Multiculturalism in Gunsmoke TV Series

Gunsmoke is Conservative, pro-America, Pro-white social propaganda, but it goes deeper than that. Season 15 (I recently studied all the episodes in Season 15) ends with an episode (The Cage) about a thief who tries to get revenge on his swindling gang while also stealing gold in order to fund a medical operation for his Mute Mexican girlfriend. It's ludicrous. One reviewer writes, "The story was not really bad it was the fact that the writers threw in a love story on top of an unbelievable storyline."

Scenes From Oggy's Life

I was working next to a Pump Jack in South Texas....


The Pump Jack was operating, so the 440v motor was spinning like a banshee on crack cocaine. The two counterweights were spinning inches from my face and the horse head vacillated overhead. Metallic creaking came from most of the joints as well as as constant sliding sound from the polished rod as it penetrated the tubing. A hot wind blew across the prairie into my face. It felt like a hair dryer but my face was so wet with sweat that any wind gave me some relief.

I was in the 'death zone' because someone needed to feed the metal conduit down the base from one end to the other. Jose, the Master Electrician, was handing me the 10' length of conduit and I was carefully reaching out for it, keeping one eye on the heavy counterweights and one eye on the conduit. Jose was watching too because the counterweight would land on his head if he wasn't careful. We made the exchange and both exhaled as I lay it in place and bolted it down. I waited for the counterweights to pass and then scrambled on my belly over the light brown dirt, under the pipe guard rail, and out of reach of the machinery.

I looked around at the dry prairie and desolate fields of sand. Far off in the distance a buzzard floated over a mesquite tree.

"Well," I said sarcastically, "that was worth risking our lives to do."

Jose nodded with Native American stoicism. When he spoke, and he spoke infrequently while sober, he spoke like a stereotypical wise Indian one might find in a Hollywood Western. His family came from Chihuahua. His family lived in the Valley of Laredo and now traveled far north for work, returning to the valley only twice a year. 

Jose was looking at the empty patch of dirt where our conduit was heading. He had already moved on from the brief drama of staging that last length of conduit. Jose was examining the next step of the project. Jose said nothing. The machinery chugged slowly in endless routine.

Gospel

I once drove through Tulsa, OK with a leather decked gutter punk who was travelling to Austin, Tx to reclaim his pawned tattoo kit. I stopped in Tulsa to look for work in hurricane response but the dairy queen ethic of locals-firsters chased me back onto the tired Route 66. We were treated as suspicious wanderers, politely moved from town to town by sheriffs and federal marshals after a pat down and ID check. In a land of laws the lawless have no home so we wandered south, avoiding public places, camping by rivers, bathing in wastewater treatment drainage culverts. I was as broke as a virgin prostitute so we started playing music on the streets until the police would run us off. In Tulsa we ran into a musician who turned me on to Southern Gospel. I was aiming for Texas to pay tribute to Western Swing artist Bob Wills but caught the Southern Gospel bug before I got there. Authentic mono recorded Western Swing of 1944 is my ideal music. It swings, moves, shakes, makes you want to do the freaky deeky and it often involves only two chords that are embellished to death by long-fingered, cigar-smoking guitarists with names like "Slim" and "Hank" and "Three Thumbs". Buddy Holly probably had to smuggle Western Swing singles into his bedroom in the virtuous town of Lubbock but I hear lots of Milton Brown influences in early Cricket's recordings. It's 'Western Jazz' if you want to get technical. Or you could call Duke Ellington the "Urban Bob Wills".

The stop in Tulsa introduced me to Southern Gospel as it was meant to be performed, not in the previous incarnations that I'd encountered in New Orleans rescue missions where the raspberry jam tastes like arsenic and the TB phlegm and pubic hair clogs the shower drain and attending the church service is required to sleep and the out of tune piano plinks like Tom Waits on LSD to the dozing black audience.

Years turned into years and my Gospel addiction finally introduced me to The Golden Gate Quartet Jubilee. I prefer Acapella when listening solely for meditative purposes but

Joshua Fit The Battle demonstrates the brilliant enunciation of these four vocalists that I have to feature the video. It's hard to slur the word "Joshua" into "Fit" but they do it smooth as melted butter on a slab of bacon.

It's interesting to note that I was parked in a vacant ball field parking lot, no one in sight because of the brutal heat and humidity of Corpus Christi, TX, playing Southern Gospel tunes for my own pleasure when some enforcers of Law and Justice rolled up and had me on my ass with my guitar in my mouth before I could call my ACLU rep. I always think of that scenario, playing gospel music alone in a city named after Jesus Christ, and being molested by enforcers of Law and Justice for no fucking reason, and I wonder if God isn't laughing his ass off as old Oggy stumbles around this wacky pinball game of life.

No matter. I'm not bitter at that because I've got plenty current events to be bitter about. I'm a working man. The internet has more devoted writers and narcissistic travelers who can fund their adventures with royalties selling bath salts and plastic dildos so they don't have to work. I'm not an affiliate salesman for anything. Money isn't that important because I've seen the false smile selfies pasted on the over-tan youth-corporate-shill-generation and I want no part of it. It's not art. It's not honest. A shill is a shill and their product has been done before. I'm too busy nursing my emotional wounds to type anything worthwhile so I'm not going to force it. My powers ebb and flow, my interest waxes and wanes. 

A guy got dead shot today as I passed a Dairy Queen. He was wanted in another state but the Federal Marshals decided to pop the question on the busiest street in town where I happened to be remodeling a Redwood deck. A stray bullet could've taken my neck flaps off. Sometimes they take the plate away before you're finished eating. That's life. I'm still here but no one can say about tomorrow; the fates have their own agenda, their own time frame to work with and there ain't shit I can do but aim high and button each shirt button until there ain't none left. 

The word 'fit' is slave slang for 'fought' so that should give you some clue where the tune comes from. Joshua crumbled the walls of Jericho and freed his people with nothing but trumpets. I've got plenty of excuses to keep my chains tight on; what's yours?

What Lead Tells Us About The Modern World

Pb is the symbol for Lead on the periodic table because Plumbing pipes in Rome originally used lead. I can't confirm the accuracy of that statement or most of this essay so don't quote me on it.

I also learned that Kentucky coal miners were stricken by a coal dust disease that caused their throats to turn bluish-purple and that is where the term "blue collar worker' comes from.

I learned these trivial, possibly false, details in a class on lead abatement and containment. I am a certified lead renovator now because my life has not been hazardous enough. I want to delve into poison such as asbestos and lead and toxic waste. The class was taught by an experienced general contractor who had the temperament of a scientist but was raised in a farmhouse with no electricity and became a home builder/renovator. The slow wheels of science finally turned to the point that lead was banned from paint back in 1978...but there was no great rush to address how to contain lead in surfaces panted prior to 1978 simply because all city streets and alleyways, front and rear lawns, sidewalks, parks are contaminated hopelessly with lead residual from the days of leaded gasoline. Standard Oil tried to up-sell vehicles with the promotional advantage of not producing horse shit that stunk on hot days. They knew lead was pure poison but attempted many different variations to remove the lead and failed. All the additive substitutions stunk worse than horse shit, so they kept the lead and poisoned all future generations of Americans. But Rockefeller turned a nifty profit so not everyone lost out!

These tidbits of info are not verified or fact-checked. They may be lies. I will use them only to make a point about due diligence because I think it's amusing.

Let us accept that Standard Oil knowingly violated all the rules of the scientific method and ignored the precautionary principle and The National Lead Company (leading manufacturer of lead-based paint) also knowingly poisoned everyone and then adopted the name of Dutch Boy Paints in an attempt to distance themselves from their villainous past...thus demonstrating fundamental disregard of due diligence.

Due Diligence is something I think too few are aware of. I like to think of it as a process of doing anything in such a way as all the steps can be repeated. Basically, it's the way you would do something if you knew you were going to be sued at the end of the job. Your due diligence would prove your methods and document your efforts so accurately that it would be possible to recreate all the steps. If you erred then your error would be documented along with the reasons for your error and your justification for ignoring the error. Think of it as a global "Show Your Work" reminder like the ones on your 8th grade homework assignment. Your work is your due diligence. The answer is incidental because if your work is correct then your answer will be correct. If your work is wrong then your answer can be ignored since your work is the part that caused the wrong answer. Due Diligence is where the work takes place.

