What I learned in Africa:

      

                                                 What I learned in Africa:

People on safari want to see lions, especially the guides. You do see them. We saw one stalk and kill a zebra, rip it open and then she had her cubs eat it. It was exceptionally cute. She, a male relative and the two cubs, happily played with each other right after the kill. Like house cats that just proudly killed a mouse. A lion kills her prey by clamping her mouth over the nose and mouth of her future food until it smothers to death. The lady lion does the hunting. The male lion protects the perimeter. So really, he’s not doing nothing at all. Pics at link at the bottom. (Or above)

Cheetahs travel in pairs. Often two boys. They are the fastest land animals. They have a long black tear that runs under each eye. They are sleek, gorgeous hunters. We saw three of them. Pics below and above link.

Elephants have terrible digestion. They only digest about 40% of what they eat. So they have to eat about 18 hours each day. One night, we had elephants right outside our camp knocking down trees and eating their leaves. You know when elephants are visiting. They are noisy and destructive. And you’ll never forget it. We saw hundreds of them. Pics, yes.

There are so many kinds of antelopes. The largest is the eland. (Almost like a yak.) The smallest that we saw was the Dik-Dik. Dik-Diks mate for life. Very sweet creatures with a circle around each eye. The Steenbock is a small antelope, too, larger than the Dik- Dik. The Thomson gazelle has a black stripe along the side. The Impala, which is so lovely, has amazing horns (the male) and vertical black stripes on their white rumps. They are all over the place. Lovely. The Hartebeest is another great antelope, with its horns forming a heart shape. Similar to the Topi (which has dark upper leg splotches) and just a bit smaller than the Waterbuck, an antelope that lives, you guessed it, always near water. There is also the smaller Reedbuck, another hydrophilic antelope, smaller than the waterbuck. And the Klipspringer, which is a smallish antelope that has round ears and behaves a lot like a goat, living and jumping around rocky areas. We saw them in the morning before breakfast at our last place.

The larger mongooses are mostly out at night. Smaller ones are out during the day. A bunch of them can eat a python. We saw all these.

We also saw Hippos having sex. The man mounts his lady, in water, keeping her head pushed down, occasionally letting her up for air. The sex can go on for two days as it is hard for the male hippo to keep his erection planted inside the female. And once in, it can easily slip out. Hippos live in their own filth. I used to think they were amazing…now, they just seem like enormous pigs to me. They feed all night long, because the sun during the day would fry off their skin. They crap in their water and live in it. You can watch the big blobs of hippos shit float up to the surface while they wallow. When they “yawn” it is really a dominance game in order to show off the size of their large molars.

Zebras, no matter how many you see, and you see a lot of them in Tanzania, are so pretty. Wildebeest, they say, are made from leftover parts of other animals. These two travel together because the Zebras have great eyesight, just enough memory to know where to go for grass each year and they eat quantity of all kinds of grasses. It is not picky. And so it ends up being a big mammal, great for a meal for a lion. The wildebeest is rather dumb, a type of cow, really, and it needs the Zebra for memory and for its eyesight. In return, the wildebeest has a fabulous sense of smell. Wildebeest eat low amounts of high quality grass. These two animals are the staple of the great migration.

We saw storks, flamingos and pelicans. A funny large bird called the Kori Bustard, (largest bird of flight). Eagles, love birds, hawks, vultures. Birds are magic.

Warthogs, no matter how many you see, are always funny. I love them.

Giraffes, no matter how many, are so lovely to watch. We watched a baby giraffe run around near its mother, practicing its hoof work. Female giraffes have much lighter spots than males. Spots on the male giraffe are practically black. The females, more orange. I have movies which will be posted at some point.

The African buffalo is enormous and they live in herds. They are intimidating and ornery and the older males are kicked out of the herd to live on their own. This makes them even more ornery.

Hyenas, after a big meal, get extremely hot from the digesting of bones in their stomach so after a big meal they will sit in a puddle to cool off. Female hyenas have fake penises they use to establish dominance. Not unlike a glorious lesbian with a dildo. Though lesbians can digest bones in their stomach without a rise in body temperature. I don’t know what I love more, lesbians or hyenas, but does it really have to be a competition?

Baboons travel in huge packs. They mostly eat plants, but are not above eating your face.

Black faced Vervet monkeys are super frigging cute.

Not many rhinoceros left. We saw one in the Ngorogoro crater, where this is possible. It just lay there.

