The Sad Disaster of Missed Life Lessons

Ah, poor Bush baby. It's been another difficult week, hasn't it? What a pathetic mess you are, now having to pay the piper for all those free wheeling dances, and just not understanding how your carnival show could have turned so wrong.

It grows daily more apparent that when the most basic yet important of life lessons were being taught - the lessons real cowboys, farmers, and even overly rich little boys in prep school learn - you were lazily sprawled open mouthed under a leaky beer truck. We've known for a number of years now that you missed the lesson that says honesty is the best policy, but the most important one that you allowed to slide past while in a childish fit of pique was that chickens always come home to roost.

See, all these little lessons tie together, the one about honesty firmly anchored to the one about roosting chickens - or in your case, turkeys. Your lies are catching up with you, Bush Baby, and no matter how often you do the Hustle or the Electric Slide or the Twist, it isn't going to get that turkey off your shoulder or the monkey off your back. You and your secretive little Cabal friends have miscalculated. That's what happens when more attention is given to counting money, making bets, and manipulating the bottom line of a few special groups instead of tending to the real business of governing or managing a country. It's doubly bad for you as the front guy, the ventriloquist's dummy, because you're the one to take the heat. And Bush Baby, at a high enough temperature, wooden heads burn, but you've obviously missed that lesson, too, and it's not even difficult science.

All this anger over the business arrangement for the U.A.E. to take over running our ports has burst into the open simply because neither you nor your Cabal buddies bothered to keep track of the lies you've told to cause the conditions you created so you could get your way. Just like little kids and school yard bullies, you forgot to keep an eye on your back trail, Bush Baby, and the creeping paranoia you created to magnify the fears of the 'little people' has suddenly blossomed into outrage at you for selling their security to the enemy. Roosting chickens, Bush Baby. Can you say cluck, cluck? Or gobble, gobble, you turkey?

Something else, chicken/turkey man, that just came up today. The company in Dubai requesting (or demanding - that, like so much else is unclear) a 45 day hold on any arrangement so it can be more 'thoroughly investigated. Hah! Now you have to come out from under that cabbage leaf in the barn yard where you're always saying you didn't know about, or don't know some person, or weren't informed, and you're going to get to go on record with a yea or nay on the whole shady deal. Say yea, and more of your blindly loyal but royally pissed political base will leave you out there with your naked behind showing. Say nay, and all your middle eastern buddies are going to be just as angry. Naturally, you're not solely to blame, since you've never taken the blame or responsibility for anything in your life, but your good buddies and handlers, those wanna be robber barons, marauders, beserkers, and manipulators that hide themselves away in their power dungeons, are certainly culpable of overweaning arrogance on this one, may all their genitilia be pecked apart by a hoard of wild turkeys.

Hmmmm. Wonder if we could say, because of all the foul fowl coming home to roost, that this is a version of political bird flu run amok? We might even be able to pass it off as a hybrid version of swine fever. That would fit, too. Can you and your buddies say oink, oink?

Artificial Imperatives, Optimists, Gamblers, and the Well Scrubbed Brain

Alas, like millions of Americans in 29 different states, my dream of winning the $365 million record Powerball lottery Saturday night was in tatters Sunday morning. Walking into my local retail liqueur store, I knew my chances were near non-existent, but opened my billfold, brushed away the moth that few out, and plunked two crumbled greenbacks on the counter anyway, even joking with the vendor that I was still running a perfect negative record, having won a pitiful $2 years ago for guessing that laggardly little last number - the real Power number that is more like a wee hiccup on the road to Nirvana.

We are amazing optimists and invenerate gamblers, as we prove every time we steer our vehicles into the mayhem that is city traffic or expressway madness or don't look for an oncoming bus when we step off the sidewalk. Something about us just wants to believe that the stars will align, the dice will roll to our will, fate will wear a smiley face, and life's slot machine will stop on three cherries with no pits. Instead, we end up repeating the empty cliche that it's not how you win, but how much you pay to play and if you're still standing - and wearing a shirt - at the end of the game.

Remember chain letters? Recall the addlepated prose that promises you luck or wealth beyond all imagining if you'll just send the letter to 2,354 good friends in the next 20 seconds? Or, if you ignore it and miss the deadline, a deadly virus will enter your body through your left ear bringing excruciating pain and debilitating diarrhea as it wends its way toward your crotch and withers and rots your genitila? Well, state run lotteries, casinos and riverboats, four-color magazine ads or TV commercials for automobiles, cosmetics, legal pills, beer and singles connections are the chain letters of the modern age.

We live in an artificial world of phony promises, yet optimists and gamblers that we are, we bite every time for those messages. Rubba, rubba, scrubba dub dub. The well washed brain at work.

Everyone enamored with the idea of reaching out to touch someone has spent enough on cell and digital phones, answering machines and voice mail, caller ID and call waiting, 900 numbers and the love connection hot lines to have traveled to Ireland at least 542 times to rub the Blarney Stone. We haven't touched so much as harassed and been harassed. Everyone who accepts the network come on of 'Must See TV' has sprawled on their sofa to eat junk food and stare at inanities for several hours when they could have been out and about making real 'Friends' who might actually come to visit, or lend a hand in a crisis, or at least send a Hallmark card (the very best) on your birthday or at Christmas.

