Discovery Channel Held to Task

I was puzzled when I heard of someone attacking Discovery Channel. I suspected that the crooked media was at the heart of the man's problem but I wondered why target the Discovery Channel. The Learning Channel, with the disgusting Kate Plus 8, is a more deserving target. Or maybe even Kate plus 8 themselves.

The media has been on my mind these days even though I am trying to concentrate on my work now that I'm banking real money and almost learning some job skills. The media is, I think, our religion. It wasn't the plan when radio and television and movies were developed but that's the status right now. We worship media personalities like other people worship God and Buddha. Oprah, in 5000 years, will be seen as some kind of digital goddess who millions of people worshiped. "Her followers were known to eat sleep and conform to her standards of ethics and beauty," will be what future researchers will write about what is basically a gossipy Tupperware saleswoman.

Anyway, we worship cars and media. It's hard not to. I planned on taking one year to be media-free. Just to cleanse myself of my culture. I tried this in Mexico and about lost my mind. I describe it like you go on a trip and leave a trail of bread crumbs behind you thinking that you can always turn around. But one day you run out of crumbs and still haven't reached a destination so you think you can go a little further and still turn around but you can't. You get lost. And you are in limbo. That's what happens without the lifeline media or God gives. And that's where I stand today, rejecting the false prophets of the media and resisting the the sheep herd mentality of the devout.

So, for a planet of 7 billion people, we actually do pretty good as far as warfare. The media keeps us docile. Only poor people suffer and that's the way it should be. If you behave yourself and exploit the natural resources around you then you might make a buck. The chances are good you'll be dead before you ever see any effects of what you do. Or you'll be senile and it won't matter. So, it's September and 96 degrees. I drive around like everyone else and am appalled at the traffic in this little town. I forget there are areas where no one drives. It's easy to forget when you are stuck in traffic. But when you are on a remote plateau on the coast of Mexico it's hard to remember we've built machines that are perfect climate killers. Americans are now reliant on private transportation. Our lives can not function without a car because we've got to travel 30 miles in 25 minutes. But that's off the topic. The topic is media.

Now, the media is coercive like a hooker who needs heroin so bad she'll lick a man's dirty asshole. Lately, I've seen commercials where fat people stuff their faces and try to speak with food in their mouths. Like, that's acceptable. We've got girls selling their virginity to porn producers. I guess I'm a prude to think that's bad. I'm old fashioned. A romantic. One thing is for sure, we are now conduction a mass experiment on the effects of free access to humiliating pornography on an entire generation. I wonder if it will be good or bad. Hmmm...

It's all part of the media octopus that's impossible to escape. Television programs that manipulate people into sitting one foot from a screen to hear about grisly sex crimes, rape, torture, pain...then bang!....Eat at Wendy's!!! New Chicken Fajitas with fewer calories! Walmart sells jumbo potato chips FOR LESS! "Next on America's criminal perverts, a man who lured his victims to his sex dungeon...."
on and on 24 hours a day of media that is purely manipulating you into a pattern of fear and revulsion and jumbo fry relief. I'm pretty sure that our media could be considered a form of torture and sex crime if you analyzed in in the right way...but who wants to do that when the economy is suffering??

God, I can't be more sarcastic, can I?

Ok, so a guy finally had enough. He knows the media is literally enabling the destruction of the planet or at least distracting everyone from an obvious crisis environmental situation. Maybe he blames humans for being parasites and maybe he blames the media for manufacturing parasites...who knows...but he knows he can't live with the media and he can't change the world by recycling plastic bottles. So he straps some bomb to his chest and tries to get his message out in a more noticeable form than typing on a blog no one reads.

Listen, I've said it before that a war is going on and corporations control the media and control the minds of Americans. That can't be denied. The whole media paradigm is so poisonous that only a "free" country like America would tolerate it. We are manufacturing sexually deviant earth-exploiting consumers. If you break our media down it basically espouses godless, loveless sex and high calorie diet and irresponsible money management. And violence. I forgot that it glorifies violence.

