Day # 46 End Days

Here we are once again, riding the last gasp of an expiring year, a new one on the way.  I will not bore anyone with inane resolutions because I don't believe in them.  Nor will I trouble anyone with my top ten list of anything as there are more than enough of those to go around.  While I love Christmas and Solstice and all of the holiday fun, for me, New Year's Eve has always been tainted with a bit of the amateur night tawdriness.  Years as a bartender I suppose, jaded and all of that.  Perhaps I am just a New Years grinch.

While I have been true to my news boycott, I have been hearing the rumours, strange whisperings on the wind, that "things" may be getting better.  Happy days may, indeed, be here again.  Holiday spending is up, nearing pre-recession levels and as we are always told, more and ever-rising spending is the lynch pin of the economy of the United States.  By the by, no one has ever explained to me how any economic system can be based on the impossibility of ever increasing consumer spending but there you have it.  The answer must lie in some mathematics that I am unfamiliar with.  Nonetheless, holiday spending is up and that is good for everyone.  Out with the old debt, in with the new debt.

Yesterday I spent an hour over coffee with a fellow in the West Coast moto community but one whom I had previously not had the pleasure of meeting.  Our business concluded, moto parts loaded for their journey South out of my shop and into the hands of needier persons, we adjourned to palaver.

In the course of our far ranging discussion, which included the state of the world, ex-wives and the business of  exporting vintage American motos to Japan, we happened upon the subject of current events.  I, as briefly as possible, outlined my news boycott and this blog.  My companion, rather than giving me the quizzical look I have become accustomed to in such situations, more than understood and offered his own experiences at stepping out of the pack of news hounds.  It was interesting to compare notes.  While he did not boycott the news altogether, He had stopped actively gathering news and for the very same reasons I had:  with the hope of being happier.

It was good to gather a different perspective on this experiment, my news boycott.  I am ending the year quite a bit less "informed" on the state of current events than I began it.  Over the last few months I have definitely read more, though not news and I certainly write more than I have in some time.  The writing is a good exercise for me, both as an activity and as an outlet.  Whether of not it is good reading is surely up to the reader and I would not venture to weigh in.

So from my smaller, more local world, I wish everyone a very Happy New Year, whether or not introspective milestones are your cup of tea or not.  I do hope that everyone prospers in the coming year but, of course, that is impossible.  Life being what it is, there will be times that are prosperous and times that are problematic. Tomorrow is just another day, with all of the trials and triumphs that come with a new day.

Now where did I put that silly party hat?  "Toot-Toot!!!!!"

Day # 44 Packin'

I started my day making the Kid's breakfast for the last time in the next two months.  He is heading back to Tucson today, something I always hate.  Next month, when I should be picking him up at SeaTac I will in Bangkok instead.  That's my news and all that I needed to get me through the day.

The idea of my long-awaited trip to Southeast Asia has become the reality of "hey, I'm leaving in less than a month".  So I allowed myself the luxury of moving from the theoretical to the practical.  I got out my travel gear list, being nothing if not organized, and piled everything from the list on the bed.  Then I carefully rolled, folded and stowed until everything I need for a month's time fit inside one 40 litre back pack that I can take on the plane as carry on.  I was very pleased to find that without too many re-packings, the entire pile fit inside the alloted space.  As a bonus, while I was going through my passport wallet, I found 30 Euros from my last trip!  That's another $40 for travelling.

I try hard to avoid living for something in the future, shortchanging today on the promise of tomorrow.  But seeing my bag completely packed, ready to go, and knowing that with one quick trip to the bank and then the airport I was ready to leave, I got pretty excited.  Like I said, it has all been theoretical up until now.  This summer I went to my employer and bought back a month of my life by reducing my salary.  I did my homework on destinations and what I want to see and do.  I made the reservations I needed, booked flights and a moto, did the footwork.  So far it has all just been planning.  Now that there is a bag, packed and waiting, it isn't theory anymore.  I am excited.

 I am ready to immerse myself in what a friend recently called the two great aspects of solo travel: anonymity and autonomy.  There is just nothing like moving through a new part of the world on one's own. Travelling as an individual, the journey is wholly owned outside of the whims of the travel gods.  There are no excuses or compromises, just oneself and one's sojourn.  Go here or there, stay here or there, eat this or that, talk or don't, interact or not without the need to consult one's fellows.  I hasten to add (not least of which because she will read this) that I like travelling with the TBG.  She is a good traveler, adaptable, adventurous, culturally aware and fun to discover new things with.  But she has taken to calling this next trip my "pilgrimage" and maybe she is right.  I invited her, repeatedly, to go with me but I think she knows, better than I do, how much I really need to be gone.  And so I will be.  Gone that is.

I have a few more weeks that call me here, require my attention and presence and I will give it.  Now, however, I am lending more than part of an ear to the siren song of a promised journey and that song, tonight, that song sounds damn fine.

Day # 43 Remains

Over the breakfast table I was told that someone, presumably an archeological team, has found Homo Sapien teeth that are something like 400,000 years old.  As the breakfast table talk went, these teeth, found in Israel, predate the previously oldest known Homo Sapien remains by 200,000 years.

Since I have slammed the door shut on outside news, I have successfully resisted the pull of politics, disasters and scandal.  A new archeological discovery may prove too much for me.  Would reading a scientific journal be perusing the news?  I have to submit this one to the news jury.  I never mentioned scientific journals in the original rules of this game.  In all fairness, the TBG asked my permission before telling me of the the discovery in the Mid-East, so I wasn't chasing down the news on my own.

The second thing I thought about, after I thought that I really wanted to read the article in question, was that it won't be long now before someone turns this discovery to their own political advantage.  I can already see the claims from folks with a religious agenda  Those who previously scorned the fossil record as the work of charlatan atheistic scientists will probably embrace the finding of old Homo Sapien teeth in Israel as proof that human-kind sprang, full formed, from the creative hand of divinity.

I guess my imagined conflict between new discoveries in the science of archeology and their collision with dogma will have to play out in the news without my help.  I an obliged to stick to my news-boycotting guns or the imperil my experiment in happiness.

Now where did I put those subscription cards to Scientific American and Nature?

Day # 42 Just Like Eric

Across a table of rellenos and burritos, The Kid says to us "You know, Dick Cheney is a lot like Cartman on South Park".  Whooo Lord, out of the mouths of babes, even if they are 6'-2".  Yuppers, holiday platitudes aside, I couldn't wait to rush home and get this entry done.

In one of my favorite episodes of South Park, "Red Sleigh Down", Eric Cartman is ranked "Naughty" on the naughty-or-nice list.  Cartman has just a few days to alter his naughty-or-nice standing so he can qualify for a Haibo Robot Dog which is his heart's desire.  In order to secure his desire, Eric will do anything, including jeopardizing Christmas for the rest of the world, Santa and even Jesus.  In pursuit of his own profit and agenda, Eric Cartman will use Mr. Hankey and the boys, convince Santa to fly over Baghdad to spread Christmas to the poor Iraqis and, when Santa is shot down, enlist Jesus for an armed rescue attempt.

In the end, the reindeer all die, Santa is tortured, the boys, with the aid of Jesus, rescue Santa only to have Jesus shot down and despite all of his selfishness (no improvement on naughty), Cartman is rewarded with the coveted Haibo Robot Dog.  Unfortunately for Eric, Santa also gives Kyle and Stan robot dogs as well.  This lack of exclusivity pisses Cartman off so badly that he kicks his Haibo Dog off into the South Park snow, muttering curses.  A miracle of Christmas redemption is not in the cards for Cartman: no Clarence will save him from himself.

Eric Cartman is the spirit of Christmas Past, Present and Future as well as Jacob Marley's salvation compared to Dick Cheney.  In 1992, while acting as the US Secretary of Defense, Cheney had the Pentagon pay Brown & Root, a Halliburton subsidiary, nine million dollars to produce a report which said that private companies (like Halliburton ) could provide logistical support to US Army Corps of Engineers.  Soon enough,  Brown & Root rake in over two billion (yeah, with a "B") dollars in revenue in the Balkans doing just that

A few years after the sudden influx of the two billion dollars into the Brown & Root coffers, Dick Cheney takes over as CEO of Halliburton.  He manages this without any prior business experience.  Wow!  Talk about your American success story!  That's using the old bootstraps!

From 1995 until the end of the "w" presidency, (intentional lower case), Cheney is busy giving Cartman a schooling on keeping your eyes on the personal prize.  Whether is helping in the creation of the Project for a New American Century, human rights abuses in Burma on Halliburton pipeline projects or engineering a bogus cause for war with Saddam Hussein, Cheney is right there, trying to get his Haibo Dog and succeeding brilliantly.

"Red Sleigh Down" ends just before the bombing of Baghdad and the start of Cheney's war with Iraq.  For Cheney, now the Vice-President of the US and one feeble and corroded heart-beat away from the presidency, this is just the beginning.  The start of the war against Saddam Hussein means one thing to Cheney and Halliburton: money.  Lots and lots of money.  Pallet loads of the stuff, ready to move forward all of the no-bid contracts awarded Halliburton to rebuild the Iraqi infrastructure after Cheney's buddy Rumsfeld bombed it back into the stone age.  It takes a great deal of taxpayer money, mountains of it, to keep Halliburton chugging ahead without any fiscal oversight whilst they rebuild that which US Forces, under the direction of Rummy and Cheney, had unbuilt.

