Bunch of posts

I've just finished posting a bunch of old and new columns on the old Blog here - some of these have already been printed, and others will be coming out shortly. Anyway, these are in no particular order, so you may notice they skip around in time. What do you expect? It's a free website! Enjoy, and if I don't post anything here before 2010, Happy New Year! Hope it's a great one for you and yours.

- MadBob Howard

2009 - Adios and Good Riddance!

2009 has been one stinker of a year. It started out with a lot of promise and aplomb, but as events wheedled their ways along it seems to have ended with more of a whimper, or a whine, than a bang. In fact, on a more personal level, the year has ended with a good solid kick in the crotch. I can taste my testicles. Some years are like that, the bar has to be set somewhere. Anyway, the main point of this is that I will not be displeased when 2009 ticks away into the history books. Of course there is no guarantee that 2010 will be any better, but what the hell? You take a roll of the dice every time you drag your sorry ass out of the bed.

Come to think of it, this entire damned decade has been about as wonderful as a cactus turned inside out and used for an artificial vagina. First some little pissant apparently steals an election, rides around on a golf cart for nine months, the Twin Towers get knocked down by 19 assholes from Saudi Arabia, and ever since then it's been one war after another. That same little son of a gun goes on TV and tells everyone to keep spending all that money they don't have so our phoney-baloney, credit driven, consumer economy can keep running so the folks sitting at the top can keep skimming off their cut. He compresses interest rates to a point where you can't reasonably resist buying with money you don't have; and then the banks, in their infinite wisdom, decide it's a great idea to start lending sizable chunks of change to people who can't possibly pay it back so they can buy houses they can't possibly afford. This creates a housing bubble that screws just about everyone, just about everywhere, in the world Way to go American lenders! Way to go!

Of course, none of the economic gurus are complaining when their house's value is going up 25% a year for five years straight – hey, no, nothing out of the ordinary there! We are just super fantastic investors with big, capable brains – never mind the hair on our knuckles and nuts, we are advanced goddamnit, advanced!

Now we have Obama, who wants to give himself an A-minus if this bullshit, health care, nothing bill manages to get ram-rodded through Congress. I'd like to see something pass in order for us to have something to change, because this particular package is not likely to help many of us at all. It has been so watered down that Howard Dean is on the record seeing it needs to be scrapped, start again, mulligan. What is going on around here? When are people going to come to their senses and realize that the folks in Washington, be they well-intentioned or not, just aren't capable of steering a ship this large. It is getting to a point where it is too big not to fail. We need to step back, shift power away from the power centers, and start letting the people have a say in this whole system again. It's no amazing coincidence that Obama seems to have been sucked up by the system so quickly. They call it a system for a reason – it exists all by itself. There is not much that a single person, even one as powerful as the President of the United States, can do to change it. These Frankenstein monsters tend to have minds of their own. War, special interests, corruption, money – welcome to the status quo. The President doesn't answer to you and me. That was out of style before it was ever in.

So yeah, you can take 2009, you can take the whole damned decade. I won't miss it much. We've had our moments, but all things considered I wish this pain emanating from my groin and arching into my solar plexus would, at the very least, begin to subside. This is the situation I am talking about – the state of being that requires the creamy, white, helliday lubrication that is egg nog. Son of a bitch! This is necessary!

There is blood everywhere. You don't need special lenses to see it. The stuff is oozing from the walls, from the floorboards, out of the heating ducts. With your eyes closed you can smell the coppery goop. I don't know how we've made it this far. I don't know why we keep living and breathing. We are strange, strong creatures – maybe stronger, and definitely stranger than we have a right to be. The nog is kicking in, the nog is kicking in. Oh come on egg nog, rum, magic. I need that dull feeling, I can tell it's coming on, it's starting to overcome me – just... about... now...................................................

madbob@madbob.com

Happy Birthday to You

Sometimes things happen much faster than they ought to. Oftentimes the drunkest person in the house is the one who takes that last drink. Clearly you need it more than they do, but that has nothing to do with it at the time. Things like that happen with alarming regularity.

Dogs bark. Stating those simple truths, the things you know that you know – this can help you through the trying times. Why else do you think prayer would be sited as such an effective exercise? All kinds of people swear by it. There is not one single solitary drink in my house right now. It's not even nine o'clock – but it's Sunday, and I don't feel like going out. I really don't want to leave right now. The fire is going, it's dark, and cold – I just want to stay in here and finish doing the things I need to do.

I get tired; we all get tired. Birthdays will leave you tired. I have had birthdays during which I felt wise, and arrived. That feeling will dissipate. The older you get, you will vividly remember those times when you feel wise – that's how rare they are. There is nothing more annoying that these early 20-something year olds, who think that, through some magical endowment, they have figured out so much more than the rest of us; and they figured it so much faster. They don't know much – and I know even less. That's my edge. Anyone who thinks they know anything is a fool.

You ask for this drivel on a Sunday night, after the rum, and the nog, and the coffee, beer, and wine – this is what you are going to get. I do not make the rules. These things were set in motion a long time ago by beings more together than you or I will ever be.

We are halfway there. Is it still Sunday? This is the day they told me these things must be done. Cryptic language can probably be blamed for 20% of what ilks the world. Natural disaster accounts for 3, and human nature makes up the other 77%. We are strange, fussy monkeys. People who have thought on human nature have advised me not to think of it at all. That kind of exploration can leave you feeling under-confident for your next date.

Try to ignore you birthday, but if that becomes impossible, then confront the beast head-first. People enjoy a spectacle. A birthday is like a sacrifice. It's improbable that we are alive to have birthdays in our honor, so a sacrifice is not entirely futile. These things happen.

Have I mentioned to you that there is not a single drink in this house at the moment? There might be a half-beer left somewhere, and I may endeavor to track it down. That's where we stand right now. Not pretty.

Between your birthday, and the time this comes out, we will have celebrated Thanksgiving. This is honestly my favorite holiday. No matter how crap your life may be, there is always something for which to be thankful. It's back to the whole improbable nature of this... scenario? I can't find the word. You know what I mean. It's Sunday night, and I don't usually even start thinking about this business until Tuesday; but it's your birthday, so for you I will push things forward. There is a natural order to events, but sometimes we meddle with the natural order, and push things forward, or backward, or from one side to the other. This can work out well, badly, or indifferently.

You know, if we didn't expect anything, we'd never suffer disappointment. What is going on around here? Man, I am reaching for it tonight. This may require a trip to the liquor store – except that I think we're making progress without it. Just a glass of water might do the trick.
On my best birthday, I felt as though a fog had lifted. For maybe the first time, I felt like I had figured some things out; and that I was starting to get a handle on the world, and my place within it. It was a really good feeling. That feeling went away really fast.
Whatever you think you might know, you could think that's wrong by this time tomorrow. Stimulus will be injected into your brain by life's events. The best thing I can figure is just be happy that you have a birthday; and be happy, and thankful, when another one comes around, and you're still with it enough to enjoy it and have a good time.

madbob@madbob.com

Put Your Money Where Your Mouth Is...

“Brother if I stepped on a worn out dime, I bet a nickel I could tell you if it's heads or tails.”
-Hank Williams Sr.