Well, due diligence appears to be a result of lawsuits and I'd like to promote it as an end in itself. You should not need to be sued to embrace due diligence but that seems to be the tradition.

Case in point: lead paint removal and renovation. As a newly certified lead paint renovator I now have an casual understanding of what is required to responsibly and legally renovate dwellings with lead based paint. This involves due diligence, ie. demonstrating and documenting my methods as outlined by the Dept. of Housing and Urban Development and OSHA. I won't go into the details about those methods but I will say that they bear no resemblance to what took place in the labs at national Lead Company and Standard Oil. These companies worked in relative secrecy and it was only the extreme health problems that their employees experienced that caused any changes at all. One of the changes ended up being the Dept. of Labor creating a branch called the Occupational Safety and Health Admin. Lead was a paint additive since 4 B.C. and it still is in some paint. Lead paint was banned in the U.S. but only in household paint. It's still in all kinds of imported products such as Chinawear, Crockpots, Toilets, sinks, Tile, toys, tractors, motorcycles...etc. It's also in any soil near a street. Well, after 2000 years of irresponsible usage it now falls on this generation to expunge lead paint from households and I got a glimpse of what this means.

It basically means containing dust and cleaning the job site, ensuring all the paint is scrapped onto a surface that can be controlled, not onto a hardwood floor with cracks that will capture the lead. I think of the hours this will cost humanity, the lifetimes spent meticulously removing lead paint from surfaces. But it doesn't stop there. Because a renovator removing lead paint from surfaces is probably working on someone else's house they are encouraged to document every step of the process. The first step in removing lead paint is actually informing the client that their home is contaminated and that the process is quite involved to remove the lead paint. The house or work area is then contained and the paint is peeled off in whatever manner is most tedious, whilst documenting the process with photos and client signatures. Again, each step needs to be documented so it can be recreated when you get sued after the client dies of lead poisoning. If you can't demonstrate Due Diligence, then the fact the client died due to unrelated landscaping in the backyard that stirred up lead dust, will be irrelevant. Your renovation, the lawyer will insist, caused the death. No, it was not 2000 years of irresponsible manufacturing, generations of greedy cock-sucking corporate fiends who depleted the Earth to amass huge fortunes in order to buy political favors whilst poisoning the land they rent to wage slaves. No, no, that part is irrelevant and besides, they did no Due Diligence so no one has any idea how lead got in our paint or soil. It was Oggy's 2 week project removing window trim from a house built in 1952. THAT was what caused the untimely lead poisoning of the client. SURE!

It vexes me greatly that this is what it comes to; a blatant engineering blunder that is passed along from one corporation to another until finally the lowest wage earner in the equation is required to DO SOMETHING RESPONSIBLE AND DOCUMENT IT. Is Standard Oil or the Rockefeller Estate or Dutch Boy paint handing out $9000 grants to assist in the removal of paint from some 300 million homes? I ask you? Who will cover the colossal cost of this $2,700,000,000,000 fuck up? The same people who are covering the cost of incarcerating all the developmentally delayed lead poisoned inner city collateral damage victims. Yes, you will pay with dollars and Oggy will spend a lifetime picking apart the mistakes of corporate past. It's worthwhile, right? It's a worthwhile job, dissecting lead poisoned paint. Yes it is.

I shake my head, actually shake my head back and forth like I'm being filmed and the director is shouting "OK, Oggy, shake your head back and forth in deep regret and disappointment!!" That is how I shake my head because of the series of events that led me to today. 

Lead on painted can simply be bagged and thrown away with all the other poisonous trash we toss in a pit that will eventually leech into rivers and oceans. There is no other way to dispose of it since the brilliant chemists at Dow spend all their time trying to poison humanity rather than how to turn lead into harmless elf farts.

Jesus, what a total disaster. Generations of humanity poisoned for brighter colored fences and faster horseless vehicles. So contemptible, so disgusting.

Modern Times

My wrists are broken and my armpits stink like an Egyptian Slave's butt crack. My neck creaks with arthritic decay. My back muscles feel like so many weather-worn rubber bands cracking in the sun. But I have some things to say so I will suffer and tap each letter with my nose or my flaccid penis and eventually all the letters will create an essay. This is my curse: when I have something to say then I am broken by the heartless world and too physically deformed to type, and when I am healthy and peaceful then I have nothing to say but putrid political vomit. 

I have an essay to type about Jim, the disabled Coast Guard veteran who lives in a van in the Walmart parking lot near me. His grandmother was a Blackfoot Indian squaw purchased in a gambling saloon by a fire and brimstone preacher who was Jim's grandfather. But Jim and his crippled knees are a different essay although he makes an appearance in this one. I also have an essay to write about my longing to be married to the recently passed Debbie Reynolds circa 1953 and to dance with her on the beach as Nat King Cole serenades us, but that is not only redundant, but also hopeless fantasy. I may as well go to Las Vegas and scour the escort service websites for a Debbie Reynolds look-alike and then have her dress up in '50s era clothing or a Singing Nun's habit and fuck her on a vinyl, paisley couch but it would only fill me with shame and self-loathing. Goodbye, Debbie. You were an actress but, damn, you played the part of the talented, lovable, buoyant sprite perfectly, the woman that men shamelessly desired even if it was only an act. 25 years of chasing your modern day equivalent has proved futile. You were one of a kind. George Michael also died recently and I want to reminisce about 1984 and WHAM! and Junior High School woes (standing alone outside a dance, listening to Cyndi Lauper serenade dancing couples in awkward gymnasium light) but there is no time today. And Carrie Fisher, Debbie Reynold's daughter died a day before her mother and this is prophetic because Fisher's on-screen persona, Princess Leia, was recently manufactured circa 1977 by computer generated animation...and if anything will kill you it's the realization that you have been cloned. I want to write an essay about Star Wars phenomenon, not so much a review of the recent movie, but a study of the SW phenomenon in general. But that will have to wait for another day.

Why The Media Should Stop Using The Word 'Overdose'

I've been pondering this heroin topic and think I see at least one problem that I'd like to bring to the attention of deep thinkers like myself. The problem is the use or misuse of the word 'overdose' when describing a death from drugs. It's sloppy, which is no big deal in modern journalism, but it is sloppy and also and insult and also misleading and also false information. And in this particular topic the use of the word 'overdose' is so misleading and false that it actually contributes in a way to the problem itself. I don't think journalists intend to magnify the problem because that would mean the journalists actually took some time to think about what shit they are writing and what topic they are writing about, but I suspect they merely write their essays paint-by-number style and give no thought outside of interchanging nouns. One week they write about legal prostitution, and the next week they write about heroin use...the same article format is used in both, total bullshit, and they swap some nouns and think they are big heroes. Well, this kind of sloppy writing is infectious because it makes any asshole who reads the paper some sort of half-assed authority on topics that a journalist made no effort to understand from an intelligent perspective. They merely want to sell copy and they are also probably dumb to begin with so what kind of intelligent examination is a CNN hack capable of really? none.

So, let me explain why they are further magnifying the drug problem with their misuse of the word 'overdose'.

Chicken Bus Fever Part IX Coming Full Circle

I promised I would not write anything about Antigua because the town should be experienced. And I will only share one photo of the Ex-Convento.

Tranquility defined

I will design a house for myself and that house may or may not be built but I will have the plans. And part of my research into this dream house is seeing interior open courtyards are designed. There are actually Hacienda or "Spanish Courtyard" blueprints online for free...

too complicated

but if I want to see exactly how the monks lived in 1700 then one needs to walk where they walked. The number of Exconventos I've visited in my quest for the perfect representation of Spanish Colonial Spiritual Retreat Simplicity could fill a book. There was one in Huaqechula...and one in Tochimilco that

Huge Tochimilco Courtyard. Pretty Ridiculously pretty.

 I had completely forgotten about and a few in Leon and an epic Spanish Courtyard in Granada. Epic!

