2008, Year of the Rat

Nothing says Christmas like a couple of young men getting mauled, and one killed, by a 350 pound tiger at the San Francisco Zoo. The twelve foot high wall was not enough to keep the tiger from attacking these three stooges. These late teens and an early 20 year old were almost certainly taunting this tiger. After two of the “victims” ran away while the feline was chewing on their friend, this driven animal went after the escaped taunters and found them in the café 300 yards away. This cat was no random killer, it was out for retribution. It was angry. The tiger was probably well aware of his capability to escape, maybe he was even in the habit of taking evening excursions, but up till this pivotal moment, he had dealt peacefully with his imprisonment, except for once, a few years before, when he mauled a zoo employee. Clearly this tiger was not completely satisfied with life in the zoo.

What animal, or human for that matter, would be satisfied with a life in a zoo? Speaking as a human representative, who lives in the zoo of western civilization, a prison without physical bars, I have to admit that sometimes I’m ready to go the way of the tiger.

Who do we think we are, keeping these majestic wild beasts in captivity for our entertainment? One of these days (not that this isn’t already under way), mother nature and the animal kingdom is going to turn completely against us. We are evolutionary masterpieces, by the nature of our minds, we are more ready to adapt to changing circumstances than most in the animal kingdom. One could almost say we were created as the stewards of the earth, and yet for the past few thousand years, maybe since we kicked ourselves out of a theoretical garden we are still technically in, and began treating it like a garbage dump, we have been bad little angels, and it’s about time for the tiger to begin biting us back.

Humans have been busy. It’s been act, act, act, for a long, long time, and we have so rarely stopped to think. But for all that action, we can expect reaction. What should we do?

We shouldn’t raise the fences in our zoos to keep from getting attacked by tigers, we should dismantle these zoos before the time of reaping comes completely to pass. The seeds of greed, selfishness, and unconsciousness have been sown, and now we have our crop, more greed, more selfsishness, and more unconsciousness, along with their side-effects: suffering, separation, cruelty, resentment, and death without freedom. But a new consciousness is also growing out of our dissatisfaction with this zoo.

There are tigers inside us all, and they long to be set free. This coming year is the year of the rat in the Chinese zodiac. This is fitting as it is our rat-faced President’s last year in office. But we should also remember some of the good traits of this marvelous little animal as its year approaches. Rats help us clean up our messes, they also take care of each other and live in close proximity with their neighbors, and contrary to our poor opinions of them, they are actually healthy, hearty, animals. Our ancestors would not get on boats if rats were not on board, as it meant that the ship was not sea-worthy. Rats are smart cowards, when things are not safe, they run, they change course. If only our rat look-a-like of a President acted a little more like he looks we wouldn’t be in a criminal war. We have rats to thank for the bubonic plague, like little grim reapers they helped eliminate overpopulation in Europe, without them there would never have been a renaissance.

Anyways, that’s the news in the animal kingdom. What conclusion can we draw? If we want to calm the tigers, we may have to start acting like rats.

Only One

Selfishness is the only sin.

coming soon

Well this isn’t a bad moment. Couldn’t be much better really, the present moment being so generally difficult to beat. So I’m sitting at the Woody Creek Tavern having a cup of coffee and getting ready to order my first meal of the day at 2:00 in the afternoon, two days after Christmas in the year of our Sun, 2007. I’ll begin by giving you a little astrology report. The Age of Aquarius is coming, thank god, is actually really in the midst of coming, by Sun, by enlightenment, by illumination. A new age finally, after two thousand odd years of dysfunction, selfishness, and the idiotic dream land of Pisces (no offence meant for you Pisces out there). The change is already under way, in this most marvelous moment, the present.

I keep thinking that we are somewhere deep inside of Mindhead, which is just a word I got from a cheesy Steve Martin and Eddie Murphy movie called Bowfinger. Mindhead is meant to be a takeoff on Scientology, but the Mindhead concept has some potential as an idea for our own little heads to expand.

I’ve begun to get this conception of the Mindhead as an articulation of a universal consciousness, a frequency somewhere “out there,” of which we are all a part.

Back to the drawing room, two glasses of wine later, still at the Tavern bar, satiated from a veggie tamale and a cheese enchilada. Yum is all I can say, and back to the keyboard of this mad little machine, the computer. The typing happens very fast, but there is often too much background noise, what with all the emails coming in, and all the dumb news to check on Google News, the worst source for news on the internet. But where else is a news hungry man supposed to go? It’s not really all so bad, it’s just that it’s so full of “news” everyday, just like CNN and FOX.

The problem is that most of this drivel is not news. It’s just the same old shit. Somebody died of cancer. Somebody overdosed. Somebody killed somebody. Somebody got more successful than somebody else. A volcano erupted. A VW broke down. Another “invention” was “invented.”

What about the real news, meaning that which is actually new? Well the real news is Mindhead. The real news, in this world of entertainment news, is the news that will actually entertain me, and by entertain I mean expand my mind. That which does not expand my mind is not news. Hence I have grown weary of the general drivel in this massively idiotic, repetitive, and greedily loony mass media.

This afternoon I will drive down-valley to run errands with a higher concentration of real people. The real people are my favorite. But I cannot seem to extricate myself from the addiction that is Aspen. I have to live in Aspen. I love it too much, even while I am overly exposed to a scum of the earth psychopathic elite who think they are somehow entitled to a 20,000 square foot mansion and a leer jet, while the working people of this little town have to work two or three jobs just to afford a twelve foot by twelve foot space in this little wonderland. And the greedheads only grace us with their presence one or two months a year, but they leave their giant screw you mansions everywhere to remind us how much we miss them when their gone.

But tomorrow I’ll ski, and all will be well again, and this afternoon, I will spend my time in thrift stores, surrounded by the real heads. Why are the working locals in Aspen so happy? They are happy because even while they toil and toil to make a nice little trip for the billionaires, they also have a double super buzz, because not only are they stoned, and not only did they get huge powder shots yesterday on highlands bowl, they are also keenly aware that the dull rich person they are standing across from, serving a drink to, is more miserable and empty than they have ever been in their whole life. So what’s that, if it’s not something to smile about?

Welcome to Fat City, USA, where the working folks can smile, because they are richer than the rich here can ever possibly imagine.

4/30/07

The steam of my pain shines like an old man, neck cranked and tweaked, and wretched.
But that will not stop the Gonzo. Pain can never stop the rebels. The future is simply conformity to rebellion.
Liquid,
Aromatic championships.
Forward Ho said the Ghost from his dormancy, and the great spirit whispered happiness in his ear.

The Fat is in the Fire

Everyone you know is completely insane.

4/12/00

I saw the top of a mountain as I climbed
Perspiring, I couldn't stop
I climb towards the peak,
Perspiring
I want to stop
I cannot
I must reach the top
And then further
The mountain goes upward into the sky
The heavens above
I will find love
Gasping for air I cry out
"I must get out!"
I'm just getting started
Summoning Lord, Shiva, Buddha, and the Like
I take my heart and squeeze
Squeeze so I may rise
I'll go beyond the human plane
Go on towards the twelfth dawn
Mystic men, Mayan friends
Moving into love's domain
I'm ready now for what may come
Ready for the Devil's death
Into a kind horizon
See the bills go up in flames
Greed and anger dead in blame
Grasping truth
Tasting fruit without disease
Death, death, to all that's wrong
Ready now for spring to come
Truth flowers bursting forth from evils ashes
Bliss's birth
Calm calm be set free
Let go of all your malady
Release your hand from the devil's branch
Fall from the tree
You will not land
Only rise

Alright

I have very little time this morning, there is a plan to make snowmen. Then I'm going to go put some more paint on the walls at the new shop, (trying to figure out whether to go with Loves Light, Golden Path, or Tomato Soup). Nathan at Ace hardware helped us out yesterday. Fuck the greedhead bastards!! Sorry I may be developing terets syndrome. I'm so damn tired of the nonsense in this world I can hardly contain myself. I'm the happiest, most well adjusted person I know, and I'm also the most pissed off.

Anyways, more about the paint store. We were doing a little filmaroo, and silly tom, the corporate trained swinerag, tells Tony the Tiger and I that we are up to no good. Hey what are you guys doing? he growls, sensing something out of the ordinary because we are cruising around with a camera, laughing, and just exuding a healthy well being of hash and happiness. Tony tells him we're buying a hammer. You guys need to talk to the general manager Master Tom says, but he just left.

