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