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.

The One Duck Project

Thanks to a generous donation I am ready to get on my horse. I thought I was going north to Labrador but if you haven't heard the greatest man-made disaster in history has just occurred in the Gulf Of Mexico. It's the wetlands and estuaries equivalent of a full scale nuclear war. Remember that term "First Strike Initiative"? It was developed into Strategic Defense Initiative otherwise known as Star Wars. Boy, the military got their golden goose with Reagan, an actor too dumb to say no. Listen, this is a guy who got shot by Lee Marvin in The Killers, and he's agreeing to put laser operated defense against missiles...in space. Uh, are you serious? That's like putting me in charge of the first cavalry division in Iraq. "Ok, today we're going to kill the enemy...with pot brownies." It's laughable but it's part of American history. If there had been a military coup in 1980 we wouldn't have ended up with a worse person in charge. A teenage crack addict couldn't have been talked into contributing to Star Wars...but Reagan was enthusiastic about it. (I say he was dumb but he just understood good business.)

Anyway, the oil spill is like a preemptive attack on egrets and waterfowl in the bayou of Mississippi and Louisiana and Texas and Florida and Colombia and Venezuela and Georgia and Mexico and Honduras and Jamaica and Trinidad and Cuba. I don't have any live news available to me but the bit of research I just did on it and my instincts and knowledge of that area tell me this is going to be much worse than the Exxon Valdez spill. First of all, the Valdez hit the coast. It crashed just a few miles from shore on a reef so the spill was isolated. Of course it was isolated in some of the most isolated coastline in North America so that made the response hard, but it didn't have to deal with the ocean currents of the Gulf of Mexico like this latest nightmare.

I could be wrong but I think I worked for BP and serviced that oil platform back in 1993. I know I shipped out of Port Fourchon like every other dirty deckhand who worked off shore. The name of the platform, "Deepwater Horizon" sounds familiar. Maybe we just talked about it as legendary because it was gigantic. You could see those platforms for miles when the sky was clear at night, the blow off gas burning in the air like Mad Max or Waterworld, glowing silently in the distance as we crawled past under Orion's Belt, the captain smoking madly and scanning the radar while I daydreamed and ate chips. Most of the ones I worked with had pipe style support legs. This is Deepwater Horizon and it looks like a Transformer Robot. (I just read that it was built in 2001 so I definitely didn't do anything related to this former oil exploration platform)

Before:
After:


What's my point? Oh, that I'd like to go save a duck or an egret. Relocate the duck to another marsh in California or Texas. It's hard to guess where is safe but anywhere is safer than the coast of Louisiana. There's a page where you can read more and donate to the effort. Or you can just donate here.

Donations for The One Duck Project:

Looking at the satellite picture it's hard to believe there is a big threat. It's a tiny spill compared to the ocean. But looking at it from the egret's perspective it's very serious.
Secondly, I'd like to document the clean up efforts. There are pictures of the Exxon Valdez spill and folks are on the beaches in suits hosing the rocks. Well, my memory of the coast of Louisiana is that there are no beaches and no rocks. One second you are in the Gulf and the next you spot a tiny river going upstream and you aim for that opening in the marsh and the grass meets the ocean and you can look down and see the fresh water pouring out into the salt water and that's when you know you're in the river. There is no place to stand, no rocks, no sand, no beach, no land. I guess it will be like changing your oil on your lawn (a lawn that's four feet high) and accidentally spilling 5 quarts of oil and then trying to clean it up. Except the oil in this case is 170 miles wide and 10+ million gallons of unrefined oil and the lawn is 3000 miles long. Imagine oil covering this stretch of land near Fort Stark. Imagine the New Castle Harbor closing for forty years and every form of life dying there.


It's crises like this that historically generate the best ideas so there's bound to be some good that comes of it. Because it is so difficult to contain an oil spill and because my instincts tell me the dolphins and egrets of the Gulf unanimously oppose oil exploration I'd say we need to reduce our use of oil. But mankind seems to still be operating under a wartime mentality.

