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“congressman paul was right on that”
Watching some Republican debate action. Everyone looks very earnest as there is yet another over stylized singing of the national anthem. Rick Santorum sings along. Rick “don’t google me” Santorum kept it brief. I would like to see them follow the rules of the debate, listen to each other and the question, and answer it as directed. This spew a sound byte instead of thinking is a troubling turn and if you’ve ever talked to someone who communicates that way, its annoying.
Its been a pretty busy day. I was up late last night and had a busy one. A challenging but engaging two hour co-occurring disorders group, but it ended up all coming together nicely. I start each group with a “check in” your name and how you feel. I ask people not to use the 4 meaningless peaces of politeness “good”,” fine”, “OK”, and “alright” and the generally is a body feeling “tired”. I had to check in myself as “defensive” half way through the first hour and used it to teach how I had observed it behaviorally and not felt it as an emotion but still knew it was true. I like to teach the sociopaths that not being able to feel feelings is an excuse. Left me worn out but got through the rest of the afternoon.
John made supper so i got to bring in the plants as the paper was calling for 32 degrees for the next 2 nights. I also started up the furnace. I got a whole mess of green tomatoes. I’m going to fry them up for dinner on Friday, maybe. Maybe, I’ll do it Parmesan style. I wouldn’t mind doing green tomato jelly as well but that’ll take some doing. I am going to St Louis for the weekend so I would have to research, shop & make it all on week nights. maybe.
So the debate has been going on. Some real answers and interactions. A lot of nonsense and a fair amount of dare i say dickishness. Again only Ron Paul has any attractive qualities. The courts are unfair to minorities, they’re against Obama care because Democrats proposed it. He just says it like it is. Bachman is against the 14th amendment and she calls herself a constitutional conservative, but they’re all like that. I “liked” the constitution because all they talked about was amending it.
Occupy My Living Room
Again the blog catches me watching baseball. Tigers and Rangers tied at 3 in the ninth. If I am going to stick to a post a day for the rest of the month I am going to have to do more then just updates on my life. It might be interesting enough to carry that kind of attention but fair chunks of it is confidential so that is just not going to work. I’ll have to go then a little further afield for topics. I think I want to talk about The Occupation.
I have been a student of social movements since high school and what this one has a number of things going for it unique to anything else I’ve seen. Mostly its the fact that is going on right now and that its growing. The times seem ready for such a thing with a clear rise in disenfranchisement and the youth unemployment rate why not. Our political system has failed to the point where there is no longer even a semblance of functional democracy. The financiers gambled away the future and no one made them pay. No one went to jail no one has to pay except for the 99%.
If we are going to have to swallow painful medicine, austerity, service and benefits cuts and tax increases or total financial collapse, there is no longer any middle ground then some folks from their side are going to have to pay as well. Someone is going to have to go to jail some real regulations are going to need to be put in place to see that this doesn’t happen again. Our politicians bought and paid for have nothing to shackle the unbridled greed that caused this mess. Nice to see a little old people power.
Now we see what happens. If it keeps spreading and keeps growing then clashes will occur. The state will predictably overreact and the numbers will grow and change becomes possible. They have already changed the nature of the debate. Policy will follow. People can only be pushed so far and no farther. Our bankrupt system is a call to action and I’m glad someone is listening.
Me I just go to work, buy my local food and putter in my yard. watch some baseball. If its the real deal there’ll be time. If its not then I guess it doesn’t matter that much.
still watchless
I’m up early, heard John get up with his dogs and Fido had to pee, if I would have realized it was 4:00 i might have tried continuing to sleep. I’ve gotta get a watch or a clock in my bedroom. Mostly I use the highway traffic to tell the time. First wave of “rush hour” means its time to get rolling. Its been a pretty good week. With the long weekend, short weeks go by quick. Tuesday I felt pressed by messages I couldn’t respond to, paperwork I couldn’t write, training I need to get going on. Wednesday I got some no shows and moved on the first two.
The training thing I think i am going to have to go in on a weekend and dispense with. I need a little space to think, read, and put together the final touches on my certification application to be at long last a [drum roll please] Certified Co-Occurring Disorders Professional – Diplomate as well as my re-certification for my [no drum roll required] Registered Associate Substance Abuse Counselor II.
