Saturday, June 19, 2010

Summertime

No, I do not always sit at home hatching plans to invert the environmental paradigm of America. Sometimes I go out and drink and laugh about the old times.
Actual dialogue:

"You couldn't run and you lay down a bunt?
"Bowden, that was 21 years ago!"
"Two outs and two strikes?"
"I saw the third baseman playing back."
"I don't care. I almost tackled you at first base when he threw you out."
"He got me by half an inch."
"You were flat on your face."
"I dove head first!"
"You tripped over your gimpy leg."
"Oh, what the fuck! Forgive me."
"Never."
"I was in that car crash with that drunk on the way to school."
"I don't care."
"I thought I could beat it out."
"Inexcusable."

And we played cornhole, a game where you throw a beanbag onto a platform until 3 am.
That's JJ and Bowden in the back. Bowden said I look like Nakoma from the Grizzly Adams tv series. You can judge for yourself.


Maybe when I was 23 years old I sort of looked like this. I haven't had a chin that smooth since 1982. I am 1/32 Native American on my mother's side so...I'm going to get one of those necklaces one of these days to hide my bulging Adam's apple.

Here's Nakoma on his horse...

Speaking of Grizzly Adams, it was one of those tv shows I loves to watch in 1978. I loved it. I identified with it. Was it propaganda for the environment? I don't think so and the creator would agree...

"The Life and Times of Grizzly Adams was mostly the result of market testing and computer modeling, a research process Sunn Classic Pictures founder Charles E. Sellier Jr. was quite proud of. Grizzly wore no animal skins and ate no meat because the audience displayed heavy PETA-type leanings. The audience, he went on to say, likes "eternal summer in the primeval, womanless wilderness."

This explains quite a bit about my life...Little did I know it was all mapped out by tv executives.

The story was based off a real person and was cheap to produce so NBC went with it. But it made sense to me. I understood the simplicity of the woods and Indian blood brothers and bears and log cabins.

"I want to live like that," I'd say to my father.
"Ok. Whatever," was his response.

Well, I was determined and a careful study of movies like Jeremiah Johnson and Grizzly Adams and reading Call of the Wild at least twice I landed in a forest in Alaska where I chopped down trees to make a log cabin and snared rabbits for food. Thank you NBC and Nakoma!

Lyrics to theme song..

Deep inside the forest there's a door into another land.
Here is our life and home.
We are staying here forever in the beauty of this place all alone.
We keep on hoping.
Maybe there's a world where we don't have to run.
Maybe there's a time we'll call our own, living free in harmony and majesty.
Take me home. Take me home.


I took these lyrics as gospel even though they are obviously conflicted. Are you home in the forest or trying to get home through the forest? You need to go to the forest to find a door? Why? Why do you have to be all alone? And if you are all alone then why hope there's a world where you don't have to run? What are you running from? Who is following you to the forest? It makes no sense. If you've gone to the middle of the uninhabited forest that is beautiful but you are still hoping there's a time you'll call your own and be able to live free in harmony and majesty then maybe you are fucked in the head because you've done all you can do. What's next? climbing in a volcano? Are you whining because you have a bear as a friend and an Indian as a blood brother and a crazy gold miner as a buddy? Two human contacts and a bear? IS that too much to handle? You want sympathy?


PS: In other news I have ended my assignment at the hockey warehouse and am getting my hack's license.

Are You a Friend of the People?

Recent discussions in the comment section have led me to this image. It's more proof that people want to be part of something noble, something that transcends business. Business makes things last, but ethics are what many people can respond to. We're not all businessmen so images like this are how many people account for their energy. It's like a dollar symbol to many of us.

I'm looking for images that will tug at the heart of the inner environmentalist in us all. Let the businessmen worry about the numbers. If the demand is there then it will pay for itself. But the demand can be manipulated and mostly it has been manipulated by Sams Club and Shell Oil. That doesn't mean those business models work, but it means they have the best marketing strategy. Whole grain bread, marijuana, goat farms and radish juice are absolutely no different fundamentally than Doritos, root beer, cigarettes and industrial slaughterhouses, but the difference is in the marketing, the propaganda. They each can be equally economical if businessmen break it down. But the demand comes first. And demand is controlled by marketing. So, we need to manufacture a demand for alternative energy.

Films like Inconvenient Truth, March Of the Penguin, Crude, Arctic Tale, WALL-E, even Avatar are propaganda for alternative energy but the mainstream media is controlled by so few people who are owned by business entities and except for PBS it's all ad sponsored or influenced by the chamber of commerce so it takes media like Al Gore's Current TV to try to start over with a different paradigm. There's a bloody war of words taking place right now and I want volunteers for the front lines.
Beat your swords into plowshares and your iPhones into flower pots!
Creative Commons License
Man in the Van by Oggy Bleacher is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License.