Giving up on Trickling Down

Well I just heard a report that the infamous insurance agency AIG has been issuing massive bonuses to their executives – their profits fueled by a $180 billion tax-payer hand-out. Wow. I don't really know what to say about that. I will say this – we've been dicking around with this “trickle-down” economic theory since Ronald Reagen was in office back in the 1980's and every year it gets more difficult for working class Americans to make their ends meet. Bail-outs aside, all these folks who decry the government paying out welfare or giving medical aid to the poor never seemed to issue so much as a peep at the tax-breaks, subsidies, and grants enjoyed by big businesses. I get the premise of trickle-down policies – give money to the wealthy and they will generate jobs that will employ the rest of us. I just don't think that premise translates into reality. People and businesses don't grow rich by spending their money – they maintain wealth by holding onto money. In turn, I'm well convinced that if the government had taken that bail-out money and put it right back into the pockets of the working class Americans, that money would have immediately been put back into the economy. The reason for this is that working class people have to spend money – not on yachts or servants, but on food and clothing. People have got to eat and pay their gas bills.

Burn Ban

Speaking of gas bills, the Chico City Council seems to be embroiled in an on-going debate over whether or not to ban burning, either via wood stove or fireplace, on certain days of the year when the air quality is poor. I'm ambivalent about this idea: on the one hand I agree with the notion that we need to be doing everything we can to improve air quality. On the other hand, relative to wood, gas is extremely expensive! There are a lot of folks who are burning wood, and it isn't because they enjoy the nostalgic flicker and glow of a traditional fireplace – it's because with a chain-saw and an $8 permit they can cut themselves a few seasons worth of wood. Compare this with a $200 monthly PG&E bill to keep a modest house warm through the winter and you start to understand the real-world economics that a burn ban would bring to bare.
I get the idea that a lot of folks are really out of touch with those of us who just barely manage to make our ends meet – those of us who are working a wage job and scraping by, month after month, keeping our fingers crossed and hoping that the squealing dryer can make it through another year. This segment of the population isn't technically poor, they're not collecting any government benefits and they pay their taxes year in and year out – but there sure isn't much left in the coffers when it's all said and done. Saving $500 a year on heating costs means something tangible to those who are living on that cusp – and there are a lot of them; us.

Wal-Mart Mania

The Wal-Mart controversy is another one of these economic issues, but I think a lot of the working class aren't reading this one right. People want Wal-Mart to move in because they believe it means greater availability of cheaper goods. To me, Wal-Mart means low pay for the workers they employ. If I were Scott Greundl and the City Council, I wouldn't be telling Wal-Mart to pay a million dollars for environmental rehabilitation, I'd be telling them to promise a higher wage for their workers here in Chico. That money, the money they pay their employees, would come right back into the community – it would flow into the restaurants and local businesses.

Blame it on the Tooth Fairy

One bright spot has emerged from all of this economic gloom and doom. I have it on good authority that the Tooth Fairy is now paying between $5 and $20 per tooth! I don't know if the Tooth Fairy organization received a government bail-out or what, but by my calculations this indicates an increase of between 2000% and 8000% since I was getting a quarter per tooth from the little lady back in the middle 1970's. Cash money, off the books; losing teeth might be the best business in town these days.

madbob@madbob.com

Circles, Spirals, and Clogs

Sometimes nothing flows. Right now the sink in my kitchen and the sink in the shop where I work are both clogged. Water does flow through them, but very slowly. One extraneous egg-shell or a spot of grout, and I'm down on my knees with a drill and a $25 Home Depot pipe snake for the next several hours. Cursing will ensue.

But I can't help think these clogged sinks are symptoms of a clogged spirit. Tension and tedium have combined to create a particularly sticky stasis. I just can't seem to get moving very quickly, smoothly, or even in the right direction sometimes. I still produce, but it is only through tremendous effort; and the results are not always satisfying.

A long time ago I figured out that there was an ebb and flow to things. Some cycles are so easy to pick out. Tonight the moon is almost full, and I feel like I can almost breathe. There are those surface-level, easy to identify cycles. The sun, the moon, the stars. But there are other cycles, less obvious. There are cycles nested within cycles, or spinning off of them. The whole thing acts like a pinball machine sometimes. Hundred year cycles, thousand year cycles; and, conversely, cycles that take seconds, or milliseconds, to complete.

Well I suppose we trudge onward. It's either that or just sit still and wait for this thing to pass. I prefer movement to inactivity, for the most part, even if that movement is only around and around in ever-expending circles.

I read once about a people who inhabited what is now the Northern Nevada desert. They survived in this desolate and inhospitable environment for tens of thousands of years. These people lived in caves during the night. When day broke, they would leave the caves together and walk in circles around their dwellings. With each pass around the location of their cave, the circle along which the people traveled would grow slightly larger. They foraged whatever berries and small game they could. In this way, they covered a tremendous amount of ground, without ever straying too far away from the safety and security provided by the cave. As the sun began to set, they headed in a straight line back to their cave. There, the rested and waited for the next day to break, when they would begin their circular travels again.

Most of us don't live all that differently from the Northern Nevada cave dwellers. We have a home we leave in the morning, and we spend most of our day traveling here and there, covering a lot of ground, but never getting so far away from our homes that we can't get back as the sun sets, sleep in a comfortable bed, and return to our circular travels the next morning.

Traveling along longer, straighter lines is more difficult, or rather, it requires greater courage. There are so many more uncertainties. You don't know where you are going to spend the night, or where you might awaken the next day. Everything is memorable though, because so many things are new, or in a different context, or unfamiliar. Moments are seared into the brain.
Don't be fooled though, even when we think we are traveling in straight lines, we spin. There's no avoiding it, we're on a ball. The itinerant traveler is sure to eventually acquire island fever. The Earth spins in a circle around the Sun, the Sun around some black hole, or dark matter, or who knows what? Maybe we're all being sucked into God's great anus.

I have a fondness for comets. A comet probably moves in as straight a line as any other body in this Universe. The fact that these comets return and visit us ever decade or every fifty years, or every a thousand years, reveals the circles they travel. They are longer, and stranger. What does a comet get to see? Is the comet nostalgic when it finally sees the Earth again?
People are crazy for fame these days. It strikes me as the ultimate tread-mill. I'm sure fame is an amazing high for awhile, but where do you go from there? Now you've got the monkey on your back.

Anyway – tonight is French fries, coleslaw, and leftover Thanksgiving lasagna. These are the days. The moon is nearly full, the fire is warm, I'm almost there. Now if only I had a two month supply of egg nog and rum, things would be lubricated. At least they would seem lubricated, and if they weren't, I'm sure I wouldn't care.

madbob@madbob.com

The Ghosts of Winters Past and Halloween

The end of October, almost November, almost December. Winter is just around the corner. From what I understand Boreal is already open for business. Years ago I spent a winter in Tahoe, picking up odd jobs and snowboarding as often as humanly possible. It was the tail end of summer, a few months after I'd finished with college and grown disenchanted, for the first time, with San Diego. I moved to the mountains and scrounged work as a bus-boy in a Tahoe City restaurant. During the fall months, before the snow and ice started to accumulate, the drive from my North Shore condo into Tahoe City was no problem; it was pleasant really. After the snow fell and ice formed, the drive became treacherous – even with a four wheel drive SUV. The bad weather meant that the resorts were finally open though, and so then I was working in the rental shop, tightening bindings and grumbling about the manager – he couldn't seem to figure out how to get us out on the mountain very much, even if we were dead slow. I never could figure him out – but I suppose the 45 year old coke addict, whose seasonal job is running the rental shop at a small-time Tahoe ski resort, was probably not graced with the innate ability to generate success. Still, it was a frustrating experience, and one that ultimately ended in confrontation, followed by termination: my own. That was alright though – after the rental shop I floated into a job as a short-order cook in a restaurant that was not as fancy as the owner wanted it to be. We prepared too much of our fare in the microwave oven; but it paid, until it didn't; and then I drifted out of the mountains and down into the Bay Area. By then it was late March.