Chicken Bus Fever Part VIII Capital Bound

I read a travel passage from Thomas Wolfe after watching the biopic movie Genius (2016). Wolfe is one of my favorite writers and for at least a month in the '90s I thought if I could memorize the dictionary and drink heavily and live in a Cleveland slum or a Baltimore public housing then I would type a novel capturing my tortured artist soul and thus exact my revenge on the many N.Y. editors who rejected my manuscripts. Fuck them! I had the fire, like Wolfe, and merely needed the right combination of events to ignite the words that hammered for release from my schizophrenic brain. I even read a dramatic passage about growing up from The Web and the Rock to 9 year old campers when I was a counselor one summer. Man, I was going to throttle them with impressive imagery and the magnificence of life! Well, the recent movie is another topic, but it led me to read some of a piece of travel writing Wolfe published back in 1937. It was about his trip through Germany and I was curious how he tackled the nuts and bolts of travel writing. Maybe I could learn some tricks. 

A Century of Spin

Battle of the Somme: 100 years ago.

Reading the news today is like a test to see how much frivolous bullshit one can tolerate. CNN has adopted a habit of posting random, anonymous Twitter comments instead of interviewing real people on the street. We all know how Twitter brings out the best in us. That allows CNN to cherry pick the most infantile or dramatic or clever or literary quote to fit their rotten article. It got me thinking, "How would these illiterate fuckwad journalists who graduated from some diploma-mill like Brown write about events from 100 years ago?" I really am curious how someone who scours Twitter for snarky remarks about totally irrelevant events in 2016 would write about almost identical international news a century ago. 

Now, the Battle of the Somme resulted in 1,000,000 casualties over 4 months (yes, one million) so it's pretty high on the list of insane human events, but are events of 2016 much different? I think not. The 1916 Summer Olympics were scheduled (by some idiot) to be held in Berlin so they were cancelled because of an active war zone. Today, Rio, Brazil was deemed safe enough to hold the Olympics but Russia is militarizing allies for a land grab, Syria is in a Civil War, refugees are fleeing Africa by inflatable raft to countries that immediately criminalize their religion, America has been occupying oil production territory in Iraq and Yemen while ignoring blatant civil rights problems in distant barbarian cities such as Chicago and obviously dire flooding in other foreign lands not protected by the Constitution, such as Louisiana, while paying some $2 Billion to Iran for an arms deal that was intended to keep the despotic Shah in power back in 1979, but never happened because he was overthrown, but Iran had already paid for the arms so even though the 'buyer' from 1979 died a year later the U.S., for some reason, feels obligated to pay this money back, with interest, to a completely different terror supporting band of lunatics who now claim it is owed to them, the same people who tried to kill the original buyer whose goal was to squash the rebellion led by the parents of the people now demanding the money back. Makes sense. In 1916 a campaign was building to end alcohol production because it was an obvious health scourge and in 2016 there are more Heroin overdoses than births* But Heroin is already illegal because that law empowers municipalities to attempt to profit from suicidal, broke, drug junkies. Pretty smart!

Here is a list of actual events from 1916 - combined with generic spin from a modern day fuckwad journalist a'la CNN or Breitbart.

• Battle of Verdun is fought - A Pop singer in N.Y. complains that her summer house in Belrupt-en-Verdunois has been destroyed. Demands restitution.

• Mexican Rebel Pancho Villa attacks town in New Mexico - Woodrow Wilson claims this is proof that we need to build a wall between America and Mexico.

• Easter Rebellion in Ireland put down by British troops. - 10 Irishwomen in Boston refuse to wash any clothes manufactured in Britain for a week. They are denounced as Atheists. User #RemembertheMaine@'98 comments on Twitter "A Chink can wash clothes as good as any potato famine Cat-lick whore."

• Emma Goldman is arrested for lecturing on birth control in the United States. - Goldman is uniformly considered a slut but a small group defend her. She later accepts lucrative offers to pose nude.

• Voyage of the James Caird: an open boat journey from Elephant Island in the South Shetland Islands to South Georgia in the southern Atlantic Ocean (800 nautical miles (1,500 km; 920 mi)) undertaken by Sir Ernest Shackleton and five companions to obtain rescue for the main body of the Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition following the loss of its ship Endurance - Lurid rumors of homosexual orgies plague expedition. Financial sponsors flee.

• United States Marines invade the Dominican Republic - Florida rejoices as Banana prices plummet!

• U.S. President Woodrow Wilson signs a bill incorporating the Boy Scouts of America - Conservative pundits say this demonstrates failure of American family to perform first duty of preparing sons for war.

• In San Francisco, a bomb explodes on Market Street during a Preparedness Day parade, killing 10 injuring 40. (Warren Billings and Tom Mooney are later wrongly convicted of it) - Billings and Mooney were identified by web sleuths who later delete their accounts.

• U.S. President Woodrow Wilson signs legislation creating the National Park Service - Liberal Pundits announce this will lead to high price of admission at previously free parks. 

•  Mary, a circus elephant, is hanged in the town of Erwin, Tennessee for killing her handler, Walter "Red" Eldridge - "Pachyderm Lives Matter" activists boycott Tennessee. #JusticeforMary

• Margaret Sanger opens the first U.S. birth control clinic - Men nationwide breath a sigh of relief in private but denounce whorish behavior in public.

• The first 40-hour work week officially begins in the Endicott-Johnson factories of Western New York - 11-year old Derek "Nine-finger" Sullivan says he prefers the new hours. "It's like working half-time," says a smiling Sullivan from behind his bench.

I couldn't resist an insulting modern day meme.

*none of this is fact-checked

Chicken Bus Fever Part VI.5 Sweet River

I can't leave this chapter of log describing my circumnavigation of Guatemala via local bus without some mention of Santa Elena, Flores, La Isla De Flores, Tikal, and my experience there. What kind of selfish travel writer would I be if I only analyzed bedroom curtains?

The main point I will make is that Tikal and Flores are not the same place. People I met seemed to use Flores and Tikal interchangeably, but they are not very close to one another. If one wishes to visit the Mayan ruins of Tikal then the city of Flores is the natural hub for travel, also a hub for travel to Belize and other historic destinations in Northern Guatemala as well as destinations to the south. There is an airport but I prefer bus. Within the Tikal zone there is a hotel as well as a campground. But the ruins are closed after 6pm except for guided night tours. So, even if a person hitchhiked to Tikal in the evening after the last bus departs for Flores it's possible to camp in the park or rent a room, but don't take my word for it if you know what's good for you. I'm irresponsible and barely care about my own well-being so do you really think I care if you must sleep in an active jaguar den because you followed my advice? I'm sure these hotel rooms are expensive, but probably nice too, if they do exist.

Chicken Bus Fever: Part VI Ruined

The owner of the Hospedaje in Sayache gave me advice that I should rent a room in Santa Elena or Flores because the hotels near Tikal, the Maya temple site, were expensive. This was good advice because I didn't really know where I was going. I knew I wanted to visit Tikal but was not sure if Tikal and Flores are the same town. I knew they were in the same general area but did that mean they were close enough to sleep in one and visit the other? Well, the advice to rent a room in Santa Elena was wise because Tikal and Santa Elena are about 1 hour apart and while buses go between them regularly I only saw one or two premium hotels closer to Tikal near the lake, and the budget hotels/hostels and hospedajes were all back in Santa Elena.

Eric Hoffer

The True Believer by Eric Hoffer

I had an experience right out of Glass Bead Game when I was in Guatemala. I was discussing life and history with a retired man who had a colorful past and it was very similar to Knetch's discussion with the elderly historian in the monastery where he is sent for his first assignment after graduating from the academy. In his casual conversations with the historian leads them to the realization that they both had studied a little known philosopher named Johann Albrecht Bengel from hundreds of years earlier (Glass Bead Game takes place in the far future). Bengel exists, along with some of the other historical figures mentioned in the book, but some are invented to imply time has passed. Well, in my conversations with the retired man in Guatemala he mentioned making a pilgrimage to San Francisco not to smoke pot and listen to music, but to seek the counsel of a "longshoreman philosopher" who lived there in the '60s. This could only be Eric Hoffer, whom I had read about randomly in my attempts to justify labor as a means to self-enlightenment. I had not read much of what Hoffer wrote, preferring to romanticize a laboring philosopher, content with his day's work and content to write some witty aphorism on a park bench. The ideal was enough to sustain me and inspire me. Hoffer was not of the Stalinist camp of labor, represented by the horse Boxer in Orwell's Animal Farm with the quote "I will work harder." No, Hoffer reached the conclusion that work was hard enough, labor was required from someone, and he would give his fair share. He was not content with intellectualism as an end in itself, like Dr Zhivago who scoffed at the idea of earning his keep with poetry. Hoffer may have found that reflecting on the act of work was his idea of rest. One of his many quotes says, "It is not work that makes us tired, but work left undone." and even if you can contradict it, one must agree it is a witty statement. My favorite quote is, "Why are Jews expected to be the only Christians?" in reference to refugees evicted from Israel and critics asking Israel, but not countless other Christian nations, to do the Christian thing and make room for the refugees. It's witty, even if one can contradict or pick it apart because it not only questions religion, by also contradictory principles and history and the laughable idea that a Christian ideal would be imposed on the very religion that historically executed Christ. It's funny if you examine it, but the idea is quite clever and important and still relevant today decades after Hoffer wrote it.

