lucky they might mention what base he or she was stationed at.

War of this sort robs the populace of its humanity.

Once again, back to SiCKO.

Universal Health Care isn’t just morally right, it’s beneficial to society as a whole due to improved quality of life and subsequent gains in productivity. It’s like the commercial ‘happy cows come from California‘. Happy, prosperous people don’t have to worry about choosing food or health care, don’t put off seeing the doctor about that weird lump under their skin because they can’t afford it. Many insured are content to merely have some insurance and, as long as their group of monkeys is looked after, doesn’t want to run the risk of change.

Michael Moore might just shock them into action, however, as humanizing the victims allows reality to break through monkeysphere wall. They become conceptualized humans again and then maybe we’ll feel enough in our monkey-hearts to demand our monkey-politicians make some progress on the health issue.

And what better time to talk about it than a presidential campaign?

(The irony, and perhaps lesson, is that Moore may have more of an effect on this election for a film that could arguably be called non-partisan, than when he created Fahrenheit 9-11 with the intention of defeating Bush.)

For a Christian country we have a funny way of showing it. If Mary and Joseph were alive in modern America they’d still be giving birth in a manger. 2000 years later, from mules to Bugattis, yet we’re the same monkeys we were back then.

I was kicking around in the road the other day and in the dust I saw a rusted penny, I gazed at it for over a minute and could have sworn it said:

In God We Trust and Pray We Don’t Get Sick.

My eyes must be playing tricks on me. If only I could get that looked at.