If you get a flat tire, consider yourself lucky as it is changed and you are standing on the side of the road watching giraffes go at it with the acacia trees.

The spring hare (no pic of that worth showing) is also called the African Kangaroo for how it jumps along. It really does ambulate like that marsupial. But it is a rabbit.

The crocodile and the hippo live in harmony. They don’t bother each other too much. They are an even match.

The civet cat, which we did see one night, is almost never spotted.

The hyrax, which looks like a ground hog, can be domesticated.

The termite mound becomes home to all sorts of animals, especially snakes, warthogs and mongooses. Once an animal invades, all the termites leave.

The Maasai, who we spent a lot of quality time with at our camps and lodges and also at one of their real bomas, are gorgeous. The men wear bright robes. (The lions are terrified of the Maasai and stay away.) Every fifteen years, any boy who has not been circumcised goes through a ritual (including from weeks to months, depending on how rich their father is, of wearing dark clothing and white face paint to scare away demons), that ends in the circumcision ceremony. After that, he must wait to become an elder before he can marry. He becomes an elder when the next load of boys goes through their circumcision. So it takes some time. A man’s wealth is measured by his number of cows and children. Since he may have many wives, from two to two-hundred, he can easily amass a huge family. All he needs to increase his wife-load is some cows for trading. Traditionally, a woman gets her clitoris removed before marriage. (Though currently the government is cracking down on this practice, a traditional marriage still requires this mutilation. But as one guide told us, “A Maasai woman does not enjoy sex anyway.”  He meant with or without a clitoris.) A man cannot marry until after he has been circumcised and becomes an elder. A woman can marry anytime after she has been circumcised. This leaves many young men single for a long time. I witnessed men holding hands. I also witnessed an incredible languid nature that was very much connected to the earth. They are smiley and present. I have the video. Stay tuned for an eventual movie of this. Though, overall, Tanzanians are a bit formal and any display of any kind of sexual feelings, we did not see.

Do not try to video a lion killing a zebra. You will miss the exact moment of “The Grab” when the lion bites that hind flank of the last zebra up the hill, flips up on that horsey back and then swings down around to the face to clamp and smother. Even if you see all the stalking and then all the clamping, you will regret, for the rest of your life, that you were fumbling with your stupid little Canon Powershot video option during the most exciting moment of your life. You will have to rely upon your husband to tell you again and again exactly how it happened. You will then have to watch on YouTube lion on zebra kills, just like everyone else who has never been on safari.

You will survive in a tent even if it has mice. If you have power bars of any kind in your knapsack, they will chew through many layers of anything at all to eat those bars. Then you will have to throw out the swiss cheese looking zip lock and all the half eaten bars. When this happens to your husband, all you can tell him is, “Make sure you throw out that mess far away from this tent.”

It is always fun to take a private safari. Add to that a few other people in their own private trips run by the same company who you run into more than once here and there at camps and lodges for dinner, and you make instant friends because the whole experience is so incredibly enlivening.

Do not drive from Ngorogoro Crater to the Serengeti. It is punishing, bumpy, long and dusty. Take a bush plane. It is worth it.

What to do that we did, when you go:

Bring ivory soap and a portable clothesline for laundry.

Bring a head lamp.

Bring great binoculars.

Bring Purell Wipes.

Pack as lightly as possible, buying up all those super light pants and shorts at R.E.I.

A Tilley hat, though unoriginal, is your best friend.

Make sure everything has a case.

Bring guide books.

And:

Take pictures, but don’t try to video the lion-on-zebra-kill, as I mentioned, for you will miss “The Grab.”

We were “in the bush” for ten days. Seven days is probably enough. Go away somewhere lush and pampering when you are finished. Safaris are rough. Bring Pink Bismuth tablets for your stomach, Benedryl for sleeping. And anything else you may require for your body parts that tend toward any vulnerability.

Though the climate is much like Southern California, don’t count on a film career in Tanzania.

You can’t save all the poor people in Tanzania, most of who seem to spend their days in transit in search of water. A society cannot modernize while its citizens spend most of their daylight hours fetching water.  Polygamy seems anti-productive, too. A man would be much richer with fewer wives and fewer children and the same number of cattle. But if you start pulling on strings of the Maasai culture, the whole thing could unravel for good. They are holding onto their past, firmly, with both dusty fists. I do not understand any kind of tribalism. It puts culture ahead of the individual. Blech. Let it go, old timey types. The Enlightenment has happened.