So, it does have to stop. Absolutely. It must stop. It's a genocide from the inside out. The media is mentally gassing children before they can even speak. They don't stand a chance. No, it doesn't kill them outright BUT ONLY BECAUSE YOU CAN'T BUY THINGS WHEN YOU ARE DEAD. The media situation right now is bad enough that sensible people are reaching the conclusion that they have to defend themselves with bombs. Of course, so many people have been brainwashed that when you say "Humans are parasites. We have to stop breeding." then you can say, "That guy isn't talking sense. He's crazy." Yeah, crazy like 96 degrees in September and an iceberg as big as Manhattan floating south. Our lifestyles are completely over the top crazy and I really don't blame the guy for getting radical. It's time for radical action. It's too bad because if I was born 20 years earlier I wouldn't care and if I was born 20 years later I'd know it was too late. But right now I'm just optimistic enough to think something can be done to stop this insanity.

My father recently gave me his trademark advice, "Oggy, your problem is this: you can't save the world." Boy, it brought a tear to my eye knowing he was behind me 100%.
My response was, "Not with that attitude I can't."

I hate to make comparisons but I'm sure a kid in 1936 Germany questioned the Jews being lined up and given free trips on a train. And at least one father said to that boy, "You can't save the Jews." And that father would be what I call a coward. And that's basically what you are if you want to lay down and watch the media hijack the priorities of every person who comes in it's broadcast range just because the media is too big to fight. The media will defeat cowards every time. Definitely. Any asshole can tell you that. But heroes, people who stand for something and are willing to die for it, will prevail in the end. I know what side I want to be on.

I haven't figured out how to be media free and still complain about the media. I think I want to create my own media and supplant mainstream media with my own content. But how do I avoid the media? It's hard as hell. The guy who attacked the Discovery Channel stood for something. It is a war and there will be casualties. The best thing to do is organize a resistance that is big enough to defeat corporate media. Individual attacks don't accomplish much. We need to actually locate the source and go to work. That's not easy to do but that's what has to happen. Who is with me?

blindness

Walmart chicken cooked to celebrate the end of the Russo Japanese war. dry like the inside of a barrel of sand. chasing a neutral safety switch. or will rebuild the current one like a carpenter restores a blown out door jamb.
tired and blind we race rats throgh the maze. the pharoah took us out to drink on the ocean and we flirted with the stars. I left a trail of bread crumbs through the universe and it is up to you to follow it.

speaking of finding something. I'll buy a beer to the first person who can locate a neutral safety switch for a 1969 econoline E 200 5.0L van. The 1970 part doesn't work supposedly. I need one from a junkyard preferably so I can get the experience of taking it off before I destroy my own transmission linkage. Or a new one.
anyone?

Mt. Man

I'm taking a moral inventory. What step is that in the AA book?
I am trying to get my van legal. Fuckers at the chop shop are as smooth as cream when they are trying to get me to drop the van off. Vultures seeing dollar signs where my headlights are.
So I drop it off and blast back on my Vespa Ciao on route one to work another 11 hours. Then go back and it is all ugly attitude and nasty stares from the service writers. What is the deal?

"What's up? Why no sticker," I said after seeing my van with no inspection sticker.
The dude's attitude was terrible. Treated me like dirt. All condescending tone.
"Well, there are no reverse lights and the shift interlock system doesn't work so you can start the engine in all gears."
"Why would I start the engine in anything other than park?"
"You shouldn't."
"I don't."
"Good."
"Well, then..."
"It's illegal."
"Only an idiot would turn the key with the tranny in reverse."
"It's the shift interlock. That's all I can say."
"Are you sure it had one?"
"Yes."
"I'm not. I'm not sure at all."
Get it fixed and we'll give you a sticker."
"You're serious? Because I could start the van in reverse you want to fail it? Do I look like an asshole?"
"Bring it back when it's fixed."
"I'll never fix that. I'm sure they bypassed it for a good reason."
"And no reverse lights."
"There were reverse lights."
"Not today."
"Well, who cares?"

Everyone of the service writers were looking at me like I was dirt. I felt like driving my '69 van into their window and crushing all those fiberglass sports cars they display in place of their pricks. Some asshole with a baby blue Harley outside that couldn't get over a curb if you had an F22 afterburner thruster attached to it's ass.

