Discovery

Since the beginning of time there have been new discoveries by man. A few thousand years ago it may have been the discovery of an undiscovered edible berry. Or maybe the discovery of another tribe of people who you more than likely didn’t get along with because they believed in Lord Katatata and your tribe believed in the Magic Fairy. You probably fought, and you didn’t want to learn their language. Back in those days you may have discovered a few new sources of water or a few new hunting grounds in your lifetime.

Things are quite different now. It is remarkable how many discoveries there are in today’s world of 6 billion people. We get a new vacuum cleaner about every 5 minutes. We discover new drugs all the damn time, with new ailments to support them. We are still discovering new species of life here on the planet, but not as fast as we extinct them.

But there are a few discoveries over the last few hundred years which have really made a splash. In 1206, Al-Jazari designed a reciprocating piston engine. That was a big one. Down the road aways we got the industrial revolution. We found ourselves with planes, trains, and automobiles, with the extra special global warming bonus package. Have fun with electricity and burning fossil fuels, enjoy the world travel, and we’ll serve that up with your imminent demise on the side. The telephone: Big! Computers and the internet. Holy cow. Here we all are. In touch. Other than that we’ve just been fucking like crazy, and enjoying the landscaping of our overpopulation. We still starve the poor, kill people we disagree with, and act with a total disregard for reality, or with any degree of humility in relation to our place in the world.

We still act like God created the world for us. Can it be that we still haven’t discovered that it’s not true? We evolved here. We got really smart. We’ve discovered that we are made of the same stuff as the trees and the stars, and each other. We know we are one human species. We’ve gone pretty far out in space and we can’t seem to find another planet we can live on. Yet we still treat this one like a disposable piece of garbage, even though this garbage heap we live on, this beautiful mothership earth, will be the one who throws us out. It’s time for us to wake up to the discoveries which are relevant today.

Remember the canary. We used to bring a canary down into the mine with us, and if it died, we knew to get the hell out of there. What should we think in this present world where over 50 species go extinct every day to make room for more Wal-Marts and oil exploration? That’s like 50 canarys lying dead around us every day. Yet we just keep digging. We are all made up of the same matter, even as oil and Wal-Mart. We are all particles in this infinite universe. We are all connected.

We are smaller than we act, but we are bigger than we think. There is still room for spirituality, love, beauty, light, hope, truth, and justice, in a new paradigm of thought which can allow us to cease our ignorance and foolishness as a species. We can’t keep killing each other. It’s bad form. We can’t just call someone a terrorist and then think it’s OK to kill them or lock them up. We can’t just keep using this old technology which is filling the atmosphere with pollution which is really going to heat things up.

Let’s put the fire out under our ass before it kills us before we can. We know what corporations are doing in concert with governments around the world. They (and we) are paralyzing populations with dumb boxes, branding, sales, and greed; turning them (and ourselves) into perfect consumers, but terrible people. This is not OK. We should really change our ways. We’d be a lot happier if we did. If we stopped trying to be what they want us to be, “normal,” good Christian citizens, and decided to be ourselves, think how fun it would be, and what a better, freer, world we could create. We have to find that little beautiful spirit we all know we had when we were kids. That sparkly eyed dreamer, that little kid is you. We should celebrate ourselves and be free to be ourselves, and live to live great dreams, to be the caretakers of this planet which is our home. We can still dream. We can still act. There is still time. But we have to turn off the TV. We have to join forces with all those who want to see a better world, and we need to go out and convince the people who are still sleeping that they want it just as bad.

Big News

So the Doctors removed 5 polyps from GW Bush's ass, and he's safe and sound. They found the polyps during a colonoscopy. I just have one question. Why couldn't they find his head stuck up there somewhere? His head must be so far up his ass, that even a medical anal probe can't find it. The diagnosis for the country is not good.

Watered Down Logic

I like water. It keeps me alive. I like living in Aspen. It’s full of really fantastic people, and a whole lot of schmoozy wallet peacocks, all of whom are harmless in their obviousness, and are easy enough to avoid on any deep level. Hunter Thompson called them greedheads, but I think their heads are small, how else to explain how much bling they need? Generally these people have a mansion, or are building one, “another middle school on Red Mountain,” as I recently heard someone describe what they look like under construction. Or maybe they live in Starwood, which has lately been slightly out of vogue, likely because of the acceleration of a Nazi-like glee for punishing perfectly good drunk drivers, even though they are driving on empty mountain roads at 2:00 am, harmless to most everyone but themselves, or other drunk drivers. Close proximity to town-Aspen has become supremely valuable and uber-cool, and so the distant Starwood has lost the star status it held in the 80's. Nowadays the greedheads want the town. The more in-town you are, the bigger the dollar sign on your forehead.

These people are harmlessly desperate for attention, just like the rest of us, but instead of trying to garner interest by having something interesting to say (or in my case just being slightly crazy), these people just buy 200,000 dollar cars and a leer jet. Generally, much enjoyment can be gleaned from watching them, and allowing them to kiss your ass while they despise you, and mutually demand that we “do something soon.” There is really nothing to this, other than that you both understand that you cannot have too many friends in this town, even ones that totally bewilder you, and you them.

But I really wanted to talk about water, ballet, and the Aspen Music School, officially sponsored by FIJI water. The Aspen Music School is an entity that a member of this community wants to be friendly with. It is better that way. Life is easier. People like you; yet people still get murdered all day in Darfur, where FIJI water is rare as the likelihood of a man landing on the moon in 1823, where the idea of potable tap-water for the general population is a distant dream.

In fact, as someone who grew up in this funny little mountain town, I really have to say that drinking FIJI water in Aspen is as ridiculous as drinking toilet water in Aspen (I have yet to try the latter, but I regret having drank my share of the former). We have the best damn mountain drinking water I’ve ever tasted here. I love our local tap water. I think there is a guy out there who actually bottles and sells it. They probably have a taste for the stuff in the Hamptons, or some other far away place full of rich people where it makes no sense to drink water from if you don’t live there. But from a greedhead perspective it does make sense that we drink FIJI water in Aspen. It is the crème de la crème of water. It comes all the way from Fiji after all, so it must be special. It comes from especially far away, that is for sure. Here we are in Aspen with a Canary Initiative to green our ways, everybody is buying a Prius and are guilting each other with footprint lingo. Water may be the most disgusting sign of the impending doom of consumer culture. We have perfectly good water to drink from our taps, and yet we choose to buy water from the store, and we rarely if ever consider the environmental impact of our purchases or the significance of our habit.

If we want to be special in Aspen, then we should stop doing something as stupid as drinking bottled water, especially since our wonderful tap water tastes so good. Isn’t the price tag on our town big enough to give the water from our taps a golden hue? At the music tent watching Al Gore speak tomorrow, I hope I don’t see anyone drinking FIJI water. If you care about our planet, then why would you drink water which has been packaged in one-time-use bottles, made of petroleum, then transported on giant ships which burn the nastiest fuel in the world, across the sea, and into a port city where it is loaded onto trucks and moved across our roadways burning nasty exhaust all the way? Why would we drink bottled water at all? We should send all the bottled water in this country to parts of Africa and the rest of the world where the people don’t even have tap water, let alone the privilege to drink it. The word on the street is loud and clear: bottled water is not cool.

Be Vigilant

Today, White House Press Secretary Tony Snow repeatedly said we need to be "vigilant" in the face of Al-Qaeda's quest to destroy us. He was addressing Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff's comment about his "gut-feeling" that we are under increased threat of terrorist attack here in the good old USA. One of the reasons he cited was that The Terrorists seem to like the summer. I can remember the last time we were attacked, and it was nearly 6 years ago. There would be many constipated American Citizens today if, after these long, war-crime-ful years, we were steadily vigilant.