Ostriches are solitary birds and can easily outrun a lion. Plus, they don’t make for a good meal.

If you look due north from Boundary Hill Lodge, our last lovely place, you can see Kilimanjaro.

Tsetse flies can bite through a light pair of jeans and underwear to get at your scrotum. Particularly enjoyable on the last day of your trip. They are zig zaggy zippy things. And it seems like they bite with a very long proboscis. I hope I do not get sleeping sickness or elephantiasis. Wearing no shoes at night can get you stung by a bee, in your tent. Another fun experience. But at least the bee was half killed before it stung so it was only half a sting.

Jackals are cool.

Aardvarks, though rarely spotted, are all over Africa. We did not see one.

Leopards, of which we saw three, like to hang out in trees and are hard to spot. They look like cheetahs, but they are larger, with bigger heads, more defined spots and they do not have the long black tear coming down their face.

Everyone in Africa loves you, as long as you are tipping.

Just because it took twenty-four hours to get to Arusha, don’t think it isn’t going to take thirty-six hours to return via Dar Es Salaam.

There is no greater delight than watching a little Maasai girl giggling as she rubs the hair on your arm, something which is so unusual to her. There is nothing sadder than a Maasai woman, who still has her eyesight (unlike some of her older sister wives), yet haggard beyond her years from living in dirt and dung, in a midnight blue wrap with almond shaped eyes, who looks at you deeply with a desire to connect and a desire to flee. And you can’t help her. So you just go back to your fancy lodge and cry.

No matter any inconvenience, physical pain, or cultural freakishness, it is worth the effort to see this amazing diversity of so many animals in such great numbers. Africa: I give it two paws up. Roar.

Click on any pic to go large.

Off to Africa

Returning September 10.  Until then, please enjoy a picture of our luggage.

Onward!

It's a Matter of Size

It is difficult getting down the sidewalks of New York. Surely. East side West side, all around the town.

But just when you thought you got used to all the horrors, the tourists walking arm in arm in three generations of familial fear and hubris, the guys with the pants halfway down their legs walking side-to-side, as if they are crabs, barely budging forward and proud of their style-over-efficiency, or the poor elderly slobs, male and female, who simply stop at corners and stand there, lost, you have to face the leather and not so leather goods.

It’s these purses. Why are they so huge? These women, they are very thin because of all the walking they do carrying bags that weigh fifty pounds. It’s amazing exercise…but this is the problem: the bag, made of hide or vinyl or brilliant cloth and certainly lots of coated metal rings and straps flapping it all together, is the size of an entire adult female torso or my desk. And how does a woman counterbalance this sucker slung up on her right shoulder in order to fly forward? She uses her left arm as a pendulum swing. Her horizontal diameter now becomes as long as her vertical.

And let’s not forget about the torque.  Just as the Scrambler, that cheap thrill ride of youthful carnivals, was a heavy car at the end of a pole moving briskly, forces are felt. Strong ones. To a walking woman, with a purse the size of Dothan, Alabama, this torque acts strongly against her will to walk straight. So with that left arm still flailing, the Mt. Zion bag pulling and heaving, the forward moving vector is disturbed into sideways motion, and though the female will is strong, it cannot help our lugging doyenne from forming a repeating S-curve in her gait so that she carves out most of the sidewalk. The S-curve is the body stabilizer.

I see it every day. But tonight, a tall woman with very short, soft hair with a bright white top on and black slacks hugging her ass so I could see that the bottom of her left cheek had a much greater divot than the right, was walking in such an aggressive S-curve, with such a mace of a bag, that as people approached her, they could not help but either block her way (since she was taking up all ways) or get pulled right into her centripetal field much like a leaf into a whirlpool. She looked like a young David Bowie, this possible waitress, possible high fashion model. Her aggressive anger was kind of thrilling and made me want to pick a fight with myself (okay, with her). As small Hispanic men got in her way she crossly dressed them down with a LOOK WHERE YOU’RE GOING. She was a bruiser. She wanted it all. She wanted to fight and she had the purse-boulder to give her the force she needed to do it.

This was the most extreme example of the purse-planet that I have witnessed. Parlaying the effects of her bag physics into a weapon and pretending the problem of this mammals-colliding-on-earth experience as she boinked and weaved was caused by the inconsideration of others, is certainly something one could accept as a sad, sideways case of convenient dissociative fugue. But that requires compassion. And who are we? Jesus? She was anger justified for no reason. Maybe from history. I wanted to ask her if she was an incest survivor or simply had a bad shift at the Stardust Diner. I did not. She trundled south. I went east. I was glad to be rid of her.