When I worked at the resort I had a season pass, but that was taken away from me when I was fired. That was no biggie, I had an extra pass because I thought I'd lost the first one. That second pass was taken away after a girlfriend of mine tried to use it. After that I hiked up Mount Rose for my boarding pleasure and it was the best. The highlight of the winter was snowboarding under the otherworldly light of a full moon on fresh powder. It must feel something like that to be on another planet. I recommend it to everyone.

It was during those first few months in Tahoe that I seriously concentrated on writing for the first time. I spent several hours every day with a notebook and a fountain pen, and I wrote non-stop. None of it was worth a damn – I was working through a process advocated by Natalie Goldberg in a book called “Writing Down the Bones.” Goldberg calls it automatic writing, and the idea is to write so fast and steadily that your conscious brain can't keep up with your pen. It generated a lot of nonsense, but it also helped me to hack out a style of writing, and to get comfortable with it. It's a process I still work on (obviously) - but those initial three months in Tahoe were a formative experience for me.

Happy Halloween

Halloween is the holiday my wife and I really celebrate. We actually decorated the house this year, with cob webs and these bizarre skeleton garlands Trish found at the $.99 Store. They are really creepy – each garland is a series of a half dozen very realistic, six inch tall skeletons, hanging from their necks on a piece of twine that stretches from one side of a window to the other. We also have a metallic life-sized card-board skeleton, spiders, a foot tall skeleton, and a series of pumpkins that volunteered in the back yard this summer.

This time of year is my favorite. It is a tenuous, delirious time; the days grow shorter, things grow weak. I've been told that this is the time of year when the worlds of the living and the dead are in their closest proximity. It is harvest time for weed, almonds, and a host of other crop. If you listen and look carefully, you can hear and see the spirits of the dead quivering in the air. Fogs will start to accumulate in the nooks and crannies of the valley floor and the light will become rich and saturated.

Right now I am looking forward to the fall and winter months.

madbob@madbob.com

Climate Chaos, Celebrity Mayhem, and Stupefaction

Leaders and activists from all over the world have converged on Copenhagen, Denmark, in order to discuss climate change and what we can do in order to keep temperatures from rising dangerously. The theory is that greenhouse gasses and carbon dioxide emissions create a layer that traps in heat and causes these unnatural and excessive global warming. As of this writing, the temperature is 25 degrees. They should consider holding these talks in the summer, here in Chico, just for dramatic effect. I saw John Stossel years ago reacting with disdain to the idea of global warming. First he argued that it wasn’t happening, and then, in one of those classic twists of logic distortion, stated that even if it was happening, what’s the big deal? He suggested that the temperatures would rise most in the coldest regions, and that the people who lived in Siberia for example, would likely appreciate the increased temperatures anyway.

The problem is bigger than temperatures of course. The issues are: rising sea levels, changing weather patterns, droughts, storms, melting polar ice caps, and so on. Personally I understand a branch of the skeptics- those who admit global warming is happening, but won’t correlate the rising temperatures with human activity. It is hard to conceive of us pesky humans actually having the capacity to screw something as large and robust as the Earth up so utterly. But experience does suggest that if humans are good at anything, it is screwing things up in a very serious way. The first town that had two automobiles, had the first automobile accident shortly thereafter. The world’s first unsinkable ship, sank to the bottom of the sea on its maiden voyage. The Hindenberg, the atomic bomb, the leaning tower of Piza, eviction from the Garden of Eden, the Tower of Babel, the twin towers… Our collective ego is the only thing greater than our ability to erect and construct – that and our incredible myopia.

Celebrity Mayhem

Holly Sampson

I try not to focus too much on the celebrity nonsense, but Tiger Woods, wow. His life is screwed up now to be sure, but for awhile there apparently he was paid billions of dollars to play golf and sleep with a wide variety of different women. When he wasn’t knocking his balls into holes on the golf course, he was just doing it with waitresses, models, a porn star, a newscaster, and one “sex-crazed cougar” from Great Britain. What a life. Now it looks like the bill has finally arrived in the mail. This morning a blond woman was taken from Tiger Woods’ Florida home in an ambulance to the hospital. I hope nothing too terrible happens there.

Alexa Ray Joel, daughter of singer/songwriter Billy Joel and supermodel Christy Brinkley, apparently may have tried to kill herself by taking 8 homeopathic pain pills. I am doubting that would even give me a good head buzz. The Joel’s don’t seem to have a solid grip on the more successful methods of snuffing oneself out – Billy Joel admitted that at a particularly low point in his own life he tried to kill himself, by drinking furniture cleaner. That must have been quite the hangover.

Egg Nog Season

Myself I've been avoiding the hangover by slipping into that smooth, creamy world that is egg nog and brandy. The residual effects of the concoction are more of a delayed stupefaction than they are a traditional, painful headache and nausea. It is just the lubricant one needs to successfully navigate the emotional and psychological labyrinth that is the holiday season. While the world around us descends into consumer-driven chaos, those of us on the nog can manage to ooze through the mayhem and maintain a semblance of alcohol-induced sanity. It's the only time of the year the stuff really works – one of those perfect symbioses, like the parasitic worms that help certain people deal with allergies, or those little fish that swim into the mouths of the larger species and clean their teeth. It's a combination that has evolved from necessity and endured because it is effective.

News Flash!

Danica Patrick

This just in! Danica Patrick will be attempting to make the switch from Indy car racing to stock cars. I know there aren't a whole lot of Nascar fans out there, but this is exciting stuff. Patrick will apparently be racing in a limited number of races in Nascar's Nationwide series – the series a step below the premier Sprint Cup events. She'll be driving for JR Motorsports, a team co-owned by Dale Earnhardt Jr. and his sister Kelly. Kelly Earnhardt is the General Manager for JR. Now I am seriously looking forward to February.

madbob@madbob.com

Madmen and Monkeys

I'll tell you what, when you get older, you come to the realization that you don't know much. I do anyway. It's an odd phenomenon – I would have expected that I would know more as I get older. It doesn't work that way though. I know more facts, and I have a little more knowledge of myself, but with every passing year I come to understand that I know even less than I thought I did about simple human nature. We are random creatures. I suppose that's what I finally have come to realize. Trying to get your head wrapped around human nature, I don't know if it's a good idea.