Stop and think just a moment about Super Bowl Sunday...that curious day of celebration, beer and unending overly expensive commercials. Suddenly, because of the price tag and the hype, those ads you usually skip over or use as a pause to raid the fridge, now get more attention than the 22 banged and juiced up players on the field. And they have the temerity to ask us to pick our favorite commercial and we have the warped brains that comply!! Talk about an artificial imperative that erodes your will.

We are so bombarded with exhortions to buy, buy, buy. No matter what ails us, the cure is there in a new car, in a total home make-over, in a brand new wardrobe, a shipload of cosmetics, or the pharmaceutical company's pill to relieve symptoms of the illness de jour. We're so optimistic, we believe, and plunk down our hard earned cash for a host of things that rarely solve our problems or make us look better, feel better, act better or better attract the opposite sex.

Men keep gambling that a new muscle car will lengthen their penis and turn them into Casanova. Women keep gambling that a tummy tuck, cosmetic surgery, or $2,500 worth of night creams and blusher will make them irresistible. Sorry folks, but your brainwashed willingness to believe and to gamble only makes you irresistible to all those businesses with something to sell...and that something is rarely anything you actually want or need.

Remember those high flalluting CEO's who ran their companies into the ground, absconded with employee pensions, defrauded the government, and embezzled company funds convinced they'd never get caught with those two sets of books? You remember what most of them did with all that money they took? They bought 'stuff!!' They fell for all the hype and phony promises, too, thinking the accoutrements of sophistication, the trappings of gentility, the glossy appearance of trophy wives or tans on the golf course would make their petty mentality special. The miserable bastards and sad sacks bought stuff. Good grief. Their brains had been so well washed, it's doubtful an honest or original blip would have appeared on an EEG.

Face it. We've all been artificially inseminated. We've become the retard children of the advertising age. We kowtow to the marketing genius' hired by big business to keep them in obscene profits while they keep both adults and children enthralled with empty promises. The business of business might only be business, but the results of this kind of business is that we bloat our little lives with 'stuff.' With wide eyed wonder, we buy what they offer, use it a while, realize nothing much has changed, and then double down on our bet, and buy something else that won't work for us either.

No business wants any of us secure with our selves or comfortable with how we appear to ourselves or each other. These companies are not finding water in the desert. They're not working to cure cancer or explore space for colonization. They are not interested in ways to get us away from gas guzzling cars with internal combustion engines. They are simply re-working and repackaging the 'stuff' that's worked before. They're finding a new way to get their messages about 'stuff' believed. They're in collusion together and working in tandem with banks, accountants, lobbyists, ad agencies, the media and a host of peripheral business to simply keep us lathered up so scrubba, scrubba and rub a dub dub will sell us all more 'stuff.'

Before you dream of how you'd spend a huge lottery win on lots of 'stuff,' maybe you should take time to douse your brain with cold water and rinse.

Sometimes, Bush baby, it just doesn't pay to get out of bed!

This has been one of those weeks cartoonists and comics make jokes about. I'd laugh, too, if it weren't my life, especially since the word that immediately comes to mind for it is 'hellacious.' But your life hasn't been very positive lately, Bush baby, and that does make me laugh. While I have in no way affected your karma (except with the negative energy of my thoughts toward your destructiveness), you and your devious little cabal buddies have definitely affected mine.

After a deceptively mild winter, the temperatures here suddenly plunged. Twenty six degrees never felt so cold, as I had to fill my 6-cylinder car with overpriced gas and ten minutes later pulled a $300+ natural gas heating bill from the mailbox. And, of course, it was only a couple days later that my furnace, after having gorged on that ultra expensive fodder, belched itself into a potentially terminal coma. On the same day the repairman handed me a humungous bill for new parts, the master bath toilet sprang a leak. The only happiness in my house was feline. The constant drip, drip, drip became a terrific source of fresh water far surpassing their normal dish. My checkbook, already struggling to survive all the recent banking and credit card changes, is expected to die a quick but far from painless death once the plumber gets here.

And it's mostly thanks to you and your buddies, Bush baby, even if you are only the hollow and incompetent front guy for those unscrupulous businessmen, special interest moguls, oil magnets, and other assorted sleaze and slime.

It does my heart good to see you having a bad time of it, too, Bush baby. Your nervousness was obvious with that latest song and dance routine about foiling a terrorist plot in 2002 to crash something into the tallest structure in Los Angeles. Since Shaq O'Neal is the only thing that would fit that description in L.A., I bet he was pleased that those eavesdroppers at NSA had their noses in American's business and their ears pressed to doors all over the country. Taking a few hits, aren't you, Bush baby? Gonzales, your little sleazy appointee at Justice, didn't exactly have enough ballroom dance skill in front of those Senate interrogaters either. Not even all those Republican party hack Senators were happy with his missteps and flubs. Earned a few demerits there, Alberto.