Well, I said, "That's Eric Hoffer." and thus closed the circle set up in The Glass Bead Game. My conversation companion was never able to meet Hoffer at the time and way led on to way. Hoffer wrote, "People who bite the hand that feeds them usually kiss the boot the kicks them." He also wrote "Propaganda does not deceive people; it merely helps them to deceive themselves." And this quote makes me wonder if we are not also on the same page with the word "just" which is usually substituted for the word "merely" but doesn't mean the same thing. Readers will notice I use merely or simply instead of just, unless I am rushed or sloppy, and a study could be done of how Hoffer avoids that insidious word.

Hoffer was an observant and wise man. His work does fall into the realm of punditry or cultural analysis, and his aphorisms toe the line with a broad brush, but his experience earns him a position of respect. He had done the hard work of examining the world from all corners and his experience, not his political bias, served as the source of his opinion. Jack London wrote Martin Eden, which I am still trying to adapt into a screenplay, and that book also studies the dichotomy between labor and philosophy. This theme is also covered in a short story by Jack London that I can not track down right now but it involved a man who lived a dual life as a street fighting socialist and a genteel white collar professor. A literary buff has told me this story is called "South of the Slot". This story had a profound effect on me, more than even the London stories that led me to The Yukon Territory in search of gold. The romance of entering a socially antagonistic culture and learning to fit in and then returning to the bourgeois society and lording your superiority over the ignorant pale pundits appealed to me. I was unaware of the larger message London suggests about this transformation, that one's superiority would merely be used to ostracize and alienate one further, and one's bourgeois roots would always prevent inclusion in the working class society, so that one would be alienated completely from both the north and south of "The Slot", but that wisdom would come later, like Hoffer's, won the hard way.

Jack London and Eric Hoffer. Check them out in this time of idiot pundits and soft pale politicians with toothy lies and bloated egos. 

Hoffer was not a scientist and did not want to be. He wanted to reason out social puzzles while hauling rope and moving cargo and that left no time for science. He is a rhetorician and begins his book True Believer with a humble quote from Montaigne, "All I say is by way of discourse, and nothing by way of advice. I should not speak so boldly if it were my due to be believed."

Propaganda does not deceive people; it merely helps them to deceive themselves.
Read more at: http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/e/eric_hoffer.htm

Chicken Bus Fever: Part IV Jungle Love

I don´t actually know what insect attacked my arm in Coban. I was asleep and then woke up and felt an angry itch under my arm. I am not immune to mosquitoes and usually sleep with a mosquito net to avoid the red welts that appear after a mosquito has feasted on my blood. But the infection that followed this insect bite in Coban was like no mosquito bite I can remember and it looked nothing like sample mosquito bites. It looked like makeup for a zombie movie, veins bulging, skin decaying, ragged diseased appearance. I thought I would have my arm amputated but the only ill-effect was itching. Thus began the lowland chapter of my Guatemalan travel.

Chicken Bus Fever: Part III Mal Estado

The trip from Huehuetenango to Coban by collective bus shortly took a place among the most miserable bus rides in my memory, which I will describe now: 

 The most painful bus ride was from San Cristobal to Palenque and back, a 17 hour affair involving a million speed bumps that actually injured my neck because the seat had no head rest and I wedged my body in a corner at a bad angle so each speed bump caused my head to snap forward across my shoulder and then slamp back into the window frame, so my neck and head were injured for about 10 days after that trip and I have almost no memory of the tourist sites we visited because the majority of the day was spent with my face buried in the seat in front of me. Many times I actually moaned in pain or screamed in agony. We departed at 5am and returned at 10pm. Insane. It is simply a foolish way to travel because the natural and archaeological sites should be enjoyed for more than 1 hour and the vehicle travel should not exceed 12 hours. If you drive 8 hours to walk in a circle among Mayan ruins and then get back in a van and drive 8 hours back to where you started then you are an idiot. The better way would be to take a big bus to the city of Palenque and sleep there and visit the site and then go back to the hotel and then take a bus back to where you came from. Trying to visit Palenque on the same day you leave Tuxtla or San Cristobal is an insult to the restoration work involved in that site. 

Chicken Bus Fever Part II: Sierra Madre High

 A Note on History: I've been enviously reading Paul Theroux's The Old Patagonia Express. I'm not envious because he went places I want to go; I'm envious because he fills a page so naturally, is not apologetic of his personality, and does not toss punchlines around casually. But he also includes historical backstory that I'm not accustomed to duplicate. I don't trust 'history'. One person says "Columbus discovered America'. Well, what does that mean? Who cares? I can write Guatemala was once the generic name for all of Central America. So what? I can research the years of founding and wars and earthquakes but these mean very little because I am taking someone else's word for the truth and passing it along as derived truth. I do not know what Cortez saw during his trip, if I can trust Cortex existed at all. I can stand before a plaque claiming Cortez was once on such and such peninsula, but the plaque is not a guarantee. I can guarantee the plaque exists, but not that Cortez was once standing there. See? It's merely words carved in iron. Furthermore, I vigorously doubt that the teaching of history prevents one from repeating it. Maybe it does, maybe it doesn't. I'm even skeptical that it makes one more informed. Maybe a person using common sense and critical thinking is the difference, and the trivia they learned from history books is irrelevant. Maybe research needs to be done on the present, not the past. Consider this passage: "After 1,500 years of Canaanite rule over Palestine, the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea fell under the rule of numerous invaders, including the Philistines, the Israelites, the Phoenicians, the Assyrians, the Babylonians, the Persians, the Macedonians, the Romans, the Arabs, the Crusaders, and then it was ruled by various Islamic Caliphates from 1291 until the British mandate in 1922."  Really? That's all indisputably true? If so, why does it matter today? I read that passage like I'm reading an ancient magical spell intended to defeat demons. Even if it is true, where are the demons I'm defeating? Since I can't embrace this kind of history-fetish I don't want to pass any history on about what I experienced. See? I suspect the main function of 'history' in modern times is to collect innocent children in a room, for instance, and tell them, "[Insert ethnicity here] murdered your great-great grandparents during [insert war date here], and this is why you must hate [insert ethnicity here]..." or "Back in [insert date from several centuries ago here] a [insert Race here] person defiled the grave of [insert another Race here] and this is why you must always distrust [insert Race here]." That is how I see history being applied today and it does more harm than good.
Maybe conflict is fueled by an overemphasis on the past. Maybe a disputed past is best forgotten because the present is where we live and the future is where we are going. The past is not trivial, but harboring grudges based on the past does no good. Honor and respect are earned on a day to day basis, cultures develop based on current accomplishments, not grudges and revenge.

Finally, better historical summaries have already been written so why am I going to edit them further to pretend I am well informed. My goal is to see and describe what is before my eyes, not justify why it is there and rationalize its existence. Once in a while I'll discuss history, but mostly for comic value or to advance my specific political agenda. End Note.

Quetzaltenango (shortened to Xela or Shay-La) is at an altitude of 7600 ft and the trip from the coastal town of Champerico is only 100 KM, or about 60 miles. Where else in North America are you going to climb 7600 ft from sea level in less than 60 miles? That is a geography question for the quizical. I believe the Sierra Madre Occidental in the Mexican state of Sonora and Chihuahua is the best place to look because the high peak is 10,000 ft and is around 60 miles inland of the Sea of Cortez, but you don't drive to that peak and you do drive to Quetzaltenango. A little research directs me toward island peaks such as Puncak Jaya in Indonesia and Manau Kea on Hawaii, which is barely 40 KM from the sea and is 13,000ft high. I don't want to argue about the specifics, but it's a dramatic change in climate although I was told June is winter in Champerico. 

