I Think My Brain Noodles Are Melting (03-12-2008)

 Politics scare me. Badly. Anyone who’s followed my illustrious journalism career as closely as I have may notice that authority gets me really nervy. I don’t like the idea of power being held by people with more power than me, especially since my only chance of fighting their power is with the rights they allow me to have. That strike anyone else as a bit weird, or am I out of line?

It wouldn’t be so bad if it was on a smaller scale. When my ancestor’s made the democracy that you all love so much, it was a few thousand people, a few hundred representatives, and everybody had to serve their time, like jury duty. Flat out, it was easier. That’s a fact, and it takes a lot for me to admit that anything in the past was better than we have it today, but politics is one of them.

If a homeless man came up to your face and asked you for a dollar, most people don’t give anything. But politics is the activity of throwing control for the next 4 years of your life over to someone you’ve never met. You don’t know them, you’re lucky to touch them, and tomorrow they could decide to hold your sister down and rip her uterus out using your tax dollars. There’d be checks and balances, things of that nature I’m embarrassingly retarded on, but they have the tools, they have the technology, and they’d be in charge of anyone you would call to try and stop them. I have best friends that I wouldn’t trust with my sister’s uterus.

For the sake of the people I love, specifically all of you, me, and my family, I’ve been meaning to try following this election process and write about it. Yes, thank you, I noticed it started a while ago. I’ve spent all this time trying to get a handle on it. I literally had no leverage, no crowbar on the door. I’ve been soaking here in total confusion and paranoia, for months now. I’ve asked so many people where I can start paying attention to politics, to try and start putting it all together, and I haven’t gotten a satisfactory answer yet. More than a few good ones, but nothing to make it all fall in to place and give me a starting point. It’s actually the same thought-process that got me to the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire in the first place—I threw out every pamphlet that came in the mail from colleges, and never visited a web site to research. My logic being, “Well, they’re talking about themselves, so they’re obviously not going to be honest. Fuck them.” I only took EC because my mother started weeping that I’d get killed in Iraq if I wasn’t enrolled somewhere soon, so I took the cheapest one I could farthest from home that had accepted me. When someone talks about their candidate, they’re only giving me the good. What they don’t understand is I feel so much more at ease when I get bad news. No chance of getting blindsided.

I didn’t know what to know. Everything out of someone’s mouth was up for suspicion. Before I knew I could trust CNN, I would have to read the ad revenue, see where their funding was coming from, what monetary gain they would get from presenting this story, saying this about that candidate…I would have to actually see an economic conflict of interests—if they were funded by friends of Candidate A and gave a gleaming review of a Candidate B speech for instance—before I’d believe it. Can you imagine what that’s like?

And in the long-view, I still feel saner than a lot of people around me. I don’t cheer at the TV on Primary Tuesdays. I have to get drunk just to stay in proximity to those kinds of people. And that’s no way to cover politics. You can’t get blitzed until it goes away. It’s not going away. It never will. It’s the art of ambition, it’s made up of people who want power, and those people will always be around. Not even a dystopian population of coked out potheads with no arms and legs is going to be without those kinds of people. This race will have a direct effect on you and everything you do for the next 4 years, and when they’re done there’s going to be another one. Even if you want to run mountain-man and anarchize your life from cradle to grave, it’s still a round world. They will still affect how much fun your little back-packing adventure will end up being, how many obstacles they put in your way out of town. Your last choice now is how much you want to try to rein in the bull. It’s already been in the China shop for 232 years.

What are your options? Who knows. I don’t really think there’s anything for us to do, that’s the problem. I know people who went on 5 hours sleep a night for weeks leading up to the Wisconsin Primary. They’re a small honorable minority. And out of those, I’d bet that there’s an even smaller number of people who really educated themselves enough to make an informed decision on who they’re grassrooting for. As in knows what is good and bad about everyone, and threw their hat in with someone whose margin of difference matched theirs. I have a bad feeling that there’s a lot of very skilled cheerleaders. No better than a TV screamer, just with closer seats.

But to despair is the ultimate sin. I knew someone with my…blazing intellect could find a back door here. What hasn’t been covered yet? What angle is waiting for me? Arrogant, I know. The idea that everything of everything has been taken, staked, and claimed except for one spot just right waiting for me? Shows what kind of fool I am, right? It kind of hit me, though. The thing I’m good at, the thing no one else ever does, is the only chance I have of breaking this thing down into digestible microwave dinner squares. I know I’m not the only person who has no idea what the fuck is going on here, but I think I am the only one to admit it.

A good dear friend keeps calling me Post-Modern, intended as an insult. He thinks I see every side of every issue so much that I have no stand on anything. That I have no opinion of female genital mutilation or evil shit like that. He tries to rope me into admitting that I don’t care about anything. What he doesn’t get is that I know how wrong human history has been about things before. My job, not just as a writer no one reads, pays, or listens to, but as a damn philosopher, is to find the things that do not change when you cross a border. They’re next to impossible to find, but that’s not the same as impossible, or non-existent. He mistakes my patience, my endless patience, as apathy. But apathy doesn’t break a chair over watching democracy getting shit on. That it was a chair at his house at the time just made it ironic.

Combine that with my enjoyment at watching people fail, in this instance, newscasters. I mean really stick their foot in their mouths. Every one seems so amped to be the first one to call results for someone, they’re actually making the calls before the voting has even started? If I don’t say anything unless I’m absolutely sure it’s a fact, I’m prime to really bring a revolution in political reporting, huh?