I'm actually quite sure if the general manager is any too smart, (as a general manager should be in general), he would have been happy to have us help advertise for Ace Hardware on our fine little yellowjumpsuits.com. We would be sharing with the people the pure wonderment of the cruising around an Ace Hardware. All REDS AND YELLOWS everywhere, and so much happiness, where the paint gets shaken, and we'll be getting it all out to you really soon.

Carry on,

The Goose Wrangler

12/9/07 On At the Airport on way from California to Colorado

Red paper Coca-Cola cups and yellow letters on a Denver airport billboard
Total contentment in a perfect world of imperfect people
Overly smart ants march violently over mommy
Wearing funny clothes over our naked alienness
Good morning winterberries
High noon to the dingbats
Welcome to mindhead said the medicine man of modernity
Come again to purify and reconnect the lonely masses to the ultimate consciousness field
Steve the drunken master knew
At the bar
We talked
We can influence it
I said
Not quite
said Steve
We are it.

Did It

Yellowjumpsuits LLC is now the proud owner of an RV. I'm pretty sure her name is Dolores. She's a 31 foot beauty. I'm a bit nervous. I'll miss my plane tomorrow and drive her back to Aspen from California. Pray for us.

She's the modern day donkey. We'll be riding around this continent finding gems for the people and developing the Church of the Open Mind, which will eventually be found at openmindchurch.com, and out on the open road, and, of course, in your mindhead.

love always.

Goose Wrangler

Preface to the Anti-Christ

by Friedrich Nietzsche
Published 1895

translation by H.L. Mencken
Published 1920

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

This book belongs to the most rare of men. Perhaps not one of them is yet alive. It is possible that they may be among those who understand my "Zarathustra": how could I confound myself with those who are now sprouting ears?--First the day after tomorrow must come for me. Some men are born posthumously.

The conditions under which any one understands me, and necessarily understands me--I know them only too well. Even to endure my seriousness, my passion, he must carry intellectual integrity to the verge of hardness. He must be accustomed to living on mountain tops--and to looking upon the wretched gabble of politics and nationalism as beneath him. He must have become indifferent; he must never ask of the truth whether it brings profit to him or a fatality to him... He must have an inclination, born of strength, for questions that no one has the courage for; the courage for the forbidden; predestination for the labyrinth. The experience of seven solitudes. New ears for new music. New eyes for what is most distant. A new conscience for truths that have hitherto remained unheard. And the will to economize in the grand manner--to hold together his strength, his enthusiasm...Reverence for self; love of self; absolute freedom of self.....

Very well, then! of that sort only are my readers, my true readers, my readers foreordained: of what account are the rest?--The rest are merely humanity.--One must make one's self superior to humanity, in power, in loftiness of soul,--in contempt.

FRIEDRICH W. NIETZSCHE.

YEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE HAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAWWW!!

Hampton Inn San Jose

Well,

it's the 6th of December, and i'm in San Jose California to attend the wedding of a great old friend of mine, and I'm sitting in the lobby of the luxurious Hampton Inn, with a free glass of wine they just gave me (they rarely give you free anything at the expensive places), but down here in real world land gifts are more common, (which is as it should be considering that all the people staying at the expensive spots (if they can actually afford to stay there) probably shouldn't be getting anything for free.

Our government is on it's way to censoring the internet. Look into it. Call your senator. Get angry. Get mad. This fascistating country is on its way down, and it's a sad thing to see. Turn on CNN or FOX news and watch. They'll tell you we are the greatest country on earth, and make you feel like your filthy desire (trained into you by a corporate greedhead media, and a bunch of corporate marketers who own your mind) to consume more is a sure sign that we are living in the greatest country on earth, full of freedom, liberty, the American way. See you at Wal-mart headupyourasshole.

Other than that, the human condition is beautiful as always. There is joy, happiness, pain, and suffering, and more beauty and lots and lots and lots of love, just like there has always been. I'm going to the rehearsal dinner in a few minutes so I better go shower up.

blessings,

the goose wrangler.

Same Day I think... 2003

Paper is the only one that listens-
Because it doesn't think,
in sadness our tears can drip,
Drip,
and sink,
Then disappear,
and paper says not a word.
Lay ink atop the tear
or leave it alone and circle round it.
The paper has no opinion here.
Scribble sloppy sour severed lines,
or write eloquent symmetry.
Paper won't even notice.
Write ugliness, insult, or ridiculous flattery.
Paper's feelings won't be hurt.
Nor will foundationless compliments make paper an egomaniac.
The scribblers feelings are safe also,
On paper's neutral ground,
For paper will never criticize, laugh at,
or discredit,
our thoughtful or unthoughtful work.
But remember
Though paper is the ever-listening ear,
The only one who is always there,
Paper is a cold hard friend
Because paper doesn't care.

Sometime in 2003-maybe in my second class with Ward Churchill

You the boy from writing class?

"I am a boy from writing class."

The one that pisses everybody off.

"well I suppose that does make me the boy from writing class.
The one that pisses everybody off."

This blatant stamp I seem to put everywhere-

This stamp of my pissoffedness-

This reality-

This misplaced anger and instigation.

Everyone I meet,

I place in the position of debate partner.

You may agree with me, but i'll argue with you anyway.

8/14/02

The classroom
Darkness slipping blind into empty seats
Attempting to open molded minds
Softness
Sweet biscuits
Tearful sad children
Sadly stumbling over television sets

Snowing again and a 4 year old poem

Well the snow is finally falling, and it's falling hard on us down here at Red Butte Drive in little old Aspen Colorado.

I'm going outside to hang a big yellow St. Moritz flag that my housemate Mr. Danny the powder Panda just gifted me. It's gonna hang proud down here by the river.

Here is a little something I wrote back on 4/7/03:

The cold spring air freezes the heat
Alone
The smoke inhales us
Licking our lungs in darkness
Orange lenses blending the wood floor
Sharp lines crystallizing the confused mind
The tunnel
Dreaming resolution through destruction
Insanity
Flames lap at the fragile crest of goodness
Ethanol
The gastrointestinal infernal solitude
The branches are cold
They're shivering
Flowers
Mist is holding an hourglass sideways
Stillness
We're already dead

Aug 1, 2002

HO BA Haroo
The time keeper is in the shoe
It lives scattered on the crunchy asphalt
Surrounded by tar pebbles
Hello to the picture books
The crisp mangoes
HO HO
South of the border organics
My word
The mouth sounds are bloated
Meaningless
Inside the house of grandmother
Leather couches and horses,
Dark, shiny hardwood floors
There are no shoes in here,
No labels
No scattered bills or trash bags
Or worthless knick knacks
This is a museum
I'll steal the pictures
There are no lines here,
These pages are empty
No structure
Can't you see?
YOU
YOU PEOPLE
There is no meaning anymore
No purpose
Don't you see?
This is a dehydrated world
No amount of bleach, detergents, or disinfectants
Can clean up this mess
Or wash away the misery
This world is a museum
Do not treat this world like a museum
This world is our grandparents house
This world is an empty shoe box
And we're walking all over it with the shoes we tore from it,
We're devouring this place
Eating deeper and deeper into its soul
Listen
We've caramel coated this apple
But it's rotting away from the inside out
Just like the shoes we wear
Take off your shoes
And stick your face in them
And smell the sickness

Sometime in 2001

Empty contemplation of happiness
Grateful drips of gravy run down soggy biscuits and sudden sadness
Running down the sidewalk
Smoked Christmas turkey and spider man pajamas
Lost in thoughts of overpopulation
Curing abortathons
Mixing suicide martinis
Time tracking digressions in servitude
Watching a dream of knowledge sink into the dry river bed of truth
Dreamy ripples ever present are here
Absent as I watch flocks thicken and see the shepherds purses bulge
As their lost sheep multiply.
And all the while the spider men fight over jobs that their children will steal
And my smile withers as I look at my reflection
Just another sheep stares back
A bulge in his pants
And a dream of a blue eyed son and a dark haired love
With a Mediterranean smile
And a magic child in her womb
Warm my blood with the blanket of my own humanity

