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 I think it might have something to do with this outdated, false idea that we were created by God.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.

Depressing myself.

As always, there is something interesting to be found in the news. The stock market is recovering. Kenneth Foster is going to be put to death in Texas in a week for a murder he didn’t commit. He was sitting a hundred feet away in a car when his friend, who was put to death last year, committed the crime. Karl Rove has quit and the king rat could make off with a fortune if he gives up the dirt on the inner-goings of the team he put in power.

What perfect justice that would be, if Rove came back to bite Bush in the ass with a tell-all book. When you find someone who will get you elected President when you aren’t even equipped with enough intelligence to construct a sensible sentence, you shouldn’t trust that person to cover your back. Yet, if you weren’t so dumb that you needed them to run over all lawfulness to get you elected, you probably would have considered that.

The great lesson of the departure of Karl Rove is how inconsequential he has become. Who pulls the lunatic strings in Washington we may never know. If Bush has a brain, I don’t think Turd Blossom makes up even half of it. All I know is that high up on the list of items on Google News today is that our United States Government “may brand elite Iran guards terrorists.” Wow. This reminds me of a few years ago when we were watching the legitimization of preemptive war right here at home on every news channel.

The last few years have seen some magnificent new precedents set by this our faithfully dangerous government. We can begin with the Patriot Act, which allows the elimination of individual liberties which were given us by the authors of the Constitution. We can move on to the preemptive invasion of a sovereign country which had never attacked us. Here is the invasion of Iraq and the toppling of a regime there which has sent the country into a spiral of dysfunction and violence, and drawn radicals from around the world like magnets to a hatred of the USA and our American way.

Now we want to label another countries army a “terrorist group.” Here is a nice precedent to set just because we want an excuse to start bombing sites in Iran and sending Special Forces Units in to shoot up the place. The lighter side of the situation is that it might be the beginning of what will eventually force us to start behaving ourselves. What our great and imperial leaders consistently fail to consider is that we are a country as well, and our activities are becoming more and more blatantly terrorist in nature. “Shock and Awe,” for example, may not have been the best name for bombing the hell out of Baghdad. Shocking and awing is what terrorists do. It would have been just as appropriate a name for Al Qaeda’s attack on the World Trade Center in 2001, except we probably killed more people and did a whole lot more damage to Iraq’s biggest city than Al Qaeda did to ours.

At some point we have to consider the consequences of our actions. We act like we can do whatever we want. On CNN yesterday they asked the question: “what can be done to keep America from going the way of the Roman Empire?” Most of the answers that came in were in surprising agreement that we aren’t really number 1 anyway, and if we are, we aren’t doing much to help ourselves stay there. Most of the people who responded seemed quite dissatisfied with our Governments actions. But we the people are responsible for our Governments actions. Just like the people of Iraq paid a huge price for the fact that our President was obsessed with toppling the leader of their country, we may eventually be forced to pay for the consequences of our governments’ actions. When the bombs start going off in our streets we have to be ready to take responsibility for why. If we don’t care enough to stop our Country from doing wrong, then we are subject to the consequences.

Even though the United Nations is our little baby, we have to understand that at some point, if we keep acting like we’ve been acting, it is going be our army that is labeled “terrorist.” When a multi-national force comes to put a stop to United States war crimes, it’s going to be ugly. If we the people keep paying the bills and allowing our armies to do whatever they are told by a Government gone awry, we are complicit. When the bombs come home, we are going to regret not standing up for decency and righteousness in foreign policy. It’s time we look in the mirror and take a peak at the terrorist staring back at us.

Turd Blossom is walking away from the White House, the stock market has been hammered and is coming around, we are about to kill another innocent black man sitting wrongfully on death row, we are setting things up to attack another country in the Middle East. I’m heading to town for a cup of coffee, plus tax.

Animal Terrorism

The bugs are entering my house from somewhere, and it’s the middle of the night again. My pale white legs extend from my fancy underwear. Little pink pigs stand backwards with their curling tails standing out on the brown fabric. No. I’m not gay. There is a laughing cow on my turquoise t-shirt, and a health cocktail made me sick hours ago. I thought of the brown buffalo, and painted my own red picture on pale porcelain. Moths are attacking my paintings and I’m peaking out my windows like some paranoid speed freak. The police don’t concern me, and I’m mostly sober, but I’m looking for the bears.

I’ve double checked the locks on all the sliding glass doors, closed the windows, and locked the front door. I’ve learned that one can’t be too careful around here. Living by the river is grand, but the wildlife makes it a true adventure. Aspen is not cheap, but included in my extravagant rent is an adrenaline wonderland of furry invaders. I live alone, but every night new friends come and visit. I hear them outside, plotting their next break-in.

Just before I fell asleep tonight, I remembered I’d left the window in my office open. I hurried down the hall and shut it with gusto. A simple screen is no sort of barrier to a bear. Raccoons are smaller, but can still cleverly navigate a screen door with their greasy claws.