I always wonder why I fuck around with things way beyond my present comprehension. I don’t just shoot for the stars. I say “Fuck off” to NASA and try to jump there myself. I bash my head into a wall and tell myself I don’t bleed. If I’d just sit down and trust someone else’s advice, my life would be so much easier. I’d be something with a brain, not a fucking pile of straw that just knows how to type. But as long as you can, you should always bite off more than you can chew. I think it’s one of the best things you can do with your life. I have to prove that I have something to offer here, now, in what might be the greatest political race of ours lives. This time when people might actually vote for someone, for Obama, instead of just against a Republican. Either that, or he might just be the greatest swindle in presidential history. I haven’t made up my mind yet, but one or the other is definitely going to happen by the end of all this. I have to keep my eyes peeled until way past when it feels like my lids might be bleeding. I have to be there. I was born now. That means I elbow up to the front row to the best of my ability. Being alive, that’s my duty.

So here’s the first and last lesson, kids: The only way we’re going to get anywhere from here is by admitting we might be wrong and investigating accordingly. I’m definitely sure of that one.

Paul Rusesabagina: Bigger than Jesus! (03-06-2008)

 …And on November 2nd, 2005, he came and spoke in the Zorn Area at the University of Eau Claire Wisconsin. It was the first time I had ever seen the auditorium full to max capacity.

The occasion was a presentation on the history of the genocide slaughter in Rwanda, Africa, of the Tutsi by the Hutus, and what can be done to stop it from happening again. The night was a full bore emotional effect, with a showing of the triple Oscar-nominated film, “Hotel Rwanda”, about Mr. Rusesabagina’s experience protecting 1,200 people from machete wielding mobs while in his 5-star hotel, prior to Paul himself speaking at Zorn at 7:30.

After missing the initial wide release in theaters, and the release in budget theaters, and having never gone to the multiple screenings held by huge numbers of different friends mine, hearing of weeping acquaintances, and this movie single-handedly getting lots of friends of mine to change their very approach to volunteer work, (getting some to even start in the first place), I had heard a thing or two about this film. So since I was basically a Virgin on this whole story, I decided to opt for the whole violation of 4 hours of movie + speaker, witnessing worldwide apathy, ignorance, fury and hatred in the bowels of my soul and gut, sympathy and pathos for innocent victims, hopelessness and confusion at what I can do to stop this from happening, and rage at the human power of denial. Luckily I had a sandwich.

Here’s what you get from me:

Rent the movie.

You can do that forever, for the rest of time, so I’m not going to waste time discussing it. I’m moving on to the presentation, because you’ll never get to see that again.

Before the beginning of the forum proper, I read the crowd to see if I could tell who’d just seen the movie, or just had tickets to Rusesabagina, which ones had seen the movie for the first time, for the third, fourth, or fifth. Who’d been outraged, who’s still lazy, who was left weak and powerless, and who was left with a pin on fire under their ass.

When Paul Rusesabagina finally approached the stage, it was the first standing ovation just for walking up a pair of steps I had ever seen. He then proceeded to recite the history of the country of Rwanda, tracing each step that had led to where Rwanda was and had been, from the 1800’s to present day, and what had happened to it. He recalled the history of German and Belgium colonization, and their method towards splitting the native population of Rwanda into Tutsi and Hutu tribes; arbitrarily by nose width and skin tone, selected by the foreign occupiers. No, I can’t remember who had which features, and you don’t need to know. All you need to know is that they were bullshit reasons for government endorsed racism seeded amongst the native people to make them easier to handle with infighting, and leaving no forethought to what would happen if the socially encouraged hatred and separatism was allowed to flourish.

At first, either/or, one or the other of the “tribes” was deemed superior to the other, and put in charge by the invaders, leading to the initial antagonism. After the Europeans left, there was a back-lash by whichever group had been oppressed, leading to a retort by the other one, which began a reaction by the other one, leading to massives of moronic retaliations of back-and-forthery, which is always how business rolls in the international crime scene known as diplomacy.

On April 16, 1994, the democratically elected Rwandan president was killed when his plane was shot down. He was a Hutu. This began a nationwide retaliatory slaughter of the 15% minority Tutsis, by the 85% population of Hutus, egged on (according to the movie) by a nationwide radio broadcast of hate-speech, calling for extermination of the “Tutsi cockroaches”.

A genocide, the proportions of which were the biggest in recent memory, and maybe the fastest in history—1 million Tutsis and any Hutu caught defending Tutsis, in 3 months vs., lets say, about 1939-1945 12 million of anyone who got the Nazi’s cranky = 500,000 per 3 months, average? That about right?

In the odd 35 years, there have been leaps, bounds, and drug addled addictions to making technology the most prevalent force on the planet. But it couldn’t spare a swivel of a camera, and CNN couldn’t spare a day of its life, to seeing these things happen, showing these things to the sons-of-bitches in charge, and ask “WHY JESUS CHRIST LORD GOD?!? I just watched a man’s head roll across a street! WHY?!?” and watching their reaction? Clearly, it’s not the shine of the toy, it’s the dirty thoughts of the child using it that we need to be concerned about. The Hutus didn’t even need to train the people away. They did it door to door, with machetes. No general, major, lieutenant, private, pull the switch. No hierarchy of power to blame. This was face to face, and they got away with every swing of it, for three months, over a million times. No one even knows who shot down the president’s plane in the first place. 11 years after the fact, there’s been no investigation, no charges filed, and I’d be surprised if the bodies have even been gathered yet. “Oh shit, we were going to get around to that!”. And we all squirm uncomfortably at the implication that maybe? could they have? shot his plane down themselves? The Hutus shoot a Hutu president, blame it on the minority, and take their vengeance? Who would stop them? People waiting to pull the trigger and kill someone already have the drive to end a life, you would just need to give them a good reason. They made their own?

You want to blame me for being paranoid and playing conspiracy theorist. I want to blame the lack of any straight facts or investigation for your inability to counter me with anything other than “you crazy”. That’s why people get prosecuted for major political killings; so delusional pseudo-journalists can’t fill in the gaps with their self-appointed fluff stories. But not for this one, 11 years after the act. Oh well. T.S. for you.