The no-bid contracts keep rolling in for Cheney and Halliburton.  Kellogg Brown & Root, a subsidiary of Halliburton, have a continuing "cost-plus-award-fee indefinite-delivery, indefinite-quantity service" agreement with the US Department of Defense  This ten year contract started in 2001 and remains in effect as of this blogging.

You can't help make money with a no-bid contract.  In fact, you can make so much money that your company will have to pay a measly two million back to the government to settle a lawsuit for over-billing.  The difference between the billions in and a few million back out is, well, lots of money.  Enough money to buy lots of toys of your choice.

Cartman jeopardized Christmas, Santa and Jesus to get his desire.  And guess what, its a cartoon.

Cheney has disregarded domestic and international law, subverted the democratic processes of the United States, played a pivotal part in justifying a war that has killed hundreds of thousands of people and defrauded the citizens of this country of billions of dollars.

The biggest difference between the two is that Dick Cheney isn't the product of the imagination of Trey Parker and Matt Stone.  He is a dangerous nightmare that is all too real.

And its old news.

Day # 41 Boxing

Prezzies exchanged, torn wrappings tidied up and recycled like good little Seattle-ites, another Christmas has passed to be replaced by Boxing Day.  In our household, we do not have tenants living on our land or servants to give boxes of left-overs to.  Instead, we have the much more important tradition of the TBG's birthday.

When someone's birthday falls on the day after Christmas, it is critical for the rest of the household to grasp how imperative is it to separate the two holidays.  When the person in question is one's spouse, the need becomes of paramount importance.

So today will be about prezzies that have no green or red tints to them.  We have learned, years ago, the foolishness of something like "We got you an extra big present for Christmas and your birthday".  Trust me, that crap don't fly.

So Happy Boxing day to those who celebrate it.  And Happy Birthday to the TBG on a day that is so unlike Christmas as to be unrecognizable.  I better pay attention where attention is due.  I am sure I can work up a suitable rant for tomorrow.

And the news?  The TBG is letting our subscription to the local paper run out this week, something she has been asking me to do for some years now.  Hey, does my acquiescence count as a birthday prezzie?

Day # 40 Here's the news

Here's the news for today:

Merry Christmas to everyone or (enter appropriate holiday greeting).

Day # 39 What Pagans do For You

Sure, sure, you read in the media that Pagans and Pan-Theists are a scruffy New-Age lot shuffling about in a  mish-mash of belief systems.  While there is a decided lack of dogma involved in Paganism and I know that this lack really, really bothers some of your more structured religious folks, have you ever stopped to consider what would happen if Pagans weren't there?  Or worse yet, what would happen if all of the pagans converted to Christianity or stopped being infidels and embraced Islam?

The sun would stop coming up, that's what would happen.  Here's why:

Winter solstice has come and gone again.  In the magical and dangerous time when the veil between night and day, darkness and light, becomes thin and tenuous, certain rituals must be performed to ensure the return of the light.  The sun shines on the rest of you lot as well as the Pagans, so pay attention. Each year, with the coming of solstice eve, hardy bands of Pagans, Hippies and their Neo-hippie off-spring along with various Pan-Theist New-Agers, trek to the beaches, the forests, the mountains, or Stonehenge, to commemorate the passing of the world from darkness to light.  Bonfires are lit and libations toasted, drunk and spilled to earth as the longest night gives way to the promise of longer days.

Once again, our stout band of Manly-Men and Womanly-Women donned skis and snowshoes to trek up the mountain to a tiny lake perched in the bowl of a mighty mountain cirque to mark the passing of the night.  The traditional dura-log was packed to guarantee a roaring fire, even in the deepest snow.  Many a libation were lovingly slossed into stainless sig bottles and treats nestled in zip-lock bags.  Headlamps twinkled through the darkness of snow-bent trees and as we shoed and schussed our way up hill and avalanche chute to the tiny knoll above the frozen puddle of the lake that is the source for the Snoqualmie River.

Lightweight shovels made quick work of constructing the circle and snow benches, magical fire was lighted to bring warmth and the promise of a new dawn and the ring was joined with smiling faces.  Then began the carefully scripted ritual to ward off the night.  In a methodically choreographed sequence of drinking, laughing, eating and pyrotechnics, we ushered the longest night onwards and embraced the promise of longer daylight to come until the summer solstice.  Without this yearly Pagan vigilance, this selfless determination of small bands all over the world, the night might very well remain in place, ending life on this planet as we know it.  It would be dark times, dark times indeed my friends.

So the next sunny morning that you and the family  are off to the church or synagogue or mosque, ponder the light of day for a moment.  Think of the joys, the warmth and the wonder that comes from the jolly old sun.  And while the rays of that star caress your face, keeping you alive, remember to say a small thank-you.  Say thank you to the unknown ranks of pagans across the world who yearly sacrifice sleep and sensibility to keep the solstice vigil that brings the sun back from the night.  Remember, without our scruffy lot doing their bit for everyone, one of these days Mr. Hume could be right and then we would really need those LED headlamps.

Day # 38 Rumblings

"The children were nestled all snug in their beds, 
While visions of sugar plums danced in their heads......


When out on the lawn there arose such a clatter,
I sprang from the bed to see what was the matter."


The clatter, of course, turned out to be phalanxes of Christians arrayed against battalions of Atheists, all with their loins girded as if for war.  Ah, the annual Battle for Christmas, where grinchy fingers are pointed, holiday spirit and goodwill towards men (and women if you are one) are proudly supplanted by fanaticism and traditional names changed to protect, well, someone's dogma.  And without listening to the news, I can still hear the annual rumblings as sides are drawn once again.

While I come down firmly in the camp of secular humanism, at least from a political perspective, I love the winter holiday season, that which we collectively call Christmas, Chanukah, New Years, Kwanzaa, Solstice or whatever.  I get solidly down with the making merry, the eating of treats, the lights, communing with family, friends and reveling in the holidays and the passing of darkness to the days getting longer.  If other folks desire their holiday tradition to include railing against the holiday tradition of others, I have to say that I find that a bit contrary to the supposed spirit of the season.

So here are my purely personal observations on the Battle for Christmas.  And just to be fair, I am not going to start in on the folks you might think I would make note of first.

First, the History  The Holiday Season, whatever you choose to call it, has been around long before any of the Christians and Atheists starting battling over it.  The seasonal passing of the Winter Solstice was observed as an important event by peoples and tribes the world over.  The Holy Roman Catholic church, with infinite political savvy, simply co-opted the holiday from the Germanic pagans and re-branded it to give it legitimacy.  The church had learned that the pagans had a pesky way of adopting the teachings of the church that suited them whilst keeping their pagan traditions as well.  Since the Roman Clerics, specifically Pope Julius the First, knew politics at least as well as dogma, they shifted dogma to suit the political situation, thus bringing the pagan hordes under the umbrella of the Holy Mother church and, in the process, creating Christmas.  Between the fourth century and now lots of people have added to the legend of Christmas, with the "modern" Santa Claus image being most often accredited to Thomas Nast, a 19th century cartoonist who did a series of drawings for Harper's Weekly.  Thus we have Santa at the North Pole, the big list, the toy workshops, etc.
I fully acknowledge that this briefest of historical sketches leaves out big pieces of all of the influences that make up what we now call Christmas.  Do your own homework if you want to learn more.  Hint:  Santa's Reindeer?  They came from a Finnish tradition.

What I am saying is that this whole holiday thing is a cultural amalgam built over centuries.  If you think that your little group of dogma generators can lay sole claim to the holiday season, you got some 'splainin' to do.
So in that spirit of tolerance, let's get specific:

Hey Atheists!  Christmas has evolved into an almost entirely secular holiday for much of the population of North America.  With church attendance at new modern lows and many more people heading to the malls than to the hallowed halls of their churches or synagogues or mosques, organized religion is doing a fine job of dogmatically nailing its own coffin shut.  The cultural currents don't really require help in the form of protests to change the name of the "Christmas Tree" to the "Holiday Tree".  That sort of shenanigan is just the type of semantics that might lead people to think that Atheists don't have a sense of humour.  No municipality  in their right minds would put up a nativity scene so, while I know some of the Christians get a little testy around the holidays, show your depth of tolerance and intellectual integrity and lighten up.  If they want to believe, let 'em.  And hey, if you're lucky some of them will pray for your immortal souls, even it you don't have one.  I know, the serious right-wing Christian fanatics are a dangerous bunch of lunatics, but ease up on the struggle for a few weeks during the holidays.  Don't become the other side of the same coin.

Hey Christians!  First off, you guys have never "owned" Christmas in the first place.  Yeah, yeah, the name has "Christ" in it but that's because in the fourth century the Pope plagiarized a pre-existing holiday, in part because no one had any idea of what day the historical Jesus of Nazereth was born on.  Remember, at that point in history the Romans did not know the earth was round.  Check it out, its historical fact.  You don't even need to expend any faith to believe it.

So here is the deal, the Church swiped pagan sun god rituals and then renamed them.  That being the case, why don't we all try to stretch our boundaries a little bit, OK?  If you want to complain about such things as "Where is the line to see Jesus?" in response to people lining up to see Santa, then go stand in line to see Jesus.  Just don't berate the folks who want to take their kids to see Santa, many of whom are good church going folk.  I thought about what would happen if I dressed up as Jesus and sat, in public, waiting for people to line up to see me.  I'd probably get stoned.  No, I mean with rocks.  The kind that hurt.