Wednesdays are my late day so I have a rare weekday morning to do something besides work. I went downtown and checked on Tre and myself”s application for the Oddfellows. We were accepted and are moving on to the next phase this month or next. Tre is visiting an Ashram in Colorado so is inaccessible to nail down plans. I am most looking forward to some cross-generational socialization. I haven’t had much old dude rambling on as i’ve been used to since Dad died.
I also stopped by the Occupy Como site at “Freedom Square”. Met an earnest young man named Tripp who told me about the 1%, very cute really. [i apologize for the bold, i am up early writing in the dark and hit some wrong keys and its easier to live with then figure out how to turn off. i will just write about stuff that needs extra emphasis. while i am on a break from my mainstream of thought anyway i will mention the light/medium roast Yemeni/Guatemalan blend I am drinking this morning is quite frankly excellent.] The Como Occupation has been going on for better then a week with someone always there and sometimes a little crowd. I asked if there was any way i could help out and we settled on me picking up Tripp some loose tobacco.
Whenever I deal with youth activists I am always informed by my interactions with my old buddy Ivan. In my youth activist days Ivan was a Geometry professor [bubble specialist] who moved from Berkeley to toledo and found our scruffy activist ways the closest thing to home. He used to insist on buying the pitchers when we went out after meetings because we were poor students and he had a living wage. I try to do the same.
When i came back Tripp was engaged in a lively discussion with another Occupier about the Truth about 911. Yawn. I picked up a sign “You Are Awesome” and waved it for a while and jumped in when the conversation moved on to Blackwater and agreed to stop back by this weekend when I had to go to work. I hope to stop in this evening when i am downtown to check out a little of the Artrageous. Someone I know is having a showing i said i would try to stop by at.
While downtown I went into Coolstuff to see about that watch situation. If i am going to try to squeeze a little Walstreet protesting in i’ll need to be better organized. They had backward clocks which i considered for my timeless bedroom but can’t see it in the dark anyway. I looked at alarm clocks but no wind up ones. I only need an alarm a few times a year. Seems silly to draw juice the other 360 + days. No backwards watches and only a tiny stretchy watch that would not fit my giant wrist. I’ll keep looking. Maybe at Itchys.
The other big event has been Tiger baseball. Enjoyed mightily seeing my Tiges fell the mighty Yankees. Sportsmanship and management overcame money once again. Fister came through and I like how Leland had the confidence in him to take Verlander off the potential roster so he’s fresh for game 1 vs Texas. I hear Texas’s whole roster costs less then one of the highest paid Yankees. Yankees were warming up the bullpen in the first inning after 2 quick solo home runs and through everything but the kitchen sink on the mound including CC Sabathia’s first relief work in the majors. But they still lost. Hah.
Now i’m going to drink a little more coffee then take Fido out for a morning walk. Got back in the garden finally and planted my mum in a gap in the strawberries the hot dry spell created. Might be a mistake but I figure they come on slow and the strawberries will have done their thing before the mum gets big. I got a big bag of crocuses at Costco in toledo and am going to weave them into the herbs i think. Maybe up by the roses as I try to even out the rough patches in my mow route.
to many competing demands. Tre gave me some garlic which i want to get in the ground and john built me a cold frame i would like to get some lettuce and spinach and the like going in. need to get compost. oh well, one thing at a time. trying to be patient.
nuclear power and me (part 2)
The police arrived on the scene rather quickly. Traffic was backed up and I and 5 or so others were handcuffed to the cement barrels. We were chanting: “One, two, three, four, don’t pollute our lake no more, five, six, seven, eight, shut down fermi smash the state”. The crowd of protesters strung all over the countryside realized where the action was and started to arrive. The police came with bolt cutters and we were clipped out relatively easily. (We couldn’t raise the $100 for stove pipe to complete the barrels according to design, otherwise they would have had to bust through all the concrete.) We got bailed out though because it took long enough for the cop cars batteries to die from running all the lights. the road was still blocked for better than an hour.
I hit jail with such an incredible since of relief. i was so tired and stressed from organizing this monster event jail was a blessing. I wondered about what my life had become. The police had taken to putting us in a separate holding cell where the phone was “broken”. This had been their policy since an activist, john i think, did a tv interview over the jail phone. I heard reports of the tripods, the police just pushed them over and maced people when they hit the street. john whose plan had been to handcuff himself to the first cop car filled with protesters had been preemptively maced and arrested just because and the cops were intrigued by the handcuffs.