We all have to get somewhere. Why can’t we just be efficient about it? Keep a slim profile and if we are loaded down with a locker-sized amount of personal belongings, maybe assume some responsibility?

On another note: what the fuck are in these huge bags and why do women want them? Aren’t women disadvantaged enough competing against the other sex, with their inferior muscle mass and shorter legs? Why add a camel hump of consumer goods in a dead cow bag to force you into a frightening, manic S-curve of a walk that tries to scoop up all comers? The straightest distance between two points is a straight line. Ladies, it is time for emancipation: Get rid of that purse-town, and everything in it.

Box, at Sundance 2013: Why not!

http://boxthemovie.wordpress.com/2012/08/24/sundance-1-out-of-125-chance-and-we-continue/

Old Sperm

A recent study in Scandinavia has made a connection between older sperm and children with Autism (and possibly Schizophrenia).  As men get older, the mutations in their sperm increase. This gives rise to autism and other developmental disease. It is not from momma. It’s from grizzled dear OLD dad.

This is fine and all---but what is causing all these mutations?  Is it simply age? Or is it the result of the increasing amount of time spent on a toxic planet? Do the children of old daddies in Papau New Guinea have an increased risk for brain development problems?

My guess---the more plastic in your life, the greater your sperm mutations.
The more preservatives in your food, the greater your sperm mutations.

The more fire retardant in your couch cushions, the greater your sperm mutations.

The longer you are exposed, the greater your sperm mutations.

And they will NEVER be able to test for all this in the general population.

But you can’t ask the fire retardant lobby to back off because that’s not good for their business. Why, oh why can’t people just change what they do when they find out what they do is harmful? You use the same skill set to do so many of the same things. Just transfer across.

Poison will eventually destroy a species. It does not matter where the poison comes from. Even if the species itself makes it. 

I’m sure my sperm would give rise to nothing but a blabbering armadillo headed pants-shitter-into-eternity obsessive hand washer at this point.  Or maybe since the beginning of my time. Back in the 70s, my brother and I used to play on the bags of fertilizer outside my grandparents’ apartment in New City, New York. There was nothing else to do but watch T.V.

Moonrise Kingdom. Yes.

Go see Moonrise Kingdom http://www.moonrisekingdom.com/#home
for

The humor
The sadness
The ART DIRECTION!
The acting
The directing
The Benjamin Britten music
The whole thing.

Listen for one of the great lines of the current era of cinema spoken by Frances McDormand to her daughter in a bathtub.

Friends, I don't want to oversell it. But this is fully up there with Rushmore, the other grand masterpiece of Wes Anderson.

Three thumbs up.

August Thoughts

The fight in politics and in religion and in education, all systems, is age old: the false thought of the separation between the material and what is in the mind. Which one is more important, how each are cut up and who gets what causes so many problems. It’s damn Cartesian, this split.  But Spinosa wacked that shit back. Thus the Enlightenment.  And here we are, post enlightenment, and the stupidity of the pre-Spinosa period still rages.

Making movies about disenfranchised folks when you are sitting around in your booj slacks is ultimately exploitive. Maybe. Perhaps it helps. But I am more likely to do less if I see a movie about someone downtrodden. I figure they have at least recently eaten some craft services.

Boys are without a doubt the sex symbols of today. You can barely see a hot young woman on a billboard any longer. It’s all boys. Because they can dish it out AND they can take it? A pole and a hole for everyone? I don’t know. I think young girls are feeling it.

I love coupons. For certain things.

Freedom is an illusion. Cargill owns your fat ass. Put down that soft drink. Grow avocadoes.

The coolest town, it seems, is London. Though Scranton comes close. Right?

This east coast is overrun with deer. We need more wolves.

I need a unifying theory. And Adderall?

Can we give Monsey NY back to the Munsee speaking Lenape Indians? Corn, beans and squash are more useful than suburban squalor.

If you haven’t yet read Mencken’s The Libido for the Ugly, Google and enjoy.

Give New York City back to the beavers! Bloomberg needs a pelt!

Walking really matters. Go local. Walk.

Must we?

Depth

Transacting. It is not the same as caring.

Help.

Maureen's Got a Mouth on Her

When Cruelty Is Cute

By MAUREEN DOWD

Published: August 14, 2012 NYTimes 

WASHINGTON

I’d been wondering how long it would take Republicans to realize that Paul Ryan is their guy.

