on being pro-dope in wingnutland...

When I was in 5th grade, they started in with the srary stories about drugs, including Pot. Images of addled, violent miscreants competed in my mind with Jack Kerouac's road buddies and the Beatles. After 5 years and further reading, I smoked my 1st joint. Not scary at all.(!) Could it be that They lied?!
Research confirmed that they did, or at least cherry-picked the information.My Mom was attending a well known CJ college(for Art...) at this time, so I utilised their extensive section on drugs in the library. Clinical studies, galore.

Conclusion: lies. And about more than just Pot. Halucinogens, it turned out, could be utilised to expand one's mind, if used properly and with care.
What a world opened up to me in those days.
This was also what got me on my skeptical track. If they would lie, repeatedly, about something as relatively harmless as Pot, what else would they lie about? I haven't trusted gooberment, or any other establishment organ, since.
I know most of my posts end up as an anti-rightwing screed....
But the sky IS blue...no matter how many people they put in jail for saying it.
I've come around to the belief that the whole War on Drugs is a scam, a controll mechanism.It's designed to divide us, make us fearful of the other, and thus allow the PTB more power over us. The cops make lots of money off this ruse, and lobby hard to escalate it. I've seen it bandied about that the PTB is actually making $ from selling dope, laundering $, etc. It is curious that wherever we 'pacify' turns into an opium farm,no?
Just another example of the authoritarian's War on Reality.
Who you gonna believe, your Leaders, or your lying eyes?
I consider this long, failed "effort" like a practice run for the new War on Terror. A new, equally nonexistant "enemy" that we are to FEAR. And because of that FEAR, we willingly give up what's left of our sovereignty to those who would Rule.

"What luck for the rulers, that men do not think."- Adolf Hitler.

Sex,Ignorance and Hysteria.

So, let me first get the "closet" part over with... I'm Bisexual. I lust after women, but am opportunistic about men. I consider Try-sexual to be a good , underutilised descriptor.
Whew!
Our culture is sick.

We don't say a word to our kids about anything sexual till they're 20, if at all, then condemn them for finding out on their own. The Church forbids priests an approved outlet for what is ,arguably, God's greatest gift, and then wonders why they resort to sordid sex with minors. We rain down judgement on masturbation, and sex education, and nudity, and premarital sex; mystify and cloud the whole subject, then wonder why we have rapists and pdophiles and all the other sexual predatory behaviour.

A 4000 year old book of unknown authorship makes vague allusions to various sexual practices and we base our law, mores, and post-enlightenment social constructs on it.
Sex is, biologically, the "Prime Directive". It is a part of being Human. To deny our own Nature is to invite disaster and hysteria.
The Right (again, with them...) has driven us back to the bad old days. Ignorance, fear and hatred rule the day.Their own fear and guilt are projected onto society as a whole and God help those who don't subscribe to their narrow world view.
Gay marriage will, somehow, in their eyes, lead to pedophilia and bestiality and the demise of marriage, itself.(!) Their methods of repression and enforced ignorance sure seem to be working on those fronts.Look around. Perhaps it's time we tried another approach.
Perhaps we should educate kids, whenever they become interested, about the facts of life...
That masturbation is safe sex and a good way to get to know about one's body..That sex can lead to pregnancy and STD's and that there are ways to prevent both of these.That the Human body is beautiful in all it's variety and love and affection take many forms...

Perhaps we could "legalise" and "destigmatise" consenual behaviour between adults...Like the Pagan Imperative:"Harming none, Do as thou wilt."

I'm sick of the moralising, hypocritical posturing. This is a major reason I ultimately rejected Christianity...
I couldn't believe in a God that would ,presumeably, create me as I am, and turn around and condemn me for being as I am.
War , Sex and Drugs are the biggest businesses on the planet. It's who we are.Maybe, if we softened up a bit on the latter two, we would have less of the former.( I'll get onto Dope later...)
Something called the Dove foundation called me out of the blue.Wanted my support to "fix" tv.I said great!
Then they started in about sex and nudity....and profanity. I told them I thought it was stupid to excise the word"fuck", a womens breast, or nonpornographic representations of consensual lovemaking and leave in images of folks getting cut in half with machine guns!
They hung up on me.
Wasn't what they wanted to hear, I guess.

preacher

So Obama's preacher got him in hot water with his 'sermons' about us foreign policy and it's consequences.Obama is, of course, all over it, rejecting, denouncing, condemning. The MSM consensus seems to be that this is an 'extremist',"radical' opinion. They just can't get their head around how anyone who doesn't hate america could believe that 9-11 ,etc. could be a result of our imperialist meddling in other people's business.
I have lots of problems with this. For one, it is a sacred tradition in this country to call out our government whenever it behaves badly.They are supposed to be our servants and should be held accountable and made to answer such important charges.
For another, it is no secret that the CIA, et al, have been busy , for 60+ years, doing horrible things in our name. Coups, assasinations, kidnapping, fomenting revolution, subverting Democracy , all over the world.And theres the 'soft' power, employed most recently by Clinton, thru the IMF, WTO, etc.... ruining economies of countries that don't roll over for us corporations.