The cops were pissed. taken off guard and outside their experience. They are not used to having people say “no”. They were not used to detroit anarchists pelting them first with doughnuts later with stones. They were not used to photographers catching them being rough. They arrested a couple, real professional journalists. My friend Roger yelled out “don’t mace her pig!” A cop came over and yelled in his face that if he stepped in the road he would be arrested. Roger yelled back “ok I won’t” and the cop pulled back and hit him. six cops beat him down with sticks while Roger lay on the ground yelling I am not resisting, I am not resisting. They squirt mace, lots of it in his eyes up his nose in his ears down his throat until he vomited. then they arrested him and charged him with felony assault. I kid you not. i saw the video. roger was convicted at trial for assault. crazy world. they say spittle left his lips when he yelled ok i won’t.
We all chanted bad cop no doughnut when they brought roger in. we chanted and sang all night. we did a hed hum that was transcedent. we slept in a big pile like puppies when they wouldn’t give us blankets. we all refused bail because it wasn’t offered to Roger and a photographer who was beaten and also charged with assault. if you didn’t know it if the cops beat you up they charge you with assault to justify your injuries. pricks.
there’s more to the story but little about nuclear power. i was disillusioned by the whole thing. mostly roger. i realized my policy of creating conflict situations to radicalize people was reckless and costly. i didn’t think i had it in me anymore. constant court support plus my own legal involvement long after the cameras went away made me think. the plant opened largely without incident. on christmas we got santa (Terry Carpenter) arrested with an elf (Marie Mason) and an indian (Jesse Deerinwater). my mom and both my brothers. that’s where you had to be if you wanted to see the trapps on christmas.
the following summer other activists picked up the torch for another big action and i felt i had to carry on though my passion was gone. spent the summer in detroit organizing and we brought together a similar coalition. we again did multiple arrest events. our big finale was a full on non-violent assault on the plant. we had two ladders hidden and planned on going over the fence. one was a cooling tower sculpture with a ladder and a long ladder swathed in paper with slogan written on it. both of these were feints to draw the security so two of us could throw blankets over the barbwire scale the fence and climb the power towers with handcuffs and a banner. Our cooling tower ladder was pegged right away and seized by the cops. the other fooled them and we got three over the fence but it didn’t draw off the security. rather than get pulled off the fence i went around to the camera crews and said there would be an action at the custer statue in 15 minutes. Me and a kid from kansas drove down there, climbed the custer statue and handcuffed ourselves to his stirrup. Oh and I forgot to mention the guy who showed up with scuba gear who was coming in from the beach to climb the reactor building and plant an earthfirst! banner on the roof. we were all scared when he never showed. violating a nuclear security zone is a federal felony. he was a strange guy with a crew cut, no activist credentials and a trunk full of high tech gear. everyone thought he was a plant so i palled up to him. i did with all the suspected infiltrators. put em to work, take em under my wing, embrace them watch them. when we got out of jail i called his emergency number in chicago and he answered. he said he was picked up by “federal authorities” and questioned. “don’t worry they’re not interested in you” he said. they’re after squatter and the greenpeace bigwigs. speaking of greenpeace it was hiroshima day and no greenpeace parallel action. but on nagasaki day they dropped giant banners down the cooling towers. hadn’t told us which was good on them because we had likely been seriously infiltrated.
It was sweet. more arrests, probation, lack of money and i ultimately drifted out of full time radical environmental activism. i saw where it was heading. i was getting tired. the chronic poverty and constant travel, the stress. mostly i was tired. tired of hitting my head against a brick wall.
I did some other stuff, small protests, conferences, teach ins and such. when davis besse in Oregon Ohio had their incidents 3/4″ of stainless steel all that was left in their corroded containment vessel. so close. all i did was put it in my chap book. i might have went to one protest.
