Sunday, March 11, 2007

Thou Shalt Not Steal

So I’m walking back from my friend’s house. He lives a block away and we play music together every Tuesday night. I’m walking back from his place, it’s a three quarters full moon and I cross the street like I always do and walk along the sidewalk towards the house before the vacant lot with the sagging chain link fence. I walk past this last house and there is a skateboard lying in the grass on the front yard. The thing is the same skateboard was lying in the same grass in the same place in front of the same house a week before. Tonight it looks as though it was starting to embed itself into the grass.

I wanted to take the skateboard and week before and I wanted to take it even more tonight but you can’t, I can’t. That’s stealing. Bullshit. Sometimes stealing is just taking something that someone else has stopped caring about. Sure it’s this kid’s property but it’s a perfectly good skateboard that is on its way to being decay. All I have to do is ignore the fact that someone owns it and has a perfect right to let it rot if that’s what they want to do – if I could just ignore that fact I would have gained a working skateboard.

That’s stealing. I know there are plenty of more extreme examples of someone forcefully divorcing someone else from their property but this rotting skateboard, if I were to rescue it from this lawn, would be stealing. Police could arrest me for taking inevitable rot and getting use out of it. Maddening. But these are the rules, we are a nation of laws.

Natural Born Convict

Myself I am not cut out for theft. A lucky combination of a generally honest disposition combined with the worst luck in America has kept me on the straight and narrow. Of course I toyed with petty theft when I was a kid. My neighbor’s baseball ended up on my lawn and even though it had his name on it I took it and used a marking pen to cover the entire panel of the baseball so that his name was obscured. He caught me. Naturally. I shoplifted a pack of chewing gum from Obexer’s Market in Homewood on Lake Tahoe and got caught. Naturally. I peeled the “nice price” sticker off of a Billy Ocean album and stuck it to Metallica’s “Ride the Lightning.” I would surely have been caught if the girl at the counter cared. As it stands I feel no remorse for stealing from Metallica. After their Napster fiasco and the tremendous amount of crap they’ve released over the last decade they deserve a lot worse. I suppose I’ve taken things from work – the usual, pens, paper, white out. Nothing major. I could never steal money, not even from a lousy employer. I wouldn’t be able to look myself in the mirror.

But back to this skateboard. I live in what would be considered a relatively poor neighborhood – but you wouldn’t know that from the amount of expensive toys and junk that the kids around here leave out. If I take a walk down the street or through an alley I could pick up a half a dozen bikes in varying states of disrepair. I think it is an ugly symptom when the poorest amongst us are sucked into the gross consumption – we buy things we don’t need, or even want! We buy just to buy and then we let the things we buy rot as soon as something shinier comes along.

Shit, I’m sounding like a broken record.

Speaking of Stealing…

I’ve recently discovered internet radio. I listen to internet radio at work mostly as my connection at home is dial-up. Sometimes we’ll listen to KZFR, other times KCSC, but just today I discovered a doozy of an Americana station called “Bourbon Disaster Radio.” The station is a sublime blend of classic outlaw country and more contemporary alternative-country and Americana. Get your twang on at: http://www.bourbondisaster.com/.

Honesty is the Best Policy

Seriously. Well maybe it’s just because I’m not smart enough to lie and get away with it. To each their own I suppose and I certainly know of a fair amount of highly successful and extremely devious and deceitful people. But you know, it just isn’t worth it – to sacrifice pride and decency for money or material success. What do I know though? Plenty of people have told me I’ll die broke.

Happy Birthday to Me!

“We all grieve in different ways,
Some people grieve longer than others and
Some people grieve forever.”

-Louis T. Wermann


I’m in a particularly melancholy mood this evening, listening to Celtic-flavored music, sad songs, songs of freedom and loss. My birthday’s coming up. On Saint Patrick’s Day in the year 1971 I breathed my first breath. March, wind, spring. The crocus have started blooming, appearing out of the cold ground and opening for the growing sun. The saucer magnolia in the front yard is ablaze with color and life and the peach in the back should open up completely with a couple of days worth of warm weather over this first weekend of the month of March. This winter has been strange – punctuated with loss and bitter cold. Tears.

I was adopted. It’s a beautiful thing. I was raised by a family of people who love me, but are in some ways fundamentally very different from me. It has given me a tremendous sense of freedom. I learned at a very young age, at least I was exposed to, the concept of sacrifice and loss. I don’t know who my birth parents are. I started to look several years ago but then I met a lovely woman I quickly fell in love with and married and the urgency of that search faded. Now I’m ambivalent about it – about finding people who look like me and share my genetics. I’m happy with who I am. I’m excited about who I may become. My birthdays are tinged with sadness though. There is no way not to think about the woman who decided to give me up.

My dad told me I was adopted as soon as my parents figured I was old enough to understand. I was around five at the airport when he told me that I was not his biological son. I remember a big yellow jet airliner just lifting off from the runway and pointing at it. My dad always recalls that to me as a sign I was accepting and not bothered by this strange news.