What does it mean to be vigilant? Does it mean we should report any Muslim looking person we see to the nearest authorities? Is that vigilance? I think it just means "be scared." We tend to consume more when we are afraid; and if we know one thing here in America, it's that a good American is a consuming American. If their behavior is any indication, what with this preemptive war on, our lovely Cuban torture base, and the lies that are told in Washington to keep anything close to an open, honest leadership alive, our government seems to be lacking in guts and feelings. As for me, unless you can give me something more productive to do with my "vigilance" than sitting around being scared of the increased risk of attack, I think I'd rather the leadership kept their gut-feelings to themselves. Then again, having this story in the news these last two days sure did help out the markets. The DOW reached a record high today. It seems the big corporations and investors believe in the American citizens ability to be vigilant; vigilant consumers R-US.

Realistic Optimism

The United States is an amazing country. The most powerful country which has ever existed on this strange earth, with all its strange inhabitants, is an interesting place to live. It is sometimes frustrating how odd we are, and how slow we are to catch up to the closest thing to reality that the small but expanding minds of man can understand.

There are a plethora of signposts which say “Hey Powerful People, Get Real, Change Course Now!” We’ve entered into a preemptive war. We’ve stayed in it even though there is every reason to get out, the most important one being that we should not have been there in the first place; and how can we make a wrong right by continuing to do it? In the face of logic and science, many of us still choose to believe that some God is out there pulling the strings, punishing or rewarding us.

We are a confused bunch of earthlings, busy as can be, screwing things up. We are polluting the earth as if we’re in hurry, we are crushing other species as if we are worried that they take up too much space, we are still killing each other as if we don’t believe that the rest of our species are our brothers and sisters.

Yet I have some faith left in this funny huge country of ours, just as I have faith in our species to collectively figure out that we can easily do better than we are doing, and allowing to be done.

On television today, during a speech by our little Bush of a President, CNN stated: “we are sorry to interrupt this broadcast to bring you this breaking story; [blah blah blah]… Oakland airport shuts down because an unidentified man ran down an exit ramp [how scary].” I was discouraged. When we can’t even concentrate on what our idiot of a President is saying long enough to criticize it, how are we ever going to start doing better?

I turned on CNN again this evening, and watching them tear the President’s speech apart, watching them articulate how ridiculous this war is getting, made me thank the Lord [in this case Anderson Cooper]. Here is the great thing about our [so called] democracy: we can always change our mind. The speed of our communication can only help us. Even though it takes “press pound to leave a numeric page, press 2 to talk to a psychiatrist, press 3 if you know what to do after the beep” just to leave a message with a cell phone rigged to make you use more minutes, you can still share information fast with your circle of friends and family; even more so with the internet.

Our media has the power to change the course of history. Even though they played a huge role in getting us into war in Iraq (just remember Wolf Blitzer taking us on the play by play through the “threat of WMD in Iraq,” and then through the Shock and Awe campaign), here they are now trumping up the peoples support to get out of there. I remember a few years ago when most people I talked to were at least sympathetic of us going to war in Iraq; they would get into arguments with me about it. If we were a better country we would not have gone into this illegitimate war in the beginning. A healthier media, more interested in spreading truth, than generating revenue, would have reminded us at the time that even if Iraq had WMD, and lots of them, we had no right to go to war with them. They would have told us the truth that the country was not all that bad off under Saddam. They would have told us how unwelcoming he was to terrorist groups, and how little interest he would have had in ever attacking America. We were Bushwhacked, sure, but we were also misled by a media who was blinded by the $$$ signs attached to the revenue a war could generate for them and their shareholders. But by the nature of their greed, they now have to give us what we want, more anti-war rhetoric, because we are tired of spending so much money on a losing battle, and lots of Paris Hilton, because we are stupid.

It is too bad we are going to end up leaving Iraq in such tatters. But if it does end up a terrorist strong hold, and as Bush puts it “a base out of which THEY will attack us,” who can we really blame but ourselves? We deserve it. After all, we declared war on a country which had never attacked us (bad form any way you look at it). It could be that some of our other far-less-than-innocent ignorances are contributing to our misbehavior. Learning from our mistakes could lead to recovery. It may be that the dumber we get, the closer we are to getting smart.

Digging in the carpet

They want to suck oil out of rock here in Colorado. There is a battle on, between some folks who think it's a bad idea to start a process which will leach water from a very dry state, pollute and brutalize pristine acres of land, and then there is the corporation and quite a few politicians fighting for their right to rape the land. Environmentalists believe that mining oil out of shale could require almost three times the electricity used by the state of Colorado in 2005, and consume as much water each year as two cities the size of Denver.

I picture a drug addict crawling around on the carpet trying to find traces of his substance of choice. In this case, he's an oil addict. Rep. Cannon, R-Utah, on the issue: "With people having to choose between food and putting gas in their cars, it is nothing short of cruel to stand in the way of tapping new sources of fuel." Right Chris, that makes sense. With gas at over $4.00 a gallon in my neck of the woods, I cannot help but laugh at this madness.

We have some of the cheapest gas in the civilized world here in America. What we need is not to make it more available, but less. Without our government's help, individuals can barely make a dent in the carbon emissions problem. But rather than fighting for new choices for us consumers, a new system which would not lead to our inevitable decline as a species, and the further destruction of life on earth, like the present model will, our leaders are busy fighting for our right to keep killing ourselves. And like it almost always is, the decisions being made are made in the interest of big corporations, and the ever-important "free-market economy" and not in the interest of the human species and prospering life on earth.

We must begin fighting for LIFE, and we must force our leaders to do so. Dead organisms, like religions, corporations, and even nations, should no longer be protected at the expense of human beings, animals, and ecosystems. Enough is enough.

True happiness

Sitting in the kitchen listening to New Order from speakers in all the corners of the room is perfection this afternoon. I need a shower. My feet stink, and I need a shave. The perfection of this moment is the incomplete madness of a hot afternoon moving into your dream house, and realizing that you have more stuff than most old people. Bada-DEE! The future is most certainly more squirrel work and store-aways. I don't mind. It's luck really, and just a bunch of stuff, which can always be abandoned to the universe to set the master free.

Living by the river is like a Valium drip. It's hard to make a move away from the perfect location, looking up at green mountains and emitting high pitched enthusiasm screams while doing laundry. I am my own 1950's housewife, complete with a broom and a modern kitchen. I do need to buy a microwave. I just invited a girl out on a first date tomorrow to drive to Glenwood with me to buy beanbags and a vacuum cleaner. I did it by text message, and it was worth all the laughs it gave myself, even if she declines the gesture. How could she? (The answer is if she works.)

Madness is a great pleasure in these days of boredom, social disrepair, and general homogeny. The only true madness now is to act like everybody else around and think it's healthy, or "normal" to humanity. There are a plethora of paths for the great majority of the humans on earth to travel on, and I fear that the biggest river of us is flowing in a fast stream toward something we don't even want to imagine. It's a reality we are creating, but in our own social constructions we may be reinventing the robot with our own selves. Let us never forget that we are free. Suffering the consequences of rebellion may be the result of our freedom, but that is a freedom I will choose over adherence to the laws of the people of the wrong river; and i'll choose it gladly to be free.

Southern Florida

Our arteries are clogged,
by fear, greed, misguided faith.
People can barely breath.

I can feel the pressure building in my veins,
Pulsing like its own beating heart.
I take another sip of wine
and think "fuck it,
Bring me a Heineken."
So I order one from the waitress,
and screw this $17 dollar glass of red wine.

I eat the tail of a fried shrimp,
catch a droplet of sweet and sour sauce on my forefinger,
light a cigarette,
and pop the benzo I had contemplated.

Then one night in Capt. Tony's saloon, Key West, the end of the rainbow, Florida, in the bathroom taking a leak, and staring at this poem scrawled in black marker on the yellow wall in a black frame. An unknown poet wrote:

I ate the last mango in Paris
Took the last plane out of Saigon
Took the first fast boat to China
And Jimmy,
There's still so much to be done

Key West is a bastion of life, drink, debauchery, color, and happiness,
Painted in yellow, pink, and green
At midnight, I sat down in Tony's
To contemplate and read the stories on the walls.

