Perhaps it’s Just Me.

So far there have been 36 hours of non-stop news coverage and discussion of the tornado that hit Moore Oklahoma.  Every network has a crew on the scene and all the talking heads are falling all over themselves to interview what’s left of  the bedraggled inhabitants, and assure all involved that their prayers are with them.  ”We are all praying for you” they claim.  My television is flooded with requests for donations to every conceivable “organization” claiming to be dedicated to helping the people.  Before I hit the hay last night the Pope in Rome was on TV claiming to be “with” the people of Moore Oklahoma.  He did not take that opportunity to remind them not to use condoms.  I thought that was a nice touch.

So, what’s really up with this?  Twenty-four people were killed.  That’s roughly the number of people killed from texting while driving every three days.  Oddly enough, texting while driving and getting killed, or, killing someone else doesn’t kick up nearly the hubbub that a good twister does.  No one is awed by, or, glued to their TVs over the coverage of a car accident.  No network, let alone all of them, will ever consider dedicating round the clock coverage to the carnage caused by texting while driving.  Even the Pope isn’t praying that people give it up.  Mrs. N. finds all this very curious.

Ever since I read about Terror Management Theory in Scientific American  I have had a hard time not seeing that American corporate media is out there 24/7 trying to fuck with our brains.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=fear-death-and-politics

They never seem to miss a good opportunity to drill home the idea that if we are not currently terrified about something we are not really with the program here in the good old USA.  A few weeks ago it was getting blown up by crazy people while running a marathon.  Today it’s a twister.  Tomorrow it will be another school shooting or some other crazy bastard doing what crazy bastards are want to do… (crazy shit that kills people).  There will, again, be round the clock coverage and intimate portraits of people in pain, and prayers, lots and lots of prayers directed at the God who has a (seemingly insane) plan for us all.

The people of Moore Oklahoma were hit and flattened by another tornado less than 15 years ago.  Mrs. N. was struck by the fact that almost none of the people have tornado shelters in their homes or back yards.  I saw some of the residents on TV and heard their answers to questions from the talking heads with regard to why that is.  The general consensus seems to be… the ground is pretty hard in Oklahoma.  ”It’s red clay don’t ya know”.  One Hispanic family was interviewed, and they all made it through without a scratch, and the father said that digging a shelter in the back yard was the best $2000 he ever spent.  $2000 it seems will save your ass in Tornado Alley, and yet it appears to be too much expense and bother for almost all the people who live there.  Go figure.

I’m sorry to have to report to all my friends at corporate media that Mrs. N. has not been left terrified by all their expensive coverage.  I don’t subconsciously hate people different from me any more after their coverage.  Any political leanings that I may have had have not become more rigid.  My plutocratic masters will not find me more easy to manipulate.  My life is just as absurd now as it was before.  If anything, the constant level of embarrassment for my species that I float in like a swimmer in a warm sea has been increased ever so slightly.

The Governor of Oklahoma took time out of her busy schedule of fighting abortions, birth control and any reasonable control females in her glorious state may wish to have over their reproductive systems to assure the world that the stupid bastards who live there and vote for her… WILL REBUILD!  The people I saw interviewed on TV all stated that they had every intention of staying in Moore Oklahoma, smack dab in the middle of Tornado Alley.

Oh, how much better Mrs. N. would have felt, how wonderful it would have been if just one person interviewed on TV would have said when asked if they planned on rebuilding…  Are you fucking nuts?  

No such luck I’m afraid.

Kiss, kiss

Mrs. N.

 

Business as Usual

Mrs. N. has been safely back in the Homeland, the good old USA, for more than a full week now and everything is back to normal.  I’m swimming alone in a vast sea of absurdity, as I always have been, with that uneasy feeling in my gut that, just behind me lurking in the darkness there is something with big sharp teeth closing in to bite my legs off.

I have had many conversations with my fellow citizens of this capitalist utopia in the past 10 days.  As is my way I have talked to the young and the old with an eye to learning what makes them tick.  This past wednesday I had a conversation with a young man who is graduating High School in a few weeks.  I asked him his intentions and he informed me that he was joining the United States Air Force with the hope of becoming a drone pilot.  I know his family well.  They are Bible thumping Born Again Christians.  I told him that his career choice confused me.  I asked him how he could adhere to the Christian command that he “Should not kill” while putting himself into a position where he would be called upon to do just that.  He appeared confused at first, but, eventually took all the wind out of my sails by replying, “Well, that’s different.”