And ain't it awful that you couldn't even find a good funeral to enjoy without having to hear all those folks cavail, complain, and put your flaws in the lime light? Poor Bush baby, sometimes life is simply a bitch, but you still managed to sneer and wink and pretend things were rosy and bright. But, then, you've had a lot of practice slewing reality and wearing your idiot's face. That's one of the reasons the Cabal chose you to be the ventriloquist's dummy.

This morning, "you're doing a great job, Brownie" gets to tell all those Senators about Katrina - that part where your administration didn't know the levees broke or that you were leaving the poor vulnerable and dying. Brown is supposed to testify at 9 a.m., but if he runs true to form, he won't show up until tomorrow. Of course, if it puts you and your evil minions in a bad light, you can always tell us about another foiled terrorist plot. Or accuse the poor and disadvantaged of being unpatriotic for not dying quietly.

Let's see....oh yes, now Jack Abramof, that upstanding worker for Indian rights and easy money for chosen politicans, is saying he had many, many face-to-face meetings with you. Of course, that's in total contradiction to your comment that you don't know the man, so you'd better get Rove to pull out another foiled terrorist plot. Or perhaps Cheney will beat you to it, since it's now been published that he gave Libby the go ahead to expose Valerie Plame's job with the CIA to punish Joe Wilson and untold others for exposing one of the earliest lies about WMD. Gee, Bush baby, maybe you could smooth things over by doing another burlesque routine about missing WMD's for the national press, or even donning a janiorial costume of overalls and galoshes and, while holding a wet mop, stand in front of a wash bucket bearing a sign that reads "Mission Accomplished."

Things aren't looking good for you and your friends for this year's election. If the American voters (excluding your crazed loyalists, of course) have learned anything at all, any number of Republicans will lose their plush jobs in the House and Senate. And if there were any justice at all in this world, you, your vampire veep, and even Hastert, who helped give the pharmaceutical and energy industries obscene windfall profits at the expense of human beings, will be impeached and prosecuted.

Yeah, Bush baby....sometimes it just doesn't pay to get up in the mornings...and it couldn't happen to a more deserving bunch of guys.

When it's all be said, there's nothing left to say

It has been a long time since I've posted to this blog, but I awoke one morning and found myself in a quandary. I had been keeping to my normal routine: feed the cats and then myself, read a few newspapers, think about the stories, play with the cats and muse on recent happenings, take care of mundane chores, listen to some music and let my mind wander, but I was suddenly stumped. I'd heard all these recurring stories so many times before and there was nothing left to say.

People who know me will tell you that it is very unusual for me to be at a loss for words. I always have an opinion, a quip, a story, a rant. Silence is not my normal style, although I do sometimes retreat from electronic distractions to regroup and clear my mind. But, this time it was different. This time there seemed to be nothing worth saying simply because it's all been said over and over and it apparently made no difference. Talking is useless unless there is someone to hear. Writing is empty unless there is someone to read and comprehend. Angst is only selfishness turned inward. Depression is sometimes no more than a loss of imagination.

I've always been one to celebrate differences and diversity. Sameness, whether in people, places, activities, or ideas has never appealed to me. No doubt that's one of the reasons I despise shopping malls and am convinced that people who complain of being tired are usually just bored. I've also always found that people who complain readily of being bored are usually boring people, so it's natural that I would resent being bored by the same old stories, the same old problems, the same old warped people and their tendencies, and the same old excuses for never curing any problem, never seeking any solution.

While I'm in this explanatory or confessional mood, I'll also admit to nurturing a fanciful notion about this planet of ours; I always enjoyed thinking of it as being a cosmic garden, an experiment in advanced galactic agriculture seeded by an explosion of nutritious stardust, the watery landscape evolving as natural changes occurred to ultimately result in humanity being the most advanced plantings in that garden. With a nod toward pagan and druid thinking, I suspect that's how we came up with the idea of a 'tree of life' and the concept of 'growing' to be the best we can be.

If my metaphor has merit, there is a natural hazard in gardening and growing things. Disease, pestilence, wind, fungus and drought. Our celestial garden is not in a healthy state. Our most prized plants have mutated to empty shells of their former glory. Strife, stress and sickness in the most basic root of the human soul have weakened the fabric of our very existence. What can any of us say as we watch ugliness consume former beauty and strength? What can we say as we see a fungus of greed invade and alter the symbiosis of one plant to another? What can we do when parasitic plants invade and destroy the growth cycle, suffocating and crushing those elements of fragility and gentleness that give the garden luster? What can we do when the hearts and minds of a wondrous garden are eaten away by bigotry, hatred, fear and horror? It's as though we have purposefully salted the ground and no thing will again be allowed to grow.

When a garden is infected beyond hope of repair, when disease holds sway, when pestilence multiplies beyond the point it can be controlled, there's only one thing that can stop the advance. Everything in the garden must be burned. Fire is the only thing to rectify the problem and purify the ground. Might those cosmic gardeners who first sprinkled their stardust decide the experiment is out of control? Could global warming be the option of cosmic choice - a celestial representation of the fire next time?

When you have nothing left but cannibalistic plants that feed on themselves and eat their own children, what is left to say?