Captain Tony was a great man, and a man we should remember.
When he won the mayoral election in Key West in the early 80's,
The Key West Citizen said of him, in the article which announced his victory:

[Tony] Tarracino, a retired fishing captain, former bar owner, and a life as adventuresome as Harry Morgan, the sea captain from Hemingway's Key West novel, To Have and Have Not, who fished the gulf waters of the gulf stream and the Florida Straights, ran rum and played the deadly game of cuban politics in the 1930's... An Italian from New Jersey who became a bohemian Floridian, he has dabbled in Caribbean revolutions, sought political office in Key West and wrestled the ocean on a flotilla of small vessels as shrimper, salvager, diver, and captain.

I take this man in, clearly a gonzo spirit, and sit in this quietest of bars, just off Duval street, drinking a Wild Turkey and a Red Stripe, and ask myself about Alcohol.
Friend or Foe? I really don't know.
Yet I know that I am happy, carrying a miracle cell phone, resurrected from the dread depths of jacuzzi death, and I just got kicked out of my home, by way of Fed-Ex from Hawaii. By what sort of witchcraft it reached me in Key West, I can't even imagine.
So I go on drinking this whiskey for Hunter; and let me tell you that the turkey is not for the faint of heart. It's too gonzo strong for me, but I drink it anyway, even though it tastes like a holocaust.

My back aches, but there is always more pain round the corner, so I don't mind; happiness will always arrive shortly. So even though my landlord wants me to go to rehab, as permission to her broad, and luxurious domains, I don't feel guilt, nor worry, nor anger; for I will smoke cigarettes tonight, as a testament to my finite nature, and though I plan to quit, I do not worry. All good things in all good times. I light a Marlborough, as my grandma would, and smile, because I'd rather live in a trailer than not be myself.

A Haiku:
Soft Plumeria
Tropical breath on Shoulders
While the flowers wilt

Then some discombobulated rambling:

Sitting in a hot springs, balls melting off. The future squirms in agony, dying in the testicle cesspool. A silent scream, not even felt in the hot water we're in.

The world turns

Slipped gently into a jacuzzi last night, took a sip of Patron on the rocks, enjoyed the zing, then felt my cell phone in my shorts pocket, swaying in the water like some plastic anemone, rubbing up my leg. There goes the blackberry I thought, as I briefly swelled in anger at myself. Then I just made the decision to not let it bother me. I smiled, and waved it off, pulled that beautiful wet phone apart, and let it sit in the breeze to dry, while i went back to the pool and jacuzzi and cocktails. No problem. I prayed to the phone gods, blessed the phone, and bowed before it on my knees. I warmed the palms of my hands in a healing ceremony over the phones wet parts. I can only hope that when i put it back together and power it up sometime tomorrow, after I hit it a few times with the blowdryer today, it works. We'll see. But it's only a phone, and there were only numbers in it.

All is well. I have to go pick up a rental car. We should really start an eco-rental car company. What do you think? I say we go for it.

Happy days to you from Miami. This afternoon, Key-West Bound. Open road and the southern tip of the USA. Being down here is so reassuring. More people speak spanish than English it seems, although, many of them speak both. This is the future I hope. I see a bilingual future for this country. Hey Latinos out there, we need your influence. Los Americanos Necessitan la vida y el Corazon de la cultura Latin!! Why is white America so freaking miserable at having a good time? Is it our puritan roots? We need to stop fighting for "the old American way," and start fighting for a future where we don't have giant guilt sticks stuck up our boring, fat, lazy, self-riotious asses. We have a lot to learn from the folks below the border, maybe we should be inviting them in, instead of building fences to keep them out.

working life and system justification theory at work

Working in the so-called "real-world" is an interesting affair. I think i'd rather be a starving artist. Then again, I'm hardly starving, so maybe just an artist. But how? I can't even draw letters.

Ah, but could I just become an eccentric? Or wait. Maybe I already am an eccentric, and trying to pretend to be some normal guy is really tiring me out, and probably making me even weirder than I really am.

But what is weird anyway? Does it just mean you don't conform? If you dress funny, or if you talk funny, or if you just don't quite conform to the boring, bland, totally whipped, strip-mall, celebrity obsessed persona, which seems to represent the present American identity. Does that make you weird? I wish more people would decide that to conform to that socially constructed identity is totally insane. With 6 billion little people like us out there, all the same in our differences, we can't expect to agree with everybody. But maybe if we were more accepting of diversity, not just in color or culture, but in indiviual personality, we could find ourselves getting along with just about everybody. Besides, if we all just practiced being utterly ourself, maybe the people we truly want in our life would materialize around us.

I think people today are just generally having a hard time. I mean our idols and heroes, in Hollywood, on stages and super-domes, in St. Moritz, in penthouses, mansions, and leer jets, are living lives so detached from the normal existence of most Americans, that we can't possibly feel content in our "normal" lives and jobs. I'm one of the lucky one's, I live in Aspen, an isolated paradise in the middle of a vast American jungle of Wal-marts, Star-bucks, Mcdonalds, massive developements, and human beings living on top of each other like they never have before in history. Our monkey ancestors would be sorely disappointed in us.

We have a few things going against us as a human species. We shouldn't have very high expectations of each other. Especially Americans; only considering the amount of medications we are on to "make us happier," it would seem that we are the most miserable bunch of people in the world. We are the richest country in the world, we are the most powerful country in the world, and yet our education is dismal, we have a larger number of our population incarcerated than in any other country, civilized or uncivilized, and we have masses of poor (when compared with our role-models in the media), a punished consumer class, who are subjugated, manipulated, and worked to a breaking point, for the benefit of a disgustingly extravagant, wealthy few. Almost sounds like the circumstances that would cause a revolution.

In a world where you practically have to have a billion dollars (and do we really ever stop to think about how much money that is?) to be one of the top 500 richest people on earth, you are most definitely comparatively poor if you make under $100,000 dollars a year. How can you compete, or feel good about yourself when our whole society seems to celebrate ridiculous wealth, fame, and instant fortune. How do you feel in your cubicle? Worthy? On your way to being ultra-rich? Or just reading people magazine?

But what is the point of having 1 billion dollars anyway? I don't care what The Donald says, I think having that much money is ridiculous. If you are worth even 100 million dollars, and you have your portfolio conservatively invested, and are making a 10% return on your money, (you should get a new investment adviser if you aren't making 10%), that means your salary is 10 million dollars a year. You are making 10 million dollars a year. How can people possibly legitimate needing more than 10 million dollars a year in spending money? And if there really is no point in being a billionaire (at a one billion net-worth, again conservatively invested, you are making 100 million dollars a year), then why are we all so obsessed with getting there?

Think about that workers of the world. And from childhood, we are taught not to care, we are taught that we can have that wealth if we work hard, and pay our dues. Well that is a big lie. Why are we even taught to want that much wealth? The American Dream is an exception not the rule. We should keep in mind that generally, if you are born poor you will die poor, and if you are born rich, you will die rich. If the present model wasn't destroying the environment, exterminating hundreds of species per year, and making the world a less safe place for my future children, I might just shut up, and be the rich guy I was born to be, but things are too funky for that. Change needs to happen.

When I worked for one of the many corporate machines I felt that in some ways it was like working in an office of zombies, it was like everyone had forgotten how, or maybe never been taught, to think outside the box. Maybe it is because they have been so conditioned not to experience their personal power as independently thinking human beings. All that power has been taken away,because there is someone above them, and someone above them, and our whole institution, even the General Manager, who is smart and has an open mind, and knows a good idea when he sees one, has somebody above him, who has somebody above him, and you keep going and going; and finally you get to a corporate machine. And that machine doesn't have a brain or a heart. And that machine, owned by the shareholders, is eating our souls, helping destroy our society, and disabling us as human beings.