He’s the cutest package that cruelty ever came in. He has a winning air of sad cheerfulness. He’s affable, clean cut and really cut, with the Irish altar-boy widow’s peak and droopy, winsome blue eyes and unashamed sentimentality.

Who better to rain misery upon the heads of millions of Americans?

He’s Scrooge disguised as a Pickwick, an ideologue disguised as a wonk. Not since Ronald Reagan tried to cut the budget by categorizing ketchup and relish as vegetables has the G.O.P. managed to find such an attractive vessel to mask harsh policies with a smiling face.

The Young Gun and former prom king is a fan of deer hunting, catfish noodling, heavy metal and Beethoven. He’s a great dad who says the cheese, bratwurst and beer of Wisconsin flow in his veins. He’s so easy to like — except that his politics are just a teensy bit heartless.

Rush Limbaugh hails Ryan as “the last Boy Scout,” noting that the tall, slender 42-year-old is a true believer: “We now have somebody on the ticket who’s us.”

For the rest of us, at least, Ryan is not going to raise our hopes only to dash them. Unlike W., he’s not even going to make a feint at “compassionate conservatism.” Why bother with some silly scruple or toehold of conscience?

Unlike some of the right-wing ayatollahs, Ryan doesn’t threaten with moral and cultural gusts of sulfur. He seems more like a friendly guidance counselor who wants to teach us how to live, get us in shape, PowerPoint away the social safety net to make the less advantaged more self-reliant, as he makes the rich richer. Burning the village it takes to save it, so we can avoid the fiscal cliff, or as he and his fellow conservative Cassandras ominously call it, “the debt bomb.”

Like Mitt Romney, Ryan truly believes he made it on his own, so everyone else can, too. He shrugs off the advantage of starting as the white guy from an affluent family, able to breeze into a summer internship for a Wisconsin Republican senator as a college student.

Only 16 and the youngest of four when he discovered his lawyer dad dead in bed from a heart attack at 55, Ryan had to grow up fast.

The Midwestern kid was guided by what David Stockman calls “Irving Kristol’s ex-Trotskyites” turned neo-cons; Jack Kemp, the cheery supply-sider who actually cared about the disadvantaged, and by one of Kemp’s favorite authors, Russian émigré and cult leader Ayn (pronounced like swine, as she used to say) Rand.

“And the fight we are in here, make no mistake about it, is a fight of individualism versus collectivism,” Ryan said in a 2005 speech to the Atlas Society. He even gave copies of “Atlas Shrugged” to staffers at Christmas. He did not emulate Rand on everything, given that she adamantly opposed Ronald Reagan, saying, “Since he denies the right to abortion, he cannot be a defender of any rights.”

Ryan co-sponsored the Sanctity of Life Act enshrining a fertilized egg with the definition of “personhood” and supported a bill Democrats nicknamed the “Let Women Die Act,” which would have let hospitals that get federal money deny women abortions even in life-threatening circumstances.

And Rand would not have approved of Ryan’s votes in the House backing W.’s profligate spending on unwinnable wars, a bank bailout and a Medicare expansion. She would no doubt have been thrilled, however, that under the Ryan budget plan, the megarich Romney would go from paying shamefully as little as possible in taxes to virtually no taxes.

Ryan was drawn to Rand’s novels, with their rejection of “the altruist morality,” making narcissism a social virtue; her exhortation that man must not only strive for “physical values” — her heroes were hot — and self-made wealth, but a “self-made soul.” Like John Galt, who traces a dollar sign “over the desolate earth” at the end of “Atlas Shrugged,” Rand idolized the dollar. She wore a brooch shaped like a dollar sign, and a 6-foot dollar sign stood beside her coffin at her wake.

Although the Catholic Ryan told Fox News’s Brit Hume in an interview that aired Tuesday night that he “completely disagreed” with Rand’s “atheistic philosophy,” he said his interest in economics was “triggered” by her.

His long infatuation with her makes him seem even younger than he looks with his cowlick because Randism is a state of arrested adolescence, making its disciples feel like heroic teenagers atop a lofty mountain peak.

The secretive, ambiguous Romney was desperate for ideological clarity, so he outsourced his political identity to Ryan, a numbers guy whose numbers don’t add up.

This just proves that Romney will never get over his anxiety about not being conservative enough. As president, he’d still feel the need to prove himself with right-wing Supreme Court picks.