Like, are we being attacked by Martians and I don't know about it? Seriously. Please tell me if we are because I'd totally understand oil exploration if it were done in the name of protecting our planet from an invasion of gigantic flesh eating bugs from outer space. I mean, I'm not unreasonable. There is a justification for oil exploration...but making sure Lady Gaga gets to her next performance IS NOT A GOOD ENOUGH JUSTIFICATION. Shipping crappy petroleum-based toys from China to New York IS NOT GOOD ENOUGH JUSTIFICATION.
Please tell me there is a secret war against aliens that would demand we risk and destroy our environment to win...and that we aren't destroying our habitat SO WE CAN HAVE HAPPY MEAL TOYS AND NASCAR. Please tell me that's not the best reason we can come up with. PLEASE! Because I'll speak for the egret and say that doesn't cut it. If you are going to spill 10 million gallons of oil on my home then you better have a good fucking reason to be drilling into the earth. No, Hannah Montana video games DO NOT QUALIFY AS A GOOD REASON.

I keep thinking that it's like when you look at an ant swarm on your kitchen floor and you have no choice but to kill the ants and as soon as you kill a few with a foot or a thumb then the entire swarm instantly goes berserk. And even if you stop killing they will still be in high gear for hours. When I watched WWII by Ken Burns I got the sense that this was the biggest mobilization of people in history. It was the biggest war with the most deadly weapons ever used and in order to win it ALL Americans had to contribute. It was evenly matched and the victor would be the one who prepared better, who committed more resources to the cause, who was more courageous. That turned out to be America and England and Russia. The losers were Germany and Japan and Italy, but it wasn't for lack of trying. I feel like since 1945 Americans have been in a war time mentality...because it worked so well or maybe we are forever insecure. It also unified us and justified drilling for oil and building roads and houses and ships and guns and having babies. It was justified because our enemy was one or two strategic victories away from controlling all of Europe and Asia and Africa. But that was 1945 and the growth, this manic uncontrolled growth has not stopped...like the ant swarm after the first thumb of death. That's why I wonder if an alien isn't attacking us because that's how we're acting, like we're under attack and will stop at nothing to defend ourselves and utilize every imaginable resource to improve our defense. I guess you could say we are at war with every nation on the planet, we want to control all the resources because that will secure our NASCAR and HD televisions and computer networks. The egret is not really considered just like the desert shrew wasn't considered when they were testing the H-Bomb in Nevada. It's collateral damage...which is another way of saying a few desert shrews died so all desert shrews didn't become Nazis. You get my point. It's a leading question to ask why we are so careless with the egret's habitat. It's not collateral damage in any war. We're just careless and selfish and violent, neurotic and blindly consuming. It's the golden era of waste to dump 10 million gallons of oil on the last wetlands in America.



I was at Fort Constitution the other day and learned a little history. First of all, when it says "Keep Out! Military Facility! Unauthorized Personnel Prohibited" that means me.
Second of all, the fort was once Fort William and Mary, a British fort and the Winter before April 1775, when the minutemen of Lexington and Concord fought the Brits at the North Bridge, a general named John Sullivan (we named the big bridge after him) and a gang of insurgents went over to Fort William and Mary and jacked up the five surprised British troops there and took all the gun powder and such before reinforcements could come. It was the first recorded victory of the soon to be independent nation over the occupying home soldiers. The battle of Concord was the first bloodshed "The shot heard round the world." No one got shot in the battle of Fort William and Mary so it kind of slipped into the foot notes of history. I was thinking that we are a violent animal but that makes our acts of kindness so special.
Portsmouth Lighthouse and the walls of Fort Constitution.

Becky Beard: Friend of Fort Stark

She came from Jackson, Tennessee in 1961. Her husband was in the coast guard. She saw Elvis in Memphis in 1957 but someone had to tell her it was him. Now she lives on Rose Lane in New Castle as she has for 50 years and guards the fort. Full interview is on the way.