Category Archives: Blogs' Archive

You never can tell on social media. Post a long, well thought out piece about how to solve all the worlds problems and you get zero comments. Toss off a one liner that you even thought was kind of silly at the time, and the dam bursts, with mostly contrarian and completely off topic comments surging in.
Today’s thread of the day was about guns and drugs. It’s possible I should have held my peace. I do have some right wingers on my feed, and I’m sure I didn’t change any of their minds, but the original post was a story out of Texas, about a guy down in Texas who was doing acid with a couple of buddies when he went to his dad’s car (His dad is a cop.The kid is 23.), took out his dad’s gun, and shot his two friends dead. He said he saw horns growing out of their heads, and thought they were deer. The original poster said “This was not about the gun. This was about the drugs.”
Well, I couldn’t let that go. I’ve had some experience in my life with LSD. There was the time I got up to go to the bathroom, splashed some cold water on my face, and saw vines growing out of the middle of my forehead. There was the time I was watching TV and an ad came on for a roller coaster at a local theme park and my stomach actually flipped and I thought I was on the ride and I grabbed onto the arm of the couch and held on for dear life. For a second. There was the time in Ireland, sitting in the wet grass on the top of a hill looking down at the Hippie encampment below, and thinking “I’m sitting on top of the world. Like, literally, on top of the world. We are always sitting on top of the world.”
One thing I’ve never done is shot anybody, or even been tempted to. I hope the jury ignores this guy’s bullshit excuse and sends him to jail for the rest of his life, because if all you need to do to get away with murder is say you were doing LSD (and you’re the sheriff’s son), then that gives them justification to keep it illegal. And it’s bullshit.

First of all, there is a flaw in the way I get my news, which is pretty much strictly through Facebook. Usually that works O.K. Anything I’m likely to be interested in, some of my friends are likely to have posted links to. This is why my friends are my friends. Similar interests. Well, some of them. A lot of them are my friends because, in the past, I’ve just added people randomly.
But, that just widens the news field, because I often get informed of things I don’t care about at all. Bad traffic in D.C.? A corruption scandal in India? A freak snowstorm in Texas? I am informed.
Today, I was notified of a lost dog in Scotland. Wish I could help.
But, there was apparently a fire Friday in Oakland that killed over 30 people and I just found out about it now from an article showing pictures of the site and how beautiful it had been. Which is interesting, I suppose, but a bit beside the point. People are dead. The amazing artistic value of the site is secondary. Way secondary.

In other news, Nancy Pelosi said the Democrats are unified and do not want a new direction. I have two things to say about this. First, I first saw it on a site called Bients, which I’m still not sure if it’s a reputable news site or not. They definitely seem to have a bias, and to sensationalize a bit. So, I thought, eh, she probably didn’t actually say that. Then I saw it in the Washington Post. Not that their record is perfect,but that’s two sources, so probably true.
The 2nd thing I have to say is that that’s either the most delusional thing I’ve ever heard or else she’s a mole, working with the Republicans to destroy the Democratic party from within. I’m serious about that.

Just got back from the December Alchemy poetry reading at the Napa Bar, which I am kind of fed up with. The Napa Bar, that is. Not the poetry reading.
In years gone by we used to have the readings in the basement, or sometimes in the garden area in the summer, and both of those were really nice, because it was just the poetry reading, and you could hear every word distinctly, for better or worse. Of course, some of the poetry is going to be bad poetry, that is inevitable, and your mind is going to wander after a few sentences until it’s just a burble of words and an occasional ripple of nervous laughter from the audience, but at least you could hear it.
Then they moved us upstairs, and it’s generally not too bad, but tonight it actually felt like enemy territory. There were some people in the back room talking loudly, which is not too surprising, it is a pub, after all, and one guy playing guitar and singing which kind of pissed me off because he could have come out and joined us and taken a turn, but he apparently had no interest in that. Then, there was the guy from the bar who was crossing through the front room, out the door (which leads to a hallway which is actually just a passage from the street to the inner courtyard, there’s no front door there, which means it’s sheltered from rain but other than that, it’s outdoors)and to the supply closet across the hall to bring back three little cartons of tomato juice or whatever, and the room turned to freezing every time he did it, and he did it often enough it seemed on purpose, and then somehow, I don’t know how they timed this, but somebody apparently always ordered a cappuccino right in the middle of somebody’s performance.
The reading itself went pretty well despite all that. Some funny songs, some clever 10 word stories (i.e. “Bugger off,” said Rapunzel, “I’ve just had my hair done.”)
a couple of new people, one from Alaska, a young guy from England who read a poem about sleeping by a canal with a bunch of homeless people, and a girl named Dakota who was, unfortunately, the sole female poet of the evening.
That’s a problem. I don’t know how we can rectify that.
Anyway, by the time it finally got around to me (we had over ten readers, and there weren’t many more than 15 people in the room at any point) I was feeling kind of like I was going to bomb, so much had gone before, but I was all right.
On to the next.

Normally, I do not watch TV shows like this, but MARS ended two hours ago,there is seriously nothing more entertaining on, so I am watching some documentary, reality TV thing about a bunch of rednecks (I hate to stereotype,but this is the most deliberately self stereotyped show since Hee Haw!) chasing something they call a “Fire Dragon” in Appalachia. Almost all of the guys have beards, one is seriously obese, one is hamming it up for the camera and actually used the word “Wharmp” to indicate a trap closing. “And then, wharmp, we got ‘im.” There’s even one named Huckleberry.
I’ve seen these things advertised, or inadvertently watched for a few minutes while skipping through the channels, but damn, they’re ridiculous. Flashlights on their own faces and hysterical over-reaction to so many imaginarythings,it’s like the Blair Witch Project. They chase after Bigfoot a lot, in his various incarnations.
Now they are shooting at some poor animal. The thing is, it’s never Bigfoot, and it’s never actually a Swamp Dragon after it’s caught or killed, it’s just some big lizard.
Because there are no dragons, by definition. Dragons are magical creatures who can breathe fire, and fly, generally with a small boy on their neck.
There is no Bigfoot. There might be undiscovered, and reclusive, gorillas of some kind. We don’t know. But, if they find one, they’ll know more about it and it won’t be Bigfoot any more.
Oop. I guess that’s it. After destroying their clever trap and outrunning their bullets, which are zinging in every direction, the Fire Dragon disappearedinto the swamp and the program ended.
MARS was pretty good, though. Looks like we may have a bit of a power struggle developing.

“we’re living in a prison but we can’t see the bars” said a man on TV just now,they are talking about ‘The Matrix’ and this guy was introduced as a serious scientist. That whole line of thought bothers me.
Sure, I get what he’s saying, I think. We only have the possibilities afforded to us within this reality, upon this world. We don’t get the opportunity, for instance, of actually attending Hogwarts, or serving aboard a Federation Starship. Most of us will probably never fly under our own power, or travel back in time. But, still, it’s an awfully comfortable prison. We have all the books and movies we could ever want, there are plenty of activities the prisoners can participate in, either alone or with other people.
It’s like saying that you never die because matter is never destroyed and we are matter, we are stardust, and so on. My atoms and the atoms inside the car that is about to hit me are both part of the universe.
Nonetheless, we look both ways before we cross the street because the real world is the world we have to live in and the one whose physical laws you would be well advised to heed.