We love our Dogs

There are many hunters out there. There are many meat eaters. We seem to condone these behaviors quite largely as a society. We are never far from a fast food burger joint. We watch as our Vice President goes out on a good old animal killing spree and he can even shoot his friend while he’s at it. We just laugh. Hah, no big deal.

I’ve never been in a slaughterhouse, but I hear they aren’t the most pleasant places to be if you are a cow. Turkey’s, chicken’s, and game-hens don’t exactly live the lap of luxury as they await their imminent deaths in tiny little cages, dirty with their own filth. How about pigs? One of the smartest animals (some say they are as cognizant as 3 year old children), they are trapped in concentration camps precisely designed for their mass murder.

I eat meat. I legitimate it somehow. Tastes good. More filling. I accept this cruelty to animals, and I am complicit in it. We pen them, we murder them, and we eat them. Except for dogs, which have over the years gotten on our good side; to the point that we keep them in our homes, let them sleep in our beds, feed them special food, pet them, and adore them. In general we do.

Other people beat them, abuse them, and even fight them to the death with other dogs. Since his co-defendant rolled over, pleaded guilty, and has already come out and said that the star quarterback bank-rolled the whole dog-fighting operation, it is looking like Michael Vick is one of these people. Underperforming dogs were killed by brutal means, dogs were fought for money. Michael Vick is indicted by the feds, and can face up to five years in prison and up to $250,000 in fines; because he likes fighting dogs.

I’m a dog lover myself. They are great friends to us, generally. But how many dogs have been murdered in our country for being a bit too violent? Dogs have been killed in the name of the law innumerable times. If a dog acts too much like an animal, if it bites a child for example, we generally kill it. Isn’t there something funny about a person potentially being sent to jail for being cruel and inhuman to an animal, when we are cruel and inhuman to animals all the time? If Michael Vick is being punished, we should all be punished.

Dog fighting is not for me, I’d rather take a dog from it’s family, train it to act the way I want, to hold it’s bodily functions in check, to eat only when I let it, to fence it in boundaries with an electronic shock collar, to train it to retrieve dead birds for me. Dog fighting is not a common American pastime, but at least the dogs have a 50-50 chance in the fight, which is more than can be said of the prancing deer in the scope of a rifle with an 8 round clip. Punishing Michael Vick for his cruelty to animals is a sick symptom of our own hypocrisy.

Dogs have it damn good. When we have crushed every wild animal species into extinction, dogs will probably still be by our side, and the pigs, cows, chickens, and turkeys will still be in concentration camps, awaiting slaughter. We have trained Michael Vick to be a warrior. He is a football player after all, and we pay him millions of dollars to go out to battle on the field. If we want to eat meat, kill animals, build houses, cities, roads, and infrastructure which consequently kills and displaces animals, then who are we to say that Michael Vick can’t fight dogs, and kill them if they don’t perform the way he wants?

That Big Fake Indian Again

“What is History, but a fable agreed upon?” Napoleon asked that question; and the answer all these years later must still be something like “not much.” History is written by the winners, and these fables generally support the status quo.

1492, Columbus sailed the ocean blue, and discovered America. Here we have a little piece of history which has been taught in schools across America for all our lifetimes. The only problem is, in point of fact, it’s only half true. Columbus did sail the ocean blue, but there were people living on the land he found. According to white history, Columbus discovered something, but what about the history of the discovered, the ignored history? According to this version of history, and likely a more accurate interpretation of fact, Columbus and our ancestors who followed him were invaders, not discoverers. After all, if we acknowledge that we are all of us a human species, and therefore equal, we can’t very well have discovered a place where we, as human beings, were already living.

The Americas were conquered by Europeans; bit by bit, inch by inch, dead or displaced Indian by dead or displaced Indian. This is a fact that even fable cannot ignore, though it tries. Ward Churchill was just fired for retelling history: “fabrications, misrepresentations and plagiarism.” But how can a Native American studies professor teach the history of his trade if the content he is forced to adhere to is made up of fables of the winning team?