Chicken Bus Fever Part I: Pacific Blues

Note: This is the first in a 9 part series of essays about a bus/collectivo trip around Guatemala in the Summer of 2016. The links to all the essays are at the bottom of each essay. Mark Twain once wrote, "Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry and narrow-mindedness." I tried to prove him wrong, but the man was wise. You be the judge...

I have some time to kill and that is probably the main motivation for travel writing, also travel reading. The process of remembering details or taking notes as one travels actually corrupts the experience, and the act of reading about travel dilutes future experience. I totally oppose identifying travel photos on the Internet and my reasons are simply that the human brain can barely differentiate between a photo and real life, so seeing enough photos of a Mayan temple is mentally not much different than visiting the site itself, but the experience is completely different. I took a panga boat taxi to a rural peninsula in search of a rarely visited Mayan site in northern Guatemala and stumbled on the overgrown ruins of some kind of Mayan plaza and a plaque that said Hernan Cortez had visited that specific location. There were no trails or guides or admission fees and rain was pelting me and dogs were barking in the low fog. My shoes were squeaking. I was lost. It was an experience. So, someone may look at a photo of Yosemite Valley, which I urge you NOT to do, and think they want to visit Yosemite Valley. But the surprise of seeing Yosemite Valley for the first time, something early pioneers certainly felt, will be slightly ruined by the past experience of seeing the photo. It is like watching a movie trailer that includes every plot point and good joke. I applied to many National Parks Concession services in 1990, and when I received an offer of employment from Yosemite I had no idea where I was going. 1990 was before the Internet and I had never visited California and the employment application was a generic form with no photos and I applied to so many national parks that I could not research them all in library encyclopedias. Thus, I left Fairbanks, Alaska in March 1990 with a backpack and an axe and hitchhiked in the direction of Yosemite Valley with no idea what to expect except a valley of some kind. I arrived at night in the back of a lurching pickup truck driven by some restaurant workers taking a trip to Merced and back. The journey itself is another epic saga I won´t go into right now, but by the time I reached Yosemite in April I was a physical and mental mess, delirious, starving. I could hear water and figured there was a river nearby. I actually camped illegally in the forest because I had run completely out of money at the time and could not afford a real campsite. I woke up the next morning and saw Yosemite Valley and the many cliff Waterfalls in full Spring explosion for the first time, which will drop anyone´s jaw. That experience was only possible because I never researched my destination and never saw a million photos of the valley first. So, aside from one video, I will not include photos of my travels because I must identify where I went and the photos would dilute your experience if you ever follow my footsteps. Also, a writer is supposed to write. However, I am not opposed to taking photos because writing and photography are two different mediums. Taking photos is a slight distraction, but if I'm trying to develop the literary ideas of an experience then the photo will be a distraction to the reader. There is no short cut to experience and I'm not writing this as a surrogate travel experience for the readers. No, the writing is an essay or 'assaying' of the landscape of my own experience the same way a surveyor traces the contours of the hills and maps out boundaries. Photos are photos and essays are essays and the two don't have much to do with one another in my mind but posting photos to the internet tends to diminish the excitement and mystery of the locations that I visited and I don't want to do that. I don't even want to risk doing that so I will post few photos. I read some silly essay by a writer who argues that not taking photos makes him a traveler, while a photographer is a tourist. I think that's a simplistic and vague distinction. Taking photographs doesn't mean you are trying to 'capture' the moment because you don't appreciate it; photography is another art form just like writing doesn't mean you are trying to describe an experience so others don't have to attempt it. The suggestion that reading Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck means you don't have to look at Dorothea Lange's dust bowl photos is as ridiculous as suggesting either Lange or Steinbeck were travelers or tourists in 1933 California. They were journalists employing different mediums and my final thoughts on this subtopic is this: a writer and a photojournalist have a responsibility to their subject; a photo or an essay should communicate truth and not misrepresent. Let this, at least, be the goal.

A wise man once said, ¨Don´t take a map, make a map.¨ This is my map.

My objective in returning to Guatemala was to explore the regions (I'd already lived there, left, returned and then left and now returned again) that I knew would destroy my van if I tried to drive there.

A Hundred Rodeo Clowns

As Promised....an essay about a Nicaraguan rodeo. I guess the Hemingway connection was too hard to resist, so that explains my tone. But I left out the emasculation part because that's too personally relevant.

The young Nicaraguan man takes a final swig of white rum (really defined as ‘liqour beverage product” on the plastic packaging) from his liter jug, holding onto the broken chain link fence with one hand as an assistant attached spurs to his sneakers. His pants are dirty. Everyone is screaming for blood. The band plays a double time version, almost indecipherable, of the Mexican fiesta song Cielito Linda, so no one sings, since the tempo is too fast. The M.C. asks if the crowd is ready and there is no clear response. The trumpet melody is the only recognizable note as the rest of the Brass section, the Tuba, and the woodwinds play some kind of improvised Harmony line. The drums and the cymbals crash rapidly and erratically drowning out everything but the trumpet. The 140 lb. young man’s spurs are attached finally and he climbs over the fence into the area where he mounts the 1200 lb bull. The bull is angry as hell and lashing his huge horned head back and forth against the metal cage, bashing the metal bars. Suddenly there are two huge sonic booms from unexpected fireworks overhead. My heart jumps almost out of my chest from surprise. Car alarms…drunk sleeping in the vacant lot nearby, a dog is jumping against a chain at a gas station. Kids are playing soccer in the distance under a single street light on cobblestone streets. Traffic, lights, the stars are still visible because there is largely no air pollution or light pollution. There are two nearby volcanoes, It’s Nicaragua and the rodeo is in town.

The man finds his place on the beast’s back and wraps his left hand tightly around a rough rope halter that encircles the bull’s neck. The bull rider appears neither confident nor fearful. Nor is he so drunk as to appear careless. He knows what he is getting into and like an inmate walking to be executed he is resigned. Maybe he believes he can ride the bull without injury, but he’s not giving the impression of confidence. Sober Nicaraguan’s are emotionally reserved normally so maybe this default expression is either fear or confidence but it is simply hard for a foreigner to tell which. My observation skills may be lacking, is what I’m saying, when I write that his expression appears like he is mounting a motorcycle instead of a huge, horned, angry mammal.

The real drunks are the several dozen young men who await the bull’s release into the arena where they are standing. These men have paid the 30 cordoba ground level admission price and apparently that comes with an option to join in the action by climbing into the arena where the bull riders do their thing. I'm feeling slightly self-destructive but decide I should not tempt fate with a non-lethal injury to add to my misery. In an American rodeo, there are two or three rodeo clowns to distract the animals when the rider goes down. In Nicaraguan rodeo there are about 40 rodeo clowns all dressed in street clothes. These local men are actually drinking beer and liquor as they wait, sweating in the early night heat, dirt across the front of their pants from crawling under the metal fencing when charged by a previous bull.

We wait. Cielito Linda rises in volume and urgency, the M.C. asks if the crowd is really ready and then asks the men in the bull ring if they are ready. Several men are obviously more reckless than the others, as they repeatedly run in front of the gate to taunt the bull. I have paid the extra 40 cordobas to get elevated standing room with optional folding chair seating so I am looking down on all the action like a Roman Emperor. I look around me and it not only appears that I am the only Gringo or foreigner, but I am also the only non-local Nicaraguan. Daria is a small town between nothing and not much else but the arena has about 200 people watching and they all seem to know each other. I know the event is public, but it’s a local rodeo so it is public only in the sense that everyone in the local community can come. So, the people around me are thinking, why is a bearded white gringo in a cowboy hat at our rodeo? The answer is too complicated to go into but lately I have been thinking that chemistry sets in motion other events that we perceive as physical, but are actually only blunt, pre-destined, chemical reactions. I can do nothing to blend in with a beard, pale skin, brown hair and a polka dot disco shirt. The suede leather pants don’t help either since they look like I’m wearing chaps. But, fuck it, I just want to watch the rodeo and write a descriptive essay, but I subtly alter what I am watching. I can not report on the authentic rodeo because my attendance causes ripples in the natural course of events, like that biological reference that I mentioned earlier. This audience is not easily distracted, but I present a more interesting spectacle than the bull riding. So I stand in the shadows to avoid drawing too much attention to myself.

turn volume down before playing video...!