7/7/05

London was bombed today
Just me and an ipod
Ready to make a move
Taliban
Ready to say goodbye
to the fear of an intifada
Time to move on
To fearlessly board a plane
In this world
Which has always been crazy
Chaotic
And totally fine
In all its inherent DANGER
The future just IS
Death
Not something to be afraid of
To shackle us from the present
Which is just as fine as everything else
Actually it's better
Even with its idiots
Like Bush
And his terrorist enemies
All of them in the shackles of the future
Blind to the fine of life
Blowing each other
and sometimes us,
UP
And finding the future endlessly
Way too far ahead of time
So real time is today
for moving on
Into the fine time
Time to plan for the present
Which means finding a tomorrow
Free of the fears of the idiots
And their terrorist enemies
Free of the FUTURE
Which we need not be ignorant of
Nor shackled to
But rather free today
Three days after independence day

11/22/2004

On the field
Kicker for the football team
The John Wayne of the high school crew
Batters the pigskin with his skinny leg
FUMP
The light foot sweeps the brown pineapple off the turf
And bounds it into the air
And the earth takes suffocating breaths
With the suffocating people
All battling to breath
Off the football field
But John Wayne just breathes
Free on the football field
On a mission to kick a ball
Free to breath in the moment
He doesn't even have to know
That the breath of the moment is effortless
Because for John Wayne
It just is

some shorts written 11/15/2004

French Horizon

Dark Mint Castles
Crack gray purple in the dusk light
The French horizon


This casual breath
Filtered serious with the dark scrambling of the mind
Endlessly rushing for answers
And questioning

God Forgive the USA

We have a lot on our plate as Americans these days. Things faintly seem like they are on the edge of something very bad happening. The scariest thing is that we have no leadership. It seems like everyone in Washington is in handcuffs, totally incapable of offering any hope or change in a sad state of affairs around the world. I know a lot of citizens who are concerned and long for some hope of change, but I fear that things are not in our control. I can't think of one presidential candidate on either side who gives me much hope. Why does it seem like we are continually offered Bad and Worse as our options for our elected officials in Washington?

Our government is failing us because it is not our government. It is the government of corporations, organized religion, and of itself. They are the ones electing our leaders, and it is no wonder we, the people, are being led into a giant mess, the likes of which human beings on earth have never seen. It is our corporate media, special interest groups, and a nasty little group of Washington insiders who choose our candidates. And every year it seems American voters have less variety of choice, fewer rights, and less power. The citizens and members of the American community are not in charge, but we are being governed. We are being led. We are being taught, and we are learning. We are learning to be selfish, self-centered, lonely, and totally competitive with the members of our communities, and the other human beings on earth. Is it any wonder we are terrible husbands, wives, parents, children, and relatives, and, most miserably, members of the human tribe of which we are a part?

We have a dangerous criminal government. They have nuclear weapons! Do you really think there is such a thing as "nuking them?" If we nuke them, we are nuking ourselves. No matter how far away they live, across the globe in China or Iran, we are still dropping a nuclear bomb on ourselves. We all live in the same atmosphere. We breath the same air, and whatever we do to "them" we also do to ourselves. Even when we drop smaller, non-nuclear bombs on Baghdad, we are breathing that crap in at some point. How can we all be so dumb? Do we really believe that cancer rates all over the world started going up after our nuclear bombing of Japan just because we've been smoking cigarettes and drinking too much, and eating too much food? That's what our lying government has been telling us so we don't hold them accountable for the truth, which is that it is their idiotic, and criminal manipulation of our mother earth and our atmosphere that is killing us in these disgusting, and unnatural ways. Do you think the cigarettes are killing us? We breath in more smoke from smog and pollution and all sorts of nastiness straight from the chemical factories, coal burning power plants, carbon burning motors, giant cow pastures, corporate farming developments, and shipping fleets, (which transport crap products from as far away as possible so we can consume them and overpack the pockets of corporations and their paid off madmen employees and owners) than we do from smoking cigarettes. They are killing the future for coming generations, our offspring. We are letting them.

Will somebody please take the power away from these madmen in Washington? We need to bring back Federalism. States rights should be paramount. We should turn the White House into a museum of the atrocious behavior of America, from the genocide we committed on a Native People on sacred land in order to gain the right to rape it, to slavery, to the criminal military campaigns of the past few hundred years, to the present nightmare greedhead show that is being perpetrated all over the world by the "freemarket" and it's Washington supporters.

Wake up people, the free-market is enslaving the human race. Do we want a free market, or a free people? Land of the free, home of the brave, has become land of the free market and home of the greedy consumer. We need to start going to AA meetings, all of us. Americans Anonymous. My name's Andrew and I'm an American. I'm humiliated, disgusted, and ready for a change. We are addicted to raping our mother around here. It is sick and twisted, selfish, and horrific. One oil well, city, building, farm, space-station, and highway after another we are threatening the whole natural order which is a result of hundreds of thousands of years of evolution. We are being trained by brainless leaders we created out of ignorance. Our leaders are not people, they are institutions. They don't care for our well-being, they care for our overpopulation, loneliness, misery, and fear. We are better consumers under such conditions.

As a people we need to learn to want what we have, and stop letting these psychotic institutions from continually training us to want what we don't have. As citizens we need to tear down this criminal government, and bring back democracy. This land is my land, this land is your land, this land is made for you and I. This land is not made for them to consume and destroy.

Manifest This

The future of the earth is the tribe of mankind. We will unite under the teachings of all our teachers to become the angels of the earth that we were born to be. We will all know each other as brothers and sisters here on earth. A tribe called the Human Race (instead of the rat race it has become). WETAHA-IWACHUPA

We are here brothers and sisters, fathers and mothers, and all of us children. We are here. We are all in this together. What more could we want than to be taken care of by our tribe, cared for, supported, and taught how to be enlightened, how to find our calling in life? We have spent thousands of years running from the "savage way" and trying to be "civilized," but this civilization is the most savage thing of all.

Our work is to expand our consciousnesses to become free. The language of the future is a language made of many different languages, and we certainly won't call it english, si vous plais.

Tuthakasa-the language of Mindhead, the language of soul, the internet of the universe. We will start to live in the dance of infinite energetic existence, connected as we are to all matter. Greetings, Blessings, help, and energy is waiting for us in the consciousness field that we have all been taught to disconnect from. We just need to learn how to plug back in, and then, after lots of suffering, famine, and war, as the light begins to dispel darkness, and all the ignorance of thousands of years of being taught, and living in, the lie that we are separate from God, begins to be consumed in the fire of our connectedness, we will rebuild the garden of eden here on our mother the earth, while our father the sun gives her the energy she needs to take care of us, so we can take care of her and tend this beautiful Garden Earth. Our Home.

Blessings and joy. We are all the same, ever created, ever destroyed. There is nothing to fear but the delusions we have been living and creating, locked into by our own creations and thoughts. Let us set ourselves free. The time is at hand.

Maybe around the year 2000

Drunk hats on high school heads
Running around the stage.
Let me go
let me go
scream the cool cat kids
as they paint disappearing ink on the scribbled page
leave us alone to rock on polluted rivers
we're tired of these cocksucker sermons
old uncle sam delivers

Good Day

Well it's Wednesday, the day before thanksgiving, and it finally snowed a bit. It seems the fire we burned this past Sunday is beginning to deliver it's payload. Mother nature is on our side. Even when she tornados, hurricanes, or droughts us to death.

Aspen is beautiful all times of year, and even though we don't have much snow, we still have this valley to be thankful for.

I missed a post yesterday, and life is a series of ups and downs, which could never exist without each other. Now it's the day after thanksgiving, and I still haven't posted anything. But here I am. Waiting for you.

The stress of getting YJS operations up and running is quite severe, but I seem to be on an inspired mission to offer recycled clothing and ideas to the people. Why not start with a store in Aspen, where the greedheads are trying to steal this valley from real people, as they have been stealing all the best of everything from us for thousands of years?

These people think they are entitled to more than their share. There is no room for mansions in this valley. They should all be bought up by the city, subdivided, totally greened, and turned into employee housing. Cheap to rent or purchase. The rents around here need to go down, so that not everything for sale is unaffordable to the people who work here. People shouldn't be allowed to be rich enough to afford a home that could house 10 families in addition to their own. You people are welcome to come visit us, but stay in our hotels, spend your money, and then go home, don't leave your disgusting, energy sucking mansions behind to remind us how much we miss you when you're gone. We need a town ban on exclusivity and the cult of holier than thou. We have the potential for a real community here. Aspen is our home, this community of people is our tribe. These mountains are our holy land. It is time for us to put a stop to people tearing up this land with a criminal negligence right out of the Bible. I think it might have something to do with this outdated, false idea that we were created by God. But hold on a minute, we were actually created by our upbringing, the culture we are raised in, the people around us, our parents, our friends and teachers. Does anyone ever wonder why we have all been entitling ourselves to this terribly idiotic behavior?