Fundamentalism

I have little tolerance for fundamentalists – and I'm now willing to admit that might stem from a little bit of jealousy. Fundamentalists know exactly what they are here for – they have a pretty solid understanding of their purpose, and the purpose of life and existence in general. Sure, I may think that understanding is based on nonsense, bad science, and a certain amount of fear of the unknown, but that makes no difference to them. Their purpose is to establish a relationship with God, maintain that relationship, increase their intimacy with their God, and then die and meet their God. Life couldn't be simpler.

The rest of us, we have to wade through all this incredible magnitude of information and belief, culture and science, and somehow distill from this a working world-view – something that gets us through the long days and the cold nights. It is no small task.

When Sex Ruled the World

When I was younger I used to think the world ran on sex. I thought everything, boiled down to its essence, was based on people trying to get with one another. Not in order to pro-create, because I've never been interested in that, but simply for the sheer, ecstatic act (or acts) of sexuality. A businessman works his way up the ladder so he can make more money, buy nicer things, woo a beautiful woman, and have sex with her. A politician goes through the rigmarole of the campaign, puts their life out their for everyone to see, and attains a position of power so they can attract beautiful women and have sex with them. Everything, in my mind from the age of about 13 through 30, revolved around sex and sexuality. That's how I thought (think), and so I assumed that's how everyone else did too.

I see now that my world-view was completely egocentric, and that people are motivated by all kinds of emotions other than just screwing. I understand that empirically, intellectually, but it still doesn't make sense to me on an emotional level. Why would people really want all the hassles that go along with attaining power if it weren't for all the hot sex? It breaks down though, because, while I'd like to think Presidents and Senators are orgying it up every night in some dirty D.C. hotels, another part of me, my brain I guess, knows this is entirely improbable at best. No, it seems these people actually want power for the sake of power. It seems that the businessman may actually want money for the sake of having money. Because really, even high-class prostitutes don't require billionaire clients... or do they? The paranoid part of my brain, it swells sometimes. I can't imagine the brain is a static organ – blood pumps to it and certain parts swell and contract. Maybe there are billion dollar orgies somewhere and shipping magnates are making it with powerful Senators. Maybe the world really does run on sex. No, stop it! Stop it... what was I talking about?

We're not all the same. Hell, none of us are the same. None of us share the precise motivation, purpose, or identity. Space separates and defines us.

Fussy Monkeys

I hear they are raising the fees at the schools again, and that students and professors are striking on college campuses across the state. What fussy monkeys we are – with our shiny speeding cars and our Wal-Mart superstores. A colleague of mine told me that, in spite of the genocide that nearly extincted them, the Native Americans have never had it so good. I guess he meant the trappings of modern convenience. My head swam a little. People lived for tens of thousands of years a certain way, with an ingrained understanding of the world around them, with a purpose that was so sublimely woven into their way of life that they were not apart from the world around them. There was no schism. Now they have cars and bills and casinos. I am confused – this is better?

madbob@madbob.com

Quotation on Morality...

I lifted this quote from Anthony Peyton Porter's Facebook status - it's a good one:

"Moral certainty is always a sign of cultural inferiority. The more uncivilized the man, the surer he is that he knows precisely what is right and what is wrong. All human progress, even in morals, has been the work of men who have doubted the current moral values, not of men who have whooped them up and tried to enforce them."

Henry Louis Mencken, journalist (1880–1956)

Set and Setting

My sleep patterns are completely screwed up from a combination of the shortening days and the switch off of daylight savings. This morning I was out of bed shortly after 5 a.m. – in the tub and reading Joseph Conrad’s “The Secret Agent.” I am enjoying it, but my brain can only handle a single chapter at a time. I’m just into chapter four. If I try and read beyond a chapter in a sitting, my eyes go buggy and I have trouble following the story. My brain used to be much sharper than it has become.

This morning, after I’d finished reading, I lay there, staring at the wall, feeling badly about how I behaved the night before. I get really moody and I take it out on people around me. That means Trish and the dogs. It is unfair – when I get into those states of mind, it would be better if I were far away from people; particularly the ones I care a great deal about. (For the purposes of this column, dogs are also considered “people,” – people with four feet and fur coats. Cesar Milan will probably want to have a talk with me.)

Winter Gardening

We took down the hanging tomato containers over the weekend, and Trish planted them with lettuce and spinach seed. I need to get those re-hung – already a squirrel has been digging around in the buckets and disrupting the soil. Winter gardening is a misnomer. A lot of what gets planted doesn’t grow vigorously during the colder months. What it does is put down roots – then when spring arrives and the ground starts to warm up, the “winter” crops burst to life and grow with gusto. We’ve never had a great deal of luck with our winter gardens. We don’t use pesticides, and snails and slugs love the sprouting vegetation. That is why the idea of using the hanging containers seems like a good idea. I will let you know how that works out for us.

Legalize Ibogaine!

I have heard and read several recent articles touting the success rate of ibogaine therapy in treating serious drug addictions: cocaine, heroin, and methamphetamine. Ibogaine is a powerful hallucinogen; it takes the user on a journey that lasts for several days. Scientists and pharmacologists do not understand exactly why it works, but there is a school of thought that believes the deeply introspective trip the ibogaine user undergoes provides them with the psychological insight to understand the reasons behind their addiction. This knowledge may then allow the addict to break those mental chains. I have read similar studies from the early 1960’s that suggest LSD helped hardcore alcoholics to escape their addictions as well. It’s my opinion that our brains are prone to developing ruts; sometimes a powerful psychotropic can smooth out those ruts and break the circles. The problem, of course, is that both ibogaine and LSD are scheduled drugs, illegal in the United States.

This is something lawmakers really need to take a close look at. Methamphetamine addiction, in particular, is so prevalent and damaging that I would think politicians would be leaping at any opportunity to help alleviate this epidemic. Right now there are ibogaine clinics operating in Canada and Mexico, but sadly not here in the U.S.

Set and Setting

I read a lot about psychedelic drugs when I was in school. One of the important elements of a successful trip is making sure that one is in the proper set and setting – essentially you should be in a safe place surrounded by good people that you trust. My personal opinion is that drugs can be good, and drugs can be bad. It has more to do with the context – the set and setting – in which the drugs are used, than it does with the drugs themselves.

CIA Sentenced in Absentia

Twenty two Americans, allegedly members of the CIA, have been convicted by an Italian court of illegally kidnapping an Italian Muslim cleric, Abu Omar, back in 2003. Omar was literally grabbed off of the street as part of the “extraordinary rendition” program that George W. approved after the attacks on the World Trade Center. After his kidnapping, Omar was held without charge for seven months in Egypt, where he claims to have been tortured relentlessly by his captors.

I’ve often heard rumor that the CIA used psychedelic drugs in order to extract information from their captives. This would definitely fall under the category of an undesirable set and setting for your psychedelic experience.

madbob@madbob.com

Lost: One Mojo

Lately I just haven’t had much mojo. The things that used to give me great pleasure now seem more like chores. I feel a little like the instructions on a bottle of shampoo – lather, rinse, repeat.

Years ago if I had this feeling for too long, I would have just packed everything I owned into my hatch-back and gone somewhere else. The years between college and Chico I lived in San Diego, Lake Tahoe, San Francisco, and Los Angeles. During that time I worked as a short order cook, a video tape runner, a marketing director (for two separate companies), a pizza delivery specialist, and a human resources assistant. There were other jobs I can’t recall off the top of my head.

