That’ll teach um

[from the New York TIMES]

The Cleveland man accused of holding three women captive in his home for a decade entered a guilty plea on Friday in order to avoid the death penalty. 

The man, Ariel Castro, 53, pleaded guilty to 937 counts, including rape and kidnapping, in a plea agreement with prosecutors. Under the deal, he would spend life in prison without parole and receive 1,000 additional years.

All right… now Mrs. N. is no longer at all interested in the crime or the person who committed it.  I admit my interest was initially drawn to the question of what kind of a maniac would WANT to spend ten years with THREE women locked in their house when every man on the planet knows that one woman locked in your house is more than enough to make you want to kill yourself.  The guy, Ariel Castro, 53, obviously had an oversized helping of mental difficulties.  But who can think about that now?

All I can think about is what must have gone on in the conference room down at Prosecutorial Headquarters.  Who was it that came up with the idea that LIFE in prison without the possibility of parole wasn’t enough to teach this poor crazy bastard “enough” of a lesson?  I mean…. How did this go down?

Who was the first one to say that being locked in a cage until you die of old age isn’t enough punishment?  AND, what the hell does 1000 additional years even mean?  Did one of the prosecutors suggest an extra 500 years, and another yell out “That’s too fucking good for the bastard!”…?  Did they finally settle on 1000 years extra because they got word from Mr. Castro’s defense team that if the offer was LIFE plus 1250 years they were prepared to fight for their client until hell freezes over?  Or… perhaps the only question really worth trying to get an answer for…  When they presented this ridiculous idea to the Judge, why the hell didn’t he say…. “OK, get the fuck out of my court and don’t come back until you’re not high any more.”

LOS ANGELES — Besieged by accusations of sexual harassment, Mayor Bob Filner of San Diego announced Friday that he would enter two weeks of what he described as intensive behavior therapy, but he refused to bow to a flood of demands that he step aside.  Mr. Filner, 70, in a hastily called news conference, apologized to his staff, his city, his supporters and “most of all, to the women I have offended.”

I watched his live news conference on television as I ate my lunch.  Standing at his side, just to his left, as he confessed to being a shameless serial groper of female flesh was one of his female assistance holding a notebook and papers.  All I could think of was how glad I was that it wasn’t me standing there confessing.  If it were me, of course, the news conference would have gone quite differently.

As my readers are aware I am the carrier of a double compliment of [CL426], or, as it is referred to by geneticists… The cheap laugh gene.  Were it me I would have had no choice but to sneak my left hand around behind my young assistant and pinch her sharply on the behind, causing her to jump and cry out, right in the middle of my elaborate confession and heart felt promises never again to engage in such unseemly and un-gentleman like behavior.  I would deny doing it of course… suggest it was perhaps a flea.

The irony of this whole mess is that on that very day another famous person, and notorious groper of female flesh, was turning 70, the same age as our poor Mayor of San Diego.  He never had to apologize for his antics.  There were never any threats of him losing his job, or, requests that he step down.  The women he groped, rather than initiating legal suits and claims of serious psychological damage more often than not bragged to their friends, and treated their experience more like an honor than a crime.

The absurdity of it ALL is almost too beautiful.

Happy Birthday Mick

Kiss, kiss

Mrs. N.

Meditation

Every year, and always in the high heat of the summer I get a project going that involves heavy physical labor, bucket loads of sweat and a flirtatious dance with heat stroke.   This year is no exception.  Last week I had 15 cubic yards of stone delivered and dumped in an out of the way place.  It’s only been a few days (in the 90’s) and I have already taken a decent bite out of the pile.  I’m moving the stone to various locations on driveways, parking areas and other sites where it will do some good.  I shovel early in the morning and observe the sun as it rises spreading that early summer light that is almost horizontal, and so beloved by those with a bent toward the “artistic”.

I called this latest paper thin slice of the absurd “Meditation” because that is what hard physical labor provides me with in a way that no other method, school or technique ever has.   It’s my favorite kind of work.  It’s the kind of work that lets you see all along that you are accomplishing something.  Every shovel full the pile gets smaller, and with every wheelbarrow load the area being covered with new stone gets larger and neater looking.  I get a good feeling out of that.  Some of it is the hard physical exercise, I know, but I never get that kind of a feeling from hard exercise unless it is accomplishing something.  I have long been of the opinion that “working out“… as so many of my fellow humans do, in a gym, spa, or, establishment loaded with mechanical equipment meant to “isolate” various muscle groups for attention is incredibly stupid.  When I look around I see that there is SO MUCH work that needs to be done!  SO MANY things and places that could, with work, be made to shine and into something we can be proud of.