We have either forgotten, or never been taught, that to do is to do, and the people at the bottom have the power, because we are the one's who choose to do, or not to do. Does it ever feel like "they" need a monkey to do the job they want done? The problem is, i'm not some trained monkey; and they need a trained monkey for the job they want me to do. In fact, I don't think a monkey would do the job either. The monkey would probably run back to the forest to forage for bananas.

They have told me to "pay my dues," "take the licks." They have tried to mold me down. It's just that old line, telling us to do the things we don't want to do, so that we can get where we want to go. What a crock.

The secret is this: If you aren't doing what you want to do, you are probably not moving in the direction that will make you a happy content human being. We have to create the reality we desire, and I for one, want a different reality than the one I see when I turn on the tv, or go out into the jungle of urban sprawl and soul-less, corporate powered suburbia. I think we can do better.

Highlands Closing Party

The Highlands Closing party was a beautiful adventure in ski and happiness. The mountain was alive with the Old Aspen Spirit. Smiles and neon danced and the blood of this little mountain town ran thick through the one-pieces, costumes, and general merriment. It felt like the old days, and I had to ask myself: why the hell don't we dress like this every day? DJ Dylan styled some fine tunes, and we danced. More 80's classics would have really taken it to another level, but we'll just have to wait for next year; maybe we can get New Order to come and play. We'll have more pictures up soon at yellowjumpsuits.com.

I hope these fine Argentinian ladies never leave our valley! Que Guapas.

Meet Castor, our Business Operations Manager

Look at these two! What a team.

We are simply here to make some general repairs on reality

An All-Star Team on the way up the Bowl

I'm speechless

A Rest-Stop at the top of our Aspen World

There was more love at this event than at any Aspen shin-dig i've attended since 1986

Let's keep the love flowing in the Valley

This was next to our little vintage ski-wear outfitting booth

Big thanks to the Ski-Co folks at Highlands who welcomed us with open arms.

With folks like these here, why would we live anywhere else?

Spirit awards go to both these gents

A Powerful Team

the little dog was the cutest thing on the mountain

Speechless again

Richards denies snorting dad's ashes

Check Out This Group of Our Membership Across the Seas

And A Few Appear Here!!

I'm at the desk in Aspen. Sitting here, listening to bird songs and dub reggae. Not a bad moment. This has been one of the greatest weekends of my life. Pg. 160, the cowbird. Page 162, Scarlett Taninger. Pg. 163, Cardinal. Pg. 165, Rose Breasted Grosby. Pg. 163, Blue Grosby. Indigo Bunty.

I'm considering my life. Feeling fantastic, enhanced by a buzz. Skied all day. Party on the back side apres ski, then got stoked on huge wet sunset back-side-Aspen tow-in laps, hosted by Mr. Maui Elston himself driving the Snowmobile. Nice. Skied with Mr. Justin, Dan the Man, and Kurk the Fantastic. Christian blew my mind with a speed take-off yank that nearly broke me. I'll never connect and commit to a tow-rope unless I know for sure that the snowmobile driver knows i'm there.

173, March Sparrow. Pg. 174 Pine Woods Sparrow. Pg. 175, Tree Sparrow.

Life is good in Aspen, Colorado. There is a big secret lying here, and while I don't want to go giving it away, I just have to say, life is so good living here. I'll tell you the truth. I work pretty hard (although i've spent lots of time not working hard), in a uniform, and mostly keep a smile on my face. I try to skin up a mountain when work is over now that it's spring and it stays light late.

I ski every damn moment I can, whether it's my lunch break, or a Saturday or Sunday, when I just can't miss. I have to ski. It is like heroin. (I've never done heroin, but I really like skiing.) Pg. 179, McCallans, Long Sparrow.

Life is good. Choose a good one, and choose to be happy. I swear to god it works for me. I drink like a fish in my free-time, I party hard, and ski hard, and love hard, and smile as much as possible, and talk about happy things as much as I can; and it works. Let me recommend it highly.

Life is so good, skiing, being outside, being with the best people in the world, living in one of the best towns in the world.

I blow it sometimes, and get stressed out, do something dumb, or hard, or painful, and i'll forget how lucky I am, for a lonely second; but when I remember how good it is, how much I have to be grateful for, I just can't help but smile again; and tell somebody next to me that we are the luckiest people in the world.

Mr. Gore on Top of His Game

"Promise yourself to be so strong that nothing can disturb your peace of mind. To talk health, happiness, and prosperity to every person you meet. To make all your friends feel that there is something special in them. To look at the sunny side of everything and make your Optimism come true. To think only of the best, to work only for the best, to be the best, and expect only the best. To be just as enthusiastic about the success of others as you are about your own. To forget the mistakes of the past and press on to the greater achievements of the future. To wear a cheerful countenance at all times and give every living creature a smile. To give so much to the improvement of yourself that you have no time to criticize others. To be too large for worry, too noble for anger, too strong for fear, and too happy to permit the presence of trouble."

This was written by Christian D. Larson (I have no idea who he is, but what a little nugget.) My boss gave it to me.

Be Well.

A

The Hill

Give me a break Hillary Clinton, you rubber, meaningless, undefined blob of politicianness. You decline to say whether Homosexuality is Immoral? You tell people that it is for others to decide. Who? Deciders like George W. Bush? How sickening.

Hillary Clinton is no leader. A leader, one would hope, is capable of having an opinion. George W. has opinions, he's a leader all right, it's just that he has this overwhelming tendency to lead in the wrong direction. But just because he is a dumb leader, doesn't mean he's not a leader. He would tell you that homosexuality is immoral, and he'd be wrong. He would also probably defend himself by telling you about what God thinks. Never a good sign. Can't we start thinking for ourselves, instead of being led by what we think a made up God thinks, and by politicians who won't even tell us what they think? Jesus (where are you now)!!??

Homosexuality exists in every animal species. If it is immoral then The Creator is "immoral." The Hill is just amorphous. A sorry blob of meaninglessness, wasting the people's time. Come on people, take back your power, demand to know what your "leaders" actually think! If they talk about what they think God thinks, realize that you are in trouble. Run away.

Get Positive

Can we improve our lives by changing our perspective and learning new ways of thinking and seeing the world? I think the evidence suggests we can.


Can we begin to create a different reality by understanding the limitations of the present moment? Can we begin to reinvent the modern world? Are we victims of our own thinking? Yes.

We are living in the future. We have new information before us. We've suddenly got these wacky movies like "The Secret" showing on Oprah. Movies that question our accepted ways of seeing, movies like "What the Bleep Do We Know," are available at the nearest video store. What happens if we start to fill our minds with the best information out there? I think it can make us feel happier and healthier.

I like the fact that quantum physics tells us we are all connected. It breaks us down even deeper than the truth that we are one human race, existing on a tiny planet in one universe in a whole lot of space. This is the apex of human intelligence. We have the information, but at least speaking for myself, it is difficult to conceptualize it and make it mean anything concrete. Our culture is still pretty stuck in old modes of thinking which don't necessarily fit with the new information available to us. As a society we often unconsciously restrict our potential by acting and responding to life with habituated ways of thinking that are not in our best interest.

One form of new psychology out there sheds some light on why it seems so difficult for us to see and understand our shortcomings. System Justification Theory first emerged in 1994, and was developed by John Jost and Mahzarin Banaji. Jost is a professor of psychology at NYU, Banaji is a professor of psychology at Harvard. System Justification Theory explains why we are psychologically programmed to protect and defend the modern reality even though it is damaging, to us as human beings, to our planet, and to our emotional, physical, spiritual, and actual resources. I think it is possible that if we become conscious of our programming then we can begin to reprogram our minds. The following is an excerpt from John Jost's NYU faculty website at www.psych.nyu.edu/jost/:

There are two major goals of system justification theory, and much of my experimental and survey research has addressed one or both of these goals. The first goal is to understand how and why people provide cognitive and ideological support for the status quo, even when their support appears to conflict with personal and group interests. The second is to analyze the social and psychological consequences of supporting the status quo, especially for members of disadvantaged groups.

