But I Play One on TV

I’m not a vegetarian but I mostly act like one. I just don’t eat much meat at all. I replace it with more veggies, beans, tofu, mock duck and those new fake meats you can buy at the store. Why? Because I feel much better physically. I’m leaner and lighter, yet stronger and more confident. That’s a good enough reason for me.

But there’s an op-ed in the Minnesota Star Tribune today by a guy named Ron Way. He’s a former assistant director of the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency. He’s reviewing a book by Sonja Trom Ayres who grew up on a family farm in Dodge County in southern Minnesota. The book is titled: “Dodge County Incorporated: Big Ag and the Undoing of Rural America”

Way, and more thoroughly in Trom Ayres’ book, which I have not read, spell out the effects of corporate farming on the animals and on the communities that were once filled with family farms. Instead, as Way writes, our “farmland has been transformed, mostly out of sight and little noticed, with look-alike, elongated buildings where tens of millions of hogs, cattle and poultry live short lives in crowded crud, guzzling feed for fattening in prep for a one-way trip to slaughter.”

I’ve noticed all those buildings and just sort of assumed they were chickens and turkeys. I did not realize that hogs and cattle were locked up there as well, and that is probably why I see so fewer cows out in pastures than I used to. If you’ve been around hogs and cows, you know that they are not, well, chickens. They’re intelligent, emotional, and have rich inner lives. It’s possible chickens are similar and you can tell me if that is so, I do know that they live the short, brutish lives of all of these animals, but I’m guessing they’re not dolphin, octopus or my dog smart.

They are not referred to as farms either, but “feedlots”, which sounds about as depressing as it could. Way goes on, “more than 23,000 feedlots now dot the Minnesota’s farm country,” and adds, “annually producing 49 million tons of manure – a waste-equivalent 17 times the state’s entire population.”

That’s a whole lot of shit to get rid of and they talk about how that works and doesn’t work, the immigrants who work the feedlots, the dying small towns, and much more. It’s one big-ass shit sandwich.

So, there’s another reason I act like a vegetarian. I can’t get behind that sick system. They torture the animals, destroy the towns and livelihoods of the people who live there, remove the money from the communities and up to corporate “big ag”. It’s just so horribly wrong in so many ways. Anyone for a mock duck salad?

Stop the money. Save the nation.

I do this every once in a while where I write something after some immersion in the bad news of the day. Note that the current bad news is worse than it’s ever been in my lifetime. But I start pontificating on the evil, greed, hate and blah, blah, blah. This time I’m quite a bit more freaked out but when I got done and reread it, I was struck by how silly it all is. Bestowing upon the world my opinions on whatever. Here’s what we need to do! Whatever. But it’s cathartic and so ultimately it’s worth it, right? And I kind of like this one. Here goes:

Everybody right now open an account on Bluesky. Good Americans can talk there.

Completely shut down all of your other social media accounts – X, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, etc. All of them. We’ll do this fast and we’ll do this right and you can get your accounts back. Grab your data, or start fresh. Do it now.

Do not buy anything from any of those companies – purchase nothing on Amazon, close those accounts also, do not buy a Tesla, if you have one, enjoy it and drive it into the ground. Do not use Elon Musk’s satellite connections, nor any of his other companies, and those of you who do the science as astronomers and engineers and the like working for him, you’re smart! Get the fuck out of there! Anybody working for any of those companies, walk now.

Disrupt the activity of everything related to those same businesses. This of course includes Trump companies. Whatever you can do. Good hackers, this especially means you. Blow our minds.

Yes, this will create hardship, but if we do this fast and we do this right, we’ll get through it easily and the old-fashioned way, taking care of one another, looking after our neighbors. We’re the good Americans, remember? We can take a little hardship. In fact, we can take a lot of hardship to save the nation – and ourselves, our families, our loved ones, our friends and coworkers and neighbors.

If we do this fast and we do this right, we can avoid violence of any kind. That being said, everyone be prepared to the best of your abilities.

The only two things they understand are money and power, and they will stop at nothing to use their power to bring us to our knees and take all the money for themselves. They are doing it right now. Right in front of our eyes. We must immediately stop the flow of any money into their businesses.

Please pass this on to everyone you know.

