Oggy Reports From The Year 2030: "Clim8 change ain't cool!"

The basic message (if you can't understand me over the wind) is that the climate in 2030 is terrible and I've traveled through time back to 2010 to alter the course of history. PLEASE LET US MAKE ENORMOUS CHANGES TO OUR LIFESTYLE is the theme of my mission. For the sake of the wolf.

The climate has to be protected and the scientists who sent me here decided that the best way for me to relay this message is to go to Baffin Island to visit the Arctic Wolf for a Man/Wolf summit meeting. Politically, the United States is a total fraud with elections deciding which thief will steal the most money. So any changes will be from the bottom up and if you are reading this then you are on the bottom.

If you think the state of the world is bad now then let me tell you it is even worse in 2030 where a reincarnated Michael Jackson is Secretary of Defense and reruns of Jersey Shore are worshiped like the bible. Osama Bin Laden is still running amok but in 2030 Afghanistan has the climate of Brazil so he wears bermuda shorts in his videos.

The lessons we learned is that anything is possible and everything has a price. Most people understand the first part and ignore the second so my mission is to demonstrate that price. 350 ppm of CO2 is the limit. In 2010 the concentration is like 380 ppm. In 2030 the concentration is 520. We can avoid that future even if it means I'll be erased from existence.

What I learn along the way depends on my ingenuity and your curiosity. There is no where I won't go to educate and illuminate.

Is the converse true?

If I can't have a bad day in Bell Bottoms does that mean I can't have a good day in plain beige cargo pants? I tested this theory today and let me tell you it was a shit storm from start to finish with the bulk of the abuse laid on Oggy's wallet and lungs.

Awoke to the smell of latex paint and fumes from the painting going on near Oggy's bed. The guy was trying to get work done around my old socks and dirty thoughts.

Next step was to ask advice on how to assemble a pedestal for my wood stove. That's right. It went from a simple stove to a damn set piece from Citizen Kane. Now who is the Pharaoh? But all the metal came from the Wentworth scrap and salvage yesterday where they gave me the stuff for free because I was wearing plaid bell bottom pants. The guy next door who trades penny stocks and counts his nickles and memories all day advises me that the plate metal is no good for my 23 pound stove. "It's flimsy," he says as he leans his 250 pounds of impacted fecal matter on my pedestal. No shit! This isn't true but he thinks so in his bulldozer dreams. The other guy who nearly amputated his finger with a metal grinder laughs at it and says, "he don't want to listen..." which is a clear statement of ignorance and condescension which will always lead me to listen even less. That old bag up in Laconia said the exact same thing to me and she was very close to ending up in a carpet along with the scraps of aluminum heat sink fabricated from Vietnamese slave children. The only people who don't listen are others when I say that I live my life by a vast set of unwritten rules so complicated that I'm still trying to return to Alaska to pick up a piece of trash that blew out of the back of the pick up truck I was laying in as I hitched down to the Kenai peninsula to see eagles. But does anyone listen? No. I'm the stubborn asshole! Ok. Keep up the good work in the Gulf of Mexico. Maybe one day we'll light it on fire and eat cooked crab as they leap from the flaming water.

All of this taking place with normal old pants on as my damn plaid bell bottoms were so wet because the fucking rugs in my van are soaking from an ill-advised bath I gave them.
Yeah, I'll have clean fucking rugs when I freeze to death in Labrador. Idiocy. I'm sure all the Inuit villagers there would look down on me if my rugs were dirty

So, everyone has great advice about how to weld plate metal onto a platform except I've got a leatherman tool and a drill with no battery as tools so how to cut the piece is beyond me. So it is off to another scrap yard where a Maine junk man with a limp like a wounded moose gave me a piece of plate metal from the inside of the naval shipyard prison and with the screws I fished from the inside of a computer housing I think I can manufacture something ON MY OWN. Of course no one wants to help a guy in cargo pants so they charged my ass to take a piece of rusty metal from their bin. Great.

Then the fucking starter on the van starts making sounds like it is mixing glass marbles in a blender and all this reminds me of the traveler's adage which is, "Go. Go. Go." because if you tarry then the universe will close its ugly fingers around your plans and will laugh in glory as you fumble for recovery. If you can't solve problems on the road then you should just stay home and watch Jeopardy. But I can't leave with actual problems so now I'm fucked. Joseph Campbell said, "Follow you bliss" he didn't say "Watch your bliss fade over the horizon until it is out of sight and you have a broken washing machine and the parts will take a week to arrive," which is exactly what I did following the shitty advice of NASA engineers and car salesmen. Bullshit!

So, the starter is fucked...I've got moldy rugs...numerous rusty pieces of metal on the moldy rugs which are now as dirty as they ever were...$60 worth of stainless steel flex pipe that glowed devil red hot when I accidentally fed it particle board with toxic glue...the brakes are juddering...my bank account dwindles every time I go and flirt with the fake tan\hair extension girl with the nice ass at the BBQ shack...and I'm wearing cargo pants. FUCK!

Wish list:
plaid bell bottom pants for every day of the week.
pac boots size 10.5 good for -40 or below. preferably used.
remanufactured starter for 1969 E 200 5.0 liter Gypsy van
tall glass of vodka
new cartilage for spine
a sunny day SO I CAN DRY OUT THE RUGS
a cure for my eyelid affliction that leaves my eyelid skin peeling like a snake in the desert.


My quality of life index is proportionally related to my bell bottom pants index, which is also zero.