After the history of Rwanda itself, Paul Rusesabagina began telling his stories of the 2 ½ month ordeal itself, straightening out Hollywood flourishes and acts at quickening pace and certain aspects of story, since it all had to be condensed to 2 hours in film. Of course, stories of things that weren’t shown in the movie were obligatory, like UN peacekeepers leaving from the gates at one end of a base while machete wielding Hutus entered and began from the other. Also, (though it was alluded to in the film, it was never fully explained), here’s a linguistics lesson: if a representative if one of the members of the UN council were to use the word “genocide”, they would’ve been forced to step in as prevention. But since the beheadings were always referred to as “acts of genocide”, that absolved responsibility. “Acts of”. That’s it. The prefix wasn’t removed, and the 2 ½ months in the summer of ’94 in Rwanda were only referred to as “genocide” (at least by anyone that mattered) in November—4 months after the fact.

Towards the end of the presentation, Rusesabagina told about his attempts to call for help while barricaded in the hotel. He told how every time he reached someone, out of the country, to call for help, he was forwarded. Put on hold. Handed off to someone else. Every time. It was always someone else’s department. As if the only thing that led to any action was the pure annoyance caused by the phone calls and faxes of over 1,200 people hiding out from machete wielding killing squads. “Send some soldiers over there, see what they want, and get those people to shut up already! They’re clogging our lines!”

During the Q & A at the end of the forum presentation, a person mentioned to Mr. R that the movie “leaves one feeling helpless”. And here’s where I tie in the seemingly immaturely shocking headline I prefaced this article with into something meaningful, thought-provoking, and maybe even emotional, but definitely making an attempt at pathos. The thing Paul Rusesabagina has over Jesus, Gandhi, and Martin Luther King JR. is that he’s here. He’s alive. He’s real. Someone can do something of his magnitude. And he didn’t step into the job of saving these people. It was dumped on him. The entire world was there, and as they pulled out on buses, trucks, and jeeps, UN and international journalists alike, they watched a five-star hotel with 1,268 unarmed people in the middle of a war field shrink in their rear-view mirrors, and left one guy holding the ball. Teddy Roosevelt said “Do what you can with what you have.” The sickness would be if this ordeal left people wishing they had their own genocide to prove that they were a hero, “just like Paul Rusesabagina!” He was stuck in the middle. That’s nothing to be proud of. Our job, from out here, is to make sure that when our phone rings, and it’s someone asking for our help…..“Someone else’s business”. “Someone else’s department.”

A Search for Soldier Coverage: Part 3 (05-04-2008)

 “You need to look at everyone as if they’re trying to kill you, but you cannot treat them that way.”

Jake Everett said this is Rule #1 of the Marines when dealing with the populace. After getting back from two tours of duty in Iraq, as well as being A Dude I Know, I decide to make him the subject of my third part in this little dig-in to the military team that’s coming back to our fine red white and blue land, back from Troubles Abroad.

As P.J. Kennedy said in the last installment 6 months ago that I’m sure you all remember so well (if you don’t already have it waiting on the wings right next to this article already. I’ll wait…), “there’s going to be a lot of injured people coming back”. There’s roughly 300K coming back, as the holy Pedia of Wiki was kind enough to inform me last time.

With rules like that one, I was reminded of something I ALSO said in the last issue, basically that there are rules that a large contingent of the populace are told to follow from the day they’re born to the hour they die. That is definitely not one of them. What happens to the ones that learn things like that when they’re told to stop thinking those things?

Talking with Jake, I felt like a heel. Imagine if someone who you’ve only known for the better part of 4 months started jamming a tape recorder in your face and asking you about that time you killed all those people. And he was right neighborly about it, cause when I wrote The First Article, about pissing myself while sitting at a Perkins restaurant 10 feet from men armed in M-16s, I never thought I’d ever consider going out of my way to get a real soldier to read the fucking thing. I asked him to, and he complied with reading my original spew, an angry letter from one of the fiancés in retort, and The Parts one and two.

“I guess it’s easy to overreact if you’ve never talked to somebody about what it’s like, but it’s not a big deal, for most people. But the majority of people aren’t that dark, depressed, angry guy from what they’ve seen.”

But one of the things that I hadn’t counted on was that he’d tell me I hadn’t actually been too far off the mark in one of my manic lines. I’d originally said that the 9 soldiers at the table were “trained killing machines”, and the woman in the retort had taken me to task on that, claiming that I was being prejudiced. That there were plenty of humanitarian efforts that soldiers engaged in that didn’t involve destroying lives. I was surprised that Jake seemed to lean towards my side, at least as far as he’d experienced.

“You said everyone’s a trained killing machine, and actually, in the marine corps, there’s a saying, ‘Every marine a rifle man.’ So regardless whether your job is a mechanic, or whatever, down to the bare-nothing bolts, you’re a shooter. In boot camp they said, ‘We’re professional killers. That’s what we do, that’s the bottom line. We exist to kill people.’ That’s our job.”

So I wasn’t that far off the mark? Regardless. Ignore what I said, she said, he said, who’s right. There’s something else. Look at the qualifier—and pay attention now, cause I’m about to have one of those amazing insights to share with you all—“in the marine corps”. Not the army, not the air force, not the Violent Service Industry. Whatever you want to call it, these aren’t all the same types of people. Jake was especially careful to mention multiple times that he has no experience in the other branches of the American military. Most of the time, what Jake and I talked about was the difference between types of people. Reserves and professionals, marines and infantry, civilian and soldiers, American and Iraqis, us and them. When you get down to it, not only is Jake’s every answer only 1/300,000th of the story, there’s the other 285,700,000 of us to take in to account. When Jake tells me about dickheads in a bar who ask, “Hey man, did you ever fucking kill anybody?”, and war protestors who do everything short of giving him a foot massage right on a sidewalk cause they think he’s so sad and pitiful—“Have a hug!”—I don’t know how bad I feel when I hear the United States military is using what basically amounts to Functional Prejudice like the rule at the beginning of this fine piece of journalism.