It makes you wonder about a country with SO MUCH work that needs doing and… (wait for it)… NO jobs.

But work… hard physical labor anyway is a funny thing in American culture.  Just saying that I enjoy it opens up a whole can of worms.  Am I just being elitist?  Isn’t it elitist to say you love physical labor when you have more degrees than a thermometer and never HAVE to do any, other than for “recreation”.  It certainly could be.  It’s not in my case.

I’m one of the lucky bastards that has a choice.  I don’t have to pick up a shovel every morning and do hard manual labor to put food on the table.  But, I’m lucky enough to have experienced times when I did.  It taught me more about life than any professor, book, or, class I ever took.  It’s almost funny when I look back on it now.  How much I learned about being human without knowing I was learning at all.

As a culture we reserve the dirtiest, hardest and most lowly work for those on the short end of the stick.  The backbreaking, rip your body up, work is done by those we see on the lowest place on the cultural totem pole.   The “Dirty Jobs” we call them, and you are supposed to get a good education so that you don’t have to do them.   The Dirty Jobs are the jobs you DON’T want your children to grow up to do.  You want them to be better than that.

You want them to be “Better than That”.

I have news….  Being an investment banker who fucks people out of their life savings, or, a salesman who convinces people they need something they really don’t, or, an office worker who pushes paper around, or, a government employee who spends his/her day hiding from responsibility or anything that even comes close to honest work, or, a teacher who died of boredom years ago, but, still shows up every day, or anybody who does ANYTHING for “The Money” and for the money alone IS ANYTHING BUT ….. Better than that.

Those are life’s losers.

Those are the depressed.

Those are the fools who sell their lives for money to buy things they don’t need, and then wonder how it all went wrong.

Those are the people who never had the luxury of looking down at something they did with their hands and thinking to themselves….. God Damn…. That’s something I can be proud of.

People who understand that feeling built the world and everything good in it.  All the others can offer is ten thousand ways to fuck it up.

(If you don’t understand any of this, perhaps, it was just the heat.  Perhaps Mrs. N. just stayed out in the sun too long today.  I don’t rightly know.  But, I know this.  If you tell a person to dig a hole, put a shovel in his/her hand and come back half an hour later….  That hole will tell you EVERYTHING you need to know about them.)

Kiss, kiss

Mrs. N.

Dead a long time

Ain’t it hard when you discover that (he, she, or, it) isn’t really where it’s at?

I read yesterday that half the people in America couldn’t come up with $2000 unless they borrowed it.

In 1975 the average size of an American home was about 1500 square feet and the average cost of a new car was about $6000.  Today the average size of a new home is 2500 square feet and a car costs about $31,000.  Wages during that 38 year span have not risen at all if you factor in inflation.

As of today it is estimated that America spends approximately half a trillion dollars a year treating depression.

Feeling like crap and having little or no hope for the future appears to be the biggest growth industry in America.

Cicero said that all a person really needs is a garden and a library.  Somehow, people got the idea that to make things even better planting and harvesting must increase in efficiency until the labor of gardening wasn’t at all fun any more.   But it was progress and progress has to be good.   Our friend John Schumaker writes… “The presence of the single ruling motivation destroys all ability to concentrate on anything else.”  The very process of believing precludes acknowledgement of contrary information.   What we believe, on borrowed opinion, is that happiness is to be found “out there”.   We are consumers of products, images, symbols, icons and manufactured reality itself.   Lacking fundamental knowledge and understanding… an inward journey is impossible.  There is simply nowhere to go.

Bertrand Russell said… “Men fear thought more than they fear anything else on earth… more than ruin, more even than death.”

I think he was right.

I think America has reached the point where just thinking about the mess we have made of the world is toxic.   We must think of other things and divert ourselves from the obvious.  We must inflate denial like a big balloon… BIGGER and BIGGER and BIGGER!  We must twist our faces up into that look one gets when one knows the balloon is about to burst … and keep them twisted up permanently if we are to be in keeping with what passes for American culture.

…Or, we can turn our backs on it, as best we can, and strike off on our own.

Whenever I used to ask my grandmother’s advice on something risky, or, out of the ordinary she would always say… “You know… you are going to be dead a LONG time.”

It’s very wet in Dixie

The flowers are magnificent.

My maters got the early blight, but, the string beans keep-a-coming.

Kiss, kiss

Mrs. N.