The beast is released and the young man is immediately in trouble. The previous bulls were bigger and less agile but now I see this is the smallest bull yet and he is angry and more compact and able to move much faster than the previous bulls. So the man on top of his back is thrown forward when the bull’s ass end rears six or nine feet above the ground. The rider has no saddle to take advantage of, nothing to grab except the rope. Whether he wants to or not he digs his heels into the bull’s side, which causes the bull to kick even more ferociously. Within seconds the bull has kicked his ass high up, causing the young man to fall forward, and then the bull snaps his horned skull back into the falling man’s nose. The collision is noiseless compared to the cacophony of integrated insanity coming from the band, but the crowd groans as the man’s nose or jaw is probably fractured. Maybe the man is beyond stunned, definitely concussed, but he starts to loosen the rope on his left hand, considers getting off but the hazards of getting off the bull and staying on the bull are nearly equal, so he grips the rope even harder but quickly loses his balance to one side. He can’t pull himself back up to the center of the bull and I know he is finished.

An ear-drum-splitting sound effect screeches from the speakers and I am forced to plug my ears with my fingers. The sound is a woman’s horrified scream. It’s awful. It’s worse than any blood curdling scream in a haunted house. The effect is annoying and dangerous and damaging and pointless since I would prefer to hear the authentic groans and cries of the crowd than this pointless, stupid, canned sound effect. I don’t like the periodic and random use of deafening explosions and alarms and sound effect or music. Senseless and without any encouragement from the crowd. Maybe the M.C. believes it will encourage or replace genuine reaction but the sound effect belongs in a haunted house for partially deaf psychopaths. Here at the rodeo it serves no other function than to damage the hearing of everyone within a 20 yard half-radius of the speakers. I only emphasize this point because the live music is already deafening and the crowd is shouting and the recorded music is beyond tolerance but this particularly awful sound effect of the woman screaming is so incredibly annoying and loud that I nearly jump out of my sandals when it happens randomly. It can probably be heard for miles and I’m 30 feet from the large speakers.

The man on the back of the bull has lost his balance and is bleeding from the nose. He slides to one side and can not regain an even mount so he tries to get his hand untangled but momentum makes this impossible. The bull shows no mercy and the man falls with one arm trapped in the rope. First his legs are trampled. His arms is wrenching and he is tossed around like a balloon on a string during a hurricane. Finally he is thrown away, maybe his arm has been amputated. Then the bull turns and tramples on him with massive hooves. Then the man pounds the man’s head and an enormous groan comes from the crowd. I make a textbook cry of sympathetic suffering as the man’s lifeless body is pulverized by the bull as dozens of men try to distract the bull. It has happened so fast, maybe 7 seconds between the man losing his balance and him losing consciousness. The woman’s screaming sound effect pierces the air and I say, “A la gran puchica!” Some women hear me and give me a nasty look. This is followed by an equally annoying sound of an amplified car alarm beep. Imagine recording a car alarm and then doubling the volume and patching it through huge speakers to delight a crowd. It’s insane, awful, painful.

The man is being trampled to death as I cover my ears. I’d like to take a photo but the lighting is horrible, exposed, harsh bulbs directly in front of me and there is no good location in the shadows behind a chain link fence and a row of people dancing to Cumbia. It’s 7PM and totally dark outside the realm of the plaza del toros. I take a few photos and the preview looks like shit so I give up.

The man has been trampled to unconsciousness or else is faking it. The bull doesn’t care and trounces his face and head and chest until it is distracted by a brave man behind him who slaps his huge ass. The trodden rider returns to life and appears to realize how much danger he is in but his body won’t respond. He tries to rally his energy and as he turns to look at the bull he is gored in the face by an indifferent horn. Everyone groans and shouts. The man holds his face as another of the men in the arena rescues him by pulling his shirt and dragging the wounded man to safety of the fence. He can’t see and can’t walk without assistance but they reach the fence seconds before the charging bull and roll under the fence. The bull tries to gore several others before calming down. Men hanging from the fence kick the bull’s sides. A vaquero runs out and lassos the bull and leads it into a gate of the cheap seats with the bull manure and saw dust and used condoms and empty aluminum beer cans. Someone throws a shoe at the bull and people cheer.

The injured rider is forgotten. His ordeal is over and the bull is gone. The band hammers out another chorus of cielito lindo. “Ay ay ay ay, canta no llores…” double time. I walk to the corner of the seating area and buy a bag of popcorn and a hot dog with mustard for $1. The bloodletting is suspended and now the audience is bored. Teenagers text into their smart phones. Parents cuddle their young children. Couples hold hands or kiss. A drunk man stumbles into the corner bathroom which is nothing more than a hole through the planks.

A new bull is set loose with another rider who seems more experience even though he walks with a serious limp, like his spine is fused. Young men surround the bull and throw soda cans and cigarette cartons, a shoe and a black and white FSLN political flag at the bull. Someone runs behind him and whips his ass with a belt. The bull endures, turns, blinks, makes a movement like he is going to charge and this causes the men to flee for the top of the fence or slide on their stomachs under the bottom rung. The bull never actually charges. The hot dog tastes like salty sawdust. The bull stands alone. The bull endures.

Murdering a Dress

I want to combine two popular/compelling internet events: 1) The debate of what color "The Dress" is, and 2) the Steven Avery trial that is the subject of Making a Murderer docuseries.

What the two have in common is simply the complete polarity of opinions despite equal stimuli. The dress debate was if the colors were Gold and white, or Black and Blue. The actual dress was a tint in the range of black and blue. But the photo was clearly gold and white to me and many people. When seen in a different photo I can clearly see it is black and blue. But in the controversial photo I clearly saw a tint of white and gold. I don't mean popcorn white and Aztec gold, but a tint in the range of gold and white. Just like the real dress is in the range of black and blue. There are many shades of black and blue and gold and white. off-white, greyish black. etc. Many many shades, but in general I could polarize the picture into gold and white. But the dress is actually not remotely gold and white. The dress only appeared white and gold to me. This was an optical illusion that caused a divide in opinions that captivated people and is still being studied. This demonstrates the infinite range of experiences and how humanity is still learning about our own perceptive abilities/sensitivities. 

This is not to be confused with preference such as with the new Star Wars movie. Some people love it and some people hate it. But at least we can all agree on the color and shape of the principal characters as they appear to us.

In Defense of Thoreau

I often target Brown University graduates as becoming hired philosophy thugs, Think Tank spin doctors, Idea Mercenaries, propagandists drinking mocha latte Gelato shakes at 2 am, putting a fixed wheel bicycle in their Ford Explorer and driving to a park to go riding and ponder how to cast doubt on Climate Change. I know the type, schooled in flim flam, buying low and selling high, "invest in income property" was their class slogan. Those lawyers who are still defending the asbestos and cigarette industry all came from Brown. Ask a Brown law school graduate if Lead paint is harmful and they will calmly say, "The studies are inconclusive at this point, your honor, and though we are sympathetic to the victims we ask this suit be dismissed for lack of evidence." I think Brown Law students are required to memorize that response like baseball players learn to stay back on a curveball. Brown Law students are the perfect storm of a godless, pragmatic culture devoid of reflection and lacking ethics, but who score 1580 on the SAT. I usually target the Ivy League schools because I think all of the Enron criminals were graduates of Ivy League. Check out the really devious Wall Street thieves and you will find they all learned their skills in the Ivy League colleges. And these crooks end up being the Ivy League's biggest promotion tool. Look, we created financial magicians! One of the greatest monsters of the modern times is Alan Greenspan, and yes, he went to Colombia. The engineers of the Trillion dollar bailout scam were Ivy League to the core. It takes smart people to engineer the economic collapse of a nation in order to accumulate more property and wealth, and Ivy League colleges have been producing these types for 200 years. First you have to engineer a baffling economic system and then you have to exploit the loopholes you hid in the schematic. Milton Friedman, architect of passive proxy fascism that decimated Central and South America, went to Rutgers, so I guess he didn't apply to Brown, but everyone else who does appallingly horrific white class financial crime is either a Brown grad or a close approximate. Henry Paulson went to Dartmouth and Harvard, worked for Goldman Sacks, became Secretary of the Treasury and then gave away $1 trillion to the banks he helped destroy. He's not in jail, in case you are wondering. I could go on, but if there are any real research journalists out there who want to study why Ivy League colleges are failing to pass on any ethical guidelines to their graduates, be my guest. (Yes, there are some alumni Brown can be proud of. Of course there are. Don't pay any attention to me.)

