an evening in the Revealing

It is disturbing to see what is happening with the elections coming up on my geographic horizon.  The subscription TV which the fireteacher pays good money for out of his hard-earned chipster cheque is showing Arnie Terminator/Twins flicks through the night, every night.  Hey dudes, where's my Battle of Algiers, my Wild Pacific, my Spike Lee post-Katrina documentary?  No question over which side the satellite hovers.  How much did THAT cost?

And just where was Arnold while Georgio Armani Angelo Mozilo displaced the citizenry of our nation, quickly bleeding across the oceans destroying the peace of mind of westernized peoples worldwide?  (Think on that name: country-wide for a minute, ah such grandiose fantasies of pre-Elizabethan professional executioners have nothing on what heights are reached in our new millennium. (In fact, the Elizabethan age was one followed by many years of peace and prosperity, it is well known the Virgin Queen loved her people more than herself.)  It wasn't so long ago we had Gray Davis as governor who apparently bombed with the populace despite Enron's miserable  meatless ending.  The press ran Gray through the shredder under pressure from the you-know-whos. The press runs everybody through the shredder now since its their job to shred regardless of pressure. You see, they learned their lessons well.  For shame.  The truth is nobody can run this place, or any place, definitely not Meg Whitman, heh, just wait till she meets up with the local fruits & nuts overpopulating the west coast or worse, has to balance the state budget, the classic gubernatorial demise.  As soon as budget time rolls around, the shredder starts humming and it hums along through years and years of tears.  And, yes, Whitman's already denying her personal nannygate, exposed by none other than her X'd illegal immigrant housekeeper, but what really got me was something she said quite a while ago which was "I believe marriage is between a man and a woman."  She really said it.  Everything that came after that might as well have fallen on deaf ears, the blow was struck, the character naked for all to see and mind you, do we really want more X or "on leave to serve at the pleasure" CEOs in government?  No thanks, Meg, I won't be voting.  I will be among the millions all of you and yours lost with your expensive press-released, personhooded campaigns blessed by our highest court.  We have been burned so many times in state and national elections why ask for it outright?  Hey, gimme more idyllic penury huh?  And a little less room to just be, why don't ya? Fruits and nuts don't eat.  Yes, I know, voting is my Constitutional right to exercise so I exercise my right to protest by withholding.  The question is:  Do we prefer a candidate who lies all through the campaign or one who lies all though his/her tenure in office?  That's like saying we have a choice, isn't it, paper or plastic...
Oh well, nina, you could vote for Brown, right?  No.  His aide (um hmm) called Meg a whore.  I guess its the dirty politicking, the displays of concealed corruption and vast amounts of money spent on self promotion all the while attempting to hide one's true character.  All that money could be put to SUCH good use on improvement of the state and country and our species' survival.  For shame, again.  Are these people human beings or holograms or socio-hybrid aliens?  You tell me.

On my sojourns through God's Kingdom lately, the landscape is littered with peeling, weather-beaten campaign signs.  I try to get away from it and go deeper, farther and leave it behind where the neighboring mountains appear grey-green at the base, a lighter green-grey behind it and a higher, pale lavender grey-green ridge in the far distance.  Mist rises from the base of the far lavender ridge graduating to deeper grey at the top where it meets the clouds.  The mist means fog is coming on which means summer is over, winter opened its window and frost lies on the ground at dawn.  Its just a quick slide into wood gathering, stacking, hauling into the fireplace from there, although we never got started so early before.  I keep my eye on it.  First snow is always on Thanksgiving, but this year it could happen any day.  The Elk began bugling at the end of August.  That never happened so early before either.  Actually, this is a wonderful thing because the cold, wet night air (humidity) limits the probability of wildfires.  Lastly, as was the case in 2009, the Juncos are late by many weeks. The weather conditions must be just right for them to make the journey south and apparently, it is not.  I think in my mind its the air quality.  The belching filth of big agra is easily mistaken for fog coming through the passes.  Indeed, it is that surreal.  It was not always that way.  I remember.  I made notes in my Smithsonian guides.

The housing, foreclosure, low - if any - new home sales crisis reminds me of the GOM crisis.  The blowout preventer was broken as it was broken in the market crisis, or the credit crisis, or the ... etc..  Sort of like 911 too, each crisis militarily industrializes afterwards.  We keep having 911 disasters with eternal effects upending the previous story.  We know from reading stories there must be an ending somewhere, but there isn't.  Most everyone is still living the old story whether they are an unrepentant shopaholic or a Nigerian child selling sodapop in the mud to the pipeline police.  Even when attempts are made to reform corruption, the corrupt make the new story instantly throwing everyone and everything into deeper, darker, more terrifying and uncertain futures and still the story goes on.  The ever-changing, ever-enlarging story is a way of life now, as if the anomalies of the present are all that ever was or will be.

The courts are already backlogged, imagine what sheaths of complaint are hitting the desks today from all those who were foreclosed and evicted or threatened with the process, and all those who bought those foreclosed dwellings, ahem, illegally?  What a scene: the angry millions forcing their ways through the McMansion doors demanding their homes back from alarmed young couples feeding baby number one in the breakfast nook?  What are they gonna do in this economy, double up? Oh why not, they'll learn to get along just like we do, but they won't be happy about it until they win their lawsuits.  As we watch an entire new industry is being born, the graduation of Robo Signers to Paper Seekers tasked with unwrapping all the CDOs and sifting through xeroxes of xeroxes to find something that is probably lying under the mattress in Polanski's chalet if it actually exists, legitimate titles of home ownership and legitimate titles to commercial properties that is, not the mattress.  We only know one thing for sure at this point and that is: Everyone has again stepped on yet another rung of the Apocalypse ladder where nothing is what it seemed and all hell is breaking loose from the shylocks to the cowboys on bar stools looking for love in all the wrong places. There's a big range in between consisting of the colorful variety of Planetary Citizens.

There are many things I can handle as weird and strange as some things are, because I am not in that world. It does not concern me or the immediate members of this existence.  The man, me, the Guinea Pig, the Dogs, these are the beings whose interests are my interests.  The relatives and our children are the collective ribbons that complete the package.

Have you ever thought about being a survivor from a shipwreck, floating on a very small section of what is left of the lifeboat's hull, whom out of all those faces treading water would you reach for? 

On the other hand, when it comes to causing deliberate pain to our people in the larger sense, it burns, it scathes, it maims for life and kills as it does all victims whether they know what is happening or not and this is not acceptable.  One day its a feeling, then its a blurb at a news site, by evening the blurbs have their own wiki page.  And then, like the dark season, suddenly its upon us full steam ahead and we rearrange our existence again.  Suffering can be very good when you can, if you can, compare it to other states yet that also is being denied wherever possible.


Cufflinks photo: Mark Wilson/Getty Images N.A.: Angelo Mozilo, founder and former CEO, Countrywide Financial Corporation, testifying during a House Oversight and Government Reform hearing ... examining the compensation and retirement packages granted to the CEOs of corporations deeply involved in the current mortgage crisis.