System justification theory addresses the holding of attitudes that are often contrary to one's own self-interest and therefore contrary to what one would expect on the basis of theories of self-enhancement or rational self-interest. Thus, our research focuses on counter-intuitive outcomes, such as the internalization of unfavorable stereotypes about one's own group, nonconscious biases that perpetuate inequality, attitudinal ambivalence directed at fellow ingroup members who challenge the system, opposition to equality among members of disadvantaged groups, rationalization of anticipated social and political outcomes, and tendencies among members of powerless groups to subjectively enhance the legitimacy of their powerlessness and, in some cases, to show greater support for the system than do members of powerful groups.

Current research interests include the study of complementary stereotypes in which members of high and low status groups are seen as possessing distinct sets of advantages and disadvantages. Gender stereotypes, which stress that women are communal but not agentic, whereas men are agentic but not communal, represent one important example of complementary stereotypes that may serve to preserve support for the status quo. Other examples that we have explored include "poor but happy," "rich but miserable," "poor but honest," and "rich but dishonest" stereotypes.

Finally, I am interested in the underlying cognitive and motivational differences between liberals and conservatives. In other words, my collaborators and I are exploring the psychological basis of political ideology. In particular, we are carrying out studies to determine whether certain epistemic and existential variables (such as uncertainty avoidance, need for cognitive closure, and death anxiety) are associated more with conservative or right-wing political orientations than with other political orientations. One focus is on whether certain situational factors (such as those pertaining to stability and threat) are capable of bringing about change in the endorsement of political attitudes.

I think understanding where we are now can help us imagine our way out of it.

If we can start identifying primarily as a human race, which could really do a better job functioning as a species, dependent on each other for health, happiness, and survival, we might be able to start materializing these possibilities.

Either way, check out "What the Bleep Do We Know," if you haven't already seen it.

Ipod Nightmares and the Corporate Machine

I'm only 27 years old, but I can remember the good old days, when the customer was always right. I keep being reminded that in the world of today, that's just not true anymore. I keep coming into contact with these corporations, and despite their human representatives, I am continually reminded, by these "corporate interactions," that I am not a man. I am a dollar.

I own an ipod and a PC, and it's the ipod I have to thank for getting me out to see the Apple machine at work. I was in New York a few days and have now visited a couple of the legendary Apple Stores, the mid-town store, which is a big fancy glass square, with underground shopping, bright white lit, hip 24-hours a day, and the down-town store, in center of cool SOHO, at 103 Spring.

What a crock this company is. They have suavely branded themselves so successfully, as the hip, indy, thing to be, that they have an army of zombies out there, who you can spot by our uniforms, often dressed in thrift/retro t-shirts, colorful shoes, overcoats, and scarves, with little white earbuds, we all think we are SO anti-establishment, so independant, and so in-the-know. We have "I"-pods, little symbols branded cool. White. And i'm just another Zombie, trudging the streets of New York trying to find the Apple store so I can get my damn ipod replaced because the headphone jack just stopped working one day, about 6 months into my new, utterly over expensive (it's gotten a bit cheaper since I bought it, but still $300 for something smaller than your hand...) 60 gig gadget. The ipod, in fact most Apple stuff, is big money gear, no matter how indy you think you are. I wonder how many folks have an ipod in Darfur? Somehow I don't think that's Apple's target demographic.

Now don't get me wrong, I think the ipod is awesome. I can carry around over 6000 songs in my pocket. It has made one of my life-long dreams ( of walking around with a soundtrack for my life) come true. I'm lucky enough to be able to afford one. This ipod is actually my second. So I guess I'm a loyal customer. I just want to talk about the deplorable fact that such a supposedly "cool" company treats it's customers (in this case me) not like a human being, but rather like another soulless dollar, falling, like an automaton, into their greedy little fingers. It made me feel sick. And it took my time, 4 days in New York City to get my ipod replaced, even while it was still under warranty. First the big mid-town store gave me the solid shaft. No appointments. I mean, I don't know how they can call their little support centers "genius bars," because all the lines of people with all their faulty equipment seem to indicate that Apple is the only genius in the room. I mean what makes us such faithful customers? I think it's that we are blinded by this genius brand. We think that Apple=Cool.

But they aren't cool at all. They are a corporate monster. They make products that break, and then you go into their cool ass stores and it's almost impossible to get out without buying something more. It makes sense, in this sick business way. Make an imperfect product that people think is perfect, and have your repair center (genius bar) inside your store, that way you keep the people who are most likely to buy from you (because they've bought from you before) right where you want them (in your store where they are most likely to buy from you again). That is Genius. I can almost imagine them brainstorming it out in a meeting at corporate headquarters. It does make "business sense." But it doesn't make people sense.

Now it could just be a coincidence that they got me into their stores 3 times, in as many days, just because my ipod headphone jack stopped working one day. I don't know, it could be. But when it comes to business there are so rarely coincidences. Most decisions are made with the bottom line in mind. What is the bottom line? We all know this now. It's not the well-being of humanity, or even the individual, or even the sales clerk, no. The bottom line is the profitability of the machine. It's not about OUR wellness. It's about "corporate wellness."

All I know is that once I made my appointment, made my way downtown to the trendy SOHO Apple center, got in line, checked in, got seated on a bench with 20 other waiting geniuses, waited 10 minutes to get in front of an Apple "genius," talked to this character and listened to him tell me why the best bet for me getting my supposedly under warranty ipod replaced was to pay 60 something dollars, and I'd get a possibly used ipod replacement with an extended warranty. hmm. I thought they would have just checked to see if my less-than-year old ipod really was broken, not by my own hand, and then they would give me a new one. Not quite. Not in the world of the Geniuses I guess. Nope. Instead, he just kept asking me questions, told me that the way it worked was that even though it's under warranty for 1 year, after 6 months it starts costing me for replacements... huh, then I'm just like "OK, no big deal, I'll do the 60 dollar thing, just give me my replacement." Then we two geniuses sat across from each other for 10 more minutes, while mr. Apple typed away I don't know what all into the computer, and then he told me there were no replacement ipods.

NO REPLACEMENT IPODS!! So I had made an appointment online, told them online the day before that I needed a replacement ipod, then next day went all the way down there, stood in line, did my thing, and then they tell me they don't have any ipods!! And listen folks! "I'm in the Apple store!!," down the stairs from the genius bar there is a display with every ipod known to man, people are buying them one after another. There are ipods in this building and the genius behind the bar knows it. We look at each other. I give him my George Bush smirk. He laughs uncomfortably, anticipating my next words, and says "I know, I know, we do have ipods here, but they are a different inventory... I can't give you a new ipod, even though we have bundles." Can they send me my new (used) replacement ipod? No. I need to go back to the store to pick it up. hmm. Strange. I must return to the store. Genius.

So I get the call a day later that my replacement ipod is in, I can come pick it up, pay a thirty dollar replacement fee, (60 dollars if I want another year of warranty), and aren't I lucky. So I go. I want a working ipod, and i'm willing to pay for it. The sad thing is that if they told me I had to buy a new one, I probably would have. (I am Zombie.) So I go, and I've told this story a couple times by this point, trying to process this scary information, and bouncing it off my friends and fellows, and I just go ahead and get in line with the other geniuses. I Wait my turn to sign in, they tell me to sit down, wait and I will be called in the order I was received. I finally get in front of a person. We go through the process. Keyboard keys are punched, numbers into the system, get my email (again), telephone (again), making sure they can find me should they ever run out of customers and need to remind me how cool they are and how much I need them. I tell the guy how these weird business practices seem kinda non-sensish to me. I tell this man the story. I've been here 3 times, I bought this ipod with the understanding that there was no "replacement" fee. I tell him that I thought 1 year warranty meant 1 year warranty, not "6 months then the fees start." I tell him my story. And here's this Apple trained guy, a worker, a cog in the Apple Machine, and what i'm saying makes sense to him. I got out my debit card to pay my fee, and with a smile he told me: "don't worry about it." He took his human initiative and waived the fee.