You can't have a bad day in bellbottoms

That's my new motto and these past days have proven me correct. It's like an Amish barn raising where everyone is contributing something to the expedition. the van may ultimately break down but this bit of community coming together to put me right is nice. Parts, time, advice. Even the bell bottom pants came from San Fran courtesy of the junk prince of Sunset.
Then I got some expensive stainless steel flex pipe. That's 6 feet of stainless steel and that's pricey. But it's going to work. Cut a hole in the roof and stick the pipe in, add some custom flanges and put the stove on top of a nice steel platform that I tracked down at wentworth scrap and salvage along with some other scrap metal. Man, what a day of dumpster diving and it reminds me that for 12 hours of arduous hole filing in my van passes by effortlessly as I am engaged and focused while five minutes of making harnesses or mailing hockey equipment caused me to have a stroke from anxiety and depression. I problem solve with the best of them but the first thing I ask is if the problem has to be solved. That takes a long time because unlike the engineers who developed the microchip I pondered for more than ten seconds the effects of vast amounts of mercury bombarding the water table. I guess the nitwits at MIT don't teach that in their classes.

All of this leads me to washing my rugs in Bell Bottom pants and playing piano at the clipper home. Man, there's only one way to get out of that place. All the joys and pains will fade into a foldout table and batting a balloon with a fly swatter while a kid in bell bottom pants plays The Entertainer. Maybe holding your grandchild for a few minutes. A woman there once played piano but her right hand was crippled by arthritis or stroke and the rest of her was due for a trade in too. So I played what I know. I was there to visit the mother of the lovely lady in the picture...


Note the plaid bell bottom pants and their proximity to a pretty woman. Coincidence?

I don't know if it is better to deny that we all eventually get too old to dress ourselves or if it is a good thing to embrace our final destination. Does it make me appreciate the life I have now? Maybe. I guess your ability to tend to your parents as they age and fall down and forget who you are depends on your personality and situation. They did give us life even if they were really just having unprotected sex, and they put up with incredible bullshit when we were running around and refusing to listen and cutting our foreheads and fussing about how the broccoli touched the macaroni and cheese and they fought bitterly with each other over who would take full responsibility of us when their ability to tolerate each other evaporated. They did love us at some level and after we could feed ourselves they didn't vanish but instead grew frail and ended up at the Clipper Home with a fly swatter in their hand as a balloon floats slowly toward a sippy cup.

Oh, I don't understand this fickle life, this long line of cars and music and arguments that all must end with death. Our damn culture makes visiting our own elderly family almost impossible due to space and time. I swear we should all just adopt another person's elderly parents that are close to our house and visit them and treat them like they were our mother or father. Like, it makes no difference to someone who can't hardly remember or move or see. They don't want to be forgotten but they have also forgotten how seldom they saw their own parents when they were 40 and had kids demanding socks and shots. There's a line in Rabbit is Rich, where Rabbit is reflecting on his age and place in life: "Rabbit can't believe he will ever be as dead as his mother in law."
And I interpret this to mean that Rabbit can barely remember her existing...and I guess outside of Rabbit's son and ex wife, he will be exactly as dead as his mother in law...just a ghost on a mantle in a black and white picture looking young and handsome, someone's whose effects will be cursed over, "Why did he save this?"

It's overwhelming to me in a hospice/elderly house with the frailty and decrepitude. One man was fumbling with one of those foldable cartons of milk we used to drink at school. His thumbs were working the opening and no one was around and his skin was paper white and green veins bulged on his glossy hairless back. There were remains of some kind of porridge in front of him and the milk carton had green substance on it from his lips. He wasn't completely helpless as he managed to open the carton but he couldn't leave the table without help. Where do you begin? He was probably a naval officer or a reliable mechanic or a jazz guitarist and now he fumbles with milk cartons. Makes me cry a bit.

I got a glass of water for the woman I was visiting and she held it in her bony hands and put a finger in the water so she could tell the depth of it before she drank it. That's a technique used by blind people so I figure her vision is fading though she did recognize me and even had a nice anecdote about walking downstairs in 1987 to find me sleeping on the couch with my eyes open. She raised like 6 kids and maybe the best way to honor her is to keep living.

At one point she said, "Look at those pants!"

Agism

You know you are your father when you abhor pop music. I think the chances that someone would choose to read Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse instead of getting stoned on crystal meth with your horny girlfriend and dancing in a glitter filled pool are zero. Hesse is going to be like the dead sea scrolls one day in a land of all night raves and drug wars.

Ke$ha is basically Madonna, whom I loved in 1985, so it is my prejudice that fills me with dread about the content of this video..in another song she rhymes "Famous" with "Anus"


Katy Perry had a tune covered on Glee (teenage visual crack) and this is the video for that...pure softcore porn. Something I would hesitate to allow my kid to watch but secretly jerk off my withered penis while watching. Keeping your music old is as likely as keeping your parents young.



But it must be modernized our pop culture and it is only good if a 40 year old balks at it. I want to embrace it but am horrified by it. If the climate is destroyed at least people will be stimulated and sex will be honored and humanity will blunder onward, leaving a wake of destruction, in pursuit of a teenage dream.
I do wonder how much of it is pure market manipulation by music production companies and how much of it is natural youth rebellion.
And for those who prefer to see us all succumb to the temptations I should point out that a puritan resistance/separtist movement IS ALSO HISTORICALLY NATURAL. So go screw yourself. You pick your side and roll with it.
Note: these songs may be stuck in your head for a day so proceed with caution.

I see your red label and raise you one more