Axis of evil. Bob Ross and Garrison Keillor?

O.K, I'll admit Bob Ross was perhaps the most mesmerizingly mellow painter of "happy trees" in all of human history but I don't think that makes him a pariah. Hell, i suspect his blissful demeanor wasn't even drug induced. Never saw him lick the brushes.
As for Garrison Keillor...well he did have a grudge against George II, and he does wear red socks but i doubt that makes him a Commie. I think people from Minnesota are just a little odd. A cold winter brings out the quirks in folks.

These guys epitomize P.B.S.(Public Broadcasting Corporation) and N.P.R.(National Public Radio).Both could be viewed as boring beyond belief and tone deaf to boot
but by God both have cult followings and are utterly unpitchable to commercial media.
Congress has a very serious vote next week which could have a devastating effect on how we view ourselves as a Nation.
In the course of this last year N.P.R. news has pissed off some very vocal Conservatives to the point that they are rallying Congress to cut the funding for Public Broadcasting. Why should American tax payers pay for liberal bed wetting, tree hugging programing when we are in a fiscal state of emergency.
Why indeed.
Because there are millions of Americans from coast to coast that rely on 4 hours of uninterrupted non commercial news a day to keep up with all the events of the world. 4 hours!! No Network is going to give a news agency that much time to cover news. It's not economically viable. No, but it is priceless.
Add to this many stations broadcast the B.B.C. world news at night and even a truck driver from Podunk Indiana can get a good perspective on how things are going on this Planet.
Information is power and I prefer to get it as unfiltered and unedited as possible. I don't need nattering nitwits commenting on news like it is a football game. Give me the news as in depth as possible and not just the big story of the moment, how bout following up on stories that have slipped from the headlines. N.P.R. has the time to explore the news and follows stories for years if need be.

There needs to be an outlet for 16th century chamber music,short stories read aloud, rare music from Africa, odd stories about odd Americans, Jazz, book reviews,American heritage music,two brothers from Cambridge who laugh more than give car advice, and even a red stockinged giant Lutheran from Minnesota who can't sing and isn't overly funny but like lutefisk has people who adore him.
Thank God we are a nation of diversity and not bound by what is only popular and marketable. Our strength is in our unique and different strands.
N.P.R and P.B.S. give a stage to voices that otherwise would not be heard.
Cut all funding for Public Broadcasting?
I say HELL NO. Crank up the Bach cantata and party like you're Nina Totenberg covering the Supreme Court. We need public access to the airwaves.

We have some thinkin' to do.

This has been a rough week for folks who speak their minds.
Monday Salmaan Taseer, Governor of Punjab Province, Pakistan was assassinated by a bodyguard. Shot 27 times because of his stance against Pakistan's Blasphemy laws.
Taseer called the laws "Draconian" and he was pleading the case of a woman sentenced to death for blaspheming the Prophet Muhammad.(A charge brought against her by her neighbors who had refused water from her because she was "unclean".)
500 clerics across Pakistan praised the courage of the assassin and thousands of fundamentalists took to the streets to celebrate his killing of an infidel.
The fear of reprisal or perhaps sympathy to the assassin made it impossible to find a cleric willing to perform the funeral. A cleric from a far off Provence was flown in to conduct the funeral. FOR THE GOVERNOR, who is seen as a criminal and his assassin a hero.
Salmaan Taseer knew his life was in danger because of the thoughts he held and his courage to speak them to a violent opposition.If common sense and an honest look at how things stand can get you killed do you keep your mouth shut or throw caution to the wind and speak?
I reckon Fundamental Clerics see it the same way....we have The Truth and must have the courage to act on our convictions.

And somehow all this horse shit winds up leaving a sad desert scene on one side of the World and popping up in another tragic desert backdrop.
Folks wail non stop about threats to our Democracy and take overs and hidden evil agendas that will undermine our way of life and then are shocked when some nimrod shoots up the Safeway.
If we argue over ideas using the rhetoric of violence then it is only a matter of time before the more zealous amongst us take such language literally.
What we say and think have tremendous power on those around us.
What we believe can change the world.
We reap what we sow. So how bout a bit more civility?