I have learned through painful experience not to attempt to engage in rational conversation with the religiously dissociated.  Instead, I attempt to concentrate my efforts to aid the youth of today on something that will, hopefully, do them some good.  Just viewing the young people here in the Great American Southland can at times be very painful.  Neck tattoos, outrageous piercing and religious symbols & cartoon figures, in garish colors, permanently etched on their young skin up and down their arms and legs.

This past week I have attempted to convince as many young men as I could to sport a Hitler mustache.  I inform them that, just as it was when I was a boy, it is the duty of the young to outrage their elders.  I ask them when was the last time they saw someone sporting a Hitler mustache?  I go on to assure them that NOTHING would piss off the authority figures in their life more than them attempting to look like Hitler.  I explain that “It’s free!”… I remind them that it involves no needles, painful holes in their anatomy and carries no risk of nasty infections.  I also remind them that, one day, should they ever change their mind, or, entertain the idea that they may wish to pursue gainful employment, they can simply shave it off and live the rest of their lives as if it never happened.  To date I must report that I have had, shall we say… limited success.  But, I have not given up.  I have learned through extensive research that cultural changes of this magnitude move, if at all, at a glacial pace.

On a more fascinating note.  While working in my extensive perennial beds and raking up billions of magnolia leaves in the roadway and along the margins of my vast one-third of an acre estate I have been approached by a few of my neighbors with the news of a new member of our little community.  It seems that I have a new neighbor across the street and a little to the right.  I had noticed that the grounds around the home in question had taken a distinct turn for the better.  The lawn is now well manicured and neat.  The flower beds have been planted with annuals and the porch is hung with gayly colored baskets and lush ferns.  In the driveway sits a shiny new BMW, a late model SUV and a Jeep.  My neighbors informed me that the home was purchased by a single mother with one young child.  The mother in question is a shapely young woman who purchased the home specifically because it was located next to the elementary school and her young daughter could both walk to class, and enjoy playing in the school playground during the summer months.

It’s a typical American success story actually.  ”Local girl makes good” if you will.  It seems that mother has found entrepreneurial success and substantial monetary rewards in the entertainment industry.  Through hard work, imagination and “True Grit” she has parlayed her good looks and computer savvy into what can only be called a 21st Century home business empire.  In her own right she has become a Star.  She collects no Welfare and her daughter does not dine of food purchased with food stamps.  They are both, from what I have observed from across the street, always impeccably dressed.  Unlike the majority of young unmarried mothers in my community, my state, and my nation, she asks for no hand outs from my financially exhausted government.  As we are fond of saying here in the South…. “She is a maker, not a taker”.

What she “makes” and what she is famous for are high resolution videos of herself, and other people, shoving various objects up her behind.  She also maintains a web site where interested consumers of her “art” can receive one on one anatomy lessons, in real time, directly in the comfort of their own home simply by providing her with a valid credit card number.  Now, what could be easier than that?

So, if you hear that American enterprise has seen better days and the future looks anything but bright…  You tell them Mrs. N. knows better.  I have seen the future.  It lives right across the street.  Mrs. N. knows where we are all going.  Hey, if you have a valid credit card my neighbor will be happy to show you too.

Kiss, kiss

Mrs. N.

My Triumphant Return

Mark Twain said… “Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness.”  I don’t think that is true.

Having just returned from ten days of wandering through beautiful gardens, consuming magnificent beers in ancient Trappist Monasteries and stuffing myself with exquisitely prepared meals in gorgeous locations I find that, if anything, I’m more of a prejudiced bigot now than when I left.

Popeye The Sailor said… “I am what I am and that’s all what I am” and I’m going to have to agree with him on that.  Standing in line for one hour and forty-five minutes at the airport just outside the capital of the once greatest nation on earth just to get to see a Customs Agent who treated me like I was an agent of some Al-Qaeda sleeper cell brought it all back in spades to old Mrs. N. like the snap of a rubber band up the side of your head.  I’m home.