One Nation, Two Movies

A friend of mine had wanted to watch Idiocracy with me for years. It’s a Mike Judge film. Here’s how IMDB describes it:

Corporal Joe Bauers, a decidedly average American, is selected for a top-secret hibernation program but is forgotten and left to awaken to a future so incredibly moronic that he’s easily the most intelligent person alive.

I knew what the film was about a long time ago – the title gives it away I guess and I didn’t want to watch it all those years because I just knew that I would be struck by intense feelings of, we’re already halfway there! and it’s only funny because it’s becoming true! and blah, blah, blah. So after the election I figured now was the time, so I called said friend and we sat down and watched it.

Holy crap, Judge is a genius. Yes, it’s a little ham-handed, but that’s the funny and so are all the citizens living in our future; but the movie is also razor sharp in its skewering of the true and actual dumbing down of the nation, the thrill of violence on the stupid, the overconsumption of media and addiction to entertainment. Sound familiar? Idiocracy came out in 2006 – long before we slipped rather quickly into our own reenactment of it.

The other movie I happened to watch was Civil War, a 2024 movie by Alex Garland. IMDB again:

A journey across a dystopian future America, following a team of military-embedded journalists as they race against time to reach DC before rebel factions descend upon the White House.

I didn’t plan to see this one either and for similar reasons as Idiocracy (we’re already halfway there) but had the opportunity and watched. Depressing. They do a very good job of not making it into a MAGA Republican versus American Progressives war movie and in fact have Texas and California in cahoots on one side of the civil war. But it’s hard to completely avoid the obvious when threats have come from mouths of people who will have a say in the new administration, so of course it’s depressing and frightening. That it’s so new and current makes it even harder to watch. It looks feasible right down to the folks in some towns they travel through who simply ignore the entire Civil War due to callousness or media misinformation – or both – ugh.

Too close to home, that one.

Love it but leave it

I remember hearing something along the lines of, you can tell the soul of a society by the tallest buildings. They talked about how it was once the church spires and then the government domes, and now corporate skyscrapers. Where the money is, there too is what we care most about. Stadiums.

Whoever came up with: He who dies with the most toys wins, nailed it. We are consumers, if nothing else. Consider the McMansion and explosion of storage facilities. We continue to move away from churches, and no one seems to care about good governance nor is willing to happily pay their taxes for the services they provide. Instead, we focus on us (our accounts, our feeds, our playlists, our entertainment, our silos and echo chambers), and better yet, they focus on us.

Consumerism isn’t new; but in about 1995, it was like a teed-up golf ball and the Internet swung in like a 1-wood.

It’s all very obsessive and dizzying, chaotic and endless, and that’s good for the Google, Facebook, Amazon and the like. They control it, and uniquely control each of us – what we see, how often, and all through a Pavlovian rewards system that responds to our every click – a different experience for every man, woman and child who logs in and turns on. And now it’s about you – your likes, your way of thinking, your videos, your music, your beliefs, your followers, your clothes, your hobbies, your culture – and so, as Greg Jackson in “Sources of Life” writes, “we create a culture in line with what we have been told the culture is like.”

The constant reaffirmation of ourselves online makes it easy forget the rest, or ignore them, misunderstand them, demean them, hate them. We’re developing personal cultures that sometimes intersect or overlap with others but mostly not. I’ve got my earbuds and you’ve got yours.

But to be free and alive, healthy and not crazy, we have to curate our own minds – extricate ourselves from the fast flowing feeds. Choose on our own what we want to put in our minds, and really think about it, as whatever we choose becomes us, too. Neuroplasticity, the ability and in fact, simply fact about our minds is that they are changed and altered, even physically, by what we see, hear, feel, taste, experience. The more we see the same product in our feed, the more we’ll remember it and maybe buy it. If you repeat anything over and over and over, you will eventually believe it. Just ask the religions.

Jackson writes, “Defending art or culture for its own sake may seem trivial, even gratuitous, amid our present crises, but our crises have flowered in the soil of its trivialization. The vacant secular despair that sends us searching for a religious politics – that underwrites the allure of racism, nationalism, conspiracy theories such as QAnon, the violent fraternal gangs; that makes us long for the escapism of entertainment, narcotics, video games and for the endless stimulation of the internet and social media – is precisely what culture of this category is meant to address.”

Support the arts. Curate your own mind.