Ryan should stop being so lovable. People who intend to hurt other people should wipe the smile off their faces.

Horshack is Dead. I Didn't Do It

1990s

North Hollywood

Ron Pallilo (né public, Horshack) was casting for the musical

Three Men Naked from the Waist Down

I was called in to audition for “The Angry Guy” and around me were bean bags, cans, a wiffle ball bat, etc. I sang well enough for a part that was too low for my voice.

I was called back. And Horshack, wound up and wild, kept screaming at me in a strong NY accent, “Get angrier. Get angrier. Swing that bat! I want to see your anger!”

So---I got angrier.

“More!”

So I slammed the wiffle bat against the audition table, not near anyone, but it caused a wave vibration through the cheap folding tables and Horshack’s diet coke went flying in the air and thudded and emptied onto the gray and stained industrial carpeting. Everyone got really upset that I had crossed some line and felt the need to protect Ron from this lunatic actor wielding a long plastic yellow bat and it was clear that I was not going to get the part, and I did not.

A helper cleaned up the soda. Ron just stared at it contemptuously.

Something about a real can of soda really getting spilled showed me off as an out-of-control loon but it was really just an accident.

This was not long after I was directed in a reality TV show by Potsie from Happy Days.

It is sad to watch the sitcom stars of your youth directing questionable productions in the San Fernando Valley. I did have a crush on Potsie, the loveable dork, when I was a kid. As an adult actor on set in a Von’s parking lot in Sherman Oaks, acting like a mugger, all I could focus on between takes were the deep lines in the back of Potsie’s neck and I thought, “This California sun does a number on people. I am going to make sure I stay inside as much as possible.” He did set me up with some agent meetings. He was kind.

Is it easier to be a has-been or a never-was? I don’t know. But that kind of competition sure is something they should do on reality TV. Produce it in Van Nuys. Hand out wiffle ball bats…

I also had a crush on Mrs. Kotter. She was my type. I was a bi-kid.

Rest in Peace Ron Palillo. Sorry I spilled your soft drink. But I have to say, you did kind of overreact after steering me into a froth and then made it all about you. But I do wish you were still alive. Because, you know, death is beat.

The Cool and the Sentimental

The Monkey brain: Our big frontal lobe. Cagey and clever and eventually smart enough to land a vehicle on Mars. It is also vain. It is self serving. It does not like others that much. And if so, mostly to play with.

The Cow brain:  Our middle brain, that we share with most mammals, is very emotional, goes on instinct. Is warm, often responds intuitively. Often needs to feel included, depending on the mammal.

The Lizard brain: The brain stem that we share with the lower orders. Mostly responds to immediate stimulus. Fearful, reactive. Alone. Sociopathic.

Enough on that…now my pet peeve:

Why are Westerners so hell bent on being rational and cool in so much of we do, and then when we want to get close, we PRETEND it, often in sentimental tones? It’s rife.

I hate sentiment, not so much because it is aesthetically wobbly, though it is, but because it is based in fear, replacing what could be the real thing. It is monkey/lizard when it would be better off cow. 

Good Ol' Brazil

What I don’t understand is this idea by the Right that a functioning government takes away freedom. What on earth would they want to do with your freedom?

Surely, the government wants to tax you, since you are doing business on their soil, and this is pesky. But this is not a freedom killer.

If I have to choose between corporations making most decisions for me, who only have shareholders’ interest at heart, and a messy government, which actually does have the populace’s interest at heart, because a successful, functioning populace fuels that very same government, well, I’ll take the government.

I once sat at a dinner and this violent prepper-conservative went on and on about how Obama is a socialist who truly hates America and wants to see it destroyed. It was a scary display of loathing and righteous attack. I could only see his thumping as the projection of pure paranoia. Something must have happened to him that was so traumatizing, he had to place it upon a man, a party, something that scares him.

This terror of government, the folks who bring you water, highways, regulate your cheap electricity, try-as-they-might to give you affordable healthcare throughout your life, protect you as best they can from terrorists, wage all sorts of negotiations with hundreds of countries around the globe in your best interest, why would you want to dismantle that? So you can pay less taxes and spend that extra money on pizza pockets and corn syrup based soft drinks? (Two representative examples of what corporations want to give you.)

Friends, there is a cult of greed in this country. And it causes inflation, greater and greater class divisions and uneven distribution of education and health care. This is the formula Brazil used to live by.  But even Brazil has given it up.  Can we not, at least, be as forward thinking as Brazil?