“I wouldn’t really call the dehumanizing of Iraqis racist. It’s not meant to be racist, it’s a mechanism to help us kill people, without suffering more bad side-effects. Cause you can’t kill people if you think of them as people. Whenever the military goes over to a country to kill people, we dehumanize them. That’s why the Vietnamese were called gooks, that’s why the Japanese were Japs, the Germans were Krauts, the Iraqis are hajjis. And I’m not saying we just go around and look at everybody and treat them like shit. We treat them really nicely. But at the same time, if you’re friendly to people and really nice to them, if you have to kill somebody later, it’s a lot harder. And actually, I had a class on it. It’s not something that we just do, the military knows that we do it, the military wants us to do it. It’s a good thing. If you’re killing people, that can be bad. But if you’re just killing hajjis or gooks or Japs or something, then it’s different.”

Hmm, I say. Government Endorsed Battle Bigotry. Intriguing. Classes, you say? Teaching you “A mechanism to help you kill people.” Without this prejudice, the result is hesitation on the trigger finger, no? Relaxed vibes. Daydreaming. Dead soldiers. So take your pick, perhaps? Equality, or more people coming back home. The military allows prejudice to ferment to the extent necessary to get the job done, and certainly not impede it. “Winning hearts and minds” includes being friendly enough to make acquaintances with the towns folk so they DO see YOU as a human, and hopefully tell you which real asshole has the C4 taped to his chest. You don’t make informant-friends if you’re ass searching the whole block at gun point because you think the only good towel head is a dead towel head.

Ah, but the point of these beautiful little things I write has never been to judge the military, has it? Not what job they do, or how they do it. It’s about how they come back.

So, one rule for the Folks of Normalcy (that’s you, me, everyone who hasn’t been in the military), is that racism equals bad. A group of other people (that’s the soldiers) have a job that says racism is good, and very very important. Then they come here and have to deal with alcoholic frat boys who expect blood stories, war protestors who expect them to have night terrors, and a shitty opinion-column writer who thinks soldiers might someday kill his unborn children. They’re coming back to an anti-racism program that is clearly not doing that great of a job cleaning us up.

A lot of soldiers kill people. Most of them, I’d guess. I’m still curious what the effects are of that bag of mental fun. But it’s fairly clear, to me at least, that nothing’s really served by calling the kettle black this time. I don’t know how much fault I could summon to throw on soldiers who stay alive by doing something everyone everywhere does everyday anyway, except the Normals seem to just do it out of pure laziness. Not much of an excuse. The only way out is to research and write enough articles to choke a war criminal about your quest to become entirely knowledgeable on something you once had a wrong preconceived notion about. But this is the kind of work you go through when you get caught having wrong facts, and actually want to make an effort improving and dissolving your prejudice. Well, maybe not you, but definitely me, apparently. Equality’s not a 3 hour session, folks, that’s for sure, however you might do it. I swear to god I’m probably going to end up volunteering for the Sand Dunes before this series is all over.

George Carlin - Better than God (06-23-2008)

 I don't like hero worship. I'm a blood-born sucker for the Nietzschean school, which says putting mortal folk on the soapbox to godhead takes the humanity out of their deeds, and resolves us of any guilt for being lazy. "Being born a supreme being, I could never follow in those deep footsteps." Fuck to that, says me and Friedrich. The tasks seemed herculean, so the fact that they were physically possible puts the weight on our shoulders to beat the unbeatable.

I tell you now that the last and only thing I worshipped has just literally died. Heart-stopped. He was better than anything or anyone I've ever come across. I'm literally stacking his body of work up against everything everyone has ever done. Ghandhi, Martin Luther King, Jesus, God themself. Fuck them, and fuck you. I refuse to pretend like I'm kidding. You don't agree, stop reading. The step ahead he had on them all was the fact that they were always just another punchline for him. He was the walking symbol for the fact that the jester is always one step ahead of everyone. They're professional bitchers. Nothing is good enough for them. Nothing is perfect, nothing is good enough. Nothing lasted so long in supreme power that it could not eventually be made fun of someday. The man's good was better than the entire bad of the Nazi's, simply by joking about them. Two Towers fell once, on one goddamn day. Everyday we cry about it, it's like they fall all over again, everyday, until we start laughing about it. That's when the healing begins. The scars are never gone, but making them a punchline, now they're a punchline, and not a scar anymore.

I was 14, and some social parasite at the time named Derek Biedermann loaned me "You Are All Diseased" on tape. My skull melted. I got everything I could from him, and listened to them until the tapes burned, in a poetic sense. I just started listening to the CD's again a few days ago. I was having trouble coming up with new jokes, and I decided to remind myself again why I love this fucking art so much. I felt like a kid again.

I apologize for the weak post. I know some of you might want me to expound onto something beautiful, but I don't have the energy for that. The thing that I've been fearing my entire adult life has just happened. I'm just concerned I'm going to get fired from my job, actually. The last watershed of my patience has just been destroyed, and I don't know how long the gloves are going to be able to stay on. I'm not even crying, and the lack of emotion in me right now is kind of frightening. I think I'm just numb, which is a sure sign I'm going to start going out of my way to snort coke in the breakroom just for the thrill of breaking a rule, just to put my brains through a strainer, like a chunk of sick spaghetti, and clean the tension out like dirty water.

Juanita Peck & The Double-Think Hustle (09-16-2009)

 “It’s a really, really, really, really, really, really cool program.”

“It’s the only way that ordinary people, who need to learn more, can get that training.”

“The program takes 30 people from the entire state of Wisconsin, and makes sure they’re crafted properly with the necessary tools to improve their community and their world.”

“It’s like a well kept secret, providing people with so much power to do good for their community. I wish more people knew about it.”

“I’m an ordinary citizen making a difference.”

“We use the resources we have to make the best community possible.”

“We’re making our community stronger.

“I’ve collaborated with lots of people.”

“It’s all about the kids.”

“School funding needs to change. We all need to do our parts, be stewards, do our part for children, and know who to talk to.”

