I remember skitching cars in wintertime when I was a kid. We’d have a day with a deep, fresh, icy snow pack, and we’d crouch between two parked cars (near a stop sign) and when a car drove up and stopped (and there was not a car coming behind them), we’d crawl out, grab the bumper and slide along down the street. It was really stupid* and that we were. You’d think the first face full of 70s car exhaust would have dampened our spirits.** I lost an expensive ski glove that way, too, which might be kind of ironic. Or maybe not.
I wrote a drunk song called skitching in the snow many years ago. It’s bad but maybe funny.
*Don’t do it. Dangerous. And dumb, too.
**Or did it ginger up our spirits like only huffing gas can do?*
Growing up I could never understand why marijuana was illegal and alcohol was legal. Shouldn’t it be the other way around? Marijuana kills no one, essentially; alcohol kills scores and scores. This I just read:
“The annual number of alcohol-related deaths from 2020 through 2021 exceeded 178,000, according to date from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. That is more deaths than from all overdoses combined.”
I would never argue to make alcohol illegal, but something to keep in mind. Dang.
“There are six things that theLord hates, seven that are an abomination to him: haughty eyes, a lying tongue, and hands that shed innocent blood, a heart that devises wicked plans, feet that make haste to run to evil, a false witness who breathes out lies, and one who sows discord among brothers.“
Hey! Did you hear Don Trump’s hawking Bibles? Yep. He is. That’s going well.
Growing up there was a woman who lived alone in an old house a block over named Mrs. Guggisberg. I shoveled her walk in the winter. She looked exactly like a Mrs. Guggisberg. She was short and odd, to an eight-year-old neighbor kid. And kind of mean.
Once she asked me to look after her dogs for a few days and I did but I hated her dogs. When I went to the door for my dollar after shoveling, they’d be all up in the doorway, barking and yipping and spinning and loud as hell. And they were ugly. Pugs. Three of them.
Pugs are all smashed face and butthole, with whacked out eyes, fat, little football bodies and legs like tiny twigs. They snort and gag and wheeze – they can’t fucking breathe. (Thanks to human breeders.) And these were mean. When I was feeding them for her, they would attack me. I’d open the door and they’d already be there barking and I’d have to kick at them to get them to move back and work my way into the kitchen, put the dog food in the bowls, change the water, and head back out the door – all the while swinging my legs around to keep the hounds at bay. And the buttholes, put your fucking tails down, you weirdos!
And I had to do that for three days. And they never let up. They are tenacious little piglets. And probably just fucking with me.
Okay, people love dogs. I do, too. And you get into trouble when you badmouth a dog breed, which is why I’m now wondering if my rant about the misshapen, mistaken and poorly designed corgi, the Ikea dog (got the right top, but the wrong legs) might muster more backlash than the pugly pugs bit? I think so. People really love their corgis. And tenacious? You could throw a tennis ball for 24 hours and a corgi would bring it back every single time.
There’s a lot of fighting going on. A lot of anger and hatred. A lot of putting down and hurting other groups of people. It’s weird. We’re tribal, most definitely. We have this ability to see a forest but not a tree and then hate on the forest, of course.
It’s weird but it’s not new. We hear more about it thanks to 24-hour access to the Internet. Which not only shows it but feeds it. That being said, I just relish watching people on Instagram videos go all dumbass hateful right into someone else’s camera and I’m right there to watch it. So there’s also a fascination, like with Trump. He absolutely fascinates. His baldfaced lies, incredible, and very vocal hatred, meanness and malice, obvious mental instability and then the fact that so many people like him, and because of these same traits. That’s fascinating! And especially if he were an evil character in a movie.
But he’s real. I wonder what will happen to his fans when he dies and that of course is not far off. He’s almost 80 now. The world shall weep as one. Just kidding.
We hate people for their hobbies. We hate people for their clothing. We hate people for their accent. We hate people for their skin tone. We hate people for their features. We hate people for their food. We hate people for their children. We hate people for their vehicles. We hate people for their difference. We hate people for the noise they make. We hate people for their worship. We hate people for their language. We hate people for their names. We hate people for their art. We hate people for their birthplace. We hate people for their current residence. We hate people for their beliefs. We hate people for their family. We hate people for their prayers. We hate people for their books. We hate people for their sexuality. We hate people for their gender. We hate people for their hatred.
The author, Edith Wharton, who has written ghost stories herself, once said: “No, I don’t believe in ghosts, but I’m afraid of them.”
Right? I’ve seen enough ghost chaser shows to know that there probably ain’t no ghosts. No one’s been able to properly photograph or record any sort of ghost-like phenomena, even in the ghostiest places. One doesn’t read about people being murdered by ghosts, just other people. So all actual evidence must lead one to believe that there are no ghosts.
Then how come I get scared by weird unexplainable sounds in my house? Why do I get all goosebumpy when someone tells me their own ghost story? Why did a huge flash of beautiful golden light fill the room the night my friend buried her mother? Not that we were afraid of the golden light, mind you, but we definitely got the goosebumps.
I suppose that, like being scared watching a horror movie, where we suspend our disbelief, we just might suspend some disbelief with ghosts, too? At some level, fear must feel good, although we’d need to define good in that particular statement.