I couldn't believe it. I was actually right in my crazy thinking, and this guy actually heard me and agreed. Here we were, two human beings, and even though he worked for the machine, he still saw the reality of the wacky bottom line. He actually looked at me as a person, and not as a dollar sign. We were rebels then, and the scariest thing is that this actual customer service experience felt foreign to me. But man did it ever feel nice. REAL genius happened that moment at the genius bar. One human being looking out for the well-being of another. When the corporation beat me down, there was a man there to pick me up. So there is hope. "Every culture has the seeds of its destruction and the seeds of its redemtion." (MH. Scott, 1991)

Feeling happy, after my free replacement ipod, a gift from the real genius, having saved $ 60.00 dollars that would have been in Apple's fat pocket, I was feeling generous. I walked over to the goods department and bought a new pair of headphones and a new computer cable. Total: $75.00. I am zombie.

Back to Ward

If you don't know the story, (Bill O'Reilly seems to have mostly forgotten about this little former passion of his), the University of Colorado at Boulder is still trying to fire one of their long standing, and most prolific professors, Ward Churchill. The big attention started, from the Governor of Colorado calling for his dismissal, to the main-stream media picking up the story and painting him as this terrorist loving, maniac communist, cop-killing, threat to the social order, because of a small article he wrote (not in a scholarly publication, nor speaking for the University, simply giving his opinion), in which he likened the members of the corporate elite (who do help pay for a good deal of our governments actions), who died in the 9/11 attacks, to "little Eichmann's."

Eichmann was a Nazi. He wasn't a soldier, he didn't work at a concentration camp, he probably never saw anyone die. He arranged train schedules. He was a cog in the terrible and hideous process of committing genocide. He was tried for War Crimes, and rightly, found guilty. Ward was making a point. The people who work for the companies in the World Trade Center, many of their jobs do, somewhere down the line, cause someone, somewhere, some distress. LITTLE would be the key word in Ward's statement about the likeness between Eichmann and participants in a capitalist system which does do a lot of damage around the world.

All of us who live in modern society, who are the benificiaries of the present social order, are on some level committing genocides, at least directly against a number of species, (please see any number of reports on Global Warming, pollution, habitat destruction, etc.). So let's just give him the benefit of the doubt to begin with, and assume that Ward was trying to provide a context for deeper thought. I don't have to agree with him, but I can at least admit that the article was well thought out, and the comment taken out of context, and blown out of proportion by an obsessive, uptight media. Ward Churchill's ideas fundamentally threaten the present American image of itself, they question our legitimacy, they force us to look at ourselves from a different perspective, and the system under threat does draw strong reactions.

Many academics around the country are speaking out against Ward's dismissal, arguing that it is an attack on academic freedom and intellectual thought. As a published scholarly author, free thinker, tenured professor, and activist, Ward has a lot of people who support him. I just want to join the ranks and offer my personal experience as his student to the argument against his dismissal.

I want to come to the defense of my former professor. He was probably the most influential teacher of my college career. He helped open my mind and wrap myself around some far out ideas. Professors like Ward Churchill helped change the way I think.

Here's a guy (me) with a few things going against his intellectual career. I was a pretty conservative kinda guy once, (certainly not the type who'd be defending Ward Churchill, or admiring of him, or both.) There were a few years when I used to sleep with a gun under my pillow. I was basically a republican with liberal tendencies; I guess I was a closet liberal. According to at least one interesting study, there are actual differences in some of the common habits of the types of people who end up liberals or conservatives. Like a good liberal, I'd always liked having a lot of colors around. I was always a touch messy (I still can't keep a room neat), I had always been curious about other cultures. I had always identified more with the global community than with my core family, religious, or national identity. I took solace in a multitude of different spiritual belief systems. I always reading some out there book about some distant, foreign religion. I danced a lot, often alone. I was actually a pretty fair mix between my mother, a hippie type, and my grandparents, historically conservative, who I went back and forth between (continent to continent) my first few years of life, finally settling with the grandparents in Colorado till they sent me to boarding school when I was 12. It was a lot like going back and forth between red states and blue states. A fair mix I may have been, but a conflicted one. It's hard to be a conservative (generally this means believing in the defense of the status quo) and also believe that all human beings are equal, and deserve to be taken care of.

Anyways, my mother was this far out lady, who's had her share of gurus and traveled the world seeking the spiritual walk. My grandparents, on the other hand: Houstonians, Oil on one side, and a Scotch Presbeterian Doctor on the other. Good, Loyal, Republicans. The only fly in the mix was that my grandma turned feminist, and divorced my granddad after 40 years of marriage when I was twelve. But somehow I came out of it rooting for the underdog. The two of them oppressed each other so much over the years, I can't really say which of them wore the pants. Maybe they both thought they did.

The point is that I was what you might call unconsciously conflicted in a number of ways for a number of years. I didn't really know what I believed, but I always believed strongly and outspokenly, and in retrospect, I can see that most of my beliefs were conflicting. I believed I was connected to the world, but I also believed WE were better than everyone else.
When I walked into Ward's classroom the first time, in the fall of 2002, I had just been realizing
and enjoying a new liberal potentiality which I had only first discovered having landed comfortably in the liberal arts in 1999. I guess it might have started earlier; maybe in my first class at the University of Colorado at Boulder: Political Science 1101, Summer, 1998, fresh before my senior year of high school. My teacher was an out-spoken Communist and prairie dog advocate who regularly put herself in the line of fire to get hunters to stop shooting her cute little friends. I think she got through to me somehow, but I didn't quite understand what it meant yet.

I still wanted to believe that all the Republicans around (my whole family except for mom) actually knew what they were talking about. To interject here! I just want to give a shout out to Republicans, who are dedicated believers, and understandably so. I think it was Ward who told the story about an Indian who once said that Reagan's Trickle Down Economics felt eerily like getting pissed on; but it does feel good to pee.

I'm just going to reluctantly and humbly admit that when I started college in 1999, I was an ardent Clinton criticizer and I voted for Bush. I used to blab away about why Clinton wouldn't have been elected if it wasn't for his Chinese connections, and blah blah blah. I couldn't stand Al Gore, I thought he was boring, and I was a gun owner type. I thought the world was a dangerous place. When 9/11 happened I was damn pissed off, I thought it was all "their" fault, and I was glad that we had a "decider" like Bush as President who would do something about "those people in the Middle East." Today I have a hard time believing that I ever believed those things, it's like looking in a mirror and not recognizing the person you were.

American Studies, Women's Studies, Sociology, and Churchill style Native American Studies really helped adjust my perspectives and beliefs. Thinking about how much people pay to go to retreats to have their personality adjusted, sometimes 50,000 dollars for a month, makes me laugh at how cheap an in-state liberal arts education is in terms of it's life-changing potential. To think I could have ended up in Economics for my education, sitting in an office today making too much money to make too much money for some corporation instead of sitting here contemplating the meaning of life. I owe that change to professors like Ward Churchill, who choose to go to work day after day, not getting paid what they probably deserve, saying the same thing over and over again, year after year, just to get through to a dumb kid like me every once in awhile.