It is easy to acknowledge that lazy people do not do their fair share and this can make one wince at anything collective. But if you really look at the numbers, there really aren’t that many lazy people. My fair shake to the Right Wingers---I am all for gathering up the lazy people and sterilizing them or forcing them into compulsory homosexuality with no possibility of parole. Why continue the generational malaise? But starving them to death by feeding them poisonous corporate foods, killing them with your corporate prisons, your lack of health care (because corporations want to make money off the sick more than they want to help them) and horrendous schools that teach nothing but test taking skills (because corporations only believe in math and knowable processes), wouldn’t it truly be more humane to just snip out their gonads? And the government can pay for it.

A vote for Romney-Ryan is a vote for 1950s Brazil.

The economy still isn’t great. But maybe that’s what happens when you hit a certain density of population and you run out of the best stolen land.

How to Write Good

The Problem with Wealth: Oh to Renew

The problem with wealth is it is so often self-protecting and self-serving.

Though, without it, there would be no capital for great works.

So…what do we do with the wealthy people? We must encourage them to take risks. Measured risks, but risks nevertheless. Go on hunches. Strong good hunches.

And they will lose sometimes. And they do. And losing sucks.

If I were extremely wealthy, I do not know exactly what I would do with the money. I don’t think about it too much.  I probably would keep making things, but at a higher level in its material expression. And I would buy a little apartment in Paris. I do not know if I would be drawn to helping others. Maybe. But probably more with my time than with my cash. Or maybe I would set up a foundation….but somehow streamline it so foundation seekers could apply in just five minutes.

Money.

Money does not stop death.

It does not create real love.

It can shield and give joy…to a point.

I tend not to organize the cash in my wallet by denominations. I like to feel like it’s all loose and you just sort of pick and grab at it as you need to.

There was a time when people thought lots of money was a sign of great spiritual advancement. Now, that fad has faded. And dust bowls are forming. And people aren’t working. (But the Occupy Wall Street people have seemed to move on, too. Why?) Nothing changes much. People push cash upward…it’s the engine that keeps us all moving. And while we push upward, we hope to land in an upward position.

I guess if I had a ton of money…I would put it all down on renewables. Yes. That’s what I would do. And my time. Maybe I should simply do that now. Photovoltaic batteries. Think outside the box for it.

The Corn is Green

In Connecticut.

Do What You Are

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bm-Jjvqu3U4&feature=plcp

Movie Advice

See Magic Mike for Matthew McConaughey

See Bellflower (Netflix it) for the filmmaking, all around.

See Josh Mix Sound

It's lovely.

Color Correct

http://boxthemovie.wordpress.com/2012/07/24/color-correction/

Public Declaration

Must get back to my book. Finish it up. It’s been in my drawer for a few years.

Rain Makes Corn

Oh that song:

“Rain makes corn

Corn makes whiskey

Whiskey makes my girl just a little bit frisky.”

Got a lot of prickly girls in Indiana right now?

Sorry about the dry ears.

Maybe it’s time to face the global weather problem?

People change when?  During extreme pain or threat of death or when the sex dries up.

Maybe all these crinkly brown corn stalks are just what we needed.

Pain=transformation.   I wish this were not true…  But I didn’t design it.

Go ahead, guys. Figure out how to get your corn wet again…

A Buncha Shit on Monsoon Wednesday

Today there was a monsoon.

I am covered with flea bites and I don’t know why.

Apartment hunting. To buy. Lots of paperwork. Give me trees.

Small children are so small.

If people would stop wanting so much, well… I guess I would not finish typing this sentence…

Yoga is necessary if you want to stop all this aging nonsense. It’s the tight muscles that yank you into wretched tired deformity.

Fresh Oregano growing on the window sill.

I am all for money. I am all against money that just sits there.

Fat pens really are the way to go.

Merry Christmas….somewhere in the universe.

My parents are young. In their early seventies. They have been around since I was born.

Tennessee Williams wrote so many plays. He always went for it. I prefer him to our sober moralist logician, Arthur Miller.

I sometimes piss people off. But then they like me because I wasn’t afraid to do just that. Fuck it.

I am all about hanging out in natural dog areas. Maybe that’s why I have flea bites.

All my old friends are beautiful. Allah be praised.

I prefer coffee ice cream on my waffles, in general.

Sex is overrated, unless it’s really good.

People are really fat for a reason. Because the first caucus every four years is in a corn state.