It's because we have been trained to do so. It is time for us to do something different. That's all. Itistime!!!

two poems from GWB's first term. 2000, or 2001

1.

A most inappropriate museum exhibit
Was a painting of a blue speed limit sign
Standing beside a grass highway

2.

Shellfish carpet baggers sing empty ocean songs while I scuba dive,
Sometimes I must come up for air.
And the Wind whispers in my ear
That life is here
and their is clarity
and I don't want this picture to disappear.
All the ingredients make my soup so confused,
but I know that as they boil together
it will start to taste good.
And maybe I can stop trying to write the menu,
Accepting that hypnotized tribal berries
are there for a reason

May 2001

And I walked through the windowed turquise cup into the fizzing supplemental libation
Watching bubbles of sparkly scoliosis eating spinal columns
Rotten ribs decaying open wound cake widdled knife wise
All bark carved away leaving shiny smooth beginnings

Stones hurdled from cliff heads
Pounding bounces of rock crumbles down dribbling ocean banks
Foreheads broken sweaty soft blood clots
Whisky pore stink from pocket flask

Open sores asking for remedy sloping concrete
Earth moving and earth dreaming of some curing ointment
To wipe away the highways and sidewalks and Hoover dams and state,
Bank, trade, skyscraping, or postmodern, brick, or Victorian buildings

Just something to make all the pain disappear
Bubbles of mumbling mother earth crying for a stop to the mutilation and manipulation
What is all that oil doing down there under the skin
Beneath the skeletal crust of earth

The sort of question she would like us to ask ourselves
But we can’t ask that question
We can’t ask those questions because we might find out that all those minerals and oils
And fuels we suck rip and dig out of the earth

They might have some greater purpose
Like maybe nourishing and lubricating this great big living rock on which we reside
Well fuck that
I need that fuel and oil to keep my 4 Runner running

I need the vehicle to get around
You might say it expands my destructive capabilities
By broadening my domain
Pull, pull, pull some more of those “resources” out

Supply and demand
I might be talking through a microphone
It might amplify my voice
This is necessary

I can ting ting a ling it
It’s metallic
Maybe there’s a metal stand to
It might ting ting a ling a loo

And a chord probably runs down
Twisty around
Twisty rubber cover
Over the metal wire

Inside maybe copper
Running into some machine
Could be metal
We could ting ting a ling it

Bring some metal object down upon the metal machine
With the knobby’s, levers, and dials
We could break it all down with some metal instruments
Ting ting a ling
ting ting ting

Pound on wood
A dead tree
Bop wood
Now the metal instrument on the metal machine

Ting ting ting
Tree bop a lee
Soon to be leeching out of earth
Something to ting ting play with

What’s on the earth is not enough
Ting
Dig it out
Digging deep and playing with metals ting ting

Bring the sword of progression down on the mother
Ting ting
Suck the milk till it’s gone
Strong lip hold on the tit dry of milk

Sucking on
Ting ting
Can’t hear mothers screams cause the jackhammers are too loud
Ting

And we have stereo’s that ting ting a ling from the inside out
And we’re sucking mothers insides out

So I have to step out of the bubbly beverage
Eat a sandwich and ting ting a ling

DUMB

John A. Thain, mr. new chief exec at Merrill Lynch is going to be paid 50 million dollars a year at minimum when he starts his new job this year. He could make as much as $120 million this coming year if he reaches all his benchmarks . Can anyone say dumb? Dumb, dumb, dumb. Getting paid 50 million dollars in one year is just dumb. The guy is already worth $700 odd million. And that's just dumb. There is no need for one man to have so much money when so many people have so little. Sure the richest man in the world is worth close to 70 billion dollars at present, so I guess John Thain is relatively poor, maybe he has goals, and with his new salary he will be well on his way to getting a leg up on those in the tiny sliver of of the global pie chart who are presently richer than him. He'll get ahead in the dumbest race on earth: the richest people race; which is really just a competition for the most selfish person award.

These huge masses of wealth are doing no good when they are just tucked into people's financial portfolios. They are just invested back into big corporations generally, and sure they expand and grow, but the money is not being used for the good of humanity. Who needs that much money people? None of us, because we are all just human beings with the same basic needs and desires, and it would take more than 10 extravagant lifetimes to spend all the money this Thain already has. He's making millions a year already, from the appreciation of his already huge wealth, and it's just stupid. And a lot of these ridiculous rich folks are getting richer writing books telling us how to get so stupidly rich, but the big secret is that these people are kinda detached from reality, and we should not be striving to be rich like them, because it's just plain dumb. We don't need to be rich like that, and having more money than one could possibly know what to do with, or even possibly figure out how to spend, is just selfish and dumb. These people are functioning on a very low frequency, and we should reject it. Look at The Donald. Has anyone ever noticed how dumb that guy is? Being smart is not a requirement for attaining these stupid amounts of wealth, but selfishness, greed, and an irrational sense of self-entitlement seem to be prerequisites. Oh let's just say it people. You have to be dumb to want that much money. And America is in the business of making us all really dumb.

5 HAIKU's

6/12/04
palm tree cloud flower
inverted beneath the sun
bursting from the waves

Japan's Narita Airport
I love this sterile place
purple leather seats

8/17/03
yellow sunflower
walking alone naked down
a dusty highway

slow naked walking
watching yellow sunflowers
dance down the highway

Tired Alarm Clock
Drown You Motherfucker Drown
Toes Growing Longer

To Tokyo. 2/23/1999

Old dirty bastards flow with the beat of their jam
Decrepit yellow men smoke infinitely in the morning breeze
Fresh floral Hawaii with hints of tobacco disgusting mess
Louie Armstrong
oh big black player of the trumpet harpoon
You were my grandfather
Louisiana dusk
Mississippi steam ships coughing along
Tight white T-shirts
On and on
Slave
Wompom
Sing the sacred wind
Striped walking
Striped clapping
Striped red swing
Bright orange balls
Unripe mangoes and Aloha shirts
Yes.
Cookies
As the young lean into the swingness in the jet fuel mess

Fat Boy Belly—March 2003

Outside on Concrete
Looking up at blue sky and green trees
A few winter flowers grow meekly in space
Between concrete and development
It seems like spring
Or maybe it is always warm spring or summer heat
Out here in southern California
Reminders that it is a very OK thing
To be alone
Art is everywhere and fat boy belly
Is hanging loose over unsuspended shorts
Soft fluffy jiggling fat over swim trunks.
America
The plentiful land
Ripe with fast food:
Burritos, greasy burgers and twice fried French fries
No shortage of food here.
All you can eat Buffets
Get your money’s worth
Then go spend some money on a diet plan or diet pills
But if you’re eating diet pills
How you gonna get yo money’s worth
At the all you can eat buffet?

New Idea

As I have trouble writing something new everyday, and have just embarked on the lazy man's journal with a tape recorder, I've decided to start posting something new every day from one of my previously written journals. I've been writing in these the past 9 years. Mostly varied blatherings, poetry, and self-critical personal analysis. I'll probably stick to mostly the poetry and bigger thoughts. None of this has been previously published. I'll be making some editions as I go. Tallyhoe. I'll still be posting rants on current events, it will just be interspersed with older thought thoughts.

Always Surpassing our Expectations

OK. This is amazing. Good old George W., our old time country boy president, the proof that Yale is overrated and will graduate anyone, our fantastic man, our super fun dude, well he's just used his 6th veto to crush a measure which would have funded education, job-training, and health programs. How bout that? He sure loves our Country. The Pentagon will get 60 billion dollars more than it got last year, and we've got a surge of soldiers over there in Iraq, seems that our government cares more about them, than they do about us. But aren't we the ones who are paying them? Don't we pay our government to take care of us and to look out for our best interests?

Maybe i'm crazy. But what the hell are we doing in the Middle East? There is a great deal of oil in the Middle East, and those Arabs are making all the damn money on all that oil, and maybe we'd like a piece, but shouldn't we be investing those hundreds of billions of dollars, which we are spending over there, on eliminating our carbon addiction at home so we no longer need to spend fortunes on grubbing around on other peoples ground.