Just moments before I was a part of a magic act that involved me and a chair that flew through the air at over 500 miles an hour.  I returned from a land that was flatter than flat, manicured, and inhabited by people who were not obese, did not drive pick-up trucks and did not dedicate their lives to the endless accumulation of “stuff” that someone on TV told them would make them happy, but, never did.

For a full week and a half I didn’t see a Jesus fish sticker on the back of a car.  I didn’t see a pick-up truck.  I didn’t see a State Trooper, County Sheriff or local police car lurking behind a billboard… I didn’t even see a billboard.  Never spotted a fat kid with a video game in hand.  Not once did a stranger come up to me and ask if I had heard “The Good News” about Jesus.  I saw no litter in the streets.  Public transportation was clean, fast and ubiquitous.  Compared to the Capitalist Paradise I call home it was… different in ways I admit I was not quite prepared for.  It’s going to take Old Mrs. N. some time to process all this now that she is home.  I will be out in the garden this weekend.  There will be lots of time alone to think, to sterpulate, and to go over what I have experienced and what, perhaps, I have learned.  It’s too soon to try to make sense of it all now.  To early to go jumping to conclusions without having lengthy conversations with myself first, out among the magnolia leaves and seedlings.  It all hasn’t jelled yet.  It isn’t ready to be handled, let alone handed to anyone else.

I can give you this.  I learned that The Netherlands is a country that was made.  Only 7% of the land that makes up the country was there to begin with.  The rest was under water, or, under water at least part of the time.  As the saying goes… “God made the world, but, the Dutch made Holland”.   They did it over centuries by digging canals, building dikes and using over ten thousand windmills to pump out the water.  In the process a culture developed that put a high value on engineering skill, hard work and never, ever, disobeying the rules.  Showing off is considered exceptionally bad form and children are taught from the very beginning of their education that rules are meant to be followed without exception.  Life in The Netherlands is nothing at all like life in these United States.  I mean… Nothing at all.

I’m back now and so much of what I see and hear seems stupid.  Not that it didn’t seem stupid before, but, it’s even worse now knowing that here we sit, telling each other that Americans are the “exceptional” people and that everything we do is not only better, but, the only right way to do things.

Again and again and again Mrs. N. finds herself embarrassed at what it means to be human.  The other side of the coin is drinking beer in a Trappist Monastery…

Wandering through a garden of 7,000,000 tulips…

Walking the streets of ancient towns that are clean and lively…

Drinking beer again…

and again…

and again…

Now, Mrs. N. doesn’t want any of you to get the mistaken notion that all she did in the Netherlands was drink beer and stuff her face with good food.  That would be far from the truth.  So, I will close this little piece of nonsense, this little slice of the absurdity that is my life with a picture of how one trains a tree to grow into the shape of a cube.  No doubt, like myself, many of you have always wanted to know.   Take a good look.

Now you do.

Kiss, kiss

Mrs. N.

MURDER!

Mrs. N. had no intention what so ever of writing anything more here until her triumphant return from her visit to various dystopian European countries that, although they may have magnificent gardens, happy populations, and 21st century mass transportation systems…. are, my government informs me, misguided Hell Holes of Socialism tottering on the brink of collapse.  All that changed this morning.

As the sun rose I armed myself with rake, bucket and weed puller and headed out to crawl around my extensive perennial beds intent upon ridding them of weeds.  Engaging in active meditation if you will.  All was better than well as I noticed that so very many of my favorite perennials had self seeded themselves in dozens and dozens of new places, as if by some magical intention.  I was busy happily crawling around from shrub to shrub, plant to plant, popping out dandelions, stray grasses and weeds, picking up the odd fallen magnolia leaf when I came upon it.

There was no mistaking what happened here.  It was clearly cold blooded murder of an entire family of children.  Lives, barely begun, snuffed out by some evil heartless fiend who cared not for the suffering his actions had wrought.  I asked myself… “Who could have done this?… Who could have so little regard for the lives of others?…  I had no answers, only theories.  It could have been the evil serpent, the black snake who I permit to live unmolested in my giant mulch pile of magnolia leaves.  (Am I to blame?)  It could have been the raccoon who, so different from you or I, prefers to venture forth at night, wearing his mask, and praying with his little hands to what Gods I know not.  (Should I have shot him as my neighbors do?)  I don’t think I will ever know the answers to any of these questions, but, even if I did, it would do nothing to bring back the tender little lives that were ended so abruptly, and so brutally.