And yet, in America, we can't discuss this? The lunatics and warmongers get a free pass?
On 9-11-01, once I realised what was happening, the first thing to enter my mind was that this was retaliation for our CorpGov's meddling around the world. " chickens coming home to roost..."
The right wing has so poisoned the American mind that we can no longer think!(see alternet, sara robinson has a great series on how they did it...)
It's just like the 'discussion' about Israel.( Let me say, 1st, that I have roots in Bohemian Jewdom.) When someone, like me, now, calls a spade a spade, and says that the Israelis are behaving like Nazi's, suddenly I'm an antisemite!
It doesn't matter one whit if it's objectively true. Even Jimmy Carter was eviscerated for speaking the plain truth. The list is long... Ward Churchill, Chomsky, etc.etc.
I'll go even further and say that it looks to me that at least elements of our government perpetrated 9-11.(Heresy!) This is where the facts and inconsistencies lead me and I am unapologetic.
Bin Laden was , after all, a CIA asset in Afghanistan against the Russians.
It becomes increasingly difficult to determine the shape of the world as ideology trumps reason and the water is systematically muddied and any dissent is condemned as treason. We are expected to be turnips... falling anew off the truck each day, into a brand new world in which what has gone before is what they tell us has gone before. A clean slate.A blank page. No thought, no memory, and no hope.

crashing,finally...

i've reached a new low . i love everything chris cornell has hever done....
boujoulais? red wine. puking out the window.
totaly alone in my mind.
have i done this to myself?
could it be that i need ......others?
where should i find them??
feels like i'm too strange.

and i am a strange one.
when the shit hits the proverbial fan, i expect the ,litteral, pitch-forks and torches.....
i expect them to come for me, eventually...
cassandra in a coal mine...
serpents licked my eyes....
and i'm cursed in that noone wants to hear about the END of their most comfortable life....

On being a Freak

I've been a strange duck for my whole life. My preferred words are 'freak' and 'anomaly', depending on context.I was born unusually intelligent. I could read at 3 years and have found I have a high retention rate. I rarely forget something I've read. I can be absentminded, thinking about things. This seems to be percieved as aloofness.
It's hard to be smart in America, today. Texas, at least. I was dissapointed with higher ed. Where I had expected a Salon-type environment I found the two extremes of 1) balls-to-the-wall partying and 2)narrow, career-track grubbing w/ facile 'net-working'. These two overlapped, somewhat, but overall university was a gigantic disappointment. Some part of this , I think, was due to choice of schools; some due to the times. High-school with ashtrays is how I've characterised my college experience.
Moved to Austin after college, and it's still the only city I would even consider moving to, short of Paris.
Still, I couldn't find the intellectual things I was looking for. Expectations were, perhaps, too high.
The press of humanity grew oppressive and I seized the opportunity to get out , into the Wilderness.
Over all, it has been a positive thing... meeting my wife, having kids, and being so close to Nature. But there is definitely something missing.
I am a lonely, cynical bastard. I am filled with contempt for most folks I know, and that seems like a rational position. My wife says I'm too hard on folks, that I expect too much, that it's unrealistic to expect anyone out here to be intellectual or open-minded.
Perhaps she's right.
But it doesn't help with the isolation.I plunged ,headlong, into the society I found. My honesty and forthrightness were met with either blank, empty looks or, more rarely, outright contempt. I was rumored to be some kind of cult-leader.(!) All for being unorthodox and thinking for myself.
I think that part of this can be attributed to the times, the mood today. But most of it is a long-term trend of anti-intellectualism. From where I stand, folks just don't like to think. The local library, tho it's remarkably comprehensive is it's variety of materials, is used for access to the latest Nora Roberts or Dean Koontz. Nothing wrong with that, that's not my point.It's that noone I know seems interested in understanding the world they live in.And that's what drives me. I've encountered no curiosity , no critical judgement.
It bothers me to no end to have noone to discuss things with, without falling into superstitious certainty or uncritical acceptance of official culture.
I've always been a lurker on the Web. I retain some hope for this and other fora; but so far this looks like just a fancy way of talking to myself. Do I offend? It is not my intention.

On the Culture of Fear and Self Censorship

(still getting the fonts,etc. figgered out..)