So I leave with an attitude like I just threw $20 away on some bullshit inspection. And I go to the van and open the door and on the floor of the van are my Spider Man man panties* and...this is the worse, the goddamn YMCA brochure I picked up because I was pricing the gym and the thing is laying there open on the floor with two prepubescent children all grinning and innocent and wet from swimming and I look at the Born in the USA Springsteen ass and Mick Jagger's cock LP cover and the bed and the piss jug and I start to put the pieces together. I thought I hid all that stuff but now I see that it all fell out when they jacked it up. Oh, god. So, now I gotta be extra careful where I park? I'm sure they made one call to the cops. Guilty by suspicion. I feel like my unconventional lifestyle unfortunately shares horrible traits with transient sex offenders. This is not my fault but at the same time I am feeling the effects. These random events all add up to being public enemy number one.

* I purchased comic book adult underoos to prove a point that just because Walmart sells something does not mean it is a culturally relevant item. Everyone wants me to just accept that Walmart is there and blah blah blah but when I go in randomly and see adult underoos in my size then I flashed an idea that I would prove that yes, Walmart exists and I can't do shit, but adult underoos also exist and if you want to defend Walmart as being too big to fail then fuck you and this is what happens when you blindly accept the Walmart marketing plan. You buy adult underoos with Thor and Spider Man on them and become a laughing stock and police target. But they exist! Walmart knows what's best for me! I trust Walmart. Blah blah! Fuck them! This is just an example of my experiment in truth. NEVER TRUST WALMART. IT'S ALL POISON!

Living in The Walmart Parking Lot

My element is the van, on the move, I feel God speaks through me at that point and here I channel some kind of modern song Woody Guthrie might've written. You see, the world is always ending and always being reborn and my goal is to understand what I can about it. I don't want to be an expert at crimping d-sub pins but I do want to be an expert at what encompases my life. Thoreau talked about making an account of one's life. In 1846 that wasn't so hard. What industries does my life rely on? Etc. Well, in 2010 that's a damn hard thing to account for. I'm telling you that something feels wrong with how ignorant we all must be about the small details of our lives.
Ok, so I make the wires that belong in semiconductor wafer slicers. I can check that off. It's intolerable work. Only a man who is chained to child support or a disabled wife would do this job. Only a woman who is diabetic and can not walk fifty yards without hacking or quick smoking a butt would do this job. Maybe that is life with 7 billion people. Maybe we have to hustle and complaining does nothing. I feel that I can't expect someone to do this work, even if it means they have money to buy pot and get stoned and build wafer slicers. I believe this work is dehumanizing and it propagates an inhuman populace. It has to! There comes a point when living requires such complicated, foreign procedures that it's a house of cards. See? We're all relying on a thin slice of a card when there is the whole face of the card we are ignorant about. We put a key in an ignition. It starts. Is that enough?
Our day to day existence of taking the dog to the park or eating or reading suddenly relies on semiconductors and what do semi conductors rely on? Ion injectors? Argon? A gas that is heavier than oxygen so if you breath it your lungs reject oxygen. I'm troubled by these things I can't learn about in a lifetime. I can't account for my life anymore. There was a time not so long ago where a relatively educated person could account for his life. In fact, a poor person could definitely account for his life. In 1845 that person was Thoreau. Walden is his account for his life, what his life relied on at that time. Today, I can not write that book because it will take a lifetime to learn about everything my life relies on. And I don't mean reading about it in a semi conductor manual. I mean working at a semi conductor manufacturing facility. These days I'm further down the value chain so I hardly know anything about semi conductors. But I know that ion injectors and Argon come into play and those things would require more research. It feels impossible, like I'm chasing a rainbow that keeps receeding.
At first I was just singing about a lifestyle that sounds amusing to me. People living in the Walmart Parking Lot. Jesus! Is that possible? Yes, it is. I wanted to pay tribute to those gypsies and make fun of it. But as I listen to the song I realize that when I sing, "We're all living in the Walmart parking lot." I'm not just talking about the people in the vans in the parking lot of Walmart. I'm talking about society as a whole. Like, you all live in houses, but it's reaching the point where those houses are just suburbs of the Walmart parking lot. People living in their vans in the Walmart Parking lot are just closer to the source. You have to drive there; they can just walk out there doors and across the asphalt. So, is that where we are at? Don't answer that question. It's like the convict said to me at the aluminum factory: "Oggy, you only have to look with your eyes."
He was talking about quality control of industrial sized heat sinks but I like to use his words to apply to our culture because after a while your eyes adjust to insanity. You only have to look with your eyes to see what's happening. If you allow the media to distort your vision then you will see Walmart as progress. Our eyes have been poked out. This is a culture of corporate recklessness. I see children who don't stand a chance to develop their own ideas. Their minds are bought and sold from day 1. Propaganda is how to control people and right now I'm seeing a reckless race to the bottom. Media this poisonous can't be by accident. Please find some unconventional independent media to browse. Report your findings to your friends.