I thought about the endless news coverage of the bombing in Boston and its aftermath.  Hour after hour, day after day of coverage of every angle, every nit picking detail of everything and everybody involved.  Interview after interview, witness after witness, expert after expert…. and it made me ill to think that such a promising species should end up so hideously deranged.  This morning it was all talk of the Death Penalty.  Yesterday it was all talk of ending the quest to write a decent set of laws to deal with immigrants because, after all, the Boston bombers were immigrants.  The day before that it was all talk of the defeat of legislation to make firearms less easily available to the mentally ill and to people with criminal records.  Earlier today I read that two studies now point to a rather dramatic increase in autism in mothers who consumed drugs like Prozac to “balance” their “unbalanced” brain chemicals.  Who could have possibly guessed that taking drugs to alter the functioning of your brain could fuck up the developing brain of your unborn child?

Sometimes, times like this, times when there doesn’t seem to be any corner of sanity to crawl into with my blanket to suck my thumb and mumble to myself…  things oddly start to clear.  I find myself laughing at something stupid, and rejoice, in my heart, that I am somehow, or, some way, wired to appreciate the stupid (rather than ballet, or, liver pate).   That I cannot only see that it’s all the game of black and white, but, understand that for either side to win would be truly monstrous.   For either side to win would ruin it all.   For either side to win would be the end.

Before I came in from the garden today I decided to do a little patching of some bare spots in the lawn.  Anyone who follows my musings here knows full well the “problems” I had last year with moles turning my manicured lawn into swiss cheese.   Rather than poison, trap or otherwise end their little lives last year through murder I turned for council to the one place that has never failed me.

I watched The Godfather once again and, as usual the way to move forward became instantly clear.  It was after Sonny was hit at the causeway and it fell to Tom Hagen to tell his Godfather what everyone else seemed to already know.  He informed him that his oldest son had been murdered.  Upon hearing the terrible news Don Corleone said this…

“I want no inquiries made. I want no acts of vengeance. I want you to arrange a meeting with the heads of the Five Families. This war stops now.”

Instantly I knew what to do.  I left the moles in peace and met with the shrubs, flowers, trees, insects and birds… and a grand peace was made between us all.   This spring all the moles are gone.  It was when I was spreading some nice soil around the bare spots left by the mole tunnels and raking in some grass seed that it came to me.  I realized that I was getting out of the country just at the right time.  That I was removing myself from the endless blather of the talking heads on television who will continue to go on and on about the Boston Bombing until…. the natural end comes to the story.

“What will the natural end be?”  you ask….

Remember the coverage of the police firing hundreds and hundreds of rounds of bullets into the fishing boat the fugitive 19 year old brother had taken refuge in, in some guys back yard?  You will know that the end has arrived when you hear on television that the owner of the boat has shown up at the police station with this question.

“Hey… Who the fuck is gunna pay for all the fucking holes in my boat?”

At the beginning of Chapter One of “The Denial of Death” Ernest Becker writes…

 ”In times such as ours there is great pressure to come up with concepts that help men understand their dilemma; there is an urge toward vital ideas, toward a simplification of needless intellectual complexity.  Sometimes this makes for big lies that resolve tensions and make it easy for action to move forward with just the rationalizations that people need.  But it also makes for the slow disengagement of truths that help men get a grip on what is happening to them, that tell them where their problems really are.”

Kiss, kiss

Mrs. N.

Mrs. N. (goes on tour)

Mrs. N. is busy packing her suitcase for her upcoming European tour.  In a little over a week it’s off to The Netherlands for the Spring Tulip Festival and a visit to Keukenhof Park, the worlds largest flower garden.  Anyone who has read anything on this blog knows full well how Mrs. N. feels about her flowers.  If we have time, since we are in the area anyway, we will try to make a short visit to Holland.