And this separation of church and state thing that the founding fathers wrote into the US Constitution?  They did that for a reason, because they were smart fellows.  They knew the damage that organized religion had done in the past in England specifically and across Europe as a whole.  Based on their intimate knowledge of the tragedy that can occur when dogmas collide, they tried to keep religious dogma from having any part in the political process.  Deal with it, many of the Founding Fathers were Deists, not Evangelical Christians.

If your Christian beliefs require you to go to church on Christmas, enjoy!  But please, at the least in the spirit of the holidays if not in the spirit of Christian charity, don't hurt or berate other people because they choose to spend their holidays in some other fashion.

To My "Other" Brothers and Sisters!  I really, really do not want to seem exclusive of all of the many, many other beliefs and practices out there.  My wish for all of my fellow holiday merry makers, those who fall outside the two camps of "Christian" and "Atheist" is this:  Happy Holidays and sorry for the annual confusion.  Rock on with your families and friends and have fun.  Sorry about the "Other" thing, its just a bad joke.

My Holiday Wishes  So, I would wish that we could un-gird our collective loins, or at least use them to a higher holiday purpose than battling over holiday symbols.  I would wish that everyone has a merry holiday full of good cheer and some goodwill towards humans (critters too!).  I would wish that we could all, at least for this small piece of time, lighten up.  And of course I would wish everyone the appropriate holiday greeting which, for me, remains......

"Happy Christmas to all, and to all a good night"

Day # 37 Bread and Circuses

One of the things I love most in the world is motorcycles and things that involve motorcycling.  So when one of my racing pals asked me if I wanted to attend a motorcycle ice racing event I was more than onboard.  At the appointed hour we were off to Everett, Seattle's working class sister to the North.

Somehow I had envisioned alcohol powered speedway bikes careening around the ice on studded tires.  This is precisely what we got for about the one minute it took for a four lap heat.  There were about eighteen heats and two mains, which were, hold you breath! six laps each.  So there was a total of twenty odd minutes of racing.  The rest of the three hours was comprised of introducing the racers, announcers falling flat on their backsides on the ice,  cute six year olds spinning around in tiny circles on their tiny quads and other diversions.

Between "heats" the racers performed double duty as shills, throwing t-shirts to the crowd.  Another of the give-away highlights were gift packs of BBQ pork products from one of the race sponsors.  While I don't eat pork (ref. Sam Jackson as Jules, "Pulp Fiction", Diner Scene) I did enjoy it when "Wilbur" the BBQ Mascot did the half-splits and a butt plant on the ice, losing his pig head in the process which tumbled down the course revealing his all-too-sweaty human head.  Very little is as amusing as a guy in a saggy pink pig costume with a dangling tail looking ever so much like a, well, plush turd, scrambling around on the ice trying to get his pig head back on.

Cute kids, pork products, free shirts, go-carts on ice, the last of the un-recalled three-wheeled ATVs on ice, quads on ice and once in awhile a speedway bike on ice.  Three intermissions and, best of all, a zamboni!!

I don't wish or mean to sound, well, mean or snobby either.  I love a good moto fest as much as the next gear head.  While not a Nascar guy by a huge stretch, I did fly across the Atlantic Ocean just to see a MotoGP race in Portugal.  But while I love the smell of race fuel, what I was most aware of as I watched the ice not being raced on was a big group of folks being kept out of trouble with spectacle.  It was a cheap date.  Adult admission was $11 including the stupid "convenience" fees.  For that small price the folks attending were provided with hours of entertainment, silliness and diversion.  I admit that no one in the arena was being beheaded or disemboweled of eaten, but I couldn't help being reminded of the ancient Roman Circus and of its purpose.  A populace entertained and focused on spectacle is a populace much less likely to look for the man behind the curtain.

Nothing is sacred and that, I suppose, is as it should be.  Reality Television, ice racing and the latest media spectacular hold the citizenry in their thrall.  And lest I feel all smug in the pureness of my chosen diversion, the hallowed and manly field of motorcycle racing,  Paris Hilton has sponsored a MotoGP 125 CC team.  The bikes will be a nice pink colour.  Is nothing sacred?

Day # 36 No Blog Rush

Happy Holiday day full of some little shopping, socializing and you know what, no blogging and no news.

That's going to have to be it.

Day # 35 Ritual

Lo these many years ago, when The Kid did not tower above me, smirking in teen-aged satisfaction, the homemade holiday cards began.  Ever since I painted a fake "Mom" tattoo on my son's four-year-old bicep and we both donned elf hats, the tradition has continued.  Be careful what you start.  From the original "When Elves Go Bad" right up through "Have an Un-Dead Christmas" we have been churning out the holiday cards and confusing or amusing relatives and friends.

This year's content is top secret, of course, but the annual ritual is not.  First there is the conception, the germ of the card's identity to be.  Then there is the process of convincing the other two participants that their ideas are crazy talk and only your idea will work.  Then the giving into others desires and finally some manufacturing of costumes or props.  Pictures are taken, pictures are printed and then the assembly begins.

The blank cards are laid out, the photos are cemented in the appropriate spot and the clever holiday greetings penned inside.  Occasionally there are cautionary remarks penned for specific receivers (never by me) and then the cards are shipped off to delight, confuse or offend as the case might be.  Cards with smiling Baby Jesus-es in the manger are not what we are sending.

There is the annual debate, I call it the debate of remorseful second-thoughts, where a few "straight" cards are sent to those persons of the flock who are the least likely to understand or the most likely to be offended, at our paltry attempt to thwart Hallmark.  I am not a party to this deception I am proud to say.  Yes, you are reading the smugness in my voice.

This year I opted for a printed message insert that is glued to the inside of the card.  Not only does it save me time but the separate fonts of this years card are part of the joke.  I am also proud that this years card contains not only a footnote to explain the cultural reference that makes up the cards raison-de-etre but also contains a foot note to the foot note.

The first batch of cards are assembled, addressed and stamped.  These are the long distance cards that go out today.  Batch two goes out tomorrow.  Members of the flock who rejoice in old BBC film and television will embrace this years selection while those that don't will sigh once again at this years offering before tossing it in the refuse or hiding it behind the good cards.  My deepest holiday wish is that at least one person will alleviate their confusion by means of the foot notes.  Its all as clear as a star in the sky.  

Day # 34 Bloody Lies

I did not read the paper this morning.  In fact, I got up extra early so I could get in the run I missed last night while I was wrestling with Old Man Trouble.  It was a perfect GreyNorWet morning for a run.  As Sam Elliot says it was blacker than a steer's tookus on a moonless night and it was cold and drizzly to boot.  In other words, a regular December morning in Seattle.  A few soggy blocks into my run my headlamp quit working, probably dreaming of nights in the tropics, but I loped on through the inky blackness.  Half way through my run I wasn't loping but rather flying, at least for the briefest of moments, and then I was crashing with a nice sliding of cheek on sidewalk for a finish.  I picked myself up, swore a bit, then laughed a bit and then after checking the difference between the warm wet bits and the cold wet bits I continued my run back to the warmth and light.

After a nice hot shower and before brekkie I put a largish bandage on the largish bloody abrasion on my cheek.  I gave me a nice lived-in sort of look.  Thus prepared for the day I set out for the Mordor of Sumner where my office is.

The really cool thing about an obvious facial bandage are the responses that it elicits from folks.  The funniest are the people who completely ignored the existence of the dressing perched prominently across my face.  It must be something along the lines of "Its none of my business, I am not going to ask."  Of course, this approach robs me of the opportunity to make up crazy stories about what happened to my face which is the only rewarding part of further scarring up my mug.

I answered the first query of "What did you do to yourself" with the statement "The first rule of fight club is that no one talks about fight club".  Given that I haven't shaved in a few days, I have been dressing scruffily and, of course, the big-assed bandage on my face, it was not a totally unbelievable response and had the person puzzling the possible truth of it.  I used the Fight Club line a few more times until my boss asked me the inevitable.  My boss has a crush on my wife so without batting an eye and completely dead-pan, I assured him that the TBG had clocked me in the face.  He laughed and I reassured him several times that this was, indeed, the truth.  I think he would have believed it until he parsed out that I was bandaged on the right cheek and the TBG is right-handed.  I guess if you have a crush on someone you pay attention to what hand they use to do stuff.  Or else he did not believe her left jab was sufficient to accomplish the task.

My only concern is not the scarring that is sure to take place because hey, chicks dig scars and it might make me look like a pirate.  No, my concern is that Santa's beard may not quite cover the nasty part and a Santa with abraded cheeks might be a bit more rosy than anyone had in mind.

Oh well, make-up was made for such as this; hiding that which is too scary to view without it.

I had meant to blog all Pollyann-ish again about how not perusing all of the news has allowed me so much more reading time that I am devouring books at an alarming rate but the bloody cheek was lots more fun for me and I have to go read my book so I need to end this entry.

Day # 33 Ry's Right

Every time you get around a tree, you better stop and grab a brick [Why?]
Old man trouble... laying and waiting on you


My main man Ry Cooder was right.  He usually is I find.  When you see the trees, especially when just a minute ago they weren't there, beware Brother, beware!.  Hell, look what happened to MacBeth?  He was doing his evil thing, egged on by his seriously femme fatale spouse, all the while thinking he was invulnerable.  What happened?  The witches told him to stay out of the trees but the trees snuck up on him.  See, trouble and there was MacBeth without his brick.  


Trouble doesn't need any news media to sow itself.  Old Man Trouble, patient and sly, he can come out of nowhere on the best day, the simplest day and wham, by the short-and-curlies you're a-danglin.