I've been having this escalating feeling that Human consciousness is hitting a pivotal point of awareness and we are at a tricky bit of our path which if we keep our footing can lead to a great age of balance or we slip and fall into something akin to the Dark Ages. Nothing new in this thought, same thing said when the printing press was invented, hell probably when fire was first captured....."Grock, you see, whole world change. Ow hair on fire..."
But now we have the science to measure the effect of our thoughts on the physical world and the closer we look at the very fabric of the universe we learn that just by our looking at and contemplating of this fabric we bring on quantum changes.
By Jimminny there is magic all around us so lets say we knock off the evil self destructive crap and get busy putting up the party decorations.
Guess who just learned about Noetics.

Ode to small mysteries.

I cannot tell you how the universe began
Something from nothing I don't understand.
How we have come from that day to this
Is there reason for us to exist?

Metal and fire meet with water to start creation
Salt, as if lifeblood itself animates this little sea
The lowly roots up from the darkness
and simple beings thicken the broth,
Essential oils mix in the bubbling stew of organic matter
combining in a sacred balance
to create a unique world of life.
The soup is almost ready.

A small choice to everything

Funny thing about having a dodgy back, it affords me a perspective on the world in which I cherish leaves caught in circular eddies of wind or the halting paths of coyotes as they slip through our busy world.
Drunks and madmen have my great respect as they truly mull over the next critical step they will take for indeed all of their existence can change in the next choice.
The fact that I could sneeze and then spend a month in exquisite pain grants me a love for the arbitrary chance or overwhelming forces that can sweep over our lives.
How many times are we happily rolling along in our lives and in a blink of an eye we are in a ditch?
Sure the great events that shake nations and rattle the globe effect us all but I have always been fascinated by the enormous consequences of the smallest decisions we make. Literally can your life be changed depending on which side of the bed you get up on?
I have a house full of dogs and have more or less become a kind of slow of foot, hairless cousin of the canine family who can make food magically appear all because I turned left on a walk instead of the usual right six years ago.
Or maybe I just basically lack drive and direction.
But don't people fall in love by the chance encounter or have the epiphanies that change lives after an unexpected occurrence?

We make plans, create order, make sound decisions and all the while we are in the middle of an immense river in which we can only know the small bit on which we float as the rest of existence surges us along.

Papa Smurf and the Infinite sadness

Last Tuesday I was in El Paso TX. It was like a brief rest in hell. The air is always dingy and brown, a dusty patina on all thoughts and things.
The truck stop is rife with pushers, thieves and hookers. The police are as scary as the criminals with just the slightest of margins separating the two.
  On the C.B. I heard a voice call out like a circus side show barker " Hey drivers this is Papa Smurf, how bout it anyone need a ride over the border. I'll take you to all the sites. Shopping, massage parlors, strip clubs and cat houses. I take you there and bring you back."
The voice was one I had heard years ago in Laredo and when I saw his brown van cruising the parking lot I was sure this was the same "guide" that led me on a journey to infinite sadness so long ago.

When I decided to become a trucker 10 years ago I had never driven anything bigger than a Datsun.
I needed several weeks driving with a trainer to insure that no one got killed while I became familiar with the hulking truck and learned control.

My trainer was a new driver himself. Six months earlier he was a failed preacher who due to some parishioner infidelity had to leave town in a hurry. He picked me up in Atlanta, asked if I knew how to drive then told me to head for Texas and crawled in the bunk to sleep.
   We were going to Laredo and the whole way he spoke of Boys Town, a marvelous cat house he had heard of across the border. We had no time to quench his yearning for the carnal delights that lay across the river for we had a load leaving immediately for Massachusetts.
  For two weeks he obsessed about Laredo until we again were headed back to the cowboy town.
The cowboys are gone from Laredo replaced by thousands of trucks criss-crossing the border.
At night a line of trucks miles long clogs the dusty avenues waiting to cross the bridge. Downtown Laredo is filled with the wail of horns and curses in Spanish.
   We parked at a filthy old truck stop very near the river and heard Papa Smurf and his offer of safe passage to Nirvana en el otro lado.
I decided to join my trainer for the trip to Boys Town. After weeks of non stop rantings I had to see this mythical place. This would be my first trip into Mexico.
Papa Smurf's van was a beat up old Ford Econoline with fetid carpeting and torn seats. The man was as derelict as the van, unshaven greasy and had the nervous ticks of a junkie.