“I was born in Brooklyn, and to affect your community you had to know people. In the city you couldn’t have the affect you can have here. It’s [this town] a diamond in the rough. We need to take care of it. We need to know we did the best we could, and left it in the best possible condition we could.”

“I started volunteer work tutoring 1st grade kids. Little by little, I was asked to do more and more. I realized I know how to do some of this very well. Like grant writing. One of them failed. I don’t like to fail, so I took a U of M grant-writing course.”

“For each session topic, they don’t just sit you down for dry info. It’s actually a class. Previous classes have even come up with solutions and offered them to the community. It’s not a canned program.”

“You develop networking in the program as well. You meet people that you can call later for help and solutions.”

Today, on June 13, I received an inspired idea from my brain – “swim back-and-forth in the pool until the world makes sense”. Not the best idea, obviously. But one of the ones that you don’t understand, yet know that the consequences of ignoring it would be bad. To go to the usual cop-out: “I just needed it.”

I swam back-and-forth about 20 times — the short way — until I was exhausted, or until I’d had this idea, or — a combination of the two — until I was so tired that I arm-locked my brain into making up a solution of some sort just so I could climb out of the pool with a clean conscience of some kind.

I thought wide, at first, until my energy could only manage small thoughts (this amount of time happened to be before even half-way of my first lap…don’t smoke, kids). So I started thinking small. I thought of this roadblock in my life for the last 362 days of my life, something that had only recently occurred to me as a major fucking tumor of a burden on my mind, leading to this little lance-and-drain with the pen, as opposed to swording my head in twain due to writer’s block.

I had been thinking about Juanita Peck. Very few people outside of Altoona, Wisconsin know about Juanita Peck, those who do could probably be counted on one hand, and I seriously doubt she had ever haunted the dreams of, ruined the lives of, or become creativity gremlins for, any of them. I was interviewing her for my freelance reporting job for the Altoona star, all the quotes of which are at the beginning of this little screed. Yes, that is six reallys, and no, I’m not exaggerating, that is exactly how many time she said the word in that sentence.

In complete honesty, which I aim for at every opportunity, her platitudes were sickening to me. They hurt my guts when they came over my cell phone. It was pure annoyment. It was pure boredom. Anyone watching my body language in the coffee shop would’ve guessed I either had a dentist on the other line trying to convince me over the phone to start flossing, or a fascist dictator telling me he’d only meant to scare those millions of people, not kill them — the gun just went off. I rolled my eyes to no one in particular, I turned the mouth-piece of the phone 180 degrees from my mouth once she started a spiel, afraid that for her coup de grace she’d say something so inanely stupid and cliché she’d catch my exasperated sigh.

But I have a confession, one that I discovered in my swim today: I hadn’t been able to write anything about Juanita Peck because I didn’t feel ANGRY enough at her. That is the scoliosisitic truth. I wanted something to tear her a new asshole. This innocent women, who didn’t even know what I looked like, and who I couldn’t pick out of a line up, I wanted to write something blistering about her, I couldn’t, and I was waiting for something to come my way so I could. There was some aborted fucking brain cell Down syndrome asshole major-crossroad of a synapse in my head that wouldn’t let me write anything about this woman unless I had something bad to say. And ONLY to her, certainly not myself at all. This was a clear case of feeling like the man on the mountain, and just waiting for a confused kid to wander in your path, just so you could scream about how he isn’t trying enough. For those of you who care, I had suckered myself into trying to do one of the dirtier tricks the internet’s good for — insulting with your brain people who are courageous enough to work with their hands.

My honest appraisal of Juanita Peck: She has delusions of grandeur as to Altoona’s place on the map and world events, and overestimates both her ability and how much helping children and her community really does in her life and those she touches. Allow me to measure Altoona’s rank in international news: First of all, you have the major metropolitans. New York, LA, London, Tokyo, etc. Cities with the same population as cities 2nd down the tier (usually even less population), but they still have a mystique to their name that means something, for whatever reason. Deluded teenagers dream of going to New York and LA merely because they’re LA and New York. They lend themselves easily to filling the bottomless Rorschach gap of imagination. Always have, probably won’t stop anytime soon. The second tier has San Francisco, Chicago, etc. Town’s with very little going against them, most likely superior in some respects to the First Tier, but suffer only because they are not the First Tier. Shitty, unfair, illogical, but a fact. Not the topic of the essay. Move on.

In the realm merely of the MIDWEST, however, Chicago reigns supreme. 2nd rate is Minneapolis (1st in Minnesota), 3rd rate is Madison (1st rate in Wisconsin, do you see where I’m going with this?). Eau Claire is 2nd rate in Wisconsin, somewhere around 3rd rate type cities for the Midwest as a whole (see: Branson, etc.) In Eau Claire County, Eau Claire is first, Menominee and Chippewa are 2nd rate, Altoona is a low third. Have I put it in relative perspective for you?

There’s a reason Juanita Peck is working in Altoona, Eau Claire, and not Brooklyn, New York. It’s safer (yes). It’s cheaper (smart). And (this is the one that hurts) it’s easier to declare victory. When she says “I was born in Brooklyn…and to affect your community you had to know people. In the city you couldn’t have the affect you can have here. It’s [this town] a diamond in the rough. We need to take care of it. We need to know we did the best we could, and left it in the best possible condition we could” you need to replace the plural pronouns with singular personal ones. Take out “you” or “we”, put in “I”. SHE would’ve had to know people, SHE couldn’t have the effect she has here, SHE needs to take care of it so she can die with the knowledge that she did everything she could.

She’s aiming low because she has to, and she’s building up Altoona because she psychologically needs to.

She’s had intensive training in community building, classes on tutoring children (see, now I give you the context — I was interviewing her on her thoughts with being a graduate from an intense “problem solvers” 2 month seminar — and it all comes together), and all it led to was a glorified Activities Director to keep kids from skateboarding around town or drive-by batting at mailboxes. Whatever it is kids do who don’t rub two brain-cells together and run next-door to a University campus and try to do something exciting, like straight-facing your way into a house party, or something creative and exhilirating, compared to staying in Altoona your whole life.