Things are a little different for me now – I am a married man, and a home-owner. I have a wife and dogs who place some reliance on my being around and bringing in a steady income. I’m not complaining; it’s just different; it’s a totally different set of circumstances.

Life does that – it changes the deal on you. One day you are surfing three times and day and the next your stranded on a couch a mile from the beach smoking weed like a chimney. It’s hard to even figure out what happened – or why? Then you’re living in the mountains, watching the moon rise over Lake Tahoe, or buying a bag of drugs in a dirty fast-food restaurant on Haight Street. Sometimes I feel like I’ve lived a hundred lives – and sometimes I feel like I haven’t even started living.

When I’m Old

I will wear cheap suits and carry a hollow cane filled with liquor. Sometimes I will carry a brief-case around with me and act as though I am in a hurry to get to an important meeting. The brief-case will contain well-thumbed skin magazines and shiny steel canisters of nitrous oxide. Maybe I’ll attach it to my wrist with a pair of hand-cuffs just to make the contents seem that much more valuable. I will be leaner than I am now – I won’t be working so I won’t have to eat as much. My teeth won’t hurt like they do now. I will have either gotten them fixed, or I won’t have any - either way, they won’t hurt, and I will smile all the time. I will hang out in dark bars in the middle of the day and strike up conversation with floozies. I might write, or I might play music – but it won’t matter whether I do or not. I might live in a second story apartment where I can look down at the people walking by on the street. Maybe I’ll whistle at the pretty girls. I’ll be old and harmless, so they’ll think it funny, instead of creepy like I would be if I did that now. I plan on getting away with those kinds of things when I am old.

In the Mean-Time

Enough of that – there are miles to go before then. Isn’t it strange that a spy would affix an important brief-case to their wrist with hand-cuffs? This would seem to me to be a huge beacon indicating that there might be something worth stealing in the case. I suppose it’s a moot point in this day and age – a would-be spy would probably carry any information around in a data-stick on their key-chain.

I’ve got data-sticks and RAM on the brain these days because our office computer seems to have taken a serious turn for the worse. I think the daily exposure to internet gossip and pornography has finally rotted the poor thing’s brains. Last night I tried to print out a paper and ended up having to re-boot, then waited for a good solid ten minutes before it finally performed the simplest of tasks.

Oh to have my problems. I literally weep over the plight of the people living in daily violence over there in Pakistan and Afghanistan. The photos on the news websites look like something out of the big-budget action films. I can’t even imagine it – living in a world where going to the supermarket poses a genuine threat to your health and well-being.

I don’t know, I don’t know – it’s just getting crazy out there. Has it always been this way? Is it a product of a hyper-active media that relies on horror to generate ratings?

Money Makes the World Go BOOM!

The latest I am hearing is that Obama is going to approve payments to Taliban fighters in order to get them to renounce violence and lay down their arms. There are a host of questions regarding this policy, but the one I come up with is where the hell is all this money coming from, and why the hell don’t I seem to be getting any of it?

madbob@madbob.com

A Desire for More

If you are paying much attention to global politics, economics, and business, you will hear the term “corporate America” come up frequently. From the political left the term is almost always used derogatorily. Politicians to activists to anarchists point the finger of blame for a myriad of economic and ecological woes at “corporate America” – and there is merit to their allegations.

Here is the problem with corporations as I see it. First off, it is helpful to understand what a corporation really is. Following is the definition from my Webster’s Pocket Dictionary:

cor’po-ra’tion: n. group given legal status of an individual

Why would a group want the legal rights of an individual? There are loads of good reasons for incorporating your business – even if you are just a small fish in the economic food chain. First and foremost, by incorporating your small business, you deflect fiscal risk away from your personal holdings. For example – let’s say you own a pizza parlor. A customer has a slip and fall and breaks their hip. The customer consults a high-paid doctor/attorney who decides they are going to take you to the cleaners. If your business is incorporated, then the attorney can only go after the specific business holdings. If you have not incorporated your business, then the attorney may also go after your personal property in order to satisfy the damages levied by the courts. This could mean you lose your car, your house, and whatever other property of value you might own.

Incorporating your business essentially provides you with a layer of protection. So what’s the big deal? What is so bad about corporate America? Well here is where I’ll get a little more subjective – but my feeling on the matter is that there are probably good corporations, and bad corporations. Unfortunately a bad corporation, particularly a large one, can wreak an incredible amount of damage on the fiscal and ecological environment. Because the incorporated company is its own entity, and because it answers first and foremost to the shareholders, it can become a moral-less and unethical being. It is like a body with no head; or a body with many heads who are all working in their own self-interests.

The underlying economic environment that fuels this unethical being is the relentless drive for profits. These days a company is expected to show a profit every single quarter. Anyone who has been in business understands this is not completely realistic – markets go up, and markets go down. A good, ethical company projects into the future. The ethical company leaders are looking five, ten, twenty five years into the future. It is for this reason that the family owned banks have weathered this financial storm much better than the publicly held mega-banks. (For the purposes of this explanation, never mind the massive corporate welfare in the form of tax-payer funded bail-outs.)

If you are in charge of a business, and you have to report a profit to your shareholders every single quarter, you are bound to make decisions based fundamentally, if not solely, on the generation of profits. If this means cutting down rain forests to grow beef cattle – so be it. If it means polluting rivers in order to produce a certain commodity, so be it. By putting profits above everything else – we have created an environment where it becomes much simpler for decisions makers to step into the gray ethical areas and cross completely over into the unethical and often illegal areas. To deal with this, corporations employ batteries of lawyers. It is easier to make profit by doing unethical and illegal things, and then hiring lawyers to clean it all up, than it is to do things ethically and legally. That’s the mentality anyway – whether or not that is 100% true in all cases – I don’t know.

Whose fault is this? There’s plenty of blame to go around. We all want a return on our investment. If we own stock – we want to see its value rise. If we have money in the bank – we want to collect interest on that money. Anyone who holds a 401(k) owns a portion of the blame.

Most of us want more than we have. That desire is fundamental to the American character. Come to this country and make a life for yourself – it’s the American dream. I don’t know – I don’t have any answers for you here. Why would you be in school, or working at a job, if you didn’t want more for yourself? Why would I be writing this, or you reading it? I really don’t know.

madbob@madbob.com

Ejection

The changing seasons are doing a number on me; my

knees creak, there are developing pockets of pain in my armpits, my head feels like a lump of warm wax. This is what we look forward to. Troublesome dreams relentlessly played themselves for me last night – dreams of strange communists living together in their filth and feces – huddle waist deep in the sewers and reveling in the fact that the water they drink is also the water they pass their waste into. It was a pale, underground world;

and its residents were soft and white. In another dream I played the chorus to Dylan’s “Knocking on Heaven’s Door” on a string-less guitar for a crowd of seated on-lookers who sang along. It was the Guns and Roses version of the song, complete with my attempts to channel the high-pitched nasal whine of Axl Rose. The guitar was amazing really – it was nothing more than a strange piece of painted plywood barely shaped like a guitar neck. By placing my fingers in the place where the chord shapes would go and strumming along the face of the wood, it would emenate a beautiful, ringing sound. It also had a strange finger of wood that was screwed onto the top of the “neck,” it served as a sort of primitive tremolo bar; but it kept getting in the way of my playing, so at some point I tried to snap it off. The screw held fast though, and so the piece ended up just sort of hanging there – but I could live with that.