When I had my manic breakdown I even questioned my antinuke stance. I had apocalyptic visions of the breakdown of transportation, the end of coal, and cried for those hospital people without electricity. my mom told me to snap out of it and remember who i was. she was right. its insane. japan proves this if ever there was a doubt. if the smoking hell hole of chernobyl hadn’t already told us what we need to know. shut em down. watch the waste forever. teach our children to do the same. everything else is an unspeakable crime that we all bear guilt from as the lights burn.
nuclear power and me (part 1)
The recent events in Japan have had me engaged in thinking about nuclear power in a way that I have not for many years. I have had an intimate connection with nuclear power for pretty much as long as I can remember growing up in fermi country on the eastern shores of lake erie. My earliest memories of nuclear power is the propaganda comics we would get once a year in science class when detroit edison covered the education.
the fermi 2 nuclear power plant went from planning to construction to trying to come online when i was in high school. having had it be a presence for as long as i could remember i never thought to ask why it was called fermi 2. i mostly remember the coloring book with mickey mouse riding in goofy’s jalopy and telling him to air up his tires to save energy. goofy preferred the smooth ride of under inflation. i also learned about background radiation and the unreasonable fear ignorant country people have of things that are new. nuclear power was the promise of the future. even my hot wheels went nuclear. tired of having to go to the imaginary gas station every so often the cars switched to nuclear fuel. a handful of powder and they’d run for life. aircraft carriers ran on it. silly scared people who don’t know nothing.
In 7th grade science class Mr Lowney organic asparagus farmer did his own bit on nuclear. He presented its dangers and promises (fermi 2 was running into billions over budget and years behind schedule at this point) and told us about fermi 1, the day we almost lost detroit. when we moved to debate i was the only proponent. fermi 1 was an experimental fast breeder reactor not the really cool GE Mark 2 reactor we were gonna get. sure there is risk from radioactivity but there is risks in not having electricity too. try running your hospital without it and see who loses more lives. sure waste is a problem but gosh darn it we’re just getting smarter every day. I already knew you couldn’t win debates with teachers but i felt i held my own. the voice of reason.
In 11th grade i had technical writing and we did a speech to persuade. I was eager to do nuclear power because i already knew the material and had already waded through a lot of science for an english class. the pro nuclear position was already taken so i was forced into taking anti-nuke or having to learn something. I prided myself for the easy way out and the little as possible model of formal education. I was crushing a novel a day in that era so i can see how school work was an obstruction. I was also hanging out with scott woodward at the macomb branch library and decided to do some research, bone up on what’s happening since 7th grade (fermi 2 is still over budget and still under construction).
I am horrified by the facts because i had not yet come to understand the sublime in the face of nuclear horror. I read the Monroe Evening News article from the day after the near meltdown of fermi 1 after perusing the day we almost lost detroit and learned about the china syndrome. It was one paragraph long from the second page and said plant operators handled an incident in an admirable fashion according to training. Kudos to them.
Mostly though it was the waste. I learned that spent fuel means that it has become so highly radiated that it can no longer be used. That with its half life it would be two hundred thousand years until it was safe and we have no idea how to safely store this shit for any where of even a fraction of that. I learned there was enough low level radiation waste to pave a coast to coast highway and that every nuclear waste storage facility radiation had migrated into the ground water. I was horrified and convinced. I was anti-nuclear. the first brick had popped out of the right wing wall i had built my political ideals.
Ultimately I would question a system that would devise such a monstrously fiendish boondoggle on us country folk with a taste for walleye. Why did we need a nuclear power plant when we already had the third biggest coal fired plant in the world? How were we selected to be the environmental sacrifice zone? jesus pushed me over the edge with his words “love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you”. bam, like a stroke of lightning i knew war was wrong and i was off to the races. from right wing republican to anarchist within days as i followed the obvious implications of being anti-war. I rejected anarchy as naive and ultimately evolved into a democratic socialist type until my ultimate embrace of decentralization and participatory democracy and that i was really back to being an anarchist. having been everything now i don’t see it changing.
Fermi 2 ultimately got close to opening. in my research i found out about nuclear protesters as not just historical relic but as happening now. Well sort of. I went to some 1o people protests mostly old nuns. I bought some buttons and told them i wanted to help. I waved a sign or two. Wow 12 people with signs or the finishing touches on your 6 billion dollar investment. the plant opened with fits and starts and the 10 people went away. I went to college.
The first gulf war changed my brother john and me. John wanted to hang a banner when i got home from the psych unit afternoon shift he had painted “wage peace” on a sheet and wanted to climb a power tower and hang it the night the bombing started. “high voltage message” and peace was on the front page along with the war. never doubt a small group of dedicated people could change the media message in a small town paper. we went to protests and were part of a million people saying no to war. it was life changing.