Trouble you can't fool me I see you behind that tree
Look out! Trouble you can't fool me trying to get the ups on me
Trouble you can't fool me I see you behind that tree
You want to jump on me


Even if you do see the tree ahead of time, lord help you if Old Man Trouble knocks it over because even if there isn't a woman in the forest to hear the tree fall, trust me on this one, not only did it fall but its gonna be your fault as well. S'truth!


Would like to see a little sunshine, just to guide my way
Would like to have a little peace of mind
That's why I wanna say you better look out !


No matter what, minding your own or not, living large or not, closing the door on the temptation to anger and arguing, Old Man Trouble is still going to find you by and by.  Its a good thing I'm no stranger so that even on the days like today, when I think I'm on the shiny side of the dime, I'm not so surprised when that bastard steps out grinning.  Not hardly surprised at all.  


And lest you think that its all doom and gloom.... (or that I'm just being all misogynistic)


It's a funny thing, it seem just before daylight is your darkest hour
And you know one thing [what's that ?] behind every silver lining, there
isn't a dark cloud


Well, it may seem that I'm not putting my all into this blog entry, but its hard to type whilst hefting a brick and looking over my shoulder.  And while there will be a dark cloud tomorrow given where I live, I'm hoping its just the regular dismal rain and not anything more, such as creeping trees with trouble behind them.


Old Man Trouble badgered and tried to trip me up but I'm laughing.  And he'll get me for that too, but one of the great things about being a moral reprobate is that no one expects that much out of you.  Even more advantageous is to be a relentlessly optimistic moral reprobate, no matter what beatings you have to take to stay that way.  It makes the silver linings easier to pick put amongst the dark clouds.

Day #31 Prezzies

Today I received a small thank-you gift from abroad.  The little unexpected prezzie was a "Thank You" for breaking the laws of these United States.  I am a scofflaw.  I regularly break the law of the land, specifically the one that reads:  "Cuban Assets Control Regulations, 31 C.F.R. Part 515, (Revised September 30, 2004) are administered and enforced by the Office of Foreign Assets Control.  Criminal penalties for violation of the Regulations can go as high as $1 million for corporations and $250,000 for individuals plus up to 10 years in prison.  In addition, civil penalties of up to $65,000 per violation can be imposed by OFAC."


Since the State Department frowns on such behavior I make it a practice to burn the evidence.  Burn, Baby, Burn!!  To protect those that I perceive as innocent of anything but commerce, I am not going to name the company of the nice folks who sent me the nifty triple-torch cigar lighter but let's just say the company headquarters is offshore.  Way offshore.

So, as I was burning evidence last night after a long stint as The Man In Red, I was ruminating on just what, exactly, the United States hopes it will accomplish by continuing the inane Cuban Embargo.  Maybe the boys and girls at State think they can bring down the Castro Regime. Yeah, right.  Serious bad-boys have been trying to kill Castro since Batista started making it a hobby in about 1958.  That was the year I was born and I'm a geezer.  Since then, El Comandante has outlived Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Ford, Nixon and Reagan.  He has outlasted Carter, Bush1.0, Clinton and lower case bush.  Yuppers, that embargo is working miracles, we got Fidel on the ropes.

While we are admiring the effectiveness of the State Department's efforts to overthrow the evil regime in Cuba, we ought to look at how we are stopping the Cubanos from all the harm they might do us if we traded with them. What do the guys in Habana, cruising around in 1950's era Buicks, Fords and Chevys want more than anything?  Well, they certainly don't want to storm the beaches of Miami.  They know that Miami is full of reactionary crack-pots from Cuba.  No, what the my puro smoking Brothers want is Mopar, AC-Delco, Fomoco, and GM parts.  They want points and rotors and distributor caps, crap we haven't needed in years except for a few old eccentric hot-rodders.

What is being accomplished for me, the average US citizen, by this insane embargo of a neighboring country? The only accomplishment I can see is giving Castro bragging rights, forcing the Cubano mechanics to be the best fabricators from nothing in the business and keeping me from being able to buy a Cuban Puro at my local tobacconist.

So, I propose an end to the madness.  I think that we caring moto-head cigar fiends should round up all of the discerning cigar smokers in the United States and pitch the idea of a cultural exchange.  We, the cigar smokers of the USA, should fill a few hundred shipping containers with all of the 1950's era car, truck and moto parts that we can find on E-bay.  Once the containers are ready, we accompany those bad boys to Habana.  Once arrived, we open the containers, distribute (ouch!) the bits and collect some puros in exchange.

Diplomacy of the people Baby!  No bombs required, and only the smallest of burning.

Day # 29 Holiday Cues

It is official, the holiday season is upon us here in the GreyNorWet.  Without the need or benefit of the news I can ascertain that this is true because verily the three stars of another Christmas coming have aligned.  Firstly, it is raining like three cows pissing on the same flat rock and looks as if it will continue to do so for days.  This is always a harbinger of winter in Seattle.  Secondly, what has become the horrible gasping of a sick industry has arrived in the form of the annual December International Motorcycle Show.  Smaller and more desperate for the last three years, the show is like a reunion of starved survivors of some island stranding, desperate to see who has lived to attend the next year.  Thirdly, the first airing of Frank Capra's "Its a Wonderful Life" is on network TV, complete with insufferable commercials breaks so long that I can blog away without fear of missing anything.

The rain pours down outside, not as a brief hard Midwest shower with clearing and a promise of a rainbow, but endlessly, unceasingly, without pause or respite..  I take smug pleasure in the insatiable and persistent torrent.  I don't derive my pleasure from the rain itself, but rather my stubborn ability to survive it. I share this ability with many of the other hardy inhabitants of this region.  We eschew umbrellas even in the most dismal of day long soakings.  We own more Gore-tex per capita than any other population on the face of this watery planet. We walk proud, heads held high, while all around us mold and mildew are growing on anything that stops moving.  And, if we are motorcyclists with any grit, in December we ride to the annual motorcycle show regardless of the impending monsoon.

Each year, around the second week in December, we gather to preside over what more and more seems like the demise of the motorcycling industry.  Each year the show gets smaller and grimmer as we gather to socialize and to count those merchants who survived through another year.  My favorite manufacturers are absent now, KTM, Triumph, Aprilia, MV Agusta and others, still making motos but not willing to shell out the dough for a display booth at the show.  Besides the economic tale that the missing vendors tells, today I ran into lots of moto folks that I haven't seen and the news I got from them is not good either.  Folks I saw today have been laid off, run out of unemployment or are working twice as hard for the same or less money.  We walk the show, catch up with each other, worry about our race club surviving the economic pummeling of falling racer participation and how we are going to survive until the next year.

Regardless of the rain or the economies of the moto industry, in "Its a Wonderful Life" George Bailey gives us inspiration that no matter how crummy or desperate events become, there is hope for redemption.  When it seems certain the fat cats are going to smash the workingman's holiday to bits, there is still hope, at least in Capra's classic.  Of course when Frank Capra cast Potter as the greedy banker, the villain is just a small town piker who had never purchased and sliced thousand of bad mortgages into derivatives and then repackaged them so many times that the the risk was hidden and passed on and the profits safely pocketed.  Mr. Potter is a safe, small and beatable holiday Scrooge, defeated by honesty, hope, character and a caring community.  The unscrupulous bastards of Wall Street that have cooked up the current economic collapse are a lot slicker, smarter and more evil than Potter could ever dream of being.  Greedy, Grinchy pond scum, every one of them.

Tomorrow I don the Big Red Suit and try to spread the cheer.  The rain falls every year and keeps us all moist and dewy and green.  The motorcycle community, of which I am a part, has taken body blows in the past, reinvented itself and survived.  I am sure it will survive this time as well.  My holiday wish is that everyone survives these difficult and scary economic times.  Everyone, that is, except those sons-of-bitches that put greed and personal gain ahead of ethics and showed total disregard for the good of their fellows.  My holiday wish for those parasites is that, with any luck, there is enough coal to go around.

Day # 28 Storage

Here is one of those Pollyanna entries of how because I am not listening or reading the news 230 minutes a day I have so much more time to make the world a better place and myself a better citizen in it.

Because I am not listening to the news, I am occupying my commute to the salt mines listening to music instead.  I am playing discs since KEXP, my mainstay of sanity, cuts in and out going through the Mordor that is Kent and Auburn.  Sorry, I know that Auburn does bill itself as the Cultural Center of South King County, but if you can't get a clear KEXP signal, well, how much of a center of anything are you really? Or is that Kent that's the CC of SKC?  Whatever, its baloney either way.

My new method for music selection is reach into the CD cabinet (its a big one folks) and grab a large handful of jewel boxes.  No sorting, or not too much anyway.  Due to the random nature of the grab and dash, I am listening to discs that have been moldering away since before my news boycott when I engaged in the 80/20 rule, playing 20 percent of my music 80 percent of the time.  Its the same with t-shirts for most of us.  Check it out, you know its true.

While I have this big stack of discs in the truck or messenger bag on the moto,  I figured I might was well digitize all of these tunes.  Normally I only kept as much music in my I-tunes library as I could store on my nano, but since I got the 16 Gb Touch, I can't seem to come close to filling it up.  What exactly do people store on the 32 Gb or the 64 Gb I-pods?  The entire Encyclopedia Britannica?  Wait, that's been replaced by Wiki, right?  So while I am puttering away in my office trying to keep the doors ajar for commerce to flow, I load another 20 discs into my library and then onto my I-touch.  Since I have only managed to fill up about 5 Gig of my gizmo, I am just going to keep loading.  If I am flying for 24 hours to get to Bangkok, I might as well be packing heavy on the tunes.