Now that I’ve thoroughly assaulted her entire existence in order to make myself feel better, this is the confusing part. Here are the things she must learn, coupled with things that I have learned because of her.

Juanita Peck: You are in a very small town, doing work that could probably be better served elsewhere, with very small positive consequences, compared to the towns that really need it, that you are avoiding because you like feeling like a big fish in a small pond, rather than a nameless fish in a group that’s actually doing wider good somewhere else. I am a writer who merely complains on the internet and doesn’t do anything in order to better his community at all. YOU ARE BETTER THAN ME. Wow that was tough.

Juanita Peck: Nothing that has ever happened in Altoona ever has happened, and (I might be going out on a limb here to also say) never will happen, that deserves 6 reallys. Find the cure to AIDS AND Cancer, and then we’ll talk. Pull it back a little bit. Otherwise you sound like you’re trying to convince yourself, and you depress people like me, because we strike back defensively and don’t help (even less than we already have). I couldn’t write my article for the Altoona Star because you’d called up my Editor and expressed constant concern that I was going to get your program and efforts “wrong”. Your constant griping about what we were going to write about you sounded like you thought there was a conspiracy out to destroy you and everything you’d worked for. There wasn’t. You should’ve just let me write my nothing little article about your (borderline) nothing little program in this (absolutely certainly) nothing little town, and we all would’ve gone on with our lives. I wouldn’t have been ignored for freelance assignments from the Altoona Star because of the debacle (they folded 6 months later, at $15 a week, you probably prevented me from $180, but I’m not too miffed at that). I would’ve had something pretend-respectable on my resume. I maybe wouldn’t have developed writer’s block. And I could’ve gotten around to doing something far far away from Wisconsin just that much sooner. In retrospect I admit if I was a better writer I wouldn’t have let you get to me in first place, so it is ALL ENTIRELY my fault, I just needed to get that off my chest, thank you.

Juanita Peck: Develop some original thoughts, please. Those quotes sound like tag-lines, which means, to me, that all you really understand about the program are the taglines. They’re the only thing that came out when I asked about the program, because they’re the only thing that actually happened at the program. If I’m wrong, tell me things about the program. Doubts, specifically, are music to my ears (obviously). Show me that you coalesced the new learning into something you already brought to the table — a personality, maybe, that you had beforehand — and it won’t seem like The Program literally steam-pressed you and slid the disk of “Operative Responses” into the back of your neck. Maybe I need to ask better questions. I’ll easily grant that. But even that, I think, should only be 50% of the work to make you interesting. The other half is where you’re actually an interesting unique individual in some way.

In final disclosure, I’ve been typing Juanita Peck’s entire name throughout this whole article, in the strange hope that she randomly google searches herself, and sees all this hodgepodge of insecure strutting and frothing, and sees the apology from a greenhorn rookie kid about feeling sorry for being such a greenhorn rookie kid and blaming it on her for so long. Take the advice, please, but don’t feel like I have many hard feelings left. If we meet and you’re still boring, I might grit my teeth through small-talk, but you’re not a specter of mediocrity to hate as much as you used to be. Thanks for the lessons you inadvertently taught me.

Ben Shute Action (09-16-2009)

 "Watercolor is an artist's medium. It is capable of brief, spontaneous, expression in the hand of a painter with convictions. The comments can be electric and telegrammatic, saying a great deal in the fewest brush strokes. It is fluid, light, airy, and the impact and message must be resolved in this fluid state. There is no backing up once committed and there are no tolerable watercolors-they are either good or bad." – Ben Shute

My first freelance assignment for the Altoona Star was to cover a dead former citizen, kind of a glorified 450+ word obituary, for Ben Shute. He had been born in Altoona barely a half-decade in the 20th century, and had died in 1986. Why they had decided to write something about him now was beyond me, but the task was weird, for lack of better word. By most accounts, he had barely returned to Wisconsin in the whole 81 years of his life, short of a festival in his name held at the city right next to his birthplace. After high-school, he was gone, off to Chicago, on to Atlanta. He founded a college, he steered a major festival for Southeastern artists for decades, and was so loved by his peers and friends that they still remembered him 22 years after his death. Well enough, at least, to keep my assignment from being impossible. One of them even offered to call me up on his day off from chemotherapy in Paris to talk to me about Shute. A high school art teacher, Richard Milheiser had met his daughter, but other than that, there weren’t many people around who knew anything about him

“Most students recognize former Green Bay Packer Fuzzy Thurston as the most notable alumni.”

I think about the third gray area between mediocrity and genius, with Ben. If he had stayed in Altoona he would’ve been, let’s say, mayor for 40 years. He wasn’t stupid. He was a smart, compassionate man. But he had this thing he loved for some cursed reason, and chased if off somewhere else. Big fish in a puddle or another one of the herd in the Big Game, those were the choices he saw.

My friend’s brothers have a band in Seattle. They’re called Quincunx, and they’re actually pretty good. They’re not going anywhere. You won’t see them at the Rock & Roll hall of fame. But for whatever reason, they still do it. The energy they’re putting over here, if they had corked it and stayed in the rat race, they’d be much farther along. Likewise in the reverse: dropping all social contacts, not getting married like one of them just had, would make them a better band. And I have trouble telling if their story, and Ben’s, and others like it, is a tragedy or a victory. 3 options: Never trying, owning the mountain, or trying, failing, and giving everyone who told you it was stupid to try in the first place the opportunity to tell you they told you so.

I feel like I’m redeeming them when I talk about them. Like I made it just a bit more worth it by letting more people know about Ben Shute. Like his life was less of a waste.

But I also think I’m bullshitting myself. This is a messiah fuck-up I’ve got. Reading over those last paragraphs, I have a massive addiction to pity cases, apparently.