Bill O'Reilly once said about Ward Churchill, in a phone conversation with Governor Owens, that "...he's making 100,000 dollars, or close to it... Of taxpayer money," as if it were an outrage that he was making so much money... How much does Bill O'Reilly make to talk his nonsense, (much of which is most certainly as much nonsense as the most non-sense that Ward has ever spoken)? How much do CEO's get paid to work to better-less the world than Ward works in his sleep to try and better it? I can't put a price on the value of the work that Ward does to open closed minds like mine. It's about education, about big, heavy, in your face ideas, which don't fit with the way we are trained to see reality, which often make us feel sick, uncomfortable, and guilty; they make us feel like there is something wrong with the picture, they make us question why we are not doing something to stop the train.

Ward always taught us as students, first and foremost, that if we want to talk, we better be ready to substantiate our argument. That guy had the most ridiculous foot-notes in his books. He backed up his talk. And if you didn't want him to make you look like a damn fool in front of the rest of the class (he never hesitated to make this mostly white, mostly well-off, bunch of us uncomfortable), you learned real quickly to know what you were trying to say, and you had better be ready to defend it against the strongest, fastest, most blunt, intimidating, fact-filled, straight talk, logic, I've ever seen. The guy does a good job. There is no greater service to the minds of all of us, than to be expanded. The Ward Churchill's of the world are invaluable. We do not need to agree with everything they say, but we have the great opportunity to let them inspire us to at least think about what they are saying.

It took some true believers like Ward Churchill to help me figure out who I am, and what I believe. I just want to paint him in that true light right now. He is a teacher. And he is the best damn teacher the University of Colorado has. Bill O'Reilly should be spanked for how much trash he has talked about Ward and the Governor of Colorado should be forced to wear an "I'll promise to try and learn something new today" hat for a year. Ward has won teaching award after teaching award, and he is a student favorite. I took three of his classes and used to go talk to him in his office hours because it made my brain expand. He made me angry, he inspired me to react, he just made me think. I always went looking for that guy, even though he is the gruffest, tuffest, often grumpiest old intimidating guy I know. That's just Ward.

Would you expect a guy who everyday writes, lectures, and thinks about the inequality and wrongdoing his government has perpetrated, and perpetrates, at home and abroad, economically, militarily, and environmentally, to have a rosy character? Would you expect him not to try as hard as possible to identify with a non Patriotic-American identity (The Cherokee Nation), which is certainly a group which does far less damage as an entity than the United States of America, and is therefore probably a healthier identity to participate in as a group member?

As an alumni of the University of Colorado at Boulder, I want to call on my school to do whatever it can to keep him as a professor. He deserves an apology. The Regents and the Dean should have been behind him all the way, defending him and reminding people that he is a beloved and celebrated member of the faculty. The students have honored him again and again. If the University of Colorado leadership believes in their choice of students at that University, then they should be trying as hard as possible to keep Ward around. CU wouldn't be the same without him, and his absence would be a tragic loss. He makes people think. He makes his students think. Everyone is allowed to disagree, but at least Ward Churchill forces people to ask themselves questions they are generally conditioned not to ask. We are only too-lucky to have him. I could have left his class in total disagreement with him. There were plenty of students who never took to his style or radical beliefs. Professors like Ward help young minds figure themselves out. I'm totally comfortable in my shoes today, as an ardent and out-of-the-closet liberal who believes some serious changes would make the world a better place. (Let's just start with Gore/Obama ticket in 2008, if another Red president wins I'll cry.)

I will close with this. Ward didn't teach me to think like him, (he probably hates Al Gore more than he hates Bush or vegans. Ward likes guns, his right to smoke wherever he pleases, and he likes to wear sunglasses indoors.) I'm not a little Ward, I'm probably still more of a little Eichmann when it comes right down to it. Ward isn't a danger to students, his absence is a danger to students. He helps people figure out how to think for themselves. He is a de-programmer, and he deserves his job.

Anyone for LCD?

We used to get high when we got high. I remember a time, before I ever had a cell phone, before there was such a thing as high definition, before 9/11, back when reality TV was new and interesting and not gross. I remember those days, and I remember taking drugs to get high. I took drugs to warp my bored mind. Now I am afraid to take anything, lest things get any weirder. I noticed a big sign today advertising some new special flat screen television, as a man stood next to me talking on a flip cell phone, which was ultra thin, with a clear plastic flip top, and I thought to myself, I've never seen anything so mind warping as this modern moment on even the strongest Acid. It was a moment which was both awe inspiring and sad.

Things are moving so darn fast now in modernity. We don't just have electricity ( a pretty strange thing to begin with), which has led to these things called phones, computers, the internet, and lights at night, but we have wireless phones, wireless internet, super high definition televisions, everything we even conceive of seems to materialize by our hands. It might sound like i'm on acid right now, but is anyone noticing that we have planes flying through the air with us on them? We have submarines, deep beneath the surface of the sea. We have fish farms, cow farms, we have big, strong guns. We have tasers, tear gas, laughing gas, prosac, and valium to mellow it out. We don't sell LSD over the counter, but we do sell a pretty altered sense of reality. THIS REALITY.


Look around. We are being sold, and we are selling, this altered perception of reality, this modernity. As if it were real, we are selling it and buying it all the time. We make it real with our perception. We are raised in it, and as we are raised in it, it seems like the norm. It takes a few years to catch up to us that things aren't quite as they were.

I took flying for granted as a kid. I didn't really think, "wow!! I'm getting on a big piece of metal, and it's going to fly me through the air." I just assumed that it was normal, just like phones, cars, gas ovens, microwaves, skyscrapers, nuclear weaponry and power, and the myriad other oddities that were just there from my first breaths, and therefore, like the sky being blue, like the fact that bears shit in the woods and Popes are Catholic, even before you learn what a bear is, or a Pope is, they just are, and it doesn't seem weird. Then the cell phones landed, the internet landed, wireless landed, and suddenly the newness of it all, the Brand Spanking Newness, just whacked me.

When I think about it, I am forced to acknowledge that nothing is real but what we make real. The ever-changing nature of reality forces me to believe this. We are talking about the earth going from round to flat, from flat to round. We are talking about the possibility that human perception is truly the creation of realities. And these realities actually affect human beings, their lives, their experiences, and therefore, their perceptions, which in turn affect the perceptions of their off-spring. We are reality creating machines.

What does a cell phone mean? Maybe it simply means that I can talk to another human being who is on another continent, at the same moment, in a different "time zone," without any wires connecting us. But what does that mean?

If we were alive 20 years ago, and were having a conversation, and I told you that you could go stand alone in a pasture in China while I went and stood alone in a pasture in Wisconsin, and then we could put these plastic, battery powered devices up to our heads, and we could talk to each other as if there were only a curtain between us, you would have told me I was wrong, and you probably would have thought I was crazy; and you would have been right. But when I tell you that it's true today, you just say "yep, I know, it's just reality?" What does that mean?

It suggests, I think, that the world is more than flat or round, or inhabited by people who speak different languages, who are black, white, Jewish, Hindu, Buddhist, Muslim, Catholic, Christian, who are Americans, French, Iraqi, or in any and all other assorted ways "different" in terms of perception....



It suggests, I propose, that we don't have a clue what is really going on. It suggests that the greatest thinkers at any one moment are most certainly as blinded by their preconceived notions of reality as those contemporaries of Columbus who "knew," by way of fact, that the world was flat.

So my friend. What does that mean?

Bush's Best Beans

I watched a little piece of our 43rd President's history tonight. It was the most complex, detailed, articulate speech of his Presidency. It was a mighty good try. Whoever wrote it was gifted, with a fine intellect, an attention to detail, and a definite capacity for complex thought. The President read it well. Indeed it may have been his finest reading. It was his opus of spoken language.

I can only imagine the high fives he got from Cheney, Rice, Rove, (maybe a guest appearance by Rummy?), and whatever other members of the Steam Team were waiting for him behind the red curtain to congratulate him on the job well done.