It’s weird being adopted. When I think about it – well one set of people chose me. So in that regard I feel special in that I was chosen. On the other side of the coin another set of people chose to give me up. So I was forsaken. I feel a sense of freedom – free from genetic expectations. But I also sometimes feel isolated. It can sometimes be difficult to reconcile these feelings. Ultimately I think it leaves me with a sense of chaos. Sometimes we think we are in control of our lives but at other times that sense of control proves itself to be a crumbling illusion.

So Happy Birthday Anyway!

But what the hell – we are all in this soup together. We’re all swimming upstream. Our lives are all growing shorter. Looking backwards is a fool’s plan or the luxury abided a leisure class of people. Looking back is a luxury, or the ability of a spoiled child to waste so easily and to be so careless. The fabric of order is at best a very loose knit of very questionable material. The likelihood of unraveling is always near.

Saint Patrick’s Day Game Plan

Yeah birthday’s get me to thinking – too much really. This year I’m going to embrace the Chico tradition of going out on the town, enjoying live music, and having a drink with friend’s at an establishment or three. I’ll dress myself from head to toe in green and soak in the sun or rain of an early spring day. I will post a smile upon my face and fortify it with strong medicine periodically. By nightfall I will be worse for the wear. It will be like living an entire lifetime in a single day. I will rise fresh and early at sunrise and I will collapse in a sunken heap at nightfall.

Life is such a marvel. If you can look at it just the right way it shimmers and shines and makes you laugh out loud. Not because it is good and not because it is bad but just because it is. All this, everything around us is.

So Happy Saint Patrick’s Day to you and whatever your plans for the day may be please have a good and a safe day.

Sunday, March 4, 2007

Politics as Usual and Cheap Useless Crap

Writing about politics, especially on the national level, is incredibly frustrating. It sometimes feels like shouting at a hurricane. I’m glad the democrats have some power only because it re-introduces a missing system of checks, balances, and oversight. Frankly I haven’t heard any democrat enunciating a strategy or platform other than “we’re not them” and in the face of the atrocious behavior of the republican lead Congress during a time of national vulnerability the “we’re not them” approach has finally paid off. But now what? I see that Nancy Pelosi is requesting a brand new jet aeroplane so that she can fly more comfortably between Washington D.C. and San Francisco. What’s another million at this point anyway? In six short years the term “budget surplus” has become an abstract esoteric concept, much like “transparency” and “accountability.” If it were up to me the politicians would all be flying coach and taking taxis. Or better yet the bus – it would give the rich SOB’s a chance to actually see, and likely rub against or be fondled by, the people they are being paid to represent. That’s sort of a joke, the idea that politicians represent working class tax-payers as opposed to the filthy rich. Birds of a feather.

So lately I’ve strayed from politics a bit. Pretty much everyone with a connected cerebellum is getting down on this “war.” How can it even be called a war when the soldiers involved don’t know who it is they’re fighting? Terror? I suppose Stephen King should be public enemy number one.

National politics is a mess. We can agree on that much. So how about local politics? Well here are some thoughts on a few issues that affect us all on a more proximate level.

What Parking Problem?

Seriously. Drive five blocks in any direction and you can find parking. Most of it is even free. The idea that there needs to be another downtown parking structure is ludicrous and an obvious tip of the hat to pressure from a construction-based economy. You want to hear about a parking problem? The first place I lived in San Francisco I would have to drive around in circles for forty-five minutes to find a parking space that was within fifteen minutes walking distance of my apartment. I think we should take the existing parking structure and make it entirely handicapped spaces so that the elderly and the disabled can park close to downtown and everyone else can invest in a decent pair of walking shoes. The exercise will do you good.

I understand this pressure to develop. Unless you work in construction or agriculture the economy in Chico stinks. I’m not anti-development like a lot of folks. I don’t buy into the whole “I got mine” mentality. Chico is a desirable place to live so why wouldn’t people want to move here? More people means we need more housing. So no, I’m not in the anti-development camp. I am, however, against stupid redundant unnecessary and publicly-funded development.

Wal-Mart

Speaking of publicly funded development I have bad news for those of you keeping your fingers crossed that the Wal-Mart Super Center won’t be built. If people keep shopping at Wal-Mart, and Wal-Mart keeps making money, then it will be built. Does it make me sick to my stomach? Yes. Is it economically short-sighted? Yes, but then aren’t we as Americans sort of the keepers of the faith when it comes to short-sighted policy? It seems almost an obligation at this point to make decisions for the immediate future that will permanently screw-up the mid to distant future.

But what the hell? People stayed in line overnight for the opening of both the Krispy Kreme Donuts and the In N Out Burger when they opened. People gave up a night of sleep so they could say they ate a fucking hamburger and a donut on the first day these corporate chain stores opened in our town. A lot of people. So congratulations – I mean, if being the first to sample corporate cuisine is a badge of honor for this great consumer nation then of course there will be more Wal-Marts, more king-sized peddlers of uselsss crap – but it’s cheap! Cheap useless crap. That should be our national motto. Print it on every fucking dollar bill and coin that comes out of our mints. In Cheap Useless Crap We Trust.

Great, are you happy? Now I’ve made myself sick to my own stomach. I’m going to go and take a cheap generic Xanax now. Thank the god of Cheap Useless Crap that Wal-Mart has a pharmacy.