So, it wasn't much of a shock when I read a slanderous hate piece titled "Pond Scum" about Henry David Thoreau (who was an Ivy League Grad) and learned the author is a graduate of Brown named Kathryn Schulz. She delighted herself with an iconoclastic lashing even Thoreau would think was overboard. I get that the younger generation must shit all over the heroes of their fathers, but my suspicion at the bottom of it all is that attacking pseudo-icons like Thoreau is simply easy money for Schulz. Who is going to defend Thoreau? Who gives a shit about Thoreau? Hipsters? Is there one fucking hipster in all of San Francisco who can point to Walden Pond on a map? No. Those stoned idiots can barely point to Colorado or the Grand Canyon. They will never point to Concord, Mass. Half of them were born in Mexico so why would they care about the birthplace of the American Revolution? So, since that is the intended audience of this overwritten piece of shit essay of vitriol against Thoreau, it's merely fluff. It's an easy essay to write, like playing the villain in a Bond movie, or saying you don't think Citizen Kane is a good movie. Sure, play the Devil's Advocate and your pub crawl buddies will drool over themselves, barely paying attention to you as they text one another dirty jokes on their smart phones. Again, this is the product of Brown University Journalism department. If you are going to pick on someone, make sure they are dead and basically forgotten. Make sure there are no consequences to your work. Fluff sells. Hipsters like fluff.

A living turtle much like the turtle Thoreau donated to the Harvard zoology museum.

Schulz's wordy essay points out all the tired contradictions that have pointed out a hundred times before about Thoreau. He's like the Golom of America, a creature we have created in order to either hate because it's unpopular or defend for the wrong reasons.

So, my defense is two fold. First, essays like Schulz's are bullshit, flim flam from a fucked up University Grad who is too young to be slandering people she knows nothing about. She doesn't even point out that Thoreau's name is pronounced THOR-oh. The accent is on the first vowel. Maybe The New Yorker has sunk to hiring fluff writers with fancy vocabulary and trendy targets, but that doesn't mean she's being sincere. The whole point of her essay is to slander a dead person, long dead, and question why anyone admires him. Well, she doesn't interview a single person who admires Thoreau. In fact, she gives no evidence at all that anyone admires him. That's a big oversight for a thesis that depends on contradiction something. And the simple reason she didn't provide any evidence that Thoreau is admired is because NO ONE ADMIRES HIM. Schulz's piece is subtitled, "Why do We Love Thoreau?" yet she does not provide a single example of someone who loves Thoreau. She writes that the book Walden is "A Classic". Is it? I know lots of people write that it is a classic, but that doesn't make it a classic. I went to the Thoreau appreciation week in Concord. Yeah, me and about 23 other people, most of whom were there for the free tea. 23 PEOPLE OUT OF 300 MILLION AMERICANS. More people love Charles Manson! Do you see what I'm saying? Devout admirers of Thoreau are as rare as a Hybrid car in the Lehman Brothers parking garage, but skin deep fan boys are a dime a dozen. So, of course Schulz fails to find one devotee to interview. She merely manufactures her essay purely from her own template of East Coast hate, with some quotes from older essays and some quotes from other dead authors to prove she can read too. Brown University shines again! Does she put one admirer of Thoreau on the stand and question their beliefs and allow them to respond? No, because she never found one. She assumes that because Thoreau is a known individual with a Wikipedia page and a few books in public domain that he is admired. What a crock of shit. Kids reading his essay against slavery in high school admire him like they 'admire' J.D. Salinger. They don't care about Thoreau. They are merely doing the assignment that the teacher gave them. So does Schulz interview one teacher who assigns Thoreau essays to his class? No, because that would require some work that is far beyond the scope of the fluff journalism that Schulz has mastered*. The teacher would simply say Thoreau is a good choice because he has an interesting story that keeps kids from falling asleep. They don't admire him, they are using him to combat fatigue. It's either Thoreau or Martin Luther King and we can't study both. West Coast students have never heard of Thoreau because they read essays by Cesar Chavez, whom they also don't admire. Schulz is far too casual with her assessment of admiration. For me, it takes more than a bumper sticker or a few lame quotes, or even the existence of a book on a shelf to demonstrate admiration.

Yeah, let's pick on this guy. What an asshole!

I looked up a previous employer of Schulz called Grist. It's an "environmental" website and at first I wondered why a tree hugging hippie was slandering Thoreau. Then I visited the site and realized it is a pure Hipster Generation bullshit website. Total click bait lacking any substance at all. This is where Brown University stoner journalists go to die, they end up writing for Grist and patting themselves on the back that maybe in 20 years they will pay off their student loans, because Grist makes no money. That's why Schulz left to work for The New Yorker. They make no money because they write articles like, "Are Vegetarians Secretly Eating Meat When Drunk?" Fluff! The website should be called "Chaff". Some assholes asked 20 stoned college kids a question about food they eat when drunk, and turned it into a 'research poll'...and that poll becomes the subject of a fluff piece of Grist. Why? How reliable is a stoned person talking about what they eat when drunk? This has zero substance. The age of the Internet has borne some poison fruit and I would put Grist in this category, along with many many "news media outlets" that serve up thousands of fluff pieces about their special interest. There's no advertising so they are probably paid through lobbyist Think Tank funding, in this case from Left Wingers. The NRA gun zealots get paid by their tribe, and the hippies get paid by their tribe. Both are abysmal, vapid, lurid, ponderous. There is simply not enough room on Earth for middling writers who don't have any experience living, haven't given anything any thought, don't know anything, and don't know how to research serious topics. Luckily there is plenty of room on the Internet for their horrible and self-absorbed essays. So they fluff their own opinions up like a chicken getting out of the bathtub until it appears they had something to say. But I am not fooled. These writers have nothing to say. They would have to live and die and live again before they could write something interesting to me. They merely learned how to stretch a headline onto 1500 words because maybe one of those 1500 words will be one you are searching for and you might click on their babbling piece and they might earn some $5 bonus per click if someone reads their piece. Hell, I might be buying someone dinner by linking to that shit, but I have to do it to prove a point. Anyway, this is where Schulz is coming from and it is where she belongs. She learned how to flim flam at Brown University and Grist taught her to master the art of saying nothing elegantly. Now she's a coworker of the ultimate fluff writer, Malcolm Gladwell, who originally went into advertising before moving onto a career advertising his own opinion. Great! Her statement that Thoreau lacked humor, coming from someone as dour as Schulz is pitiful misdirection; Thoreau is like Mark Twain compared to Schulz and Gladwell. The fact Grist was focused on the Environment was absolutely irrelevant to Schulz and all the staff writers there. She took that job because it was stepping stone and maybe the ExxonMobil propaganda newsletter didn't offer her enough money. She didn't care about recycling any more than she cared about the rain forest or Walt Whitman. Her air travel schedule is busier than the Dali Lama's. She burns through more jet fuel than Donald Trump. A Grist essay on global warming was academic to Schulz, a business decision, a bean to count. This is the nature of an Ivy League Thought Mercenary. She learned the lesson in Brown well, trade up, keep moving, take no prisoners. Never reflect, never contemplate, never pause, never transcend. Move your cheese. Why she is picking on Thoreau is topic I want to end with.