Mrs. N. chose to begin her “Tour of the Absurd” in The Netherlands because it was the home of “Tulip Mania”.  Back in 1637,  a single tulip bulb sold for more than 10 times the annual income of a skilled craftsman.  You have to wonder what they were thinking.  It is generally considered to be the first recorded speculative bubble.  The Dutch, it appears, had never heard the phrase… “What goes up must come down.”  They have that in common with Wall Street Bankers.

The people of The Netherlands are known to be an unfriendly people.  They are also known for their “Coffee Shops” that openly sell dozens of different kinds of marijuana, hashish and hallucinogenic mushrooms.  Mrs. N. is having a very hard time understanding how a population of people could simultaneously be unfriendly AND be enjoying the benefits of inhabiting what should be a perpetual Woodstock.  Something is amiss.  Even the popular phrase… (“You know what they say about the Dutch… they don’t amount to much.”)  doesn’t explain this curious phenomena.  Mrs. N. intends to get to the bottom of this no matter how many “Coffee Shops” she has to visit, or, how long the research takes.

From there it will be off to Heidelberg, Germany to visit the childhood home of the greatest epistemologist of all time.

René Descartes in an early example of the internalist approach to justification wrote, because the only method by which we perceive the external world is through our senses, and that, because the senses are not infallible, we should not consider our concept of knowledge to be infallible.   Sergeant Hans Schultz, going one critical step further, fully recognized the fallibility of our senses and stated the obvious.  He is widely considered today to be the Father of the Anti-evolutionary Psychology Movement.  It is also believed that Ernest Becker’s Pulitzer Prize winning book, “The Denial of Death” was but the culmination of work originally begun by Hans Schultz.  Both men were known to be avid bowlers.

After paying our respects to the work and memory of Professor Schultz it will be on to Dusseldorf and the Neanderthal Museum.  Neanderthals had something called an occipital bun.  An occipital bun is a prominent bulge, or projection, of the occipital bone at the back of the skull. Occipital buns are important in scientific descriptions of classic Neanderthal crania.

When Mrs. N. was a teenager she knew a person with an occipital bun.  He, lets call him Rudy, was 18 years old while the rest of us were younger.  18 was the magic age for purchasing beer and hard liquor in New York State.  New York State was 3 miles away at the time.   Rudy, occipital bun and all, became a very valuable person in spite of his curiously shaped head.  Indeed children can be cruel to those who don’t quite fit in, and jokes like… “Hey, do you have to get an estimate before you get a haircut?” must have stung.   But, that’s life when you come into the world with a head that looks like a watermelon, I guess.  Unfortunately for Rudy the rest of us eventually turned 18 too and he found himself in the same position the tulip speculators did when the market went bust.  My visit to the Neanderthal Museum in Dusseldorf will be a way of paying my respects to an unfortunate individual who provided me and my teenage comrades with beer and hard liquor during our formative years.  I was thoroughly snookered on alcohol he procured for us the night I met my mate of going on 45 years.  If it were not for the liquid courage he provided I might never have made that first move that resulted in a wonderful marriage.  In return for his kindness he was made fun of.  There was no justice.  No one was equal then.  No one is equal today.  No one will be equal tomorrow.

Rousseau tells us…  “The one who sang or danced the best, the handsomest, the strongest, the most adroit, or the most eloquent became the most highly considered; and that was the first step toward inequality…. Social imbalances occur because of differences in personal merit and the recognition of that merit by others.”

Immanual Kant wrote…  “From the crooked wood of which man is made, nothing quite straight can be built.”…

Sigmund Freud wrote…  “The tragedy of evolution is that it created a limited animal with unlimited horizons.”…

There remain a few days before my departure.  Should any of my readers have suggestions with regard to my itinerary, please feel free to comment.  …And NO, I won’t bring you back any seeds.

Because I don’t want to end up here

Kiss, kiss

Mrs. N.

 

 

“I believe that everything happens for a reason.”

Snow on cherry tree March 24th.

Blossoms on same cherry tree, April 9th.

Whenever I hear someone say… “I believe that everything happens for a reason”, I usually think to myself… “What an idiot”.   Don’t get me wrong.  It’s nowhere near as idiotic as saying… “Well, they are in a better place now”,  upon hearing the news of someone’s untimely demise, but, what I have noticed is both phrases are usually uttered by the same kind of people.   I won’t call them ass holes because that would be unkind.  Lets just call them magical thinkers… or, we can just stick with idiots if you like.

