Cleaning Out

Memorial Day Weekend around here was not about barbecues or swimming. We cleaned out the garage.

It was such a great thing to do. In Los Angeles, you can take all your cans of old poison and electronics to the toxic waste station downtown...guys in gear take it out of your trunk and they sort it all and take care of it for you in an environmentally conscious fashion. Nice.

Then, of course, once you get to cleaning out the garage, you just want to clean out everything.

I got to looking around at my loose pieces of blog papers and here they are, thus, cleaning up my desk. To purge! To clean! To make way for the new and unusual!

Fourteen pieces of paper:

1) People used to be ignorant because they had too little information. Now they are ignorant because they have too much.

2) One cannot succeed in the United States in a whole way because the pressure is to be both rich and virtuous, simultaneously. This is impossible. It leads to neurotic see-saw behavior.

3) Republicans try to trick people into thinking how they think. They fool people into believing they can become wealthy.

4) People do not behave well because they are modeling bad behavior. At the end of the day, we are a monkey-see-monkey-do sort of species. People watch a lot of television. Actors on television are not quite human. They are distant and do not form real relationships in a show. Partly because it’s a show. Partly because television is fast. When working that fast, it’s hard to show natural human behavior. Because the actor is in a time crunch, stressful situation, the behavior is kind of pulled in and self centered. At least this calms the actors down. And people imitate this behavior. This hall of mirrors is making for some very strange behavior and relationships in the rank and file. I have always felt that the invention of the camera pretty much destroyed depth. Cameras do steal souls.

5) You can be nude in Brattleboro, Vermont whenever and wherever you feel like it. How civilized!

6) Hopefully, the rage instilled by bad parenting does not run out midway through an artistic career.

7) Modern civilization has always been a war between the sensualists and the ideologues.

8) Libertarianism sounds fun...until you imagine catching that bullet because you said, “Have a nice day,” to the wrong person.

9) Alpha males take care of much of the material world. Their payment is that they get to take as much of it as they want. And the lower humans in the pecking order allow it. Like chickens.

10) My drag queen name: Helena Hand Basket

11) My optimistic view of how this right/left conflict will end: Nature seeks peace, so liberals will win.

12) Less cars, better air. Let the jobless from Michigan come to Los Angeles to build the railways! Turn Michigan into a big nature preserve.

13) People do not naturally want others in their personal space so at dinner parties, we have to drug each other to get along.

14) At the end of the day, popularity does decide who lives and who dies.