Long Live Glam Rock!

Friends told me they recently took a trip down to the Sleep Train Ampitheater to watch Def Leppard, Poison, and Cheap Trick perform. I think I saw the same show, only it was fifteen or twenty years ago. I came of age in the era of glam-rock and hair metal. I am proud to say that one of the first concerts I attended was Motley Crue, Whitesnake, Poison and Jet Boy playing a Day on the Green at the Oakland Coliseum in 1987. There was a thriving punk scene then too, with the Dead Kennedy’s, Agent Orange, and the like tearing it up, but my leanings were towards metal. Metallica was just coming onto the scene with a new, meaner style of music. They represented a shift away from the pretty boys in make-up playing for the ladies. Then grunge emerged and no one was allowed to smile anymore – music was serious and sad, for the depressed and the misfits. The excesses and debaucheries of the middle eighties were replaced by the addictions and disorders of the early nineties. The pendulum is always swinging: back and forth, back and forth.

Vietnam, er, I mean Afghanistan

Can you believe this? U.S. troops have been fighting in Afghanistan for eight years now. From what I can gather, we’ll be there for at least another eight years unless we give up our constantly shifting mission and just call it a day. Back in the 1980’s – when I was listening to Motley Crue and Ratt, Afghanistan was known as the Soviet Union’s Vietnam. They were stuck there in a war without end, fighting a fanatical, tribal, vengeful, vicious enemy that, it was well understood, would never give up. Our military advisors and politicians chuckled at the folly of the Soviets. Now, twenty short years later, we are in Afghanistan acting like we can positively change the attitudes of a country that has been fighting one enemy or the next for the last fifty years. Crazy – it’s absolutely insane.

Back to the Garden

My wife told me yesterday that historically, the single most important factor in determining which people are prosperous, and which people are poor, is soil quality. The reason they grow poppies in Afghanistan is because poppies grow easily in bad soil, with little water. Civilizations emerged in fertile valleys where the soil allowed people to establish a stable food source; which in turn afforded people with the luxury of time – the ability to think, write, create art, and experiment with different forms of government.

I have long thought that Genesis, particular the story of Adam and Eve, is a parable representing our emergence as humans from a hand to mouth existence, to an agriculturally based existence; and then a fracturing of that peaceable existence and a return to a more ruthless and sustenance level lifestyle. Afghanistan was once a beautiful, lush land. Its people were peaceful and scholarly. War has turned it upside down, placing the most brutal and vicious into positions of power, destroying the thoughtful, and castigating the meek. They’ve been ejected, by bombs and bullets, from the garden.

madbob@madbob.com

It's a Mad, Mad World

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Changing Light and Bad Business

I am writing this on what is officially the first day of fall – the autumnal equinox. Today, night-time and day-time are the same length. From here on out in the Northern hemisphere, the days will grow shorter and the nights longer until we work our way around to the winter solstice in late December. Fall is my favorite season here in Chico – while the days are still nice and warm, the evening temperatures drop way down and cool everything off. The leaves will start to turn color soon and eventually the rain will come down. We’ll be able to burn backyard fires in our outdoor fireplace, and the new woodstove will be used to warm the house. My favorite element of fall though is the changing light quality. I moved here about a decade ago from Southern California, where the light quality is so consistent year round that the motion picture industry established its home-base there during the first half of the 20^th century. Here, between ten and fifteen degrees longitude further north than that flat-lit fantasy-land, the curvature of the Earth and the path of the Sun combine to give us a wonderfully saturated light quality. Normally whitish porch lights take on a glowing orange luster. The early evening’s sky blends from brilliant blue to purple to deep, star-speckled, blue-black.

It was this light quality that inspired me to pick up painting again a few years back; it is undeniably inspiring. When we eventually get a little more moisture in the air, the fogs will settle into the valley, and with them another entirely unique quality of light will make its appearance.

The Black Cat Bazaar

Speaking of painting, arts, inspiration; the Black Cat Bazaar will be happening this Sunday October 4^th from 3 p.m. until 9 p.m. The bazaar will feature a bevy of local artists, craftspeople, and performers selling their wares and sharing their talents. The event is being held in a newly refurbished adjunct of Mim’s Bakery on Humboldt Avenue and is advertised as follows:

“This event will promote creativity and fun! It is in celebration of our 20th year in business. The proceeds will go to the Butte Humane society and the craft vendors themselves!”

In the interest of full disclosure, Yours Truly will be behind a booth there selling a variety of different metal-works, paintings, and unique plantings put together by the illustrious indie-rock icon turned horticulturalist, my lovely wife Trish Howard. Stop by and say hello.

Continuing Local Attacks on Small Business

In the North State’s continued crack-down on small businesses bar doormen are the latest targets. This has been an on-going campaign that started with screen printers and garment manufacturers and has gone on to assail auto detailers, and now, apparently, local bars. The state employees have been raiding businesses and looking for whatever obscure, ticky-tacky violations they can find in order to levy fines on the typically unsuspecting business owners.

This sincerely gripes me. Chico has a small business economy, and anyone who has ever run a small business understands that it is a genuine, constant struggle. As a result of these fines, several businesses have decided to shut their doors. The short-term interest of generating revenue by levying fines leads to the long term detriment of loss of sales tax revenue and loss of jobs. It’s just as dumb as it could get and I have serious problems with the people who are making these decisions. It seems to me we are suffering through an economic period in which the state ought to be helping businesses to keep their doors open and keep people employed. Instead it seems to be us versus them.

I have long thought that Chico is a great place to start a small business. A number of truly innovative businesses have been formed in this fertile, inspiring oasis. This free weekly publication you are flipping through is just one example. Most of us make our livings working for a small business.

I want to believe that Chico is a great place to start a small business – but they certainly aren’t making it any easier by allowing these regulators to come in and shut business down for petty violations that oftentimes the business owners didn’t even understand.

There is a misguided way of thinking out there – the idea that regulations will help to rein in big business. Big business isn’t bothered by regulations. Big business has a whole floor of lawyers whose entire livelihood comes from filing injunctions and keeping regulators at bay. The regulations hurt the little guys – the business owners who are handling everything from taking orders, to making product, to making parole. They don’t have the time to also comb through the regulations.

It isn’t hard to understand why people have the impression that California is an unfriendly place to do business – not hard at all in the face of these cheap tactics coming from the state.

madbob@madbob.com

Fear Monger in Chief

“Fear is the foundation of most governments; but it is so sordid and brutal a passion, and renders men in whose breasts it predominates so stupid and miserable, that Americans will not be likely to approve of any political institution which is founded on it.”

John Adams - 2nd President of the United States

Dick Cheney wants you to be as scared as he is…

I’ve been looking through high resolution photographs of former Vice-President Dick Cheney and I have come to a realization which is this: when I look into Dick Cheney’s eyes I see fear. His face is generally a scowl, a look of scorn and utter contempt. Cheney has a complete inability to crack a genuine looking smile. He has the appearance of an impatient, annoyed, and angry man. But his eyes are intriguing. It is said that the eyes are the window into the soul, and if true, Cheney’s soul is a tormented, scared, cowering one. His world-view is constructed on a foundation of fear.