The first invasion of my now popular kitchen was executed by just such a beast almost two months ago. But this was no ordinary raccoon. I’ve named him Napoleon, and he left his mark upon my kitchen floor, as well as on a leather bound book of Spanish Flash Gordon comics. His fish oil paw print was all the evidence I needed to conclude that it was he who had gobbled the leftover salmon from next to my sink. There, astride that leather book, he proudly ate the finest fish off a greasy salmon skin, which he conspicuously left as if to say it wasn’t good enough for him. Then with gathered paw grease from that skin, he painted footprints on the 50 year old book. The intruder proceeded to knock over my trash can, leaping onto it off the counter like Indiana Jones. The noise of the falling trash can greeted me just as I opened the front door. I made a great deal of noise, startling the perpetrator who promptly abandoned the scene.

That was the beginning of the summer, a time of animal innocence and naivety. That was before everyone was talking about the bear problems, back when I left my sliding glass doors open and assumed the closed screen theory of safety. Napoleon had simply clawed into the screen and slid it open. Not being a total fool, I began closing my sliding glass doors after that. As an old Aspen kid, I never imagined that it would be necessary to lock them.

About a month later I was slumbering in my comfy bed, lost in dreams. Suddenly I was pulled from sleep by a loud crash in the kitchen. Remembering I was in this little mountain town, where people don’t rob people at 5:15 AM, I quickly realized there was a bear in my kitchen. I jumped up and started roaring at the top of my lungs. “I am the king of this house!!!” I spoke loudly, yelling into the space outside my bedroom, using not only every ounce of primal volume insanity that poured forth, but also English, and a parade of aggressive swearing. My feet were lifting off the ground, the adrenaline pumped me up to the size of savage gorilla, and I rushed into the hallway roaring. Thankfully, like Napolean the raccoon, this new perpetrator had retreated.

The doors of the refrigerator and freezer were wide open, and light shone from within, illuminating a huge pile of half-eaten food and trash all over the kitchen floor. The sliding glass door was open, proving the prowess of a motivated paw.

Like Napoleon, this invader left me with a keen impression of his personality. The coon was a snob and a vandal, who insulted me with his suggestion that my salmon skin wasn’t good enough for him to do anything but paint with. The bear on the other hand was not so unjustly picky. He came to eat, and eat he did, but with bearish delicacy. He did no damage to the sliding glass door on his way in, and he opened both the refrigerator and the freezer without doing even the slightest damage to them. I even had three ceramic vases sitting on top of the fridge, all three of which were still standing after the incident. I was also impressed by the bears’ healthy food choices. He ate lots of fruits and vegetables, and cleared me out of veggie burgers. He even took a few items as take out. After all my yelling, he must have strolled out on two feet with his hands full. Out on my deck I found a half eaten bag of carrots and an empty box of veggie burgers. I think this was one of Jerry’s bears. Mid-summer lesson: lock the sliding glass doors.

It’s been a pretty tight ship here ever since. Except for my kitchen and bedroom windows, both of which I regularly left open. They are both well off the ground, and the kitchen window is only about 15 inches in width. So the other evening when I walked into my dark house at 10:30 at night to the sound of a familiar crash in the kitchen, adrenaline came rushing through me along with the thought that like an idiot I must have left a sliding glass door unlocked. First I leapt into the air like a startled school girl, then began the roaring and yelling again, ran back outside, leapt in my car, drove into the yard, around the side of the house and shone my brights into the big windows in my living room, and honked my horn spastically until I noticed in the light of my high beams that all the sliding glass doors were shut. I didn’t see any big animals inside, and I began to wonder if it was indeed a person who had made the noise this time. I drove back around and entered my home ranting and raving. “Who’s there?” I yelled, along with some more roaring and screeching just in case I was dealing with a non-human species. Hearing nothing, I proceeded down the hallway. I turned on a light and entered my kitchen stealthily, clutching a broom. Again the trashcan was knocked over, but the fridge and freezer were closed. I turned on the kitchen light and viewed the mayhem. The small kitchen window screen had been pushed in. The various decorations in its path were strewn around the sink and on the floor.

Almost instantly I concluded that it was the work of the dreaded Napoleon. The malice indicated by the disrespectful placement of a picture of my deceased grandfather, which was lying face down on the kitchen floor amongst scattered trash, suggested the conniving raccoon and not the health conscious hippy bear. I closed the slightly broken window, cleaned up the trash, and prayed that the little bastard had escaped the way he came in and was not hiding out in my house. I pranced around loudly and heard no more evidence of the intruder, so I went to sleep.

When I woke the next day I went outside to find out what clever stool Napoleon had stood upon to reach my kitchen window. The window is four feet above the ground, too high for the sinister raccoon to reach without some assistance. There was nothing but the vertical wall of my house in either direction which that savage little warrior could have used in the break in. My nemesis raccoon was innocent this time.

A bear had squeezed its fat ass through my kitchen window. The claw marks in the wood beneath the window, far larger than even the largest raccoon could make, told me everything. I think it was a mother/cub team, and they may have been schooled by Napoleon himself. It could not have been a large bear who squeezed through that little window, but I believe that the small perpetrator had an accomplice on this job, and that accomplice may not even be the mastermind of operations. It’s time we face the reality of our situation.

The facts are clear enough in their suggestions. Raccoons and bears may be working together now. We must be vigilant. We may have to raise the Bearor Level to dark orange. I have Napoleons’ footprints. Like Michael Chertoff, our Secretary of Homeland Security, I have a gut feeling that the level of attacks is going to rise. If you can keep your minds off the imminent collapse of the Maroon Creek Bridge for long enough, I suggest you remember to close your windows and lock your doors.