He didn't stumble, bumble, jumble, or crumble, the President and his words were one. He sounded like Anderson Cooper, but the steam he spoke, though he didn't go and choke, is still bound for poop scoopers. I was impressed.

But let's get down to the core issues.

He admitted, or at least the speech-writer did for him, that the responsibility for mistakes is his own. Nice.

He's gonna have soldiers knocking on doors throughout Baghdad. That's gonna go over nice, everybody loves a knock on the door, machine guns invited in for coffee and tearing the place apart looking for WMD's (an AK47 or two??) in the dusty Whirlpool Dishwasher.

He's not going to talk to Iran, Syria, he's not going to do that whole diplomacy thing, he's buttering us up to Attack them, telling us how much all the bad stuff in Iraq is their fault. Hmm, come on, I don't really need to say anything here do I?

He's going to send in more troops, gonna kick it up a notch, but only to numbers we've had in there before, but somehow he thinks that's going to be enough, even though it wasn't before. OK sounds like a good plan. Same Same. But different. More of the same, but it sounds like changing something. Great idea.

He says we've got to "advance liberty," but we are going to do it by increasing our troop numbers in a country where the majority of citizens don't even want us. Right.

He said "Al Queda" in that Texan drawl. OK, NEWSFLASH!! PGWB It's not working anymore.

He's listened to the advice of everybody around, lots of generals, senators, former president's, and he hears what they are saying but he's just gonna GO HIS OWN WAY. Oh wait, does it sound like he's listening to someone? Wait, wait, who's that I hear in the background? I hear their cackle whispers coming out from behind his ear bud reciever. AHAH! There they are again. It's the Neo-cons. They're like the 87 Raiders, they're mean, and dumb, and I see them on bumper stickers everywhere.

He's listening to somebody, and they put together a good speech for him to read, and boy he must have been practicing. But it's not looking good. It doesn't add up. This war doesn't add up. Beware Middle East!! They are waiting for you to blow something up in America! Hey Iran! Those boats off your shores aren't there to fish. Beans and steam, beans and steam, beans and steam. Great speech. Too bad it stunk.

Justice and Memory

I remember the first Iraq war. I was about 10 years old, and I was a big sharp shooter with my 22 caliber rifle. Somebody bought me a whole bundle of targets with Saddams face on them. So I've shot at this man before. Back in those days, I guess I bought the whole "this man is the enemy" thing as much as a 10 year old can buy anything.

I think the first President Bush made a good decision not pushing onto Baghdad and toppling Saddam 16 years ago. In part, he said it was because there was no viable exit strategy. We are now in a position to feel what that's like. We are about to send 10's of thousands more of our soldiers into a country in chaos, and we've been in there for more than three years. If we want to be honest with ourselves, we are forced to admit that three years post Saddam, the country is a whole lot worse off than when he was it's leader.

I'm not saying that we should praise Saddam, or not hold him accountable for his crimes as a leader. I'm not saying that he was a "good guy." I'm just saying that when we look at the facts we might admit that the American government is responsible for as many Iraqi deaths as he was, maybe more. Someone might respond: "well Andrew, wait, he was an oppressive leader, who kept most Shiite Muslims out of the political elite. He crushed would-be opponents, he did not allow free elections, he violently kept the Kurds from separating into their own nation-state." I would be forced to respond: "you bet. That's all true." But he also kept the country at peace for more years than it was at war. He was a leader who protected a Sunni minority who would have been oppressed more under Shiite leadership than the Shiite majority were oppressed under his leadership. Baghdad was a bustling metropolis, with a beautiful museum, nice restaurants, shopping districts, and electricity 24 hours a day. Their weren't curfews, you could go shopping without fear of a suicide bomb exploding you into a million different pieces, Al Quaida was not a welcome entity. In fact, Saddam considered fundamentalist religious/terrorist organizations as enemies to his regime, and did not allow them to exist under his watch.

He came to power from humble beginnings, born into a family of shepherds. He fought his way up, educated himself, with the help of the CIA, studied law in Egypt observed by US and Egyptian intel during an exile there, returned to Iraq, and there helped repair a country in tatters. He did terrible things, ruled as a tyrant, but it would seem in retrospect, he did it, not only in his own benefit, but also that of the country. Under the Arab Socialists, (of which he was a part), Iraq came to have free health care for all citizens, free education up to the highest levels, he helped modernize Iraq's economy, worked with many of the world governments, meeting with the highest officials of France and the US, for example, on many occasions. He did more for women's freedoms than maybe any other Arab leader.

Should he be hanged for his crimes. Maybe. But as we, America, are now experiencing, Iraq is no easy place to get under control. How are we now trying to impose order in Iraq? With violence and killing even more drastic than that used by Saddam himself. Why aren't our leaders going to hang? Figuratively I think they should, but literally, probably not. People do make mistakes.

As Ghandi said: an eye for an eye makes the whole world blind.

US State Capitals

Show me an American kid this age who can rock this knowledge! I bet there are a lot of Americans who could list the whole Mcdonalds menu though. Bad sign. How many Americans can even name one region in India? All i'm saying is we should spend a bit more time branching out and learning more about the rest of the world and a little bit less time celebrating our fictitious superiority.

Why Virgil is the Anti-American One

"WASHINGTON, Dec. 20 — In a letter sent to hundreds of voters this month, Representative Virgil H. Goode Jr., Republican of Virginia, warned that the recent election of the first Muslim to Congress posed a serious threat..." This fella Goode is a damn fool, and no damn good! Americans are afraid that we are a terrorist target for Muslim extremists. Yes we are! Bombing the Middle East, I can promise you, is the last thing that will remove us from their bulls eye; but pressure from moderate Muslims will, in the end, be the only thing that ends the violence, and prevents more terrorist attacks on American soil.

Goode said: “I fear that in the next century we will have many more Muslims in the United States if we do not adopt the strict immigration policies that I believe are necessary to preserve the values and beliefs traditional to the United States of America and to prevent our resources from being swamped,” and he vowed to use the Bible when taking his own oath of office. I fear that people like Mr. Goode, with their prejudiced attitute, are risking my own, and other Americans lives by inciting the hatred, against us at home and abroad, of people who have a right to believe what they choose to believe. The more Muslims we have in our country, and the more we welcome them and treat them with the respect they deserve as human beings, the less of a terrorist target we will be. Our Country was built upon a foundation of freedom of religion, the right to practice one's own faith and not to be persecuted for it. If we were to live up that foundation, and not allow fanatics like Goode to get away politically unscathed when they subvert the American way with hateful rhetoric, we would also be protecting ourselves from future terrorism. We should remember that Thomas Jefferson, one of our celebrated founding fathers, kept a heavily read copy of the Koran, and studied it. If we as Americans showed more interest in the Koran, and were more welcoming to the Muslim community, we would be doing a great service to ourselves by demontrating that we might not be deserving of the wrath the extremist Muslims are hell bent on incuring against us.

The more American troops who are killed in Iraq, the more of an outcry there is at home to end the war. Nobody likes to see "their own" under fire and dying. While I subscribe to the belief that all humans are brothers and sisters, that there is no "us and them," I am well aware that this is not a prevelent view-point in practice. Generally we separate ourselves on customs, social values, religion, or color, but across the board people generally don't like to be blown up, shot, gassed, or chopped. I'm certainly not a big fan of living in fear of being murdered because somebody thinks i'm different.

America should embrace Muslim people, if we elected a Muslim president, I can almost guarantee that extremist Muslim terrorists would have a much harder time garnering support for their terrorist operations against us. If the majority of Muslims felt like we, as Americans, (and we should remember the great number of American Muslims who ARE AMERICANS) were not against "them" and their way of life, they would be far friendlier towards us, and the extremists in their midst would have little support for their murderous ways. The fastest way to bring about that change is to actually be welcoming to the Muslim people, to do the opposite of this idiotic Representative, and show them that we are not their enemy, instead of giving them evidence that we are.