In this process I have discovered that I still like most of my old discs, even the stuff I forgot I had.  Like the "Replacements" doing the song Alex Chilton which I managed to play right after playing "Big Star".  (Alex Chilton is dead, Long Live Alex Chilton!  You Rock Dude!!)  OK, there are a few clinkers in there, but mostly I bought the discs for a good reason in the first place. Its like tooling around while getting reacquainted with old friends.  Besides, how often do I get to listen to David Bowie and Vampire Weekend in the same drive?

Day # 26 Yesterday

It was 1980.  I was on the Bering Sea aboard a crab boat out of Dutch Harbor, Alaska.  We were, if I remember correctly, laid up in the lee of Unalaska Island, sitting out a nasty storm with a bunch of other boats. Nothing was going on so I wandered up to the bridge where one of my pals was standing watch, mostly just keeping an eye on the anchorage and other boats.

As I walked onto the bridge my shipmate said "Someone shot John Lennon".  We were always bullshitting each other so I said something like "yeah, sure, whatever" and started looking out over the bay we were holed up in.  He persisted that John Lennon had been shot.  Finally, he made it clear to me that some crazed gunman had shot John Lennon in front of his brownstone in New York and that he was dead.

I know that people talk about where they were when Jack Kennedy was shot.  I barely remember because I was a little boy.  I do have vivid memories of the event, but mostly because all of the adults were crying and I did not completely understand why.  I remember Kennedy's coffin coming off of the airplane as we watched it on the black and white television.

I remember Dr. King's assasination, but my memories are mostly of the racial trouble that flared up as a direct result.  I wasn't yet ten years old, but I knew that bad things were happening.  The unrest that followed spread through my neighborhood of Chicago.

I remember when Bobby Kennedy was shot.  My mom was driving us in the family VW van as the news came over the radio.  She immediately started crying and pulled over to the side of the road near our school.  I can still picture the scene of the being inside the stopped van with my mom sobbing at the wheel as I tried to talk to her and tried to keep my little brother calm as well.

I remember when Fred Hampton was shot by the Chicago police.  Fred Hampton was a Black Panther from the neighborhood I grew up in, Maywood, Illinois.  My mom was active in politics in this old suburb of Chicago and things were even more tense than they had been the year before, straining the community relationships between people of different races who had been trying to work together or sometimes cutting them off altogether.

I remember all of these events but they actually belonged to someone else's generation.  I was still a child.  But when John Lennon was killed, I was an adult.  John Lennon was one of my heroes and more than that.  To me, he was a cultural hero as well.  When I realized that my friend was telling the truth that day on the crab boat, I simply could not believe it.  I said, out loud, "Why would anyone want to shoot John Lennon?"  Some deranged maniac with a handgun had killed one of my cultural icons.  Why?  John Lennon never hurt anyone. People loved him.

That was thirty years ago and I can remember exactly how the scene played out.  Looking back on it I can understand the shock that overcame my parents generation with each successive wave of senseless violence.  The murders of the Kennedy's, Malcolm X, Dr. King and more must have felt like blow after blow to my parents and their friends.

By the time John Lennon was murdered, I had seen my share of the random and organized violence of modern life.  I was 22 years old and had lived through the protests of the war in Viet Nam, been in the army myself, seen the footage of Jonestown, the Mideast and many other examples of madness.  Somehow, for me, the news of John Lennon's murder shook me like no other outside event in my life ever had.  I did not know John, had never met him, had never even seen him in person.  Yet his passing marked a watershed in my life, an event that made absolutely clear to me how tentative and fleeting life can be no matter who you are.

In spite of the transient nature of everything and the uncertainty of life, I think John would have wanted us to keep the faith, whatever that means to each of us and without hurting each other while doing it.  A lot of people are missing John Lennon today and mourning his passing.  I am just one of them

Day # 25 The Best in the World......

This is going to be all about me and not about me at all and it will be a rant.  So if anyone is actually reading this, you are forewarned.

There are currents of events that sweep past all of us, whether or not we choose to listen to the news.  I am not talking about some event in a far-flung land which we choose to ignore, thinking it does not have any importance in our lives.  I should not be surprised at how clearly a debate on a national level can so quickly become personal, directly affecting people whom I care about very much and yet here I am.  Of course, what alters one of us alters all of us, no matter what distance the event is flung to.  From the West, Mr. Donne immortalized our interconnectedness.  From the East, pluck one jewel in Indra's Net and everyone is touched.  If one is a Gaiaist it is the butterfly's wing beat in a jungle tree.  We are rowing the same boat folks.

And the Rant?  Yes.  Here we go:  I have to here, just one more time, how these United States have the greatest health care system in the world, I am going to scream so long and loud that I am going to suffer a hemorrhage to something important and require extensive and expensive medical testing and treatment.  To make matters even more infuriating, these empty-headed food trough wipers that make up the insurance-company-ass-sucking, reactionary, free-market boot-strap pulling rich parasites that protect the vested interests want to ensure that all control of health care dollars resides in the pockets of the afore-mentioned ass-sucked insurance companies.  Wait, I'm just getting going......

Yeah, it all theory until it ain't.  I could wade into the debate about how socialism is going to take away everything that we hold precious and dear, including ours guns and granny's longevity and the right to choose our own doctors but I choose not to.  Instead I am going to keep this rant close to home, the above digression about how we are all interconnected aside.

Someone that I hold very dear required surgery to avoid a nasty flat polyp that was pre-cancerous.  The surgery was not "major" in the sense of being opened up like a fish, but if you were going through it you would certainly not call it minor.  This was a day surgery that involved a general anesthesia.  There was no overnight stay in the hospital.  Total time at the hospital from check-in to discharge was less than twelve hours and almost six hours of that was waiting for the operating room to open up. Anxiety levels got so high from the wait that valium was served up.

The bill for this medical event was about $25,000.  Of that we were responsible for about $4,500 in insurance co-pays and percentage responsible.  Am I thankful that modern medical testing found the problem before it became cancer and killed my Schnook-ems?  Yes I am.  Am I blessed and lucky that I have a job that provides me and my family with insurance so I am not being thrown out of my home because I am bankrupt due to medical bills?  Yes I am.  This is where is is not about me.  The issue is that for millions and millions of our hard-working friends and neighbors, there is no such luck.  For many people in this country the choice would have been have an operation to remove a pre-cancerous polyp and be $25,000 in debt, possibly homeless, or don't have the operation and take your chances with the Big C.  That choice, folks, is one people around you are making all the time in this, the country with the Greatest Health Care System On The Planet.  Phooey!

I have a good friend who works hard every day.  He has insurance provided by his employer while he is out busting his ass trying to get seriously disadvantaged people in our city off the streets and into some form of housing.  He does work that lots of us would rather not do dealing with people whose very existence some of the food trough wipers would rather not even acknowledge.  My friend's wife is not covered by his insurance.   That would cost about $900 per month.  Social service pay scales being what they are, this amount of money off the top every month is not just having to sell one of the summer homes or maybe not buying that extra yacht for the berth in Kennebunkport.  No, its more of an impact than that.  What $900 per month for insurance for a working man adds up to is profiteering and barbarism on the part of the insurance companies of this country who are protected by all of the politicians that they buy off with the blood money they suck out of the working people of this land.

Yeah, like I said, its a rant.  And every word of it is true.  If you look around, you won't have to go far amongst your friends or your family to find cases far more egregious than the two I have mentioned.

Why oppose health care reform in this country?  Well, if you have the Greatest Golden Egg in the Entire World, I guess I can understand why the insurance pirates would be wanting it back.

Day # 24 Wood and Water

No news today, for me anyway.  I almost wrote that there was also no real desire for news but that would not be true.  This morning, when the place was still and there is just me and my tea and the day ahead, still dark out, I really wanted to read the newspaper.  I'm not sure I even wanted to actually read the news, but I did want the newspaper laid out in front of me.  I never gave over the actual feel of newsprint for the electronic substitute.  I have the Kindle app on my I-touch so I can read travel books and carry them in a small package so I am not immune to the efficiency of digital readers.  I fully intend to carry the I-touch to Thailand and Laos this winter without benefit of actual paper books.  But when it comes to reading for pleasure, either news or books, I love the tactile sense of paper in my hands and, with news, the smell of newsprint.  But again today, I did without.

No newspaper and no lasting Santa buzz either. One of the Buddhist sayings that I always liked was "Before Enlightenment, chop wood, carry water.  After Enlightenment, chop wood, carry water."  Let me hasten to add, no statement that has anything to do with Enlightenment has anything to do with me.  This saying is often interpreted to mean that all of the daily work of living continues on, even as perceptions change.  No matter what.

I apply this saying to my own life on a much more mundane level.  On rare occasions I am allowed tantalizing glimpses of what perception could be like, of what even the slightest weakening of the chains of self might feel like.  The glimpses never last.  The red suit and beard come off after four hours and the kids are gone.  I stop being a vehicle for the happiness of others, even in my tiny little role as Santa.  I am back to just chopping the wood and toting the bucket.

While I was in my office today, my boss and his son starting in on another political discussion.  I felt the anger start up in me, just for a second.  No way I wanted to let those inane assertions go unrefuted.  Then I got up, closed the door and turned up KEXP, and went back to the chopping and toting.  No enlightenment and none on the horizon of the next jillion of my lives, but it was a very small step forward I think.