I came away from my impromptu study of the former VP, the head cheerleader for the most grotesque and gruesome practices being employed by the fringe elements of the U.S. military and intelligence services in the ubiquitous and ambiguous “War on Terror”, feeling a greater sympathy for this man. I am mad at myself for feeling this way, because it is my opinion that Cheney, specifically, has taken the U.S., with the world in tow, in such a dramatically skewed moral and ethical direction that it will take generations to recover from his paranoid, gun-barrel approach to leadership and foreign policy. Even George W. Bush eventually turned away from the ominous, doomsayer advice that Cheney was giving him.

Every decision Cheney makes comes from a position of fear. He sees danger lurking around every corner, behind every closed doorway. The assumption that everyone is out to get him fuels every action, and unfortunately for all of us, Cheney was in a position to do something about it. One of the basic tenets of negotiation is that you should never make your decisions based on fear – but we did just that for eight years, and Cheney is still at it, advocating for more fear-based policy, working double-time to instill in the rest of us Americans the very real terror he feels each and every minute of every day and night. From this point of view, any action is acceptable. It would be foolish not to act in whatever mode necessary, because we are all in eminent peril of losing our lives. This is Cheney’s opinion, or rather my opinion of Cheney’s opinion.

I understand that there are reasons to be afraid – the world is based on a cycle of life and death, and death is a frightening concept. The idea that, someday not that far in the future, we will cease to exist as a living, breathing entity is a daunting one – one that humans have wrestled with since the genesis of consciousness, since we ate of the forbidden fruit and realized that we were naked; since we understood the fact of our own mortality. But death is also the inevitable conclusion to our brief time being alive, and death is all around us, all the time. 40,000 people die on America’s roads, highways, and freeways every year. That is nearly 15 times the amount of people killed in the terrorist attacks on the Twin Towers. On this note, I am approximately one million times more afraid of driving down highway 99 than I am afraid of being attacked and killed by a terrorist.

“Accentuate the Positive – Eliminate the Negative”

-Frankie Manning

I’m not trying to scare you or get too morbid here – the point of this rambling diatribe is to emphasize that we, as individuals, need to steer our attention away from the fear; there will be time enough to deal with that when it comes. In the mean-time, focus our energies and attentions on the positive energy and life that also surrounds us.

Things are Tough All Over

Well whatever, the world is a mess. There’s blood running through the streets of half the countries in the Middle East, Cabo San Lucas was just blasted by Hurricane Jimena, Indonesia is buried under landslides triggered by a massive earthquake, the Mid-Western United States are either out of water or under it, Southern California is burning away, and we live in a virtual paradise on Earth. Here in Chico we are just emerging from the oppressive heat of summer and gliding into the temperate beauty of fall. The leaves will start changing as the days grow shorter. Soon enough the rain will come and we’ll be having backyard fires again and drinking warmed drinks by the wood stove. We could be doing a whole lot worse.


madbob@madbob.com

Dead Senators and Conditional Freedom

R.I.P. Ted Kennedy

Senator Ted Kennedy passed away early Wednesday morning. He had been suffering for over a year from the effects of brain cancer. Kennedy was a fixture in Congress, where he was known as the “Lion of the Senate.” He was a great champion for those causes he believed in. To me, Kennedy’s is a story of trial, struggle, and personal redemption. I cannot imagine the agony of losing two brothers, and that loss is made particularly bitter by the fact that Robert and John Kennedy were both taken by assassin’s bullets. Ted’s own career was not without its share of controversy; the low point coming when he drove a car off of a bridge in a stupor. That accident which took place in July of 1969 caused the death of Mary Jo Kopechne, a 28 year old woman who had worked on Robert Kennedy’s Presidential campaign. Since that time, Ted Kennedy went on to be a prominent Senator. He took an ill-fated run at the Presidency in 1980 when he ran against the Incumbent Jimmy Carter. Carter won the Democratic nomination handily but went on to lose badly to Republican nominee Ronald Reagan. Throughout the 80’s and early 90’s Kennedy seemed to become embroiled in one embarrassing event after the next – all sexually tinged and apparently fueled by copious amounts of alcohol. Frankly, in reading through the litany of minor and major personal scandals Kennedy was involved in, I’m surprised he could have held a position as the local dog-catcher – much less serve in the Senate for 46 years! But I digress. Somehow, during the Clinton years, Kennedy managed to reform his image as a lecherous boozer and continued to be a prominent champion of the Democratic Party. Through it all Kennedy was vastly productive. His influence is imprinted on tomes of legislation. A few lasting pieces include Title 9, which granted women’s athletics in schools the same resources as their male equivalents, the vote being extended to 18 year olds, and an array of civil rights legislation. In recent years he stood against the Iraq War and was an ardent advocate for healthcare reform. Along with Eunice, Ted represents the passing of a generation of the Kennedy family.

Obama – Multi-Tasker in Chief

President Obama boasted during his campaign that he would be able to do more than one thing at a time, and to a degree I’d have to say he is keeping to that promise. In the midst of the raging health-care debate, the Obama administration decided to jump into the controversial torture debate. By releasing classified documents that detail the torture techniques employed, the administration has enflamed passions on both sides of the argument; the liberals are seething about the human rights abuses, and the right-wingers are pissed off about the release of materials that they feel compromises American security. The most prominent proponent of the harsh interrogation techniques, former Vice President Dick Cheney, went on a speaking tour before the release of the memos; stating his opinion that, from the interrogations, the Bush administration was able to glean actionable intelligence that saved lives.

Give Me Liberty, but not if it’s too Scary Out There!

This kind of gets under my skin; what Cheney and company are proposing is a sort of “smoking gun” scenario. The example I hear time and again is this: “what if your mother or sister were kidnapped, and you were able to grab one of the kidnappers? If the lives of your relatives hung in the balance, would you torture the kidnapper to get information?” It is such a disingenuous argument on so many levels. By claiming we are at war with this amorphous group of people called “terrorists” who are purported to be always plotting the death and destruction of Americans and America, the right-wingers have essentially declared that there is a constantly smoking gun, and that the kidnapped sibling scenario is always in play. Following that logic through to its conclusion, there is no reason for them to draw a line anywhere. They are suggesting that they have the right, no, the obligation, to stop at nothing to insure the security of Americans from an eminent threat of attack. It is a stunningly dubious proposition.

The torture of foreign “enemies” is one thing; the abridgement of our fundamental rights here in the U.S. another. Our founding fathers were not interested in limited freedom depending on the circumstances of the time. The founding fathers knew that there was a risk that came with being a free people – and that risk was so great that it often involved death. But they were willing to die for the cause they believed in.

Don’t let the bastards scare you.

madbob@madbob.com

Be Good To Yourselves, and Each Other

Here We Go Again

Well it has to be said, so we may as well get it out of the way right off the bat. Welcome back returning students, and welcome to those of you first year students who have just been dropped into our cozy little berg here in the Northern California valley. You may not realize it yet, but you’ve done well for yourselves already. Chico can be many things for you, it’s up to you to get out there and figure out just what those will be. There aren’t too many places I know of where you can spend the day by the river, the evening in a pub, and the nights soaking in a rich, rocking local music scene. Take advantage of everything Chico has to offer.