I just know that was what was going through my head when I did the work for this first article. These people should know about this not-terrible artist that was born a few miles from them. Then I wonder if there’s any kind of hero-proxy that would happen, like the old “proud of America” bullshit, that living on some land near where someone else who actually did something original with their life was born. Maybe he’s better off being unknown?

Maybe I should just grant the fact that I’ll never know whether or not he had any regrets following his dream of independence on in to obscurity, and just cover the fucking story. It’s not like I’ll ever get to ask him if he wished he had “dumped this art crap” and done “the responsible thing”.

But the question is still there: what’s the verdict? A life’s blood sweat and tears unto thanklessness. What is that, for better or worse?

The conclusion: Jimi Hendrix is just as dead as Ben Shute.

Most of life is just a process of killing time until you get back to the thing that you’d rather be doing instead of doing all those other things. Even if you get only 10 minutes of it, and it ended up not being as good, or majestic, or graceful, or just as plain goddamn entertaining as any of the other times that you’ve done that thing, you still know you wouldn’t have spent that time doing something else, even if those other things might have gone perfectly. Whoever gets to do their thing the most is the winner. If Ben Shute’s ratio matches any other dead artist’s, everything else—talent, popularity, influence, and certainly front page features in the culture sections in Podunk Wisconsin newspapers—falls by the wayside. The hours you spent in the pursuit and presence of beauty is the only score that counts. And you’re the only who knows that. You’re the only one who knows how happy you were, and how happy you could’ve been, and how big the disparity between those is. And just to adjust my previous statement: who ever has the smallest gap, they win. Headlines, pictures, awards, and disciples just ease the pain. They’re not the real thing.

"Refah!" (09-30-2009)

 "As long as you’ve been living you’ve never heard of a motherfucker overdose on Marijuana. Why it’s illegal, I don’t know. Aspirin is legal but if you take 13 of them motherfuckers it’ll be your last headache.”

-Katt Williams, Comedian

In Minnesota, it’s illegal to cross state lines with a duck on your head. In Alabama, putting salt on railroad tracks is punishable by death. In Alaska it’s illegal to push a live moose out of a moving plane, medicinal marijuana is still illegal in 37 states, and in Connecticut it’s against the law to walk backwards after sunset.

                           ****

Hi there! Welcome to my brain. I’m sorry we haven’t had formal introductions, but since you’re still reading, I assume you’re interested in learning more about my brain and its respective thoughts (unless, perhaps, I have offended you in some manner, in which case you’ve probably stopped reading, possibly something I may or may not have said about mooses. You may be a moose sympathizer, and easily perturbed by ribaldorus language. Moose fans are known to be quite proud and stoic. A moosely people, they are).

That opening compendium above is a fair warning to the following essay you have by now no doubt determined yourself to get to the end of: The fact that cannabis is illegal in any form for a large majority of America strikes me as highly ludicrous. Being held for hostage in the enticing charisma that is the audience-author relationship, I thought it only fair that you be aware of that, as I show you how the country’s drug policy reminds me of putting a donkey in bathtub in Georgia—illegal and ridiculous.

                          ****

First and foremost: Weed cannot kill you. It is nearly impossible. There are no recorded cases, anywhere, of a cannabis overdose. A 160 lb person would have to smoke nearly a thousand joints in one chain-smoking sitting in order to achieve a shuffling from this mortal coil. In a study printed in Britain (since securing hemp in America in order to perform scientific test on human subjects is nearly as impossible as it is to die from it)—conducted by a Dutch scientist with a nigh-on improbable to pronounce name—your chances of dying on weed while even behind the wheel of car is considerably low. Driving while consuming a “moderate” amount of marijuana (probably around the amount Fox News stops being terrifying and starts being hilarious) is actually still safer than drinking up to a Blood Alcohol Content of 0.04—one half what is the legal limit to keep drinking and still be able to drive oneself home in most of the United States of America (By comparison, by the way, 11,773 people died in drunk driving accidents in 2008). The study also showed that High Drivers also have a tendency to give a wider berth on the car in front of them, and drive slower than they would whilst sober. For reasons of hilarity, I want to make this clear: a study suggested that potheads might actually make the roads safer to drive on. Therefore, it doesn’t matter whether pot is illegal now, or soon becomes legal—loosened restrictions will not breed several dozen million doped up four-wheel killing machines. Beer has been and always will be the more dangerous of the two. Combinations of the two chemicals, of course, raise dangerous driving rates more than either of the chemicals alone would—just as tying cement blocks to both of your feet would make you a worse driver than if you just strapped one foot down—but ideally we can raise children smart enough to remember how to spell the initials for “designated driver” no matter how messed up they are on anything. If not, and it comes down to it, I’d just like to say for the record that I’d trade away liquor being legal if you gave me pot in the bars instead. But that’s just me.

                          ****

“Say you’re at a ball game or you’re at a concert. Someone’s really violent, aggressive, and obnoxious. Are they drunk, or are they smoking pot? I have never seen two potheads get in a fight because it is fucking impossible. ‘Hey buddy!’ ‘Hey what?’ ‘……I don’t remember’. End of argument.”

-Bill Hicks, Comedian

An economics Professor at Harvard—yes, that Harvard, the one that would probably only spend its time and research grant money on things it actually thinks are important—wrote a letter to congress in 2005 showing that legislating marijuana could bring anywhere from 10 to 14 billion dollars into the nation’s budget: $8 billion on court and prison fees for processing and holding non-violent drug criminals—which is money we will save by not doing that anymore—and somewhere from $2.4 billion to $6.2 billion in actual profit from providing cannabis to citizens, otherwise known as selling a thing, for money, to people who want the thing you have, and will give you their money in order to get it. Or “capitalism”, as I’ve heard it called on the hip-hop streets of Everywheretown, Americaland.