Dave

A Woman approached us and looked in Dave's trailer. She was hesitant because together we made a strange hobo team. Then she braved up and said, "Do you have my recycling bin?"
"No," said Dave
"Well, you took it from my yard."
"No, I didn't," said Dave. He was rocking a little faster than he had been a moment before. Dave rocks probably because the motion eases his joint pain. We've all found ourselves rolling our shoulders to make a pain go away. Imagine if that pain never went away. You'd just keep rolling your shoulders.

"You did. I saw it in your trailer," said the woman. "It was in your trailer and it was mine. I told you that you could take the bottles and cans but leave the bin."
She walked back to her utility vehicle. She as trying to be assertive without being too rude to an obviously disadvantaged person.
"It's not a big deal but it cost me fifteen dollars to replace it," she said. "That was kind of shitty."
Then she drove away.
Dave shrugged and said to me, "I use plastic bags. I don't use the green bins.



Dave was born in Vermont. He said he'd go back there if he had the money. He has no family there anymore but the idea of home always moves us onward.
Dave has rheumatoid arthritis. He takes darvocet for the pain and during the interview he had to wash some darvocet down with coffee from a reusable mug. He moved like I've seen people move who have had their spines fused.

Crossroads is full of people like Dave. Not everyone can get a job or navigate the labyrinth of social services. And when that happens they either go to the woods or get directed to Crossroads. I know what awaits me at Crossroads which is why I won't go there. Dave shook his head when I asked him to describe it to me.
"I wouldn't send my dog there," he said.
The staff is unhelpful, demeaning, domineering.
"They treat you like dirt," said Dave. "They don't want to help."

30 people per room. You must have a welfare or social service referral. Alcohol and drug tests are daily and mandatory. Lights on at 5:30 am, you must be out by 8 am. Breakfast is coffee and doughnuts.
"You're lucky if you get a doughnut," said Dave because the food is usually gone.


Dave was ticketed a few weeks ago. I was on my way to work and I saw the police dealing with Dave and I remember thinking that the story there was more important than where I was going. But I continued and promised myself that when I saw that guy next I'd get an interview. Well, the universe provides and he rolled past my van when I was eating an apple.
"Get some good cans?"
"Always."
"How about $2 for an interview? And an orange?"
"Ok."
"And pictures?"
"Yep."
Turns out the ticket was for scavenging. $124. Dave's income is $100/ week in unemployment and $64 a month in food stamps. He collects cans in New Hampshire and pays someone to take them to Amesbury, Mass where there is a deposit exchange. They make $100 a trip and the driver gets $40.
"You don't seem violent, Dave."
"I'm not. But an officer, the bald one, told me he was sick of seeing me around town. He wanted me out. Said he'd kick my ass."
"That seems uncalled for."
"Damn right."



He came from Vermont and worked at Exeter High School in the maintenance department. The first heart attack left him weak but he found ways to be useful at the school. The second heart attack earned him a pink slip. Dave's unable to work but social security denied his benefits.
"That don't make sense," he said.
"No, it doesn't."

Dave might go to Arizona because he has family there. It might be better for his joints also. But he said travel assistance would only get him to Manchester.
So he plans to keep finding cans and plastic bottles and selling them. He doesn't mind living in the woods since Crossroads is so unpleasant. You treat a man like a child and eventually he forgets what it's like to be a man.

He didn't ask me for any money. He even complimented my vespa ciao and gave me advice about the rooming house on Islington and how RV campers are staying at the walmart parking lot. This is useful advice to me since I'm tramping it now. He didn't smell like booze or swear.
"The economy is bad and getting worse," he said.