The Sad Saga of Jerry Springer

Most of you are probably familiar with late-night talk television show host Jerry Springer. Some of you may be aware that Springer was once the mayor of Cincinnati, Ohio; and those of you familiar with this detail of his political past may also know that he was discovered to have been frequenting a brothel in Kentucky. What facilitated this dubious discovery was to the fact that he’d paid for the services offered therein with a personal check. The popular sentiment is that, this personal check, and the fact that Springer was busted visiting a house of ill repute, ended Springer’s political career.

This is erroneous. In fact, Springer’s prostitution/personal check episode took place well before he was actually elected to the office of mayor; it happened when he was a member of the Cincinnati city council. Springer actually managed to rehabilitate his image after the prostitution scandal, and did it so well that he was elected mayor a few years later. After serving effectively as the mayor, Springer moved into a role as a local newscaster. He was extremely popular and drove the ratings of the newscast he joined from worst to first. It was in his role as newscaster that Springer coined the catch-phrase that ends each episode of the Jerry Springer Show: “Be good to yourselves, and each other.”

Political insiders will tell you that Jerry Springer was one of the very best natural politicians they’ve ever seen – right up there with Bill Clinton. He had that innate ability to get people to support him, even when they didn’t agree with him. He has a personality that builds bridges. Springer is still active in Democratic politics and will make occasional appearances at fund-raisers and conventions. He has never lost his desire to play the politics game.

When Springer started his talk show, he envisioned it as another “Phil Donahue” type show – a biting show that would delve into the pertinent issues of the day. Early guests included Oliver North and Jesse Jackson. Unfortunately, the ratings were low. A new producer came in and decided to turn things around, and the modern incarnation of the Jerry Springer Show, complete with shoe-throwing and a regular parade of freaks, was born.

Don’t be Hard

My advice, for what it’s worth, to those of you starting out in school and figuring out who you are is this: Be kind. Don’t screw the next guy over, don’t act hard. It seems like there is a lot of pressure these days to act tough, hard, gangster. Forget that noise. There are people who have to be hard, because life has been cruel to them; and life has a tendency to harden us all over time. Eventually, no matter whom you are or where you come from, life will deal you a vicious blow, and it will be difficult to get through. You will become hardened by events that befall yourself and others. The battle at that point will become fighting to stay supple, un-cynical and kind. In the mean-time, don’t pretend to be hard. Be careful with the people around you. Understand that relationships you form, with friends and lovers, family; they are precious, and they can be damaged irreparably.

As you go through this world understand that your actions, and your inactions, affect those around you.

Keep in mind that when something needs to be done, and you don’t do it, someone else will – because someone else has to. Be the one that acts consciously and with compassion.

I cannot guarantee that by living this way your life will be made any easier. More likely, if you choose to be the one who acts with consciousness and compassion, your life will be that much more difficult than the life of the next person. But hell, if you wanted an easy life you picked the wrong planet to be born on.

madbob@madbob.com

A Funny Story about Para-Gliding

I was just remembering this time when I lived in North Lake Tahoe and this friend of mine convinced me to help him go para-gliding off of a mountain-side. He totally looked pro - he had a jump-suit and a helmet, and the parachute and everything, and he needed me to help him keep the parachute unfurled while he ran down the mountain-side and theoretically caught air, then updrafts, and floated around for awhile.

I couldn't manage to keep the parachute spread out and unfurled very well on my own, so we flagged down these two passing tourists who were heading up the road to Reno. They were curious and sort of amazed by the whole process, and more than willing to help. With the three of us it was no problem to keep the parachute spread out and unfurled.

My friend gave us the signal and went running down the mountain side and we let go of the parachute. It filled with air and he managed to get off the ground; but he didn't get very far off the ground. Instead he floated along about five or ten feet off of the ground until he got hung up in some trees about 30 or 40 yards down the mountain.

Well the tourists high-tailed it out of there pretty quick, maybe sensing some kind of pending litigation or something, and I was left to help fish my friend out of the tree.

That was funny.

Media Distortion and Misogynistic Tendencies

I listen to news on the radio for the better part of my workday. Then when I go home I tune into the network newscasts, and I sometimes catch the morning talk/news programs before I head out the door. I primarily tune into those television programs in order to see how they are distorting the news of the hour.

Every piece of media news is a distortion; but the television programs really have to twist and compact a given story in order first to fit it into an allotted 3-5 minute segment, and second to lend the story a sense of drama and entertainment value.

Two stories cycling through the media have caught my eye recently, and I’d like to take this opportunity to share my thoughts on them.

The first is Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s “outburst.” Clinton is in the middle of a massive tour of Africa. This is a historic venture, and she is traveling to some of the most war-torn and dangerous regions in the world. While she was fielding questions in East Congo, a question was mistranslated but essentially it seemed that Clinton was being asked how her husband, Bill Clinton, felt about a certain issue. Clinton was visibly perturbed by the question and responded that she was the Secretary of State, not her husband, and that she would give her opinion and not his.

That’s it – this is the “story” that has been run on every major, and many of the smaller internet and independent radio, news program. Now I don’t know about you, but it isn’t news to me that Hillary Clinton is a tough person who can occasionally have a temper. She is a politician at the highest level of the game – is she supposed to play nice all the time? I get sick of this nonsense. Not withstanding the fact that the question was apparently mistranslated, it is fundamentally misogynistic, and Clinton had every right to be angered by it.

But aside from all that – is this really a story worthy of major media attention? It is over-shadowing the whole reason Clinton was even in the region, and that is to highlight the rampant sexual violence being perpetrated against women and children in the Congo – sometimes this despicable behavior is being carried out by government forces.

The second story is the anger and outrage boiling to the surface at various town hall meetings throughout the United States. Of course, as far as I can tell this outrage consists of about a half-dozen episodes caught on video that are being played on endless loop. Even in a 3 minute news story, the networks are running footage of the same episode 2 or 3 times.

Don’t get me wrong, there definitely is outrage out there – people are scared and confused. The government has had to act fast, and that naturally scares people. It scares me. The last time the government acted this fast was after 911 when the Patriot Act was rammed through – of course no one made a peep back then because we were all cowed by the fear of terrorists. But the media is latched onto these handful of outburst and are trying desperately to turn them into a real story. Senator Clare McCaskill of Missouri was on the Today Show this morning being interviewed by Ann Curry. McCaskill astutely pointed out that the one violent outburst that occurred during her recent town-hall meeting overshadowed the other 2 hours of healthy, rigorous debate that went on – that questions were asked and answered and that the meeting was actually, in her opinion, very productive. That didn’t satisfy Curry, who brusquely moved past McCaskill’s optimistic statement and ended the interview saying “that must have been very hard for you” in reference to people booing and being rude to the Senator.

Once again, I think Senator Claire McCaskill can take it. She is a powerful politician who has fought tooth and nail to attain the position she has. Curry’s “poor little woman” tone offended me. She didn’t ask a single question about the health-care plan being debated – the story has just become about a bunch of misinformed, talk-show driven yokels who think that by yelling at the top of their lungs they can obfuscate the issues and steer the train off the rails.

And I’ll be damned if it doesn’t seem like the bastards might be right.

madbob@madbob.com