Oh yeah! By the way, funny story. Listen to this: A science group of dudes—or “gaggle of white coats”, as they’re called—got together in Madrid and put some candid cameras on tetrahydrocannabinol—or THC, the biggest ingredient that makes weed do what it does—to see what happened when they locked it in a Petri dish with some brain-cancer cells, and picked up some zany footage of the THC making the brain-cancer cells commit suicide. Hilarious!

The positive affects of weed in one’s body has not even begun to be mapped fully. There are several hundreds of stories (and only stories, since, like I said, getting government grants to study cannabis in America is a little harder here than compared to…just about every other developed country in the continent of Europe) of weed being the last thing left for a doctor to prescribe to a terminally ill cancer or AIDS patient, and it being the first or only thing that’s gotten them to hold down a meal long enough for their body to remember it has a digestive system and could really use some nutrients, thank you. Post-Traumatic stress, arthritis, glaucoma, stroke recovery, Immune support for HIV suffers, suppressing the gap reflex caused by chemotherapy—even suggesting inhaling is easier for weak gags then swallowing a pill—spasticity, multiple sclerosis, a better post-op pain killer than morphine, does less brain damage if taken at an adolescent age than alcohol does, and, to put it in perspective as an actual source of relaxation, it has only a 9% addiction rate for heavy users, compared to 15% for alcohol, 23% for heroin, and 33% for tobacco.

Most of this is, of course, initial suggestions and hope, since studies are only picking up since we figured out exactly where pot affects the brain just a little over a decade ago, and for the aforementioned (hat-trick now) difficulty in securing any cannabis from the U.S. government in order to find out more about it.

And so we come to the United States government. The pinnacle of Western civilization. A government with an Attorney General who says DEA agents will no longer raid Medical Marijuana Offices in any state that has legalized medicinal marijuana (before, whenever the Federal Agents got bored, I guess, they could enter and close down any cannabis prescription office, because even though weed might’ve been legal in California, it wasn’t legal in America). So now medicinal marijuana is a state decision. And then, said Attorney General still continues to allow said raids to continue. As long as he just ignores it, I guess it wasn’t him ordering them? It seems sketchy, especially since the Attorney General can re-classify the legal status of any drug he sees fit merely by expelling oxygen out of his lungs past his vocal cords, using what one might call “his very words” in order to make marijuana legally available for medicinal purposes.

Oh yes, quite true. There are five federal groups under which all chemicals fall. Everything from licking poison dart frogs to buying extra mind-looping black markers for children’s classrooms falls under these categories (except Alcohol and Tobacco, which make up the A and the T in the ATF). These are called Schedules. One (I) through five (V) to be exact. The only ones that can never federally legally be used for medication are Schedule I. Schedule II – V has Laudanum, cocaine, opium, PCP, all steroids (including the ball shrivelers) Ritalin, and a thousand other ones with names that make my head hurt when I remember all of them can and do kill stupid people who use them wrong, or to purposely commit suicide with. Marijuana is one of the ones classified Schedule I. That means any doctor who prescribes Cannabis to a patient is a criminal as far as the DEA is concerned. They are literally saying weed can do no one any good ever at all anywhere and if you use it your life will be ruined, and if they catch you using it, they can send you to a large place where they specialize in ruining lives.

It has occurred to me that Attorney General Eric Holder may simply have forgotten this part: the fact that he could literally sneeze into a microphone while saying “Aaahhh—marijuanaisnowascheduletwocontrolledsubstance—kkkbliewshx” and it would literally happen. All this would be solved. Maybe he forgot that he can make the entire issue an instant non-issue. Maybe I will send him a letter to remind him, and maybe if I ask real nicely he’ll throw in a “Shazam!” when he does it. Or maybe jazz-hands. Those always crack me up.

                              ****

“I think people started taking drugs when the first Neanderthal walked out of his cave and thought, “This can’t be IT, man.”

-George Carlin, Comedian

So, final thoughts to all this insane giggling gibberish.

When you take all the myriad uses possible for the hemp plant—of clothing, textiles, printing, fiber, rope, plastics, lubricants, soaps, and all those other uses that actually led the USDA to make a 14 minute service announcement documentary in 1942 called “Hemp for Victory”, encouraging farmers to make hemp for supplies in the war effort—and combine that with the hundreds of thousands of millions of billions of dollars that the conglomerates and corporations could theoretically lose if they lost their monopoly on the chemical and synthetic market which would be replaced overnight with a cheaper, safer product that anyone in the entire world could get their hands on, and you realize all the political clout they would likewise lose…well, then we have some dark conclusions. Luckily most places that mention that also occasionally mention the theory that cannabis is delivered unto us from beings beyond stars and space, so we have some comedy light at the end of their knocking-of-bizarre-paranoia-but-still-at-least-plausible suspicions.

I can only speak for myself when I say that I remember the thought through my head when I was looking all this up—that my father is a well-off entrepreneur of his own chain of liquor stores who has made his fortune and likewise his children’s fortune in a chemical that has a nasty tendency to lead to death, spousal abuse, and automotive destruction. I thought about the blood on my hands—maybe not necessarily literally, but certainly in my head from all the fine education I’ve garnered on his monetary good will towards me. Those people made their choices, of course. Maybe we made it a little easier. Maybe I should feel bad. Maybe I shouldn’t. Who knows.

What I do know is that I prefer one chemical over the other. I know that when my dad asked me a dickish-rhetorical question (“Do you think I should smoke pot, Philip?”) and I answered him honestly that, yeah, I thought he should (awkward!), since he’s over 70 years old and he still hasn’t quite figured out the definition of “relax”.

I know when I hear comedians summarizing a point, putting it down to the only sentences and facts you really need to know about an argument, and making you laugh about it, that their attitude was always so…congenial. A shared sympathy that we all agree on this stupidity, but at least we’re smart enough to know what’s above it. What the truth is. And I know I will always resent the fact that I have to talk in euphemisms and code about how I like to sit in my basement and not hurt anybody.