We use most of that oil, along with China now, and India coming, and those who are learning our little secret about how you can make a remarkable amount of money and get a whole lot of power by simply selling out your offspring and their offspring, and raping the land, exterminating other species, types of food, and eliminating 10's of thousands of years of what sustained our survival on earth. We are spreading this radical way of life. We are really busy teaching the world how great our system is, and we're teaching them to use just as much oil as us, and to be just as trapped as us in the addiction to consumption, an expanding economy and an expanding population to support them. There is no way out but to get off the high horse; but we've made getting up on top of the horse the whole goal of the individual social consciousness. And we just keep spreading the free market American dream around the world with a model of never-ending growth, expansion, and development. We also want to spread our hard-core consumer lifestyle to the Middle East.

Paraphrasing General Tommy Franks a few years back, the war in the Middle East is about our moral obligation to bring them KFC and apple pie. But even while we are one human species, basically all of us the same, we do tend to have very different habits and lifestyles depending on which culture we happen to be born in, once the sperm of a man combines with the egg of a woman, and a little being develops in a marvelous combination of genetics from the mother, the father, and their ancestors, and that little fellow grows and grows and then gets raised into a culture which mostly preordains many of his beliefs, superstitions, and how many wives he will get to have. And "them" might not like apple pie and KFC, and a sexualized, greedy, super fit or super fat westerner lifestyle, that includes getting constantly bombarded with various degrees of rampant advertising and brand messaging all in the name of making us want more. They might prefer to get their hand cut off if they steal.

But here in America, where we make our government ultra-rich with consumer ways that make us fat and give us cancer, our government doesn't even give us health care, yet they pay hundreds of billions of dollars to fight foreign wars, and they don't put that money into helping us get off our carbon burning addiction, and they are asking for 300 million dollars this year to find a way to have warheads in outerspace that can be remotely fired at any time to strike any target, anywhere in the world, within 2 hours. We are not prepared to take care of the soon to be huge numbers of retiring baby boomers who are on their way down the mortuary highway, and yet we have trillions of debt. Are we going to go into more debt to pay for more social programs, instead of using we the people's money for our own benefit the way it is supposed to be used?

President Bush's most recent veto is a scary scary thing. The compassionate conservative AKA savage tyrant. I've never seen a president so proud to blatantly disregard the well-being of the majority of his countries' population and the environment on which it exists. He is flagrantly and consciously, in front of us all (with his little greedhead smirk), taking a big dump on the future of our entire species.

Here' A Smart Move

Intelligence deputy to America: Rethink privacy

[From CNN.com]

WASHINGTON (AP) -- As Congress debates new rules for government eavesdropping, a top intelligence official says it is time that people in the United States change their definition of privacy.

Donald Kerr, principal deputy director of national intelligence, wants Americans to redefine privacy.

Privacy no longer can mean anonymity, says Donald Kerr, the principal deputy director of national intelligence. Instead, it should mean that government and businesses properly safeguard people's private communications and financial information.

Kerr's comments come as Congress is taking a second look at the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

Now here is a great idea. Let's let this totally dysfunctional government, which is the only first world country which does not offer its citizens universal health care, which has led us into trillions of dollars of debt to China, which has taken us into a criminal war in Iraq, which has, and is further developing a nuclear weapons program and accumulating weapons of mass destruction, let's give this government the responsibility to "safeguard" our private information, our discourse, our financial matters, our whole electronically recorded lives. Great idea. Just brilliant.

Led by Blindness

Late flight out of Cleveland
A crooked spine and angry mind
Some tall man with a wig gave me
A New Hampshire quarter
"Old Man of the Mountain"
"Live Free or Die"
On the other side of the coin it says:
"In God We Trust."
I placed the coin on an alter
Live free or die side up
And Prayed for freedom

I believe in Spinoza's God who reveals himself in the orderly harmony of what exists, not in a God who concerns himself with the fates and actions of human beings.
-- Albert Einstein, following his wife's advice in responding to Rabbi Herbert Goldstein of the International Synagogue in New York, who had sent Einstein a cablegram bluntly demanding "Do you believe in God?"

Fat City Carbon Reduction Plan

Some people drive more than a 100 miles round trip every day into our little valley up here, to keep the big houses popping up on the hill, to keep our bellies full, to keep the service industry alive here in this place where working people can barely afford to live. They drive that round trip not in remarkable carbon free space ships, but in cars and trucks that spew exhaust every moment their engines are alive, like when they sit idling in traffic every morning on their way in and every evening on their way out in our “cough, cough” congestion, so I find it entertaining that a dumb little canary just flew in this morning and told me that Snowmass has made it illegal to smoke cigarettes in public.

I myself am not a huge fan of cigarettes, although I do char my lungs with them every so often when my guard is down and a craving for death hits me. But as we pollute the planet with reckless abandon, filling the atmosphere every day with more nasty crap, turning up the temperature on ourselves and the other species here on this little planet we all float around on, we seem absolutely incapable of any form of reason or sanity. We keep doing as The Lord commanded, living longer and longer, and “prospering” more and more, pumping out little kiddies with ever increasing efficiency while taking more and more space away from other life on earth, and while we are finally acknowledging that maybe we aren’t being any too careful with our precious life support system called nature, we seem totally incapable of putting one and one together and realizing that our obsession with long life and prosperous consumption is just a touch troublesome in light of the damage we are doing to life on earth. We cannot spread “freedom” (read capitalist free market growth and economic development) around the world without also increasing carbon emissions and savage land rape. This is unavoidable at present because “economic development” and the first world lifestyle, of ever increasing life expectancies and consumption, has been built upon a foundation of fossil fuel dependence and selfish individual hoarding of money and materials.

So while our valley’s present sustainability is based on a problematic dependence on workers having to travel long carbon burning distances so that our town can run (since actually holding a job in this Disneyland is too much to ask people who buy 40 million dollar mansions the size of middle schools and are busy catching their next private jet flight out to visit their plastic surgeon and refill their Viagra prescription). And now it’s against the law to smoke cigarettes in Snowmass? Give me a break people. This is just too much. Let’s put two and two together por favor.

The best thing we can do for the earth and for our future generations on the planet is to cut our carbon emissions. What is the fastest way to cut your carbon emissions? Die. So why is it then, young Einsteins, that we are making illegal the very habits that are most likely to reduce our emissions the fastest? Maybe we should start encouraging people to smoke, especially if they want to anyway, and maybe we should thank the smokers for the second hand smoke, which might help curb our ridiculously long and savagely destructive lives just a bit.

Maybe we should start encouraging risky behavior, and make life for us just a little bit more dangerous and give some of the other species on earth a touch more of a shot. In fact, if we want to get people off the roads in this valley, as our City Council is so busy trying to do with ever increasing parking costs, which actually make people want to keep driving since it’s less expensive than being parked, maybe we should start encouraging drunk driving. A whole fleet of crazy drunk maniacs crowding our roadways would probably be effective at keeping at least sane people on the sidewalks and safely out of their cars. And while we are discussing sensible policy changes, I think we should start subdividing some of those middle schools on Red Mountain while their owners are out of town. When they return, we can simply offer them a nice 1500 foot apartment in their former 20,000 square foot mansion, and we can offer them jobs as bus drivers in our newly outfitted, drunk-driver proofed, busses. Ah, how I love Fat City; Snowmass, you can take your law and shove it!

Retardo world

Some employee of the Department of Homeland Security dresses up like a Rastafarian prisoner at a Halloween party and is put on leave because of it? Lame. What on earth are we doing here? Chertoff said: "The idea that you are going to come and impersonate someone of another ethnic group, I think, is completely unacceptable." Oh my God! Somebody dressed up like somebody else! Oh no!

America the Beautiful

The hangman’s noose seems to be making a comeback here in America. From Jena Louisiana, all the way to a professors’ door at Columbia University two days ago, this symbol of racism in the United States has been popping up in a string of copycat like occurrences recently. It’s another reminder of the lingering racism in our country. The noose put outside the black female professors door yesterday brings up both the racism and sexism that are still so prevalent in our patriarchal land.

While we dreamily pretend that Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama could win a presidential election in our fine country here, our sick culture is busy sending us reminders that we have our heads firmly stuck in the ground. There is so much work to be done to repair our social fabric, yet we wander around blindly hiding behind a shield of political correctness which keeps us uncomfortable saying anything “sensitive” while the truth is that we still live in a country where sexism and racism run rampant.

