Sunday, May 2, 2010

Oatmeal at the Shelter

The River Street Shelter serves oatmeal in the morning if Steve can reign in his crank addiction long enough to put the water on to boil. The junkies and hippie deserters begin to line up around 7am for the 8am feeding. What else are they going to do?
“Anyone holding?”
“You crazy?”
“Go to the show last night?”
“I’m so hungry. They got milk today?”
“Milk? Doubt it.”
“Milk’s been pasteurized. You’d be better off eating rat shit.”
“You a doctor? Who tells you all that?”
“They was playing blues. Rock. Weed was smoking.”
“Yawn.”
“I got bit by a rat last night. Fucker was a foot long. Looked at me after he bit me like, ‘What you gonna do about it?’ I hit him with boot.”
“Milk is good. You didn’t suck on your mama’s tit when you was a baby?”
“That’s breast milk. Milk in a box is like paint. No nutritional value.”
“Bullshit. Milk is what keeps your bones from breaking.”
“Anyone got a cigarette?”
“What you wanna trade?”
“I’ll hit you back later.”
“Here. Roll your own.”
“Milk don’t serve no purpose after you’re three years old. It’s a myth.”
“This breakfast is a myth. Steve was up all night chasing rats.”
“Rats? He was chasing ghosts. That dude hasn’t slept in two weeks. You see his eyes?”
“I got bit by a rat. He bit me on the hand.”
“He’s tweaking hard. I hung with him in Soledad. He’s a bad ass.”
“What cell block?”
“B”
“I was in A.”
“You know Fenster?”
“I know Fenster. I was dating his sister in San Jose.”
“No shit?”
“Them rats kept coming and coming. I build walls with the picnic table but they found a way under them. Hope I don’t get the rabies.”
“Milk is just white water.”
“Up all night fighting rats. Ain’t that the shit?”
“Me and Steve and Fenster kicked this one dude’s ass for stealing cigarettes.”
“Gotta watch who you fuck with.”
“Fucked his shit up.”
“There was this one great big rat who walked with a limp…”
“Milk is the second worst thing you can put in your body.”
“What’s the first?”
“Meat.”
“You hear about Isabelle’s mom?”
“Mary The Whore?”
“Yeah. She stabbed this one dude with a switchblade.”
“He got what he deserved. That tramp is T.R.U.B.L.”
“I heard it was her boyfriend.”
“That rat limped over to me and I beat him back with broom handle.”
“Where is Isabelle?”
“They staying over in the crack hotel.”
“Her and Isabelle?”
“And that hippy dude who used to live in the forest. That long haired freak with the torn overalls and the bicycle…”
“…and the juggling pins.”
“Oggy?”
“Yeah, him. Oggy. I was out there smoking weed and saw that dude like planting corn or something. By the golf course.”
“That ain’t nothing. There’s this one cat who lives way out near boulder creek, lives in a cave. Does yoga.”
“Oggy’s always talking about him. Abe is his name.”
“Right. Abe. Craziest motherfucker in the world.”
“But them rats, there were hundreds of ‘em and they come out at night. It was like Vietnam with them yellow fucking eyes coming at me in the dark.”
“Oggy walks out to that cave and does Yoga every few weeks. Before he hooked up with Isabelle.”
“He’s schizoid.”
“Naw. He’s bipolar.”
“Paranoid delusional. I saw his chart in the office.”
“Probably all three. Ha!”
“I killed the little rats, the weak ones, but the big ones fought back.”
“So they all living over in the crack hotel smoking crank?”
“Oggy don’t even drink.”
“What? He doesn’t drink? What the fuck?”
“Nope. He said it was a stimulant.”
“No shit. That's the whole point.”
"Milk turns sour in your belly."
“It didn’t bite me too deep. Do you think it’ll give me rabies if the teeth didn’t go in deep?”
“So why the fuck is he with two crack whores?”
“Beats me.”
“Because he’s schizoid. He thinks they're gypsies. He was planting corn out by the railroad track. Singing Sound of Music. He don't know what century it is.”
“Gypsies? Yeah, gypsies who fuck for a living. Har har.”
“I gotta build a barricade out of sheet metal to keep ‘em off my chest. Didn't sleep at all. Real tired of fightin' rats all night.”
“Here comes the oatmeal. I hope they got milk.”

