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