And now we are stuck in a situation where the two Democratic frontrunners are a black man and a woman, and nobody is coming out and asking how on earth a woman or a person of color is going to win a presidential election in a country where nooses show up on female professors’ doors at one of our most prestigious University’s?

Here in Aspen, we are busy building a little exclusive town, squeezing out skinny pockets with parking rates of 11 dollars per 4 hours of parking that don’t make a damn difference to rich people, but are a huge penalty on people who only make twelve dollars an hour and have to pay eleven dollars for a hamburger at the end of the day if they want to eat in the same town that they work; and then they have to spend five dollars per beer. We are squeezing the life and personality out of our town by shutting down affordable bars and restaurants and replacing them with little bastions of exclusivity, membership only clubs and expensive restaurants and bars with bouncers to make sure you look like you can fit the bill and sport the vibe of ignorant wealth and the cult of holier than thou. This is about class just as much as the nooses are about racism and all the sexual harassment and other misogynistic behavior are about sexism. It goes all the way from way up here at the top of the pyramid in Aspen, down to the very heartland of America, where sexism and racism run even more rampant than in the educated class, and it all adds up to an America with its head firmly stuck in the sand, still acting out of its old ignorances, and busily denying that “yes, this is really happening.”

Down in the river, the fall leaves are dancing in the water. Crows are circling overhead trying to warn us about greedhead developers and the implosion of the society of the self-obsessed. Looking around at a big human family at war with itself, the creatures of the sky watch their habitat disappear. The crows hop around on our rooftops. I can hear their claws whispering and clattering on the shingles.

2008- and The Great American Ostrich

I’m not sure what conservative means anymore. I look around this nation, out to Washington, at our national debt, at our lending habits, at our spending habits, and I can’t help but wonder how it can be that “conservatives” have been in charge? We haven’t conserved much in a long, long, time.

It might be nice to have a “liberal” in the White House for a change. It might be nice to maybe have the chance, just potentially, to get someone in a leadership position who might try to lead us somewhere other than further into this mess of unsustainable consumption, waste, assumed entitlement and unjustified self-importance. Not that we should expect that much from the big blue party of our government though. Blue and Red, we seem to be just one nation under a free-market God.

When the wellness of the citizenry is put behind the well being of the economy, it is a symptom of a broken system. What did Bush say the other day about the global warming problem? "We must lead the world to produce fewer greenhouse gas emissions, and we must do it in a way that does not undermine economic growth or prevent nations from delivering greater prosperity for their people." The problem is, we are not going to be able to cut greenhouse gas emissions without undermining economic growth, and the more “prosperity” we deliver, the hotter things are going to get. So Bush was basically saying, “we must do something, but we must not do anything.” Economic growth wins, but at the end of the day, human beings lose.

Does having a whole country of dissatisfied, unfulfilled, over-fed individuals, in a prison of consumption driven ideology, constantly bombarded with the message “you want more, you need more,” make having the most powerful economy in the world worthwhile? I don’t think so. I think the free-market may be failing us. The systems we create should be our slaves, not our masters. When their negative consequences become greater than their positive ones, it may be time for us to stand up and do something. We have to face the fact that it might be time for us to take the freedom from the market before it eats us alive.

To understand how the market is no longer serving us, we can look at any number of things, but we can begin with the 2008 Presidential race and the role the media is playing in the election of our next President. The modern media is just one example of a free-market phenomenon. Corporations own dominant mainstream media, chief distribution outlet of the American social consciousness. Corporations have certain rights and privileges, like human beings. We gave them these rights, and depending on who sits in the White House and who is in charge in Washington, corporations can gain or lose. Their rights are dependent on those who give them. If we can determine that these corporate institutions stand to gain or lose depending on who gets elected then we can also assume they will act to bring about the outcome that will most benefit them.

Over the years, the conservative party has been a faithful partner for these corporate interests, defending and protecting the power of corporations to grow and prosper. I think we can safely say that over the last few decades, having a Republican in the White House has been to the greatest benefit of most corporations, and has also kept the pockets of the ultra-wealthy at their most protected.

Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are the “frontrunners” for the Democratic nomination in the 2008 presidential election. It is almost as if we have been told this since before anyone started taking polls. It seems like the media simply picked these two, and have been telling us over and over again that they are the two most likely candidates for the Democratic nomination. They are the front runners. They are the ones to beat. Like good students, memorizing and regurgitating information as we’ve been taught to do, we give this information right back to the media in polls, which are then used to reinforce what they have been telling us. I remember long before any campaigning was going on, right after Obama’s famous keynote speech at the 2004 Democratic convention, he began gracing the covers of some of our mainstream magazines like Newsweek. He was already a chosen front-runner. They have been talking about a possible Hillary ticket since 2002.

The United States of America, 2007: we are bogged down in a criminal war in Iraq that we were dragged into by neo-conservatives and a mainstream media which were cheerleading us along because war keeps people tuned in to the news; we are pumping out greenhouse gasses, at higher rates each day, even while we talk about needing to fix the problem. The 2008 Presidential race is there for the Democratic taking. So how is it that the two democratic “front-runners” we’ve been given, are logical long-shots to win in 2008?

Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are great news stories, but they are not great candidates. I wish we lived in a Country where we could honestly say that a black man or a woman would have a fair chance in a Presidential election against a white man, but unfortunately, we don’t.

Senator Clinton recently said to General Petraeus, in response to his report to Congress on the situation in Iraq, "I think that the reports that you provide to us really require a willing suspension of disbelief." I think that the same words would be appropriate for our mainstream media, in response to their political reporting.

Obama or Clinton would have no problem winning in 2008 if our only voters came from college towns, educated enclaves, and large coastal cities like New York City, Los Angeles and San Francisco. But America is much bigger than that, and unfortunately our abysmal education system, surprise, surprise, serves the corporate interest by offering millions of red votes, easily coerced to the voting booths by their little communities, influenced by preachers and people like Bill O’Reilly. This population, in between sea and shining sea, has always been there to win elections for the GOP, and candidates like Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton are the one’s who really get these good old Americans out to the polls. Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are winners for the Republican, not the Democratic Party. And Democrats, by buying into this misinformation, and ignorantly, wishfully, believing that a polarizing woman, or an inexperienced black man, have a good shot at the White House in this America, are unconsciously living up to the reputation of our mascot, the donkey, or jackass.

In these remarkable political circumstances, at a time when a good democratic candidate would be an odds favorite to win in 2008, we are given two candidates, a young black man, and a woman who is, in the words of Time Magazine’s Ana Marie Cox, “…the most polarizing figure on the current political landscape." So is a willing suspension of disbelief necessary to see either of these individuals being a sensible candidate for a Democratic party who wants to win in 2008?

The wool is again uncomfortably pulled over our eyes. Where are the sociologists on CNN or FOX, telling us about the pervasive sexism and racism which still roam across our land? Have we forgotten that right now, in this new millennium, there is a powerful element in this Country still trying to take away a womans’ right to decide what to do with her body? Have we forgotten that our judicial system still punishes minorities more harshly than their white skinned brothers and sisters? Go down to one of the southern states sometime, find some white folks who talk funny, and hang out with them for a day. See how many racist or sexist jokes you hear. I promise, that “N” word is still in common usage outside of the black, hip-hop gangster community. The white folks who use that word can vote, and they are usually the ones who get their votes counted. There are a whole lot of Americans out there, right now, who would laugh if you asked them to vote for what in their mind is just another n!@@$r or b!&$h. Is that a sad thing about our country? Yes. But are we going to remedy it by pretending it’s not true?

Are we going to just sit around and let ourselves be manipulated by the mainstream media, who chooses our frontrunners because they are most likely to keep our wool-covered eyes glued to our televisions, keeping us in the depths of dream-land until November 2008, when another Republican wins because we were fooled?

This is still America. It still says “One Nation Under God” on our currency. That God is still a white, male, patriarchal God, a free-market God. When people ask that God who to vote for, between a white man, or a black man, or a woman, how will that God answer? Are we ready for another Republican President? Are we ready for more years of defending the economy at the expense of the future of the human race? Get ready people, our institutions have more power than our people, and they have the most to gain from a Republican win in 2008. Is it any wonder that things are shaping up in their favor? Now I can't say how systemic the roots of this problem are. It may be that it is as simple as the bottom line and dollar signs for the media, a race between any Republican and Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama is going to be good for ratings. Having the first woman or black man as the Democratic nominee will certainly keep the attention of the populace, thereby increasing revenue for the media companies. Smart Republicans will rejoice if Clinton or Obama gets the nomination. How the leading Democratic strategists can be so blind, or dumb, or both, I cannot imagine. Were they raised in test-tubes, totally isolated from American reality?