Earth Policy Institute

I was doing some research on Arctic wolves today while my porn was downloading and I see that I'm deluded if I think there will be an Arctic wolf in Labrador. Not a chance. They probably never existed in Labrador. I figured I would see a wolf and maybe it would be an Arctic wolf but unless the wolf hired a single prop plane to visit The Hudson Bay then there is no chance in the world I'll see an Arctic Wolf in Canada outside of a zoo. It would be like looking for a bald eagle in the Hampton Beach Club Casino.

The Arctic Wolf exist so far north it takes three days of flying to reach their habitat. Really, they live near the North Pole. On a map of their habitat you can't even see the United States. I want to point out that Labrador, the almost inaccessible part of Labrador is in the far lower right hand corner next to the Hudson Bay tag. I am about 1500 miles from that point and it would take a jet engine on my 1969 Econoline to get to the little dot marked 2006 trip way up at the top where there are known Arctic Wolves. This is from one of the few devoted Wolf researchers named L. David Mech

The latitude circles are getting awfully small at that point. It's like 5000 miles from New Hampshire over totally uninhabited tundra.

So, that's just a trip few people in the world get to take and they all have $20,000 disposable dollars.

Anyway, looking at Mr. Mech's site I saw a link for the Earth Policy Institute and decided to see what kind of hippie agenda they were promoting. This is what I found..

"The United States completely restructured its economy within months once it decided to enter World War II, changing the course of the war. We, too, can change the world, but we need to start now. The choice is ours—yours and mine—to either adopt Plan B and move the world onto a path of sustainability or go along with business as usual and allow further destruction of our natural support systems. The choice will be made by our generation, but it will affect life on earth for all generations to come.

The overriding Plan B goals are to:

- stabilize climate

- stabilize population

- eradicate poverty

- restore the earth’s damaged ecosystems"


I found it very interesting that Lester Brown, the Institute's president chose to compare the mobilization of America in 1941 to what we are capable of in the sustainability field. Brown probably witnessed that mobilization first hand and while I've witnessed mainly sloth and drunkenness I did watch the WWII Ken Burns series and agree that it was an incredible effort. When I first watched it I felt that yes, Mankind is capable of the kind of mobilization needed, but lately I think it was precisely this kind of mobilization that has run amok into a compulsive production and consumption and reproduction. So, it's a double edged sword like a power so great that it can kill or heal, but it can't do both.


As if I needed something else to read I've checked out Brown's book, "Plan B" The words "Saving Civilization" appears about five times on the back cover. The opening paragraph details how the arctic saw an area twice the size of Great Britain melt in one week.

A "catastrophic" water main failure in Boston just happened. 2 million people boiling water like they did in 1740. Malaria is looming. It'll be fixed but when it rains it pours.

These events relate to the central mission of my life to experiment in low impact modes of living. Maybe I'm a little radical and that would explain the unanimous disapproval of my living in my van. I can see the point the Police are trying to make but it does sting a little when you've got research supporting the theory that an apocalyptic event is on the horizon and only a radical (See WWII) kind of change in lifestyle will prevent it, and if I try to take the advice of Lester Brown and Al Gore then I've got the the police banging on my van door. Ok, more than half of the RV gypsies were drunks and stoners and junkies, but we were all essentially low impact people, playing guitar and crying ourselves to sleep.

I'm about to get kicked out of the library now so I'll take this up again later. Please check out the EPI feed I've put on. I think I've got too many blog feeds as it is. I know people have to work. I'm trying to make this easy on y'all.

I'm Awesome by S'Pose

Driving around the upper valley I heard this tune and was amused for five minutes. There's a line in it that says they are from Maine and if a Downeaster can match the Beastie Boys then I'll promote that. Consider the Beastie Boys had Rick Rubin as producer and I'll bet this was produced by the singers on their mother's computer with garage band by Apple. Honesty is always the key to rap because it's in the reggae tradition of social commentary and not necessarily for entertainment purposes. This song is a self-critique of the prevalent attitude of ego-centrism and also the awareness of said ego-centrism.


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Man in the Van by Oggy Bleacher is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License.