Day # 23 The Red Suit

News flash for today:  Man in Red seen in West Seattle!!  No media required for verification.

One of my small roles in my community of West Seattle is that of Santa Claus.  For the West Seattle Junction Merchant's Association and more than a few of my friend's and neighbor's children, I am the Man in the Red Suit.

We don't run a slick cattle chute photo operation like the malls.  Our little Santa meet and greet raises money for very local charities.  At the risk of tooting the communities horn as well as my own, our little cadre works hard to provide all of the kids, parents and sometimes even the boys from the local tavern as much time as they need to tell Santa all about their wishes, time to get comfortable with the Red Suit or time to just sit and cry if need be.  No one gets turned away, not the afore-mentioned guys from the tavern, not the snickering teenagers, not the crazy lady with the doll or even my smart-assed friends coming for a chance to sit on my knees and give me grief.

Santa has time for everyone.  Always.

I love being Santa.  I dig it all, like today's opportunity to hold a three-week old baby boy, the way all of the people on the street wave and say hello or try out their "Ho-ho-ho", the gleaming smile of a four year old kid and even the crazy flirting thing that some woman just feel they have to do.  "I've been really naughty this year Santa..."  You would be amazed how frequently that line comes up.  It always gives Mrs. Claus the urge to backhand someone.

Four times during the holiday season I get to don the Red Suit and play Santa.  For the next three Sundays I am doing the West Seattle gig and I now do one day at Child Haven.  For me, being Santa is as close to play-acting a Bodhisattva in disguise as I will probably ever get in this life.  Over the course of each four hour gig, I have to concentrate completely on the little person or persons in front of me.   Little kids come to see Santa filled with hope and desire and sometimes shyness or fear all rolled up into little velvet or sweatered packages.  The children walk through the door and suddenly there is the reality of a big guy with a big beard in a big red suit in a big chair.  My role, from the moment I see them waiting their turn, is to meet them on their level, pour out child-like compassion, joy and curiosity and try to make them know that they are the most important being in that room.  What a learning opportunity for me!!  What a challenge to be a better person.

For five years I have been doing the Santa gig and each year the merchant's spring for a bunch of gift certificates to local businesses as my reward.  Ha!  Today I got to hold a three-week old baby boy while the entire room melted in love.

I should be paying them.

Day # 22 Nuttin'

Any morning that begins with not going to work, tea and an acupuncture appointment with my favorite health care provider is a good morning indeed.  If you live in the GreyNorWet in November and it happens to be a crisp, sunny day, you are now earning bonus points.  Follow that up with some moto wrench time in the man-cave and a real Cubano Puro, well, could world peace really be that hard to obtain?

Nothing untoward intruded on my day.  Verily the sun did shine, the birds did sing, the cigar did smoke and hopefully annoyed the State Department as well.  I did not maim, cripple or incapacitate any motos that came under my hand and I got back to the homestead before I had used up all of my spousal away points.

As the sun was setting behind the snowy Olympic Mountains, I was slurping Pho at my favorite beach side noodle shack.

No news reared its ugly (or human interest) head and since all I have to say are good things, it will, like a any non-news day, be a short blog entry.

I guess it really does take some modicum of decent conflict to make a story interesting.  Today, I got nuttin'.

Day # 21 Closed

Therapists have a great term for the initial problem that leads a client to seek therapy.  They call it the "presenting problem".  The PP is the thing that gets one in the door:  "I can't sleep at night" or "My Sweetie-Kins left me and I cannot deal with the loss" or "I have to touch every light switch seven times before I turn it off".  After a few sessions or a few hundred one tries, with help, to get past the PP and move on to the "root cause" of the problem.  "My Sweetie-Kins left me..." might turn into an understanding of abandonment issues as a child or it might just be a serious case of bleak-assed and hopeless heartbreak.  With enough sessions and money one can hope to tell the difference and resume some semblance as a healthy and productive member of society.

When I started this attempt at going cold-turkey with regard to the news media, I had a presenting problem.  My presenting problem was misplaced anger.  I found myself getting angry with my boss whilst I was overhearing his conversation with another person, a conversation that was not meant for me.  The one side of the conversation that was audible to me was my boss espousing his right-wing political beliefs, beliefs which I strongly disagree with.  That was, as we can discern from the title caption of this entry, about 21 days ago.

Today, when I returned to my office after a lovely lunch of seafood udon, my boss and his son and another of my co-workers were gathered in one of the offices.  My boss is in his seventies, his son is almost fifty and the co-worker is a bit younger.  The divergence of my political views from theirs is a matter of common knowledge and some joking.  As I walked down the hall, I heard my boss was holding forth on the United States Senate and supporting tax cuts for the wealthy.  Passing their office doorway, they noted my presence and laughed appropriately, expecting full well that I would join the fray and rise to the defense of the opposite point of view from whichever inanity they were spewing.  And, believe me, regardless of I whether I am boycotting the news media or deep-fried okra, it was inane spewing, mostly along the lines of trickle down economics.

What took place, instead of my usual citing of facts for the purpose of refutation was, well, if not a miracle, a clear indicator of growth.  (Most of my former therapists were, at that moment, rubbing their chins thoughtfully and elbowing each other in a collegiate fashion) I stopped in the doorway, took them all in with a glance, said "Oh, trickle down economics again?" then left and walked down the hall to my office.  That was the first small victory.  The second was, as I went into my office, I smiled to myself and closed the door.

Day # 20 Take the Power Back

First, there was no entry for yesterday.  The reason that there was no entry is that life had placed enough events in that twenty-four hours, some pleasant and humourous, some not so much, there simply was no time left over.

Here is what I learned today:  regardless of whether or not one is watching the news, someone else will mention, with a concerned voice, that the end may be near.  This may, indeed, be true.  As Mr. Hume so cleverly reasoned, just because the sun came up today is no guarantee that it will do so tomorrow.

I am in no way saying that it is impossible that some maniac from the Korean Peninsula might choose to lob an atomic weapon at someone else thus sparking Armageddon.  It could happen.  Then again, it could also not happen.  We as a species have been predicting the imminent destruction of the entire world at almost every significant juncture of history.  You name it, the world was coming to an end.  I guess the exception to this was the end of the Nineteen Century when fin de siecle almost bored everyone to death but hey, it was a possible ending.

I personally think that all the North Koreans really want, like most of us, is food and a way to keep warm.  If black-mailing the West gets them that, hey, I guess its a method, albeit a scary one for lots of folks.  Not that I am specifically watching the news about this issue (because I'm not, so there) but if the rumblings are true there is something afoot and the something could be, once again, the end of "us".

"Some say the world will end in fire
Others say in ice..."

Mr. Frost has both the quick nuclear ending and the slower climate change ending covered.  I suspect that we will be carping about the possibilities for a bit longer than we imagine but remember Mr. Hume as well.

The second thing I learned today was this:  Regardless of whether or not listening to music makes me a calmer and more understanding driver than listening to the news, listening to "Rage Against the Machine" (much as I love those crazy guys) makes me neither.

Day # 18 Dante's Bumbling Cousin

No news.  So there.  Counting Crows on the way to work and the sound track from Grosse Pointe Blank on the way home.  Yeah, Baby!  I was getting my 80's groove on.  Hey, The Specials and The Clash still hold up for me Rudie!  I can say that I am being a nicer driver listening to tunes instead of news.  This seems to be at trend although I could be delusional.  It has been known to happen.  Either way, I am running through a whole lot more CD's.

Today's lesson was that when you are not watching or listening to the news all the time, you have more time for helping friends, even if you only help them by showing them how not to do things.  A friend of mine, who is truly a good person going through what my Gram used to call "a rough patch", asked me to accompany her to the orientation at a local Buddhist monastery of which I am a member, albeit not a very active member.  My friend was feeling a little less than confident and did not want to go alone.  Our local Buddhists aren't quite as intimidating as say your Pentecostal snake handlers, but it was a new thing and I was outwardly happy to go with her and inwardly full of trepidation.

The last two years have not exactly been my strongest spiritual phase, so I was already feeling a bit fraudulent.  Before we even set foot inside I managed to forget to walk clock-wise around the stupa in front of the building even as my friend said "Clock-wise, right?"

It was as if Dante had a really challenged second-cousin who, out of charity, was allowed to give the tour of Purgatory on Dante's one day off each year.  He could not be trusted with the Inferno or Paradiso, of course, because he forgot all the names of the important sinners, got lost, made references to the Easter Bunny and then had the tour group take the wrong bus out so everyone ended up in hell and had to be rescued, Evangelicals and all.

Beginner mind.  Never a problem for me.

Day # 17 Airports

There was no day seventeen.  There was only me being a huge mess. I hate it when The Kid leaves, and I am not just saying that to make other people think I am a good Dad because I miss my offspring.  He is, for the most part, damn fine company and I hate it that he lives 1218.95 miles away and I get a little irrational about how much I let that bother me.  So sue me.  For the record, some days I am a really good parent and other days, when i get selfish, not so much.  Day seventeen was not one of the good parent days.

There was news, however.  I had forgotten about waiting area TV monitors.  When I looked to see what The Kid was looking at, I saw a news blurb about searchers looking for three missing boys after their father committed suicide.  I don't really need an in-depth follow-up to know that this is not going to have a happy ending.  I will try to remember about the monitors in the future.