Obama and Clinton might look good now, but wait till they get the nomination. Remember what they did to John Kerry? Remember how our media was able to turn a decorated Vietnam War Veteran, experienced, calm, cool, collected, experienced Senator, into a flip-flopping, anti-patriot? Think about what we are going to be bombarded with when it comes to Hillary or Barack getting the nomination.

If Hillary gets the nomination, it will look something like a return to the late 90's, Travel-Gate, all the same Clinton scandals, the cheating, Hillary will be turned into a weak woman for not leaving her philandering husband, setting a bad example for both American men and women, she will be vilified as a danger to the foundations of our country, a threat to the pure, good, Christian values of our land. They will characterize her as a power-hungry bitch, it will spread from FOX news to CNN, and she will be finished, and no doubt they will find a Republican candidate who will be her perfect opposite, a hero, a pure American man, it could be anyone from Fred to Rudy, but standing next to Hillary, he will be the obvious choice to protect American values and keep America secure.

If Obama wins the nomination, the smear campaign will begin. Sure, he's married, and talks good Christian talk, but he will vilified for being too inexperienced, too unrealistic, they'll pull out all the stops and portray him as being too dangerous for our country. They will use his admissions of serious drug use (cocaine, marijuana, etc.) against him, they will tell us how he still smokes cigarettes, and while he might have a better chance than Hillary, it will still be an uphill battle in the hinterlands, and non of us will be immune from the inevitable spin.

End Times

While Tom Cruise builds his bunker in Telluride to protect himself and his family from the Alien Armageddon, we are busy here at home manifesting an End Times destiny of our own. That old saying about saying something enough times and it finally coming true gives me the shivers. Western social consciousness, rooted in the Biblical idea that God is coming, one of these days, has been a convenient basis for our misbehavior. If things are going to end when good old God comes down to judge us, who really cares if we fill the atmosphere with pollution, who cares if we heat the damn planet up to uncomfortable temperatures and make it look like a hell of concrete strip-mall, fast-food wastelands, unsuitable for life. Who cares? We have heaven up there somewhere to look forward to, don’t we? If we turn our earth into a burning inferno of hell, we can at least say to ourselves, “well, see, we told you so, the end times are here.” It is just that it will have been us playing God, ending life as we know it, not God.

We are busy turning it into reality, and is it any wonder that free-market ideology, which is all about growth and expanding consumers, imitates religion in the way it trains humans to serve its purposes? A few hundred years ago we were traveling around the world, trying to spread our faith to the heathens (while conveniently taking their resources, land, and destroying their way of life, and enslaving them), and now we are doing the same thing around the world with our “free-market.” We are trying to spread “freedom” (the freedom to be a good consumer) all over the world. We call this thriving. It is no longer OK to survive, sustaining a way of life while living in harmony with nature. Freedom is defined as an open market, where we are free to consume, and consume, and consume. No matter the bigger picture that it is not sustainable. Big business does not care, just like religion never cared.

If big business and organized religion had a vision for our future, their dream would be for us consumers to cover the earth. These institutions care nothing for our species, they care nothing for our happiness, they are dependent on our continued over-population to expand their consumer base, so that they grow. Corporations have to grow just like religions have to grow, or they whither. So some day down the road, when there is nothing but corporate farmland, housing, stores, or restaurants covering the earth, when all the wild species are extinct, and the sky is red with pollution, when there is no walk in nature option to distract us from our consumption, we will have ourselves to thank for making the lies we’ve told ourselves for thousands of years finally come true.

The End Times

The End Times

It’s a Sunday morning in Provo, Utah, and I’m trying to find breakfast, but the place is a ghost town. This phenomenon is exaggerated in Utah, but there is something common about Sundays across our United States. In Colorado you can’t buy liquor on Sundays. In parts of Utah, it can be a severe quest just to find an open restaurant. In Provo on a Sunday you feel like a member of a rebel militia just sitting inside Starbucks sipping coffee with people who are conspicuously not Mormon on the Lord’s day. The Mormons are all in Church. I pulled up to a cute blond in a little white car who said she was on her way to Church in Salt Lake City at 1:00 in the afternoon. She told me that many people spend practically their whole Sundays out here in big sterile white LDS churches scattered across the land homogenously. Then she asked if I was Mormon. I told her no, and then as she was driving off I smilingly wondered if I had said yes, would she have invited me to some wonderful place?

There are churches all over this world, some are called Temples, some are called Mosques, some are called Ashrams. They generally have in common a story they tell which explains reality. Every religion offers an answer to the ultimate question. The answer to this question is what every religious follower is buying. God created the heavens and the earth in such and such a way, and it is our job to do such and such, and when we die, such and such will happen. It’s a pretty simple formula really, and collectively as a species, humans have been pretty good customers for these religious providers over the years, and it has become second nature for us to believe.

Religious beliefs are often passed down from parents to children, and we are often drawn to the same beliefs as the tribe we surround ourselves with. Some individuals have always broken away from the beliefs passed onto them in their youth, and have rebelled toward Atheism, or chosen a different religion, generally one which surrounds them with their desired peers.

The expansion of religion in the modern world is a puzzling phenomenon, although it makes sense in light of what churches have become, and yet it doesn’t make sense at all. For the first time the world is connected in ways that have never been recorded in history. The information superhighway runs from hemisphere to hemisphere, continent to continent, and village to village. We are one world for the first time.

50 years ago in America, color trumped religious belief in affecting church group membership. Segregation was just ending, and while Institutional Religion still reached across color lines to expand its power, individual churches were still largely color specific. The black man went to a church filled with black people, the white man to the church filled with white people. It was obvious early on that religion was pretty ineffective at unifying different groups of people, even though it has always been good at getting mostly homogenous groups of people to believe the same new thing, and then just the same old thing; and other, totally different groups can believe the same dogma, but often don’t. Members of specific communities historically held similar beliefs amongst themselves in the first place. The church itself was not wholly the tribe.

Religion spreads through communities by offering salvation, feelings of connectedness, and a storybook “truth,” to members of a community. New converts, already members of their individual communities, are then helpful in attracting other members of their community to the religion. Humans crave connection. Community offers connectedness.

As things have become more and more disjointed, as communities have become more and more diverse, and therefore confused and fragmented, as tribal aspects of connectedness to one’s community have died, churches themselves, the representatives of religion, have become community centers, beacons of connectedness and homogeny; but the connectedness is limited to those who buy the story, thus becoming “believers.”

Religions still offer the answer to the question, “what does it all mean?” But the purveyor of religion, the church, has gained a new advantage in its viral spread because of the community it offers to people, as sanctuary, in this ever more confusing, discombobulated and ugly, scary, new world. Time ago, before old time community started being eroded by the invention of the boat, the automobile, airplane, television and computer, people could go about their lives in their little, close-knit communities, going to church once a week to be reminded that God loved them and that the light was brighter on the other side. But back in those days, community was built into their simple lives, where faces didn’t disappear all the time, and most of the people you knew were regular fixtures in your life until they died. That has all changed.

The stories religion tells have not changed. Truth is still the product being sold, and the truth they are telling has never made so little sense in light of the best knowledge available to reason and intellect. But in this new world of overpopulation, disjointed community, and an overworked, overtravelled, under socialized population, the human connectedness which churches provide has become an important part of what religion has for sale. Belief is the ticket to a community largely missing from the modern world. Not only do churches still offer a collective version of the truth, provided by the faith, they also offer a community of people who believe the same thing. The world of the open-minded can be lonely in comparison. And religions and their representative churches just keep pumping and growing, because like corporations and other creations of ignorance and separation they have no concern for man, only concern for themselves and their growth, and they thrive on human separation, desperation, sadness, and loneliness. They all support each other institutionally, and man pays the price in this lonely world outside the Garden.

This brings us to the topic of reason in religion. There is reason for religion, but there is little reason in religion anymore. We have discussed the reasons for the pervasiveness of religion. Thousands of years ago we believed. We may have believed that there were multiple gods, if we were Greek. We may have believed in a mother creator, if we were one of quite a few Native American Tribes. We believed, mostly. I don’t know the names of any ancient atheists, but I’m sure there were some.