I find it fascinating how numbers are portrayed in the media, mostly news media. I’ve thought about it myself as I was writing, like, should I write “two hundred million”, or “200,000,000”? Each will have a different effect on the reader. Sometimes I think that the full nine-digit number will seem larger than the written number. I guess I’m not sure. Different for everyone, I suppose.
I was reading an article in the newspaper about Oakland and their struggles as a city. Toward the end they wrote, “The city has lost 15,000 residents since the pandemic began…” That’s a very small city or large town, depending on your point of view, that up and moved out of Oakland since the pandemic. Then, I looked back to the front of the article and reread, “…Oakland, a city of 420,000…” and wondered what percentage it was and what it would look like if that had been presented as such. %.035. So, “The city has lost about %.035 of residents since the pandemic began…” Different. But the same.
Two fascinating articles from the New York Times yesterday, both of which stopped me in my tracks. The first is about the protests in Israel and how one woman – a particle physicist – has become the “face” of the protests. This paragraph is what surprised me:
“Dr. Bressler sealed her status as a symbol of the protest movement last month when she led a miles-long column of demonstrators on a multiday march to the hills of Jerusalem from coastal Tel Aviv. It evoked a biblical pilgrimage, and they picked up tens of thousands of supporters during the journey.”
If you look at the accompanying image (below), you cannot not be struck by how that is exactly what it looks like – a pilgrimage (with lots of flags), and what Jewish communities have been doing for millennia – walking, marching, traveling, in this case, to the capital city, to stand up to those intent on suppressing them and their freedoms.
The next story is two babies accidentally switched at birth. One baby was born of a French Canadian father and a mother who was Cree and French Canadian, a Métis. He was given the name Richard Beauvais. The other’s parents were the children of Ukrainian immigrants. They were prosperous farmers and also had a general store and post office in a town. That baby was named Eddie Ambrose.
So, the kid with Ukrainian ancestry was taken home with the Cree and French Canadian mother, and ended up on the reservation after the death of the other baby’s father. The child of the Metis mother ended up with the well-off Ukranian parents. They both came to figure this out recently after family members convinced them to do DNA testing while researching their respective family’s history.
It’s an amazing story all-around and destined for a movie, I would think, but I found it absolutely fascinating what the Ukrainian boy endured along with his family as a child and at the hands of the Canadian government. The article states:
Then, when he was 8 or 9, came what he called “the worst day” of his life. Government workers swooped into the log house to take custody of the children, who had been left by themselves.
Mr. Beauvais remembers hitting and kicking a worker who had slapped a sister, who was crying, then being thrown off a low roof. The children were eventually taken to a room with pink walls where, he said, they were picked “like puppies” by foster parents and he “was the last one to go.”
“There was no compassion,” Mr. Beauvais said. “If you were Native, the government workers didn’t care.”
But he was not Native, right? Or is he, for all intents, purposes and a lifetime of living, and being treated, as a Native? Fascinating! I won’t comment any more and allow you to read the stories, if you’re interested.
This is all George Carlin as quoted in Lapham’s Quarterly (sign up and support it if you can), which is an amazing publication bringing in old and new writings on a quarterly theme, and in this case, Freedom:
“I found a very liberating position for myself as an artist. And that was I sort of gave up on the human race and gave up on the American dream, and culture, and nation, and decided that I didn’t care about the outcome. And that gave me a lot of freedom from a kind of distant platform to be sort of amused, kind of to watch the whole thing with a combination of wonder and pity, and try to put that in words…Not having an emotional stake in whether this experiment with human beings works.”
Then: “I root for the big comet, I root for the big asteroid to come and make things right…I’m rooting for that big one to come right though that hole in the ozone layer because I want to see it on CNN…Philosophers say, Why are we here? I know why I’m here. The show. Bring it on… We’ve seen a lot of comedians who seem to have a political bent in their work, and always implicit in the work is some positive outcome, that this is all going to work. If only we do this, if only we pass that bill, if only we elect him. It’s not true.”
“It’s circling-the-drain time.”
Wow. And don’t it feel just like that sometimes? I watched the most surreal thing I’ve seen in years of the Tennessee, I believe, House of Representatives, kicking three of their members out for disrupting for a moment during session (then they called recess) but continuing on arguing that they, the house, needed to deal with children being exploded into flying flesh, bone and brain, with AR-15s. These were two very young representatives and they made the point that this is their future and deserved for it to be looked at in terms of Tennessee gun laws. Instead, the republicans tossed them – threw em out. Well, at least one, when I last looked. No due process, no, like, okay, you’re going to be stripped of your committee assignments. The Tennessee legislature with a something like 70/30 republican to democrat hold, tossed three dems, two of which were young people of color, for using a bullhorn and, well, telling the truth.
How can we live in this world without feeling just like George Carlin? I’ve been watching for decades and more recently watching the Republican Party unravel into some sort of angry group of victimized, fearful and fear-mongering tribe. They did it and with pride (hubris) and a sense of goodness. What would Jesus say? That should be enough for any sitting republican. Are you doing what Jesus Christ would do?
But I can’t go so far as the brilliant comedian has. I’m still pissed watching them undermine all of our sacred laws, our constitution and everything else to soothe their fragile egos. It’s sad. It’s like some sort of movie about some kids who were dissed by the cool kids and so now are into their revenge. Not cool, republicans. Not cool at all.
Luke Soiseth 