True to his word he effectively drove us past the unbelievably poor mothers and their filthy children.
Past dangerous looking policia leaning on their VW's . Past machine gun toting soldiers with faces of stone. Down crumbling streets dividing decaying buildings.

We pulled into a compound surrounded by a wall and razor wire. Inside the walls was a small town the size of several square blocks. The alleys of the "town" separated small one room cottages that lined either side. Along the outside walls stood larger cantinas blaring loud music.

The van pulled up in front of what he said was the best bar with the best women. Eight or nine of us piled out onto the street whooping and hollering. I was taken aback. This looked like a prison to me.
We entered the bar and were beset upon by a wave of highly painted women.
The scene was so far from normal I left the bar hoping the outside would be less frenzied. As I reached the door I turned to see my trainer seated in a chair with two girls on his lap another whispering in his ear.

Outside I wandered down the alleys past the doorways of the little cottages. In each doorway stood a woman some young some very old. Some beaconed with smiles and sultry taunts, others stood bored as if saying "may I take your order". Others had the hurt castaway eyes I see in strays who sense their luck is never going to change. No hope.

I wind up in the street in front of a drag club talking to a six foot five he/she. Carmen is a poet who has come to terms with her lot. She tells me this is indeed a prison for women responsible for debts either theirs or their family's that they cannot pay. She has the uncluttered mind of an alcoholic.
"Can't you leave?" I ask.
"Sure, my debt is paid but the money is good"
I ask what the women charge and she says most girls charge 20 dollars for sex. The very young and the very pretty charge more she says with a sneer.

I talk with Carmen for an hour sharing beers and Neruda. After a while I leave her to her work and look for my group. I am frisked by a terrible pick pocket that makes me laugh at her fumbling. She fumes off in a torrent of curses followed by her police escort that were waiting to crack my head open if I had protested being robbed.

I find my fellow Americans as they are entering the Donkey Show. This is so heinous to me I recoil in horror. They laugh at my Puritanism and say this is their last stop and to meet them back here in a bit.
I wandered around stopping at a few doors. The women are curious of the Amish looking foreigner. I try to talk to a few but my Spanish is poor and no one is in the mood for love poems by Neruda.

I go back to the donkey show. Thank God it is over. The poor old burro is laying on his side with a dazed drugged look in his glassy eyes. At a large table the Americans beacon me to sit and have a beer and meet the girl of the act. She has long black hair and a beautiful face. Her eyes are the same as the donkey's, glassy and drugged. I sit next to her in the booth and she leans heavily on me and whispers she wants to sleep. She lays her head on my shoulder and i feel the warm mother's milk leaking from her breasts as it rolls down my arm.

I feel the infinite sadness in this prison, stained by the flow of life.

Chillies in chocolate

Chillies in chocolate.

Chillies in chocolate,
and five spice in potatoes.
A fine oatmeal stout,
while reading about volcanoes.
Vibraphones and train wheels
and bells that don't ring.
These are a few of my favorite things.......

Life is grand and it is the odd little bits that make the journey so wonderful.
Mysterious combinations of things not thought of together form incredible unions that leave one shouting "Zounds and Gadzooks".
What would the world be like without bagpipes and allspice, Bitters and kimchi.

Thank the stars that in a Democracy we have the the freedom to be the odd lots that we are and are not bound by popular rule.
Pass me the figgy pudding and turn up the Captain Beefheart.
Out of many we are one. I love that idea.

Think of just a few Americans that have passed on this year and how amazing it is that they made this country great by their uniqueness.
Blake Edwards. Director(Breakfast at Tiffany's, The Party)
Lena Horne. Actress, Chanteuse, activist.
Daniel Schor. Journalist.
Captain Beefheart. Musician extraordinaire.
Completely different but free to be who they were and we are all richer for it.
Be well and happy explorations to you.