At SeaTac, the nice TSA folks have set up the full body scanners at every other security line.  The Kid and I just happened to pick a line that was the traditional metal detector.  I had an opportunity to watch the people going through the scanner.  Based on my very limited and unscientific observations, I would have to say that the overwhelming emotion exhibited by the people going through was one of bemusement or curiosity.  I certainly did not see any sign of protest or indignation nor did I see anyone opting for a "pat-my-junk".  Of course the scanners were not operating in every line so this is a pretty meaningless set of impressions.  If, however, one was holding their breath for a large scale civic outcry, one would be turning a lovely shade of azure right about now.  At least so far.

I stand by my prediction that eventually we will all just be run through the chutes naked while the Haliburton or Diebold barcode is tattoo'ed on our collective asses.

Seriously, safer my aging butt.  Until the checked luggage and all the shipped parcels are 100% scanned, this is all just smoke and mirrors.

Day # 16 Turnabout

There was no outside news for me today.  There did not need to be.  My son leaves tomorrow to fly back to Tucson and I hate that.  As always, I spent the day pretending the impending departure doesn't matter, not wanting to spoil the day and as always, by the end of the day, I have become dark and resentful while trying not to let it show.

I have no insight, no creativity and no humour to make this any better.  I have never gotten even passable at dealing with this and it does not seem that I ever will.  Tomorrow I will put The Kid on a plane, he will fly off and I will head to my office to resume my regular routine.  Yes, he will be back in a month.  I don't care, I hate it that he is not here, I hate the distance, the literal miles, that are between us.

I want to turn and raise my hands in supplication that this not be true.  If he looked back and saw me, he would ask "What's with the hands, Dad?"

I profess the desire to be able to see things exactly as they really are.  I seem to want this ability, this clarity of perception, right up until I have to look at a thing which, exactly as it is, causes me intense grief.  Then I don't want to see it so clearly after all.

Day # 15 Grinderman

There was no news yesterday.  And no blog entry either.

There was marital strife, a continuing frustrating struggle with a recalcitrant moto malfunction and a holiday card photo session.

Lest the day sound like a total wash, the evening was spent with good friends from out-of-town, a great dinner and then slipping off with them to the Grinderman show at the King Kat.

Nick Cave worked the crowd like the madman that he is and although I was not anointed with his sweat, the folks just ahead of me were.  Grinderman is a long departure from the Bad Seeds with Nick and Warren Ellis getting back to some serious Punk roots.  It was grand.  I did not think much about anything except that I need to be doing more live music shows.

The Kid and TBG were still up when I got home late, no news had intruded on the day and neither had blogging.  So this is all there is.

Day #14 Blackness & Rockwell

I have long since joined the "Buy Nothing Day" movement.  Due to this abstention, Black Friday does not exist for me and I do not need news of it.  Given the annual excesses of holiday madness, I can imagine in my mind's eye the local TV news reports of poor, deluded consumers shivering in the early morning hours waiting to trample their fellows to secure a bargain on the latest must-have item from the nearest big-box emporium.  As for the rest of the news today, there will be speculation on the economic importance of the shoppers mood, reports on how this years shopping compares to last years shopping and what impact the expected levels of holiday consumption will have on the retail community's bottom line.

I feel a certain compunction to rail about how hard it was to get through the day without sneaking off to the loo with the recycle bin in my arms so that I could peruse the pilfered newspaper in peace.
"What are you doing in there Honey?"
"Nothing (rustle, rustle), be out in a minute..."
That is just not, however, the case.  Today was an almost Rockwellian wallow in good family time without the benefit of either heading off to gather legal tender, spend said tender on stuff, or make use of the news media to see what other families are up to.  To be honest, I did not miss the news at all.  I feel like such a failure in the obsession department.  It is a good thing there are still motos and guitars to redeem my compulsive credentials.

After a rousing round of "left-over brekkie" and a good turkey flaying were behind us, the morning was spent with The Kid helping me get a huge pot of soup going.  A teen-aged son willingly tending to soup making is a thing to be treasured because by all accounts, it won't last.  Soup on, there was a family walk to the beach and back, followed by pie and a rousing game of Scrabble.  While I should be struggling with the anxiety of not knowing exactly what is going on in the world, I am frittering away my time with counting word scores and then retiring with the little tribe to eat soup and watch "Breaker Morant" because hey, the TBG and Kid had not seen it and its one of my favorites.  We followed up the movie with a Scrabble rematch which I won and now The Kid is reading Christoper Moore whilst I blog.

Days of contentment are rare for me, so excuse me if I gush the littlest bit.  I think I may be more flawed than the average human when it comes to the contentment thing.  Constant hungering for input or information, looking for answers to problems or solutions to puzzles, these things I understand.  I do not like to admit it, but just being alive in my own small world is not my strongest skill set.  I profess a desire to live in the moment, but more often this manifests as a desire to be in the world's moment, often at the expense of my own.

So maybe I got it a little right today or perhaps I am just taking a slow cruise on the river denial.  Regardless of which is more true, the day had a bit of an old Saturday Evening Post cover art air about it.  I know that things will change, as is their wont.  The Kid will fly back to Tucson, as he does every month.  I will miss him terribly, as I always do. Someone will mention a development or happening in the world and I will feel like an idiot for not being up to the minute on whatever it might be.

But not today.  There are rumblings of a final scrabble winner-take-all match.  Gotta go.

Day # 13 Turkey

Family, friends, food and the traditional Holiday Movie fare after dinner :  "The Road Warrior".

Damn near a perfect day, including a spirited apres-movie political discussion that included weighing the merits of the news itself.

The day did not, however, include the news media.  What more do I need to say?  Not much.

Day # 12 Bliss and Recrimination

Today I will admit, right at the start, that I read the news headline of the Seattle Times as the genetic envelope and I walked by the paper box.  "Why Can't Seattle Handle The Snow" was emblazoned across the graffiti carved plastic window.  I had already read the banner and was laughing out loud to The Kid before I remembered I wasn't supposed to be perusing the news.

In my defense, I have to say that Seattle not being able to handle the snow is not really news.  The city handling or lack thereof, of the winter storm of 2009, was the undoing of our former mayor, Greg Nickels. Well, that and losing the Supersonics, caving to Paul Allen and quashing the voter approved monorail.   Now Mayor Mike "The Bike" McGinn ain't faring any better.  Just a little snow paralyzes the city.  Why?  There are simply too many morons who have to try out their untested snow driving skills, too many hills and not enough plows.  Seattle is also, duh, at sea level so whatever snow we get promptly turns to a glaze of ice because it is usually just barely cold enough to freeze and not nearly cold enough for snow to stay fluffy and driveable.

So why should the city or WSDOT care if they are short on plows?  In truth it doesn't snow here very damn often so why spend a gazillion dollars on a bunch of plows just so people can move effortlessly on the two or three days a year on average that we are inconvenienced by the white stuff? Hey, its a snow day!!  These days are a gift from the weather gods.  Its a bonus, so why not enjoy it?  Everyone knows just how lame our fair burg is when it comes to coping with snow so it is an almost ironclad excuse to get out of anything.  I say take the excuse, run with it and stop looking a gift horse in the mouth.  What kind of slackers are these people anyway?

With all the extra time afforded by the snowy excuse for slacking, the Thanksgiving shopping was accomplished with ease,  the pies were secured from the folks at Shoofly and The Kid cheered our success with a resounding "Huzzah!!"  Really, that was his exact phrasing and it made me proud.

Bliss follows recrimination as "Fawlty Towers" and "A Bit of Fry and Laurie"  follow power slides in the snow when no one was watching,  The Kid is reading "The Stupidest Angel" to ensure his literary corruption at my hand.   And I, forgiving the City their transgressions, look forward to Thanksgiving and lots of free time to watch the YouTubes my peeps are sending me of Seattlites sliding down snowy hills like so many mechanized pin-balls.

Day # 11 State Sanctioned Sloth

God Bless the Washington State Patrol

Anyone who knows my brisk riding habits might question the preceding statement but, at least for today, I stand by it.  Following on the heels of the Snowpacalypse of yesterday was the Icepacalypse of today.  Because of the incredible chaos wrought by a mere bagatelle of a snow storm, the infinite wisdom of the WSP decreed that all non-essential travel should be curtailed.  I took that to mean travel to my office should be foregone and enjoyed a State Sanctioned snow day.  So besides blessing the WSP, I wish for God to bless socialism as well for looking after the public weal.

Once again, news came to me by word of mouth from neighbors and friends as I was re-shoveling the snow that had drifted back during the winds of the night.  Tales were spun of three and four hour drives from the near neighborhoods of Ballard and Downtown Seattle, trips that would normally be short jaunts.  The winning duration was a twelve hour bus ride from Seattle to the strip mall suburb with the unfortunate name of Federal Way.  Twelve hours on a metro bus.  Metro buses have no bathrooms  Maybe that would explain my sighting yesterday of the gentleman micturating, not on The Dude's rug, but on the edge of the I-405 while traffic idled at a dead stop.  The calm creation of yellow snow when all about him was stalled in suspended snowiness did sort of tie the whole scene together.

Now the icy night is calm, no new snow is falling and my genetic envelope is winging his way through the skies towards Seattle.  In a few minutes I will engage my trusty four-wheel drive and venture out to retrieve him from the clutches of the TSA and the traveling hordes.

It was another day without the news media and I was pretty darn happy, but mostly that was because I got a chance to shovel snow and that always makes me giddy.  So I don't know if that counts.

