2010 Here We Come!

Phew. Made it through another one – not just a year, but a decade, and the first of a new millennium at that! In spite of myself, I have now seen the better part of four ten year spans come and go. Contrary to what some might tell you, I'm not convinced yet that things get any easier. Enough of that though – this is a moment of optimism and potential. A whole new span of time sits open and beckoning to us, waiting to see what we will make of it.

I limped out of that last epoch, and now it is time to regenerate the creative juices, muster energy, and move forward with decisiveness and purpose. I see 2010 as a year of bounding creativity and joy. New pathways will be opened up, different ways of thinking, the world will no longer appear in varying shades of gray, but instead in complete color saturation. Limitless opportunity will be the starting gun, and realized potential the end result, for those who don't allow themselves to be bogged down in the matrix of distraction and defeatism. I can already feel psychic muscles starting to stretch out, warm up, and relax. Smooth, confident action will get it done.

Updates...

Anyway, I don't have time for updates. Updates, it's like every single day there is a new update. How does anyone have time for it all? Do they? Does anyone update as much as we are meant to be updating? According to the powers that be? The voices that percolate from my... I feel time running out. I feel time running out as fast as I feel the need for something to happen to happen. It is a race to the finish. Either it happens, it manifests, and things go on; or it doesn't, and they don't. These are the times we live in.

I enjoy writing – but the events, and the powers that be: the politics, and the history, and the patterns I continue to expel, expunge, and expurgate – man, they start to tire me out in a serious way. The damned word processor is always trying to guess the words I intend to put down, the increments between pay-checks just get longer and longer, and no one ever complains about the diminishing quality of the writing. It makes one start to wonder. Couple that with increasing isolation, continued paranoia, and an awareness of encroaching impotence, and things start to get very disquieting. Tonight I have exercised incredible common sense, and sensibility, in realizing that more hard alcohol was probably not going to take me down the best path. Instead, I am only nursing a solid three day buzz with diluted beer, clamato juice, and hot sauce. They want me to act like the year is over, when the egg nog is still... right... there – in front of my face, and teasing me like a Moldavian mail-order bride – the kinds you can find if you know the right key words. There are no mysteries anymore – are there? God, when I was a kid, you had to practically commit a felony in order to see what a vagina looked like. I once dug up a friend's pornography – he had literally buried it underground. He showed me where he'd buried it and I dug it up with a shovel. I used to relish my bi-weekly trips to the barber because he had Playboy Magazines – airbrushed bush and not a clue what really lurked there between a woman's legs. Now the great mysteries are all a Google search away. I don't know – I was trying to keep this thing positive, but it is heading in a decidedly neutral direction.

I used to dream about things I couldn't understand. I understand a lot now – a lot more than I ever used to, back then, a million years ago. Our Declaration of Independence inscribes our inherent right to the pursuit of happiness. It represents a tectonic shift in human consciousness. But it doesn't guarantee us the right to be happy, only the right to pursue that which might make us happy – to choose, of our own volition, to follow those paths that might possibly lead us to that Shangri-La, Eden, Paradise. Our founding fathers had the wisdom to suggest to us, a few hundred years, give or take, down the road, that we might be able to manifest that world reserved for those who have passed from this life, here, in this life, while we shall live. People could only imagine a state of being we, you, I might actually live to experience. So, yeah, I guess I might have gone a little silly in the navigation there – but I think this thing is starting to turn and move in a positive direction.

madbob@madbob.com

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