Three Newsies

1. By 2015, 20% of GDP will be medicine. This must become a utility…so it can be lowered. Utilities are highly regulated. Medicare for all, please.

2. Fuck the Boy Scouts. In the ass.  (They set up their own jokes.)

3. Mitt Romney is silly. Doesn’t he realize that Obama is Christ? Okay, Christ yet-to-be-realized?

I Love Mitt's Peevishness

Oh how Romney wants to be The Decider!

The guy is so upset that Obama is telling the truth (mostly) about him. The Democrats have learned the filthy rules from the Republicans: attack at all times. And now the Dog-tied-to-the-roof guy wants to engage in a gentleman’s game only?

I love when the super entitled can’t believe that someone is looking right in their face and telling them what they are.

I have no problem with people being super rich. Go ahead. Be super rich. But don’t lie about how you did it. And don’t get so peeved when someone points out how you did it.

It’s a global economy and maybe what Romney has done has all been legal. But so once was slavery, women not having the right to vote, child labor…and those turned out to be bad ideas.  When you do something that is legal, but it’s a bad idea---you simply end up paying the piper.

It’s legal for me to go to Thailand to have sex with children, but you don’t see me doing that. It’s simply against my nature and not the right thing to do, either. So I will not do it. I will not send my money offshore. I will not outsource any jobs I create to other countries. I will do the best I can and I know there will be limits to how it all turns out.

People don’t need that much in order to be happy. Apparently, an income of 75K/person is the line where anything more is not necessary for joy. Let’s find some proportion, friends.

Mitt: You can’t have everything. And probably not the presidency. 

Two Things to Get Crazily Happy About

Choose A or B or both for a good weekend:   

      A. The major farming on rooftops in New York.

      B. The inevitable repeal of DOMA this autumn as unconstitutional.

Thank you, New York Times, for keeping me up to date.

And than you, New York, for a perfect 73 degree evening.

Undiagnosed and Alive

I wonder why people so often want a diagnosis when experience is so much more interesting.

Imagine, yes, having a bi-polar relative or knowing a good friend who suffers from severe depression.  These are problems best treated. I talk not of them. I wish them well.

But those of us who are sort manic at times or fall into despair at times or are impulsive or compulsive---we just need to keep ourselves busy and not think about what these behaviors might all mean. There is no real logic to them anyway. Plus, we need these wacky energy flows to actually get things done. The self motivated man? Nah, he just has impulses that have to be acted upon. Irrational stirring. And this is fine.

There are people who want everything to be a problem and to have each one defined as such.  But remember during medieval times? There was the town lunatic, the local witch, the fool, the eternally sad, the forever lovelorn, the filthy guys, almost all of them who would not bathe, the lothario.  These people went about their lives, energetically in pursuit to express their “dysfunctions,” and so they carried on. 

Society would have you punch a clock, sleep normal hours, have some laughs but almost never any sadness, not get too worked up, unless it’s for lusting after consumer items or wheat packed foods, remain married, solidly raise children with little to no divergence and only take risks when you are certain that what you are doing isn’t really a risk, but a well planned  something-or-other that someone has already tested that worked out mediumly okay.

Isn’t that insane?

Bring it On

I wish the Libertarians would get stronger so the Socialists would get stronger in response.

And why not a government that allows for all types?  Why can’t we separate out, even while living with each other?

Why can’t Socialists simply have a Socialist life, a Socialist web amid the hubbub?

Why can’t you just join a group and then live that way? With a fire wall between your group and the other one?

Could be an interesting social experiment. Of course, commerce between groups would be problematic.  Different pay scales. Different rates of taxation. But it could be worth it.

It would take a mountain of discipline.

I’m ready to try it.

And then the Heat Broke...

And it was beautiful...

I always like when it is very hot or very cold, in a way...you then definitely have something to look forward to. Something more pleasing.

Box is Cut

http://boxthemovie.wordpress.com/2012/07/06/final-cutspotting-session/

Never Have Seen Kiki and Herb

But I did see Mx. Justin Vivian Bond at Under 54...

http://justinbond.com/

Completely worth seeing. (S)he sings Joni's Lesson in Survival.

The best song of the night is Weil's Alabama Song.

(S)he's extremely smart and humorous.

One more Monday night. Go.

It was a wee long tonight...but (s)he was riffing sublimely.

Greetings from Jeffersonville NY

This picture was actually taken during the modern era: Today.

Notice the absence of video games, consoles, electronic screens of any kind.

Kind of makes you feel a little bit more human...