The mind is a curious thing

When I’m folding clothes, I try to make as few moves as possible to fold the most clothes and when I screw up, I get frustrated. You do that? If I turn a shirt from outside right to inside out thinking it was wrong when it was right, I add all those moves to turn the shirt back. It’s crushing. And self-inflicted. The mind is a curious thing.

I Remember

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?*

But, what about…

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.

Buds

A couple of people asked me what the hell this is. It’s a voice inside my head, the loser me, the guy always trying to fit in. The bit about mooching the money is not me. I don’t think. Can I just say it was very strange to write it down? And not a little embarrassing?

Ha ha! It’s fun to be with you guys, I mean, that’s obvious! We’re just like, ‘hey, man’ and ‘what’s going on’ and stuff. Just chillin’. Everybody’s all ‘wha?!’ you know? ha ha! So, what is up? Wanna go to one or your guys’s cribs? Check it out, you know, ‘what’s up?’ Be all ‘sweet crib!’ Yeah, no, we could go to my place but it’s so small, we’d be all over each other, I mean, and we’re buds but not that kind! ha ha! Man, especially, anyone got any brews at home? That’d be sweet! We’d be all ‘wha?!’ Hanging out and shit! Drinking some brewskis! Ha. Hey! Shit. I was gonna ask, I left my wallet at home and if anyone can front me five bucks, that’d be sweet! I’d be paying it right back, I’ll be all, ‘what’s up?’ be like, ‘cash on the barrel head, bitches!’ right? so if anyone can, just let me know. Later’s cool! Ha. So are we going to hang out? That’d be sweet. A bite to eat. That rhymes! ‘that’d be sweet, a bite to eat!’ We’re all like, ‘wha?!’ be hanging out and stuff. Anyone hungry? Grab a little nosh? ‘what’s up?’ ha ha. Not to use a big word, but I’d be remiss if I didn’t invite you guys to my place in the very near future! It’d be sweet, be all, ‘wha’s up? want to par-tay?’ Hell yeah! So where do you guys want to go? There’s some good movies out nowadays. We could get some tix, poppycorn and bevies? ‘what’s up?’ be all, ‘I’ll take the biggest tub you got, homey!’ ha ha. So, movie sound groovy? Ha! I’m a freaking poet! ‘Four score and …’ wait! no! shit! That’s not poetry – it’s the Constitution! Damn! Everybody’s all, ‘wha? make up your mind, dumbshit!’ how many times I’ve heard that – my mom and my dad, that is, when he’s actually home, but, oh, shit! What am I doing? You guys are all like, ‘what about your dad, you loser!’ ha. Anybody got any brothers and sisters and shit? Hey! We gonna head out or what? Not that I don’t love hanging out here in the freezing cold – ha ha – you guys all got real winter gear. This beauty’s a wind breaker and it ain’t breaking any wind! It’s freaking cold out here! Wait a minute, isn’t breaking wind like farting? I mean, doesn’t it mean it? That’s hilarious! Good news, guys, my wind breaker ain’t breaking any wind! But someone here is! You all smell that? Be all, ‘Damn dude! That’s rank!’ and shit. Let’s roll! I mean, get on the road. ha ha it’s cool hanging out with you cats! Ha! Cats! You all be all, ‘you hang out with cats, dork?’ ha ha Then my cat will just disappear one day – poof! from the backyard. Dad didn’t bother to look for her. It was his day off. Ha! Just joshing! Be all, ‘I’m fucking with you!’ If you pardon my French! Ha! Damn. So, if anyone does have five buckaroos, that’d be sweet! I mean, I could probably get by with a little less, but, I mean if no one’s sporting a fiver, I totally understand. But one of you fuckers must be able to spot me! Ha! I’d pay it right back, I’d bring it right to your place – special delivery! So, I need the cash for medications for my mom who’s totally wondering where the heck I am! I’d be all, ‘Put a lid on it, old lady!’ ha. ‘wha?!’ But I should probably skedaddle – anyone able to… Naw, I get it. I’m totally cool with… Where are… Okay! Cool! See you guys! Cats! ha ha. cats.

Numbers

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.

Real Dialogue

From the NYT.

I didn’t respect them.

But I did respect respect others. I respected many others that said the election was rigged.

My instincts are a big part of it.

That’s been the thing that’s gotten me to where I am, my instincts. But I also listen to people.

There are many lawyers. I could give you many books.

It was my decision. But I listened to some people.