After the war we drove down to east liver pool ohio and protested a toxic waste incinerator coming on line with martin sheen and all. Discovered SEAC, the student environmental action coalition and started organizing anti-statist pro-planet radical environmental events. it was great. changed my life. we were all in.At Frankies, this club in east toledo a door man said he was gonna jump off the martin luther king bridge for the anniversary of steven biko’s death. He said he jumped all the time and just swam to the docks, once he did it 7 times in a row. I remembered i’d seen one of his early ones in the paper. We jumped that night and it was cool. my brother was there and thought since it hadn’t been in the paper for awhile we could probably put anything we wanted in the paper with a little planning.
We looked in the calendar and the anniversary of fermi 1 was coming up. we sent press releases and organized a march from international park to the center of the bridge. Joe Mold and I got up and held a banner gave a short speech and took off our shirts and jumped in. no tv, the trucks were late and we felt we risked arrest if we waited. We swam to a sail boat to avoid the cops and sailed away drinking grog and glad we didn’t die in the cold maumee in october.
After I got my masters i was aimless and ended up being a full time field organizer for SEAC, hitching around Iowa, Kansas, Nebraska, and Missouri teaching kids how to cause trouble for a good cause. Jousted with NAFTA, the wise use movement, made a lot of connections, and got my first death threats. the woods is a dangerous place to be antilogging and lead country does not want anti-lead activists cleaning up flood damage. they’ll shoot you for wanting to pick up garbage if you don’t agree with him.
Fermi 2 ran on until christmas day 1993 the turbine threw a blade (a big un) and it ripped around the containment building. shut it down and some water got contaminated. i was home for christmas and john was still in town. better coverage then fermi 1. we both thought they would dilute it and dump it in the lake. really, what else are you gonna do with that stuff??? John was on it. organized some protests and a public hearing and 700 people turned out. started blockading the plant with bodies, people getting arrested.
I was field organizing in the ozarks as things heated up that summer when they wanted to dump the water in the lake. I came home early and called in debts from all the kids whose backyards I had been busting my hump to save and finagled SEAC to sponsor an event The Grassroots National Action Festival, we got the local coalition (CRAFT -Citizens Resistance At Fermi Two, great acronymn), the radical version we had spun off when CRAFT wanted to say no to stupid stuff we wanted to do (Zebra Mussel Alliance), and Green Peace and Earthfirst! who never worked together. we had a lot of energy and we had ruled the local media for months. My mom never really respected our choice to be radical activists until people she watched on tv started to call the house to find out what’s going on. it was beautiful.
I had gotten arrested in a blockade get dragged off scenario. There were two gates and we could only force arrests by blocking both. It got routine. Fermi was getting ready to come back on line so we decided to throw everything we had at it. In the woods we cut down 6 30′ trees and made tripods. We made three barrels filled with cement with pipe through the center big enough for an arm intersecting a piece of rebar. We bought handcuffs, steve merrix got an employee discount at the adult bookstore. we used the tools we had, could borrow, or steal.
The event came. three big protests in three days. we hit detroit edison headquarters with a handful of high profile arrests. We covered the statue of general custer (unfortunate favorite son of monroe michigan) with yarn weaving a web of peace over the nuclear war machine. (fermi 1 was a fast breeder to make bomb stuff and was defended by the Nike nuclear missile base which became a park which we reserved to camp our protesters [it really is all connected]. We brought up as guest speaker a native activist who was opposing a consortium of power companies trying to site a dump on her land. (detroit edison dropped out shortly later). On day 3 we borrowed Mark and Mike’s anti-nuke bus (no we won’t use it for anything illegal, its cool). we loaded up our team, the tripods and the barrels. We had announced we would blockade the plant at 2:00 pm on a sunday afternoon. the police were out in force and lined up by the gates with the media ready for a nice but big typical thing like we’d been doing.