The current generation of youth is poisoned by discontentment and resentment and vitriol, but they are also generic. They must shit on Thoreau just like I mocked Disco, even though Disco is still more popular than Concord hermits. Thoreau is an easy target, like Hitler or Nixon. He's quasi-iconic, misunderstood, like Che Guevara and the writer can skip over tons of introductory research because the subject comes prepackaged in the reader's mind. I'm certain the environment means nothing to the modern young urban generation, but the topic of the environment is very important. The environment is important for their photos and they like to talk about going camping in Yosemite or white water rafting, or zip lining through the cloud forest. Fucking useless hipsters. These are good topics to discuss on facebook, but the actual significance is completely over their heads, as remote to their lives as NASCAR is remote to a community of Nicaraguan dairy farmers. But Nicaraguan dairy farmers don't write essays about NASCAR, because that would be presumptuous. Oh, but a Hipster in New York City will write all day long about nature. What a joke! What nature? The park where joggers get raped? Is that nature? Ants moving rubber trees requires reflection and serious contemplation and that is not possible for the modern smart phone generation so they merely have enough coherence and acuity to realize the environment is a topic to discuss and argue about like the price of silk or saffron. It's en vogue, but they have only a passing grasp of Thoreau and his work, like equating Ian McKellen with Gandalf. Thoreau is partly to blame since he sincerely didn't care about explaining or promoting himself. Schulz probably recognizes this hypocritical shallowness in her companions but not in herself, so she set out to slander someone whom others were praising for the wrong reasons and with casual flippancy. Modern journalism is meant to antagonize without any substantial consequence, so I see this piece, Pond Scum, as a perfectly grotesque and shallow essay, lacking any evidence of the main thesis, directed at stoned, uneducated hipsters who don't even know why they are praising someone but will thoroughly enjoy arguing with one another over the validity of Schulz's fluff piece.  The piece and the audience belong together. It's a new low in journalism, narcissistic, pointless, selfish, badly constructed, fluff, aimed at people who don't deserve any attention. Gross.

As for defending Thoreau, I now think this piece doesn't even warrant a response about Thoreau himself, because the motives are so poisonous. Go watch a tree grow and get back to me in 5 years and maybe we will have something to discuss. I've done the hard work in observation and contemplation; have you, Mr. Youtube? I wrote a screenplay based on Thoreau's life, for what it's worth, and would be happy to represent the Pro-Thoreau faction so conspicuously absent from Schulz's Anti-Thoreau screed. I guess a search for Thoreau zealots didn't turn up my blog. I might even give some insight on Transcendentalism, Thoreau's guiding philosophic principle, which Schulz never investigates. Essays like hers makes me think my screenplay should be produced but it also demonstrates why it will never be produced. I wrote the screenplay with profit in mind and the Hollywood rabbit hole it led me down is another story but it did teach me one thing: 150 years after Thoreau died people still don't understand him because they fear the change that comprehension might bring. I don't admire Thoreau as much as I identify with him. He could see in 1845 the chain of events that would lead to an entire generation being uninformed and arguing over mis-categorized icons in a digital universe whilst having idle conversations about something totally unrelated in person. Schulz thinks Thoreau was being grandiose, but she actually proves his point on many fronts; she is the enemy he feared a nation that lacks contemplation would produce. And he knew that such a lifestyle was more than desperate; it was dishonest and unenlightened, shallow, inauthentic, unexplored, unexamined, and invalid...also inevitable. 

He wrote that "the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation." Thoreau was wrong about one thing: they aren't quiet. Schulz does a great job of loudly appearing to be enlightened, but in the end she exposes her twisted roots failed to inspire her to ponder and contemplate the art of living. She merely learned how to pretend to see shapes in the clouds.

I went to the woods...

Stephen Hawking said that, "the human race is just a chemical scum on a moderate size planet, orbiting round a very average star in the outer suburb of one among a billion galaxies" Thoreau was content with being pond scum, he did not contradict that statement; he merely wanted to explore the exact nature of living as chemical pond scum, for his own edification, which is antithetical to a Brown graduate. Someone pursued a goal that was not only unprofitable, but had no profit motive at all? Yes, such people exist and they are generally reviled by Capitalist mercenaries and their minions. That transcendent peak was an ambitious enough goal for one life and Thoreau managed to write a few words on the topic of intentional living. Anything else you want to read into Thoreau's remarks is purely your own psychological baggage revealing your own feeble motives. Yes, he was superior, and he really wouldn't care what you thought about him, but he was kind enough to lend me some of his disdain to help me write this essay.

*This is a totally unfair accusation because Schulz actually is a skilled interviewer and researcher. But she wants to pick on Thoreau so I'll take some cheap shots too.

Extreme Sports

I think when George Mallory was asked, "Why climb Everest?" and he replied "Because it's there." he was really referring to his Ego. 

He said, "I want to travel light and take the summit by surprise," and the translation of that is ,"We paid an army of poor sherpas from our oppressed colony to carry our shit for us, but we'll take all the credit in the end."

Mallory might've reached the summit but he took that secret with him when he died on the mountain and his body is up there still along with the corpses of many others.

I watched the movie Everest the other day. It is based on the true events of the bungled summit attempt by about 50 thrill seekers in 1996. There was probably a little bit of editorializing and exaggeration, but that's only because this unknown director didn't quite grasp there is no need to exaggerate anything that happens at 28,000 ft. Like there are no average days for a human in outer space. If you tape a cocktail straw between your lips and use only it to breath, while running a marathon, then you might get the idea of what it's like to operate at that altitude, but this grave effort is only brushed over along with ridiculous cinematic conventions such as removing ones goggles and mask in sub zero temps so the audience knows who is talking...but I can ignore that.

 I've been reflecting on this topic of extreme sports, considering opening a Los Angeles guide service that walks you through a month on Skid Row. Escorted heroin addiction. The complete package will include starting out living in a van that will be confiscated by the police in a midnight raid while you are suffering from food poisoning. The police will club you and mace your eyes while you plead for medical attention. You will wind up sharing a cardboard box with a lunatic, wearing unisex pajamas in 30 degree temps and rain. Why not? Driving the Pan American Highway is a breeze compared to living on the streets of Austin where I was a false move from either being gunned down in the street, wrongfully convicted of murder and executed, or mugged and killed, not to mention heat stroke. The stress was very high and there was no Embassy to call for relief, the chance of 'disaster' was also very high. And if someone paid me $65K for the chance to spend a month living in 125 degree heat, dodging pimps, meth heads and trigger happy cops you would be right to call them crazy. One day I lugged 200 pound sheets of masonite into a church attic for 10 hours, tore all the skin off my arm, ate a single uncooked Ramen noodle packet for my entire calorie consumption, and earned about $22, which all went in my gas tank, and then was interrogated by the police for an hour with guns aimed at my temple, while they tried to get me to do something suspicious so they could arrest or execute me. Believe me, after my work day there was no fight left in me. I sincerely didn't care if they executed me or not and the cops eventually went back to their bat cave. Only after I navigated all those dangers could I sleep in the 120 degree oven my van had become during the day. Yet, there are no guide services for this 'urban challenge sport' and equally crazy people who pay $65K to climb Everest get a movie made about them when they die. That makes no sense. I survived a hellish situation in Austin and Corpus Christi for 5 months and for a small fee I could lead you through a similar experience. If Everest is a Summit then why is it not popular to plunge to the depth of social decay and survive? Los Angeles just declared a state of emergency because of 25,000 homeless people dying on the streets. Don't you want a chance to be one of them? I don't get it, but I'm not conventional so I guess I'm biased. I also accept the fact that some adventures must surpass any rational limit, at some point we reach a do or die, safety limit and keep on going anyway. That seems to be the lesson of the movie: rarely is your goal easily achieved and sometimes you have to die to reach a summit. But you will die knowing you reached the summit and if it's that important to you then go ahead because you'll die eventually anyway. That's what Mallory thought.

The movie is interesting but they all chose to be there at 8000 meters and their choice puts many people at risk for their mistakes. They all depend on an army of locals. They leave behind trash and shit and frozen bodies in a wake of destruction following their summit attempt. What kind of person would do that? Nature lovers? No. The kind that would later claim to have "Climbed Mt. Everest" Sure, you climbed Mt. Everest like I built my car. Fortunately, the dead don't ask for sympathy, so I don't have to have any. I'm selfish, I cultivate my own private goals and hobbies, but at least I admit it. But I also try to limit the imposition on others. When I'm asked if I will drive to Chile in my van I respond, "The question isn't if I can make it; the question is how many Bolivian potato farmers I want to inconvenience along the way." The answer is zero. I think a Bolivian potato farmer has enough challenges without taking time out of his day to help me find a distributor cap or help me through a parasitic attack. And since a trip to Chile in my van will not only cost around $7K, it will also inconvenience dozens of innocent people unlucky enough to live along the route I choose, I think that kind of trip is not going to happen. Better to take a bus or motorcycle.

There was a time when the peak of Everest was free of conceited and selfish assholes, but it's safe to say that time has passed. This movie is both a fittingly garish/lavish tribute and commercialized memorial to those selfish, conceited assholes who now seem to be the only people capable of reaching the summit.

We were just minding our own business...