What was I just doing?

I must be losing my touch. I ate a $12 lobster roll and didn't make a video review of it while there are half a dozen reviews of me eating crappy pizza and meatball subs. Not that the Sanders Fish market over by the mill pond needs any help getting New Castle homemakers with platinum cards to walk in their doors. Last time I was in that joint you had to bring your own newspaper and they would throw your fish at you and if you caught it then you took it home. Today it felt like I'd entered one of those boutique shops in Santa Monica that wouldn't let me use their bathroom. But Lobster Jr. gave me the local/hobo discount and even let me eat at the table with my fur face scaring respectable customers into the street when I leered at the pretty socialites planning their memorial day lawn brunch. Next time I'll do a proper taste review because that lobster roll was so good I almost forgot it used up my entire grocery budget for the week.

In other news, Mr. Chicken Farmer taxied me to and from the auto parts store for the final air filter I'll need to buy for my van before going to Labrador. We were supposed to go to the bank but we were so distracted by witnessing a car plow through the Fleet/Congress intersection that we were like, "Let's go to the bank and then...Look! That car just mashed that sign! So what should we do now? Let's get some chowder!"


My attention span is so short if I'm not actively typing then I have to remind myself what I'm doing.

If anyone wants to help scrape and paint the fire escape to my apartment I'll buy the beer.

P.S. Memorial Day is the day we recognize the deceased soldiers. I've seen bumper stickers that say "If you love your freedom, thank a soldier." Even though I don't know what America stands for anymore, I can't be a thankless hippie. Any other country would've silenced me long ago. God Bless America!

Oggy Revisits Old Haunts

Caught between a rock and a hard place. Fort Stark almost had another shipwreck to add to their exhibit.


This little guy needs a drink.


Stairway to Heaven


The Little Goose store became an architect's workshop. They got tired of the greasy spoon next door and hit the road. Maybe Oggy will open it back up as a nostalgia museum where people will come in and he will expound on life growing up as a young man on the Seacoast. "Blah blah blah, in 1985, blah blah blah..."

Someone said, "Hey look. Osama Bin Laden is playing tennis and his serve sucks!"

All Systems Go

The saga of the 1969 E-200 Econoline camper conversion van has the latest chapter to fill in. Let me say that a more user friendly van has not been manufactured in 30 years. Either that or I have bonded with this van in an uncommon and unnatural fashion that leads me to believe we were twins separated at birth 40 years ago, perhaps in the mineral deposits of New Mexico that aided my gestation and enabled the refineries to forge from steel a chassis of strength and spine of relative weakness, the van receiving the abundance of benefit from the earth and Oggy receiving a bastardly, niggardly share of heavenly porridge leading to his limping gait and ragged dragon breath. (that was my weak attempt to write like Herman Melville.)

So, the van was buried beneath 7 feet of snow this winter for 5 months, from December to the great thaw and beyond. My goal, as you may have read, is to take this van to the end of the earth in Labrador and from there steal or con someone into taking me the rest of the 3000 miles to Ellesmere Island where I will gather information on the imperiled Arctic Wolf. The Arctic, if you've been paying attention, is melting faster than a peanut butter paradise ice cream from a Somersworth ice cream stand on a humid day in the Granite State. The window dressing I have chosen to disguise my adventure involves my being sent back in time to warn people of the drastic consequences to their heedless resource consumption. I don't even need to do this since the future has happened in Missouri and Tenn. these past weeks. To this point, my strategy has only alienated everyone I've met, gotten me kicked out of Canada and failed to interest several charities and project promoters. If I insist I am from the future then I will be alone in my endeavors. I GET IT! I could no sooner convince my host in St. Louis to recycle box board than I could get Al Gore to give me a piggy back ride to the North Pole. Waaah! No one RSVP'd to my pity party.

So, I'll give up and get a job at WalMart, right? HA! No, I will take my bag of tools to Stratham and dive into my van like a man possessed. Hasn't been started in 5 months. Two dead batteries. Flat tires. Rusting spark plugs. Oil like axle grease. No Problem! This van speaks to me as to a long lost brother. What ails you?

I inspected the plugs, the wires, the points, sprayed the carb, took the air filter off, primed the intake manifold with tender kisses of my silky mustache. There was no point in trying to start it alone as the lights flickered weakly and my brother had already given it a shot back in February to avail. So, even though the rain fell in buckets on my head and shoulders and the lightning struck the trees and fields nearby with regular violence as from the ghost of Ben Franklin calling out to us from the grave that we have awoken a demon with our ape-like tinkerings with electricity and other magics better left to Zeus and Poseidon. I drove the car to my van and hooked up the $2 jumper cables I bought in a flea market in Mexico. I tried the ignition and heard a clicking like cicadas in the Ozark hills. So, I knew that this meant a connection had not been made...and I went back out into the rain and readjusted the jumper cables receiving shocks and threat of death from lightning strikes.

"God damn ye, devils from heaven!" I cried though no one could hear as my brother would apparently melt if hit by water and all of New England has become sissy with fear of weather touching their furless members.

But the readjustment finally worked and the engine roared like a dragon, my brother, my steed, my faithful chariot! Then it died with a cough and cry like a meek child in the oncology ICU.
But I shocked it to life again and gunned the engine because this van would arrive one day in Labrador and bring me that much closer to my wolf cousins.

It idled and I disconnected the cables, receiving another shock from the 12 Strong Men that Thomas Edison unleashed on simple Oggy apes.

The van would soon die again but I was satisfied with my daily allowance of volts so I went home after searching fruitlessly for a journal entry in one of 40 chicken scratch journals I wrote in the summer of 1997 or 1998. 13 years ago? I did laugh as I came across several letters I had written to a former girlfriend while she was in jail. They were all marked "Return to sender" hahahaha...and I read the start of one, "Dear XXXX, I love you so much...." ahahahahahah (crying on the inside). broken hearted and she preferred to turn tricks under the roller coaster for small candy colored rocks of crack and threw Oggy out with the trash. Dozens of returned letters stained with codependent tears.

So, I gave up on finding the poem lest I awaken other ghosts of my past and returned the next day in another torrential downpour worse than the day before. Another lunch of 12 volts and I had the van under my thumb again with a belly full of the go juice squeezed from the blood orange knows as a Kazakh child's heart and away we went, unregistered, uninspected, leering like Aqualung in his tattered overcoat at pretty panties and dead squirrels and rodents in the wet street. Police too fearful of his hulking highway leviathan to pull him over though no decent society would allow him free travel. Oggy, the wanderer, was back on the road, free of nagging and judgmental Suburb Borgs who would speak to him AS THOUGH HE WERE AN EMPLOYEE IN THE JOB CALLED THEIR LIFE. No, that will never do. Oggy does not obey laws written by Indian killers.
The plan was to have the van inspected, change the greasy oil, pack the arctic weather gear, play some tennis and leave for