We stopped in the road leading up to the plant and threw up three tripods with activists chained to the top within two minutes while the police looked on in disbelief. We drove the bus up the road pulled on to the main one dixie highway and pulled the bus across both lanes and stopped traffic. We pulled out our barrels and started to block the road, “roads closed folks”. One lady said her son had a little league game so we waved her through. a dude in a truck said he was going to work. “sorry the roads closed”. “I’ve got a tire iron that says its open”. “Hey get a camera on that guy he says he’s gonna hit me” as i handcuffed up to the barrels. The road was closed, the plant was blockaded as promised over a month ago at 2:00 on a sunday afternoon.
to be continued….
drinking mead and pensive thoughts
this week it shifted. i have been tired of struggling, of feeling like i can’t do it and i will soldier on nobly until i am ultimately destroyed is not a good plan for life. this week i consciously decided i would be happy and competent and that as far as it depended on me it was all good. only took a couple of days for that thought to invade my feeling world and by midweek life was good.
today was a challenge. painfully busy, whooosh. i am asked to be in three places. i jam all day without cease and fall painfully behind. my good mood is unassailable is my motto, my watchwords. I hit the wall when i get home. i go upstairs and change my clothes and i can’t push on to garden, get some exercise, play with the dog. i lay in bed and crush my genre fiction. after much travail and uncertainty even against long odds the protagonist is successful.
it is all good, i’m just tired. so much stuff. then i fight on facebook with the anti-mosque people. i am strident and harsh but don’t delete it, soften it or apologize for it for my Muslim friends. For Allah. Brother John read the Koran and when I asked him to sum it up he said “god is great”. what are you gonna do? Me I’m gonna drink the beverage of the gods and write some poetry, plan on going to bed early, and largely letting it go. I’m gonna write a blog post to hide the poem from casual readers. they don’t deserve to know where i’m at tonight like you do faithful reader:
I’m drinking mead and thinking pensive thoughts
Telling a work anecdote that requires so much exposition
I am left more feeling alone.
I’m drinking mead and thinking pensive thoughts
Wondering why poetry demands loneliness
A melancholy thoughtfulness not devoid of energy.
I’m drinking mead and thinking pensive thoughts
Spark shower madness the electrical cry of the cicada
Humming loud like an electric fence then…
The deafening silence of freedom
Oh that I was trapped here
To justify the loneliness
Honey sweet on the lips
Warm in the belly
Something at least
Fit for the gods.
In Praise of the Push Reel Mower
I am up early drinking coffee and looking for that balanced time when the dew has dried but the heat of the day has not kicked in. Today is the day I get to mow my lawn. When I bought my house a couple years ago and needed to get a mower it was a pretty easy selection. My biggest factor was my carbon footprint and the push reel mower rocks on that front. Two stroke engines are terribly polluting and the noise and the gas and oil and the space just made it not seem worth it. My yard is of some size so I would be lying if I said it wasn’t a chore at times. My 73 year old pappy rues the choice cuz he likes mowing lawn, likes doing his share, but the push reel is too tough. He also likes to point out that he’s done his share on the push reel back in his childhood and still remembers fondly when his parents upgraded to a motorized mower. Having seen the size of my grandma’s yard I can’t hardly blame him. But I figure I need the exercise. I don’t go to the gym which seems artificial and strange. There is so much physical work that needs to be done and by doing everything by hand I get the opportunity to work out. Mostly its biggest drawback is the time. Its a strange balancing act of matching weather, schedule and personal energy to get ‘er done. The trick to good push reel mowing is to stay ahead of it. When the grass gets tall or is too damp the mower just pushes it over. I also like to go back over it with a weed whip and hit the grass stalks and heavy stems. The end result looks as good as anyone’s. I’ve also come to enjoy the quiet. When Amee and I lived in Toledo I used to call the guy down the street using his leaf blower excessively “manscaping”. Why do by hand which you can do with noisy power tools seems to be the ethic. I am just the opposite. I dig my garden, double dig in fact, by hand, rake my leaves, push reel the lawn, for the quiet and the clean and it just feels more serene. Machines have always made me nervous. I was a natural Luddite and I organize my life to that effect. Sure I have my ’92 pick up but when the timing belt chews its way through the engine block I may not replace it. I enjoy not driving. I’ll bike more, stay closer to home, start walking to the store. Its where we all need to go if we believe in justice or enjoy living on the planet earth. Everyone can’t drive a combustion car and a living planet. We all can have a bike, a place to call home, the internet, and maybe even a push reel mower.