Day # 10 Snowpacalypse!!!

OK, I swiped that from John Richards, the KEXP morning DJ.  John may have swiped it from someone else, but I give credit where credit is due.

What I don't need the news to tell me:

A Little Snow in Seattle is a Big Deal   No news required on this one, I can assure you.  If you live in Seattle, look outside and see that it is snowing, you do not need any media to tell you that the entire infrastructure is about to come to a screeching, grinding halt.

Your Commute Just Got a Lot Longer   Really, a traffic report is just not going to be needed.  This is the scene:  I am in my office in Sumner, about 31 miles from my apartment in West Seattle.  As I look out my office window, I see the snow is sticking to the ground and the roadway.  I don't need a traffic update to tell me that my trip home is going to be epic.  There will be crunching, spinning, sliding and swearing and all this is before you manage to get to the freeway on-ramp.  Once on the freeway, any freeway, things are only going to get worse.  In really bad snow storms (what would be a mild dusting in the Midwest) Northwesterners have been know to abandon their vehicles on I-5 and wander off on foot.  This snow journey was not, however, accompanied by a constant stream of news about which roads were worse than which other roads. I let KEXP roll out the afternoon show of alt-rock, snow songs requested by other travelers and your basic musical whatnot.

Shoveling Snow is Fun   I know, more middle-aged American men drop dead shoveling snow than almost anything other activity.  Being from the Midwest, I have the dominant SSMHK gene, which made itself apparent when I was a young boy and my dad would say "Snow Shoveling Must Happen Kid".  So when I jumped out of my lovely four-wheeled drive truck after surviving the bumper car ride that is Seattle in the snow, all I could think of was the super hero Midwest Man, whose super powers were clearing sidewalks and driveways.  That's me!!  While the traveling masses confirmed on the radio why they were not traveling and those that were home watched the local news to see those that were not traveling, I was shoveling like a super hero.  While I was making big piles of snow, my neighbors were wandering home with tales of their three hour journey from Bellevue, less than fifteen miles away, or how the West Seattle Bridge was now closed or that their husband was still stuck downtown.  That was the real news, delivered in person.

Roo Would Love This    Yes, little Roo would have been thrilled.  SNOW!!!!  Crazy, sliding, spinning cars and trucks!!  Blustery cold wind and piles of snow to shovel into other piles of snow.  Snowpacalypse!!

I did not partake of the news today.  I did not need to.  First of all, I didn't need to go to the news, because the news came to me without the requirement of any other delivery system except the event itself.  Second, I don't need the media to tell me how to act like an overgrown kid.  As it turns out, I'm still pretty good at that.

Day # 9 The Funnies?

Sunday, Sunday, Sunday!  A lovely day chock full of possibility.  Like drag racing, football, drinking beer and beating your spouse or spiritual renewal.  Sunday is also the only day that I take the time to read the funnies in the Seattle Times.  Until today that is.

This morning, a late morning following a German Sparkle Party, I was asked if I wanted to read the comics.  I automatically said no as the comic section is obviously a part of the whole that is the Sunday newspaper.  But is it news?  Frazz is certainly not news, although it is one of my favorite comic strips.  Get Fuzzy and Pearls Before Swine aren't concerned with current events, focusing instead on puns and cat humour.  Ah, but there is Doonesbury, which I have read for many years.  Mr. Trudeau indeed has a political ax to grind and while it is an ax wielded for the same side, usually, that I stand for, it does not pass the news sniff test.  So when tempted a second time with an offer of the comics section, I refused for a second time.

A Sunday without the funnies.  It was a day that included, well, not much.  The morning contained the completion of "Romeo and Juliet" because without the news, where does one find tragedy?  I was able to confirm that Bruce "Don't Call Me Ash" Campbell was in most, but not all, of Sam Raimi's movies, a quest for information that was spawned by re-watching "Intolerable Cruelty" and seeing Mr. Campbell as a soapbox doctor on a TV screen in the movie.  The only societal contribution I made today was plunging one of our tenant's toilets, because she is in her nineties and uses a walker.  I don't feel the need for lots more descriptors  for that little incident.

A Sunday without news, without the promised snowfall and without the funnies.  Based on the lack of the first, I suppose it was a day spent successfully resisting obsession as well, but mostly I did exactly as I pleased which did not add up to much.  How glorious once in a while!
 

Day # 8 The View from Brazil

Tudo Bem!  No, I did not peruse the news of the day today.  Again, bully for me, as I like to think it shows that I possess at least a shred of stick-to-it-tive-ness.  So, the good news is no news and now on to other things.

I was challenged to write an entry on how similar the modern news media is to that depicted in Terry Gilliam's dark vision of the future in his movie "Brazil".  Alas, I cannot agree.  With rare exceptions, most of the modern American news media seems to be composed of talking heads vociferously defending one point of view or another while yelling at or shaming some other talking head whose opinion differs from theirs.  There are some examples of differing ideas being discussed and debated in a civil manner but they are few and far between.  By contrast, the newscast as portrayed on Terry Gilliam's tiny TV screens of the future is all well-modulated and polite with no yelling of any kind, hardly Fox News. Although it has been at least eight days since I have watched the news or the movie "Brazil", based on my memory of both I have to conclude that the there is almost no similarity between news in the movie and news as it is rendered today.

However, setting the news comparison aside, there are some almost frighteningly prophetic images from the movie "Brazil" when viewed in the present time.  The movie was made in 1985 and paints a picture of a dark world of bureaucracy, societal control and technology run amok where information retrieval is the name of the game and ducts are very important.  There are shadowy groups who periodically set off bombs in public places and the government is powerless to stop them.  On the tiny TV screen of the future, which Gilliam intentionally got wrong, the newscaster asks a government official, Mr. Helpmann, about the terrorists and why they are staging a bombing campaign.   (thanks and credit to Internet Movie Database for the quotes)

Mr. Helpmann: Bad sportsmanship. A ruthless minority of people seem to have forgotten good old-fashioned virtues. They just can't stand seeing the other fellow win. If these people would just play the game....


The newscaster then ask Mr. Helpmann (love the names) if the government is making any progress and he replies:

Mr. Helpmann: We're fielding all their strokes, running a lot of them out, and pretty consistently knocking them for six. I'd say they're nearly out of the game.

Persisting, though in quiet Brit speak, the interviewer asks how the bombing campaign could still be going on after more than ten years:

T.V. Interviewer: How do you account for the fact that the bombing campaign has been going on for thirteen years?

Mr. Helpmann: Beginners' luck. 

While re-watching this a few weeks ago, The Kid, the TBG and I were struck by the almost mirror image of the fictional setting of "Brazil" and some aspects of modern reality.  The festive holiday music of a posh restaurant is blown all to hell by a sudden bombing.  The shattered diners right the tables and chairs and resume their meal while the battered band members pick up instruments and the music continues.  Is this a dark, futuristic vision or is it CBS Evening News?  From my point of view, it is not that the portrayal of the news in "Brazil" is the same as modern newscasts, but that the portrayal of everyday life is so similar.  

There is more than just bombings which make the comparisons seem accurate.  As the holidays draw near, a little girl gets her turn to speak with Santa.

Santa Claus: What would you like for Christmas? 

Little girl on his lap: My own credit card. 

Sort of speaks to some of the strongly prevalent views of what the holidays are all about.

Throughout the movie there is a clunky and intrusive modern "technology" which is supposed to make life better and simpler, but inevitably accomplishes the opposite.  In 1985 technology was already changing so quickly people were having difficulty keeping up with it.  Today that change has become exponential and will continue to be, or so it seems.  While our cars and televisions are cooler and sleeker than those in the movies and our duct work is not quite so obtrusive, the question of whether any of our real technology makes our lives better has been and will be debated by people a lot smarter than I am.  So I will leave them to it.  I would only add that anyone who has waited on or dealt with the Cable Guys or the Phone Guys has had a nice glimpse of Central Services, whether or not they have ever seen the movie.

Perhaps the most pervasive and prescient aspect of society portrayed in the film is the all-encompassing bureaucracy everyone is subjected to.  Today we have a most formidable bureaucracy of our ownthat we have allowed and actually helped build.  Most formidable indeed, at not very different from the one Sam Lowry grapples with.  In the film, the most important government agency is Information Retrieval.  Not very nice folks.  As Michael Palin's character Jack Lint so cheerfully and creepily states when asked for some information:

Jack Lint: This is information retrieval not information dispersal.

Tuttle becomes Buttle as key strokes go wrong in tiny offices and peoples lives are forever ruined or ended not to mention all the severe damage to floors and ceilings.   And when our hero Sam tries to enlist the help of a superior bureaucrat he is met with the cyclical labyrinth of the organization:

Sam Lowry: Excuse me, Dawson, can you put me through to Mr. Helpmann's office? 
Dawson: I'm afraid I can't sir. You have to go through the proper channels. 
Sam Lowry: And you can't tell me what the proper channels are, because that's classified information? 
Dawson: I'm glad to see the Ministry's continuing its tradition of recruiting the brightest and best, sir. 
Sam Lowry: Thank you, Dawson. 

Yes, thank you Dawson and thanks to Terry Gilliam for sticking to his guns and keeping the full print of the movie alive instead of the sappy "Love Conquers All" version the the studios came up with after hacking forty minutes of the film away to contrive a happy ending.  Give me what I perceive as the dark and real over the saccharine any day.  Maybe that's why I'm a news-junkie:  I am always suspicious of a happy ending.