I'm finding that I enjoy this blogging. It's cathartic. I've got a lot to say, and no local forum in which to say it. I became so tired of trying to explain myself , of giving a class every time I wanted to utter my two cents, that I gave up entirely and receded into my mountain fastness. I spend a considerable amount of time conversing exclusively w/ my 2-year old son. I love him, and his elder brother, dearly, but it is not exactly an intellectual outlet...
I've been a House-Husband for almost 3 years, now; part-time before that to avoid day-care for my oldest.
It feels like a vacuum. The wasteland of daytime TV offers no respite.
I've been aware of my tendancy to piss folks off for a long time. It usually seems to be about misunderstandings on their part or my ignorance of social conventions. I seem to have an inordinate amount of talent for saying the wrong thing at the wrong time.
Add to this situation the post-911 world we find around us, and it looked like the prudent course to remove to the farm and speak only with bird and turtles.There has been great upwelling of Anti-Enlightenment sentiment of late.
I , of course, blame the Right wing lunatics who have hijacked the country. Read Leo Strauss and one finds the philosophy behind it. Strauss , and his 'intellectual' heirs, hated and feared everything liberal ( in the actual, classical, dictionary sense). In their view, the Enlightenment was the worst thing that ever happened.Democracy? Liberty? All men created Equal? Horsefeathers!!!
In his insane interpretation of Plato's Republic, Strauss found justification for his most Elitest sentiments. The great, unwashed masses (that's us...) are too stupid and shortsighted to be trusted with governing themselves,or anything else. What the masses need, and unconciously want, is a Ruling Elite: those precious few , born into the best families, who can best manage the world.Macchiavelli could have done no better than this, and is ,indeed, very popular among the Junta we know and love today.This bunch believes, fervently, in The Noble Lie; the system of myths that keep the masses busy and content, leaving the Rulers to do what's good and necessary.
When I think about this kind of thing, or try to explain my thinking to my wife (long-suffering, patient woman.)the Matrix serves as a handy allegory. The Noble Lie is "..The world thats been pulled over your eyes to hide the Truth...".
Anyhoo,, our zietgeist of the past 7-8 years has had the effect of encouraging me to shut my mouth.
I got involved in local political activity for the 2004 election, volunteered for the Dem's.(we're a Red county). It seemed so futile, after a while. The "Liberals" around here,20 years ago would have been considered Conservatives. And the Conservatives!!! What a nest of vile , backstabbing, self-serving hypocrites.
I realised that I'd soon get myself killed if I continued to take part.My world-view was/is just too far outside the norm to be parading around in front of these yokels. In fact, once, during a "debate" at a local watering hole,drunk to a man, a pseudoFascist actually tried to strangle me when I suggested that Bush was THE WORST president EVER and should be IMPEACHED and JAILED forthwith!
Free Speech , it seems will not be tolerated in the Reich.
Add to all this, the pronouncements from on high that we should be terrified at anything "out of the ordinary" while we Patriotically Shop and Big Brother surveilling the Web and the phones and the mail and meetings of antiwar groups and Quakers(!) and it was obviously time to become a Hermit.
Blogging is reasonably anonymous, although I have no delusions of being untraceable.So far, it seems just another for of shouting at the mountain out back or arguing with the goats and donkeys.Soon, I expect to have geese to wrangle with, as well.
And maybe, maybe the tide is turning on the mood in this country.One must reserve a measure of Hope.
I will continue to be a curmudgeon and I will give my honest, unvarnished opinion when asked. Perhaps The great tradition of cynicism and tirades against the status quo will have a renaissance. Judging from the nightmare of the 1st decade of the 21st century, I'd say it's about time.

On Health

I've mentioned that I consider myself a cripple. Perhaps some elucidation is in order. When I was 20, I had a wreck. Hit a tree at 90mph in a nissan centra. The sweetgum tree survived, as did I.
We both, however,were broken. My left ankle was turned to gravel; right hip bone,,severed at the femoral neck; both knees "jammed" from locking legs onto brake pedal; and left 1/2 of skin on forehead scraped away by the windshield.
With remarkable endurance and tenacity, I learned to walk again and went back to work. Chef,musician, student, farmer.
3 years ago, the pain in hip and knees finally got to me. Avascular necrosis in hip, I expect the joint to collapse any time. No cartilage to speak of in either knee.(& eyelashes that grow backwards, into my eye!) Arthritis has spread to my right wrist, elbow and shoulder (my cane arm...), both thumbs from a fall when I was learning how to walk.
I feel low-pressure systems from thousands of miles away (leading me to speculate on all sorts of esoteric subjects, as this is clearly "extra-sensory " perception).


As a result of all of this I , for all my anti- government sentiment and fierce independance, have applied for disability. It's been almost 2 years.
It irks me to no end that I'd have a better hope of getting a new hip and knee in Cuba.
The only pain medication I've found that 1) is effective and 2) has minimal side effects is Vicodin, which I am puposefully miserly with to avoid addiction and to prolong it's effectiveness. However, due to DEA meddling in the field of medicine, doctors are reluctant to prescribe this schedule III drug. So for 18 years I've weakened my alimentary canal and probably my liver with acetominaphen and a whole range of other NSAIDs.
Even the Vicodin is mostly acetominaphen, ostensibly to discourage abuse.( this must be because we're a Xian nation ,since the Warrior Chist was obviously anti-drug...)
The current regime has decided that blowing up sandy, backwards countries who happen to sit atop 'our' oil, and turning the US into the Fourth Reich is more important than healthcare for the poor. In Right-wing-land, it's my own damned fault that I don't have insurance or a rich uncle. Perhaps God is punishing me for being a borderline Socialist or bisexual.

I felt bad, almost immoral, when I finally applied for disability. It goes against my Libertarian streak. Then I remembered Wulf Zendik (google it) who said "Dropping out is a Revolutionary act."
To justify myself< I've gone further:"Becoming a drain on an unjust system is a Revolutionary act."