Ward Churchill has written more than 10 books, and published numerous peer reviewed scholarly articles which have garnered him critical acclaim in the Academic community. I’ve read quite a few, and must honestly say that the guy was pretty meticulous in citing his sources. He was saying far out things and it seemed to me as a reader that he tirelessly gave credit where credit was due, and as much as possible tried to let other sources help him along in his arguments. In all that written work, I’m sure there were fabrications, misrepresentations, and forgotten documentation, especially if the reviewers were comparing his work to accepted history, which by its nature is made up of fabrications, misrepresentations and probably some good plagiarism to boot. What Churchill did do, I’m sure, was try to give his students a more accurate picture of the truth than the one they had been provided by the biased western history that they’d been taught all their lives.

He was a professor of mine in College. The things he said were so foreign to me and flew so in the face of my whole conception of truth and reality as an American, that at first I battled him all the way; but I was forced by the weight of his work, and the logic of what he said, to come around and discover the limited nature of what I had come to accept as truth. He offered a new pair of glasses to students like me who were used to the classic American shades, which have always shown the conquerors of this land in a most favorable light. That new perspective may be why he was voted best professor again and again by the student body. In fact last year he was voted best professor again, but the school didn’t award him the prize because of the ongoing investigation into the accuracy of his work which had begun when an article he wrote, which likened some of the people in the World Trade Center to little Eichmanns, got picked up and turned into a story by the right wing media. I’m getting tired of this ridiculousness.

Ward Churchill is a passionate character, a big, wrinkly, smoky, grump of a man, who I wouldn’t defend if it wasn’t for the content of his work. He’s a prick. But he is an incredibly smart man, who sees things outside the box of the status quo, and who is rightly outraged at the wrongs this Country has perpetrated with impunity. He was probably the best professor I had in my college career. So what if he’s not that much of an Indian by blood quotient? We are all human, and should be allowed to call ourselves whatever we want. The Jerk was a white man born a poor black child for goodness sakes.

OK, we know that the people in the World Trade Center weren’t “little Eichmanns,” and if they were, they were really, really little. But what about the fact that there were CIA offices in the WTC which would have technically made it a legitimate military target? There are so many ways to look at one thing that the concept of “truth” is really a funny thing to try for. Truth is relative. The best truth is all we can look for as a people. What truth will best serve us as a species? That is the one we should be looking for.

The truth we are adhering to now is largely failing us. Just turn on CNN or FOX and you will most probably see some atrociousness of our American Country being defended, and made to look righteous. Where do I start, the Iraq War, Guantanamo, building a fence to divide our country from Mexico, the defense in our media of practices which destroy the environment and don’t encourage the use of alternative energies which would begin to help in the only “war” worth fighting (The War on Global Warming)?

We are the same as the fundamentalist terrorists who we call the enemy, they are telling lies as truth just as vehemently (often more so), and often more violently; but like us, they are also simply forgetting to look for the best truth for the human species. Thinking in terms of them and us is the problem, and we are just as guilty of it as they are. Too much of the collective consciousness in our country seems to be based in the idea that we are Americans before we are human beings. There can be no other explanation for what we are doing to peoples across the world. How could we legitimate doing those things to ourselves? If we decided to Shock and Awe Los Angeles as part of our response to 9/11, could we have pulled it off? We pulled it off in Baghdad, a city no more involved in executing the attack on the World Trade Center than Los Angeles was. In fact, there were likely more WMD’s in LA.

This firing of Ward is simply another symptom of an addiction to an out of date truth. Conservatives, who can’t stand the thought of thinking about reality in a different way, are trying to do to Academia what they are doing to our Constitution, tearing it apart so that people are controlled in what they can say and do. Access to the best information possible is being eliminated bit by bit. We need people like Ward Churchill in Academia because like Galileo he is willing to speak a different version of the truth. After being censured for heresy for saying that the earth was not the center of the solar system, Galileo was vindicated, his version of the truth became the best version of the truth by the best minds who followed him. I can only hope that in the not too distant future we can face the truth of our reality as Americans, and also as a human species. That means acknowledging the out-of-date truth we are working under. It means admitting our imperfections. We have been wrong, and wrong, and wrong again, we have perpetrated crimes against humanity. So long as we deny the truth, we are still wrong, and we will keep doing wrong because we are not acting out of truth. It does not have to be so.

Just because we admit to conquering this land as criminals, destroying the environment unremittingly, killing our fellow men across borders, allowing ourselves to be taken over by giant corporations which are taking control of reality and ending life as we once knew it, does not mean we will be punished. We will be punished for not acknowledging the truth. Admitting our faults would allow the space to start doing something different. Until then, welcome to the status quo.

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.