Before telescopes came along to show us the infinite nature of the universe and the multiple universes, back when all we knew “out there” was the sun and sky in the day, and the moon and stars at night, God was a pretty good explanation for things. Sensibly, the God or Gods, back then, were intricately tied to the sun and moon. Afterwards, when the ball really started rolling, and the stories got more complicated as people developed more and more complex societies, moving away from a relationship with the providence of the land, the God idea became more and more human like, and grew into the religions of today. Hence, we have ended up with an angry, punishing, human-like, patriarchal creator God as the most powerful God concept of todays reality. When this God concept began emerging we didn’t know that our species and our ancestor species had been around for hundreds of thousands of years. We didn’t know that “God” created dinosaurs, alligators, and monkeys, before he created us. We didn’t know that we probably set out from Africa on our eventual colonization of the globe.

Organized religion came out of the creation stories of our ancestors. One built on another, and another, and another. Islam uses the same stories as Christianity, Christianity the same stories as Judaism and paganism, and then the additions and the rules. Islam believes Jesus was a prophet, not the son of God. To Muslims, the holy trinity equates to polytheism. Eastern religions have their differences, but are stories nonetheless. What is a prophet, or a human god, or a Buddha, but just another human being who speaks one version of truth, which resonates with many people?

Never in the history of our species, have these different versions of the truth, these creation stories, spread as far, or made as little sense, as they do now.

There was good reason for religion once, and the stories they told did actually make some sense at some point long ago. Belief meant an easier life, at little expense. Today faith may be the most dangerous temptation we face. It is tempting to latch onto a religion in these days of looting, and the ruin of our Earth. It is easier to believe that God is in charge, that He created the world for us and that there is a divine plan, than to choose reason and admit that there is insufficient evidence of God’s work in today’s world to prove His existence unless a person spells G-O-D with the letters, M-A-N. We have to face the possibility that both moments of connectedness, beauty, and spirituality, as well as destruction, discontent, and human suffering, are created in the minds of human beings.

It is possible that we are the Gods of our own reality, and have always been. What we think and create becomes truth. Like Gods, we are constantly manifesting reality. Not just concrete objects, like planes, trains, cell-phones, and computers, but also spiritual and metaphysical realities. The Bible can be truth for Christians, the Koran can be truth for Muslims, and for those of us who believe in our own theory of interconnectedness, faith in the infinite nature of the universe can be our encouragement. But all these are our inventions nonetheless, or maybe time doesnt' exist, and they therefore already existed, and we just discovered them and made them manifest. To believe in infinite possibility may not be quite as easy as choosing faith in a specific religious dogma, which fills in all the blanks that an honest assessment of reality leaves us without, but it does offer us an open-mind. It offers us a chance to live in harmony with our human family, who, through our rejection of dogma and "knowing," we are all suddenly allowed to love as brothers and sisters, no matter how much their beliefs differ from our own. Our own truths become just that, and we begin to create our own reality, separate from the chains of the past.

A rational look at the world today puts us square in the drivers seat, and it looks a lot like we deserve a ticket for reckless driving. Where is God? “He’s coming, he’s coming,” we’ve been told for thousands of years. And for thousands of years we’ve been here, dressing up God like man, and telling each other that it’s Him, not us in the driver seat. But we are driving baby. We need only look at the numerous species we are driving into extinction on a daily basis, and all the life producing earth we are sending into hibernation. If they could talk, or were conscious beings as we, they might be even more likely than us to ask “where is God?” And as the last of the species looks around for any of his fellows, out of his dying lips he might tearfully mutter, “He’s not coming.” Like dead canaries in this coal mine, which we could call a dying Garden of Eden, the extinctions may be warnings that it is time to come up out of the darkness because it is no longer safe down here.

A few years back Lee Strobel wrote a book called “The Case for Faith.” Even if you haven’t read it, you probably get a pretty good idea what it’s about from its title. A quick summary: the benefits of believing, the promise of everlasting life in Heaven, outweigh the benefits of not believing; one is assured freedom from punishment after death if one does believe, but the potential consequence of eternal damnation for not believing makes belief the best option. The book was a few hundred pages long, but left out the most negative consequence of what he was arguing for. He makes the case that we should have absolute faith in Jesus as Lord, and he argues that it makes sense, but when a faith based belief dictates the realities of life, we are automatically forced into a life of delusional reality; and it limits our abilities as a human race, to function in a rational way. If a fundamental piece of a persons’ reality is based on something that by its definition is not defendable by reason, and is therefore faith, then how can that person expect to live in a reasonable, honest, rational way or be depended on to make rational decisions? Is it any wonder that every President who has professed a belief in a religious God has been responsible for the deaths of innocent people? And hasn’t every leader who has categorically said that there is no God also been a killer, because Atheism is just as insane? How can a reasonable man say that there is no God, when he knows how small he is in the cosmos?

How can any of us say that God is or isn’t? This debate has gone on far too long and should not even be a debate anymore. Atheists say “there is no God,” and the believers retort: “There is a God,” and their idea of God is almost unfailingly the God of their chosen faith, or a faith in no faith. Does either of the groups have the information to make a rational argument that God does or does not exist? No. Are any of the specific religious stories the right one? Not likely. Is there an answer? Yes there is, and it’s called “shut up, we don’t know.”

As much as we may want to understand the totality of reality, the fact is that we are too small to ever totally comprehend the infinity from which we have emerged. There may be an ultimate intelligence which created us, a master plan for the universe, but it is time for us to allow it to be just another possibility. We can choose to have faith that we are connected to the universe, and to each other, or we can choose to believe in nothing, or we can choose to believe that we are the inventions of our own understanding, we can believe whatever we want, but we can’t call ourselves right. And we need to take the power away from people who think they are right, because they are insane.

Faith in God produces chemicals in our brains which we do not experience as non-believers, and belief is a good high. But the consequences of dogmatic beliefs in religion have gotten to the point that we really do need to check ourselves and stop dancing foolishly in church. It’s government sanctioned insanity, and it is affecting our decision making process and is therefore a terrible deterrent from reason and sanity.

This kind of believing creates ecstasy and euphoria, and people like George W. Bush. Religion is failing us because people are not as dumb as we seem, and our insane beliefs are driving us insane. Rome was insane, the United States is insane, and the religious Middle East is insane. People are insane all over the world, and we are acting like it. We don’t need spiritual leaders, we need spiritual people. The true teacher or spiritual person knows not the spiritual truth of anyone else but himself. If he teaches as if he knows the ultimate truth, he has already failed truth. Man is smaller than he has ever been because the Universe and universes that we are looking out into are bigger than they have ever been. And the farther we look out there, the farther it goes.

Are we looking for heaven in our spaceships? If we can’t get all the way out there, and we never will in these bodies, then how are we to comprehend what God is? We can experience God, and we can even call it God, or Allah, or whatever word you want, but we can no longer call ourselves reasonable if we believe in what any of those books offer as the true story of the reality of creation.

We must admit that we do not know, and never will know, even, most probably, after we die. Just like we have taken control over earth, water and wind to make electricity and power, engines which fly through the air, and wireless phones which can communicate across oceans, we can also take control over ourselves again, and start to come back to earth. It is our duty as the guardians of the planet. If we want the Garden of Eden, then we must create it here, and do our best to preserve it, till our day is done. We can trust in God if we choose, but we must begin to live by reason and sanity.

We can’t know what that white light means until we get all the way there. Considering the new information we now have at our disposal, the fact that we are a human species, that the decisions we make as nations and individuals have consequences far beyond what we used to think of as our sphere of influence. It is time for us to try what we have never tried before, at least not in our historical memory. It is time for us to open our minds. For whatever reason it seems we are the earths conscious born protectors and guardians, its angels. We have yet to find another consciousness out there like our own. We need to begin to acknowledge our power here. What we do does matter. In God We Trust is not working anymore. It is time for us to start taking responsibility for reality. We are the benefactors of our future generations, and it is truly up to us to decide what kind of future we are going to create here on earth. Do we want to create hell on earth? Or something else?

I wish there was a magic wand to wave to get us out of this mess we've created with the best of intentions. Human beings have been doing their best for a long time, and we've done good. Our progress has brought us together as a planet, and though there are negative consequences, our past, errors, glories and all, have brought us to this moment. We are trapped in our old ways of being and thinking, but we had to get to this point first. We cannot look into the past to find the answer. How we are going to fix things and avert disaster, I don't know, but until we can escape from the delusions of our past thinking and discover an open mind, there is little hope for a happy future for our species.