bread and circuses
Maybe a road trip is the ideal time to remember that not only is BP responsible for the oil spill catastrophe but I am as well. I drive they drill ducks get oily. I wish I could get mad like so many of my peers but I don’t feel holy enough to point my finger at anyone at BP. Maybe if I knew more I could know they’re more guilty than me. I know I feel bad because I allow it to happen, and go to baseball games. There’s this whole level of engagement in professional sports that i have gone from experiencing and taking a critical eye. I can easily understand how Marx would consider it an opiate for the masses, some piece of false consciousness to distract us from the oily ducks and the exploitation of man by man. Nonetheless I was thrilled to see Tommy Brookins, whom i listed along with Larry Norman as people I thought were self actualized in my high school psych class. I loved Tommy Brookins, and Kirk Gibson, and Lou Whitaker and Alan Trammel, and all those guys who won the pennant with Sparky. At the game there was a child like joy, mostly in the children. A toddler stood on her mom’s lap and when i would cheer for the Tigers she would too. I told her mom she was raising a little Tiger’s fan. It was fun, engaging, we all shared something. I ran into my friend Isaiah who I thought was a Cubs fan, when I asked him he said, “no, i’m a baseball fan”. If you’ve ever read George Will with an open mind you can’t believe baseball is only false consciousness. A perfect world might need baseball, as well as clean oceans and beaches. My dad has that same childlike spirit about baseball. He knows it all, every Tiger and what they’ve been doing, what their stories are, what pitches they throw and then. Who swings at the first pitch and how quickly they take between pitches. It keeps him engaged in this world. It may be the most important thing in his life. If its not shedding crocodile tears over the fucked up gulf and plotting with his class peers for the dictatorship of the proletariot then fuck Marx and his judgemental bullshit. But nonetheless I drove a gulf oil eating machine halfway across the state to see millionaires play baseball. I am not doing nor planning on doing a damn thing for the oily ducks and all that other bullshit even though I think I am cognizant of how truly awful it all is and that i am personally responsible. A client asked me how bad it really was because he doesn’t trust the news. I told him second cup bad. What? The second angel poured out his bowl on the sea, and it turned into blood like that of a dead man, and every living thing in the sea died (Revelations 16:3). I refuse the simple comfort of anger at BP and put faith that how i live my life justifies my part in this horrible piece of evil filth our works have created. It will remind me to step up my game, to work smarter if not harder to disengage from the madness. Engage more in the solution.
“Harmony”
Hardy Are Red Mums On New Years-eve
Dusted by the fallen snow, warmed by fallen leaves
Our love blooms like those hardy mums and shimmers like the snow
It also warms like fallen leaves, as only lovers know
Harmony oh Harmony, i’m not the man i wish i could be
Harmony oh Harmony, i make up words, then sing ’em off key
Angels and Anarchists never stop to marry
Heaven and Revolution don’t leave time to tarry
But if they knew love like we know love, we’d see pretty soon
Angels and Anarchists on their honeymoon
Harmony oh Harmony, i’m not the man i wish i could be
Harmony oh Harmony, i make up words, then sing ’em off key
“I’m no Eddie Von Blondt”
This poem is one of the rare ones inspired by something i saw on tv, in this case the X-Files. Eddie Von Blondt was a shape shifter who took over Fox Mulder’s life and almost made it with Sculley. He just did a better job living than Mulder had done and it got me thinking and I wrote this. It again comes out of my chap book ‘America: Its Land and Its People’:
I’m no Eddie Von Blondt
For sure, for sure
Nor Fox Mulder either
For that matter
Sure enough
I’m to comfortable
In the other
To do well
To gain the props
Of artificial attraction
Material satisfaction
The base gratification
Of the top of the stratification
The Lie’s artless beauty
And by artless I do not mean natural
I mean without art, not guile
The feeling not the smile
Straightened, whitened
Capped and mapped
By the Colgate Brightness
Of your pearly whiteness
I’ll read you the list of
The snaggle toothed super stars….
And I know the pain
Of violating social conformity
Fuck the Rules
Fuck the cars
Fuck the money
Fuck the bars
Fuck the rich
Fuck the stars
Fuck the game
And I won’t play
Not by your rules
That made me a loser
Before I even knew I was playing
And that the stakes were high
And the rules a lie
Or so cruelly true
They cry out for obfuscation
Now I’m not saying
You have to be poor
And fat and crazy
And live in your parent’s garage
And wear old clothes
And not comb your hair
Just be yourself
Your god-given unadulterated self
Brave and unafraid
Content with who you are
What you have
Because if we keep
Buying into their shit
Buying their shit
Living the Lie
Giving the Lie
To our children
And our children’s children
There won’t be a 7th generation
To give it too.
Multiconstruct 
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