Together those phrases can tell you a lot about the way the person using them sees reality.  The first one is stating that reality isn’t like a game of pool, where the point is to get as many balls in the holes as you can, even by accident.  It’s stating that it’s more like a game of eight ball, where all the shots are deliberate and called in advance.  It’s stating that someone, or, something very powerful is calling all those shots.   Like God is playing eight ball with the universe.  It’s saying, about yourself, that you are the kind of a person who could never accept that the universe couldn’t give a shit about you, or, anything else.   It’s admitting that you would be terrified to think you had no significance.

The second one… the one about dead people being in a “better place” is classical.  It’s Magical Thinking at its finest.  Whenever I hear someone say it I always think to myself…. “Then why don’t you go kill yourself, and then you can both be in a better place?”

Now, how the hell does bird shit fit into this little diatribe.   As a reader you probably find this confusing.  You probably have confused looks on your faces, and you can’t help asking yourself… Where is the connection Mrs N.?

Mrs. N. will be happy to tell you.

I went outside at the crack of dawn this morning.  I planted 5 Leyland Cypress trees along the border between my tenant house next door and the neighbors who pissed me off many years ago.  It’s a long story.  The trees grow at a rate of 3 to 5 feet a year and will soon totally obscure any trace of a neighbor from my view.

When I finished doing that I cleaned out the gutters.  Then I pulled all the weeds in the flower beds and cut the lawn.  It was such a magnificent day that I decided I would do one of my favorite gardening things.  I edged.  I’m known for my edges and I confess that I take great pride in keeping them straight and sharp.  It is not at all uncommon for guests viewing my magnificent perennial beds to remark to each other… “My goodness, those edges are so sharp I could shave myself with them.”  It’s true, and I admit that whenever I overhear such a remark my chest swells with pride, naturally.

I had just finished edging the last bed over at the tenant house when it happened.  I felt it and heard it simultaneously.  I knew immediately what it was.  A bird shit on my head.

The material in question landed dead center, as if there must have been some sort of aiming involved.  Bulls eye!.. On a cranium denuded of hair and exposed to the endless sky for what must be 25 years now, at least.   Grass doesn’t grow on a busy street, as they say, and the avian excrement was easily wiped away with my left hand.  It was dark brown and white, as bird shit customarily is.  I immediately looked skyward, but, saw no bird of any kind.  It was hard to know what to make of that.

After I had finished my gardening for the day I showered and changed into a pair of shorts and a T-shirt.  It’s 83.3 degrees here, as I write, in central Virginia, up against the side of the Blue Ridge Mountains.  I’m drinking a cold beer.  Out of curiosity I looked up on Google what it means when a bird shits on your head.  In ancient Greece it was considered to be just about the luckiest thing that could happen to a person.  It meant you were blessed by the Gods.  In China it means that a magnificent fortune is coming your way.  Every culture, it seems, views having a bird shit on your head as an exceptionally lucky thing to have happen to you.  So…. I got that going for me…. which is nice.

I mentioned earlier that the bird shit was dark brown and white.  I wonder if my readers know… what the white stuff in bird shit is?  

That question, and another one…. Did you ever notice,  when you see a large formation of Canadian Geese migrating in the shape of a giant “V” in the sky,  the two sides of the “V” are NEVER the same length?   AND, do you know why that is?...

Not being the kind of person who enjoys keeping people in suspense, I will answer both questions for you right now.

1.   The white stuff in bird shit is bird shit too.

2.  There are more fucking geese on that side.

Kiss, kiss

Mrs. N.

Crazy Business

There was a very interesting article in the New York TIMES this morning on a subject that isn’t news anymore.

…”LAST year, more active-duty soldiers committed suicide than died in battle. This fact has been reported so often that it has almost lost its jolting force. Almost.”…

It’s six o’clock on sunday morning here on the eastern side of the Blue Ridge Mountains and I’m watering my orchids as I always do, come sunday morning.  The sun isn’t up yet, but the birds are singing.  My orchid room faces east and off in that direction, sharp as a scythe, sits a thin crescent moon.  The cherry trees out there in the dark are lit to bloom like the main fuse on the biggest mat of firecrackers you ever seen.  Today, april 7th, will be the big day.   That’s what I figure the birds are singing about.  I’m singing about something else I read in that TIMES article…

…”Tricare Management Activity, the division of the Department of Defense that manages health care services for the military, shows that there has been a giant, 682 percent increase in the number of psychoactive drugs — antipsychotics, sedatives, stimulants and mood stabilizers — prescribed to our troops between 2005 and 2011. That’s right. A nearly 700 percent increase — despite a steady reduction in combat troop levels since 2008…”

Nice kids I’ve watched grow up out here in the proverbial sticks sign up for the military in high school.  Boredom, lack of imagination, scarcity of employment…  for those who grew up in a culture where suspicion of science and disdain for liberal elitism go hand in hand with not caring much for school, it’s a ticket out of town.  It’s a free pass into the meat grinder disguised as the Big Top.  Some kind of traveling circus of heroism and high adventure.  They come back, if they come back at all, broken in body and fucked up in the head.

…”The data suggest that military doctors may prescribe psychoactive drugs for off-label use as sedatives, possibly so as to enable soldiers to function better in stressful combat situations. Capt. Michael Colston, a psychiatrist and program director for mental health policy in the Department of Defense, confirmed this possibility.”…

No shit?  Lets see… they are drugging the crap out of these naive kids and playing with them as if they were pieces in a board game.  “Another day of target practice boys & girls…up, and at-um!”  Then, when and if they come home, Law Enforcement, the only growth industry around here, can put them in jail for smoking a joint out back of the Wal-mart, which happens to be the only place hiring, part time of course.

I never stop finding it interesting to note how much people like to take advice from famous military characters.  You know the characters I’m talking about.  Shined shoes and a chest that’s so covered with ribbons, buttons, pins, stars and lanyards that it would make an Eagle Scout think that’s what heaven must be like.  ”Leaders of Men” who can’t manage to stop acting like having the power to piss away enormous fortunes and the lives of what are, essentially, children, somehow, endows them with wisdom.  It doesn’t and that’s clear.  Keeping their pants on when their wives ain’t looking, long enough to fill their pockets with perks seems to be the biggest battle they ever face, on purpose anyway.  My favorite is John McCain.  He’s my hero because he thought dropping giant bombs on women and children, who never did a damn thing to harm him, from way up high in the sky where nobody could see him was what he was born to do.  My Hero…..

Then there is this douche bag.  Just look at him.  Has his own private jet, billions of dollars worth of cool equipment to fuck around with, the lives of tens of thousands of kids to play with as if they were little plastic army men… break-um and throw them away.. and what does he do?  He gets caught by his old lady storming the WRONG beach…. AGAIN.  Turns out he has the morals of a tomcat and the brains of an adolescent all hopped up on puberty.  Just look at him!  All dressed up like the dogs dinner.  Him and the rest of the military ass holes who have played their part in bankrupting the most powerful nation in the history of the world.  Fucked up ANOTHER generation of kids!  Killed another million people who asked nothing more than the opportunity to live out their miserable lives in peace.  They was foreigners don’t ya know?

But, the owners of America are smiling boys and girls.  The Stock Market is booming, taxes are low and the peasants are running around with their heads cut off over gay marriage, Obama’s plan to confiscate all the firearms and what ever today’s flavor of terror happens to be.  The rich will get richer, the poor will get poorer and the young will get really fucked over.  As the lyrics to the song say… “I was born in the land of plenty, now there ain’t enough.”…

There isn’t much I can do about all this nonsense.  I can lay low.  I can comment now and again.  I can rage against the embarrassment of it all.  I can point out that a creature with the astounding ability to understand that it is made up of chemicals that, somehow, came to realize that they ARE chemicals… realizing that they are chemicals….  OYE!

Well, it all just seems to magnificent to just mindlessly fuck up like this.  Far to beautiful to permit people to piss on like they do.

The sun is fully up.  I’m going out to play in the garden and watch the cherry trees explode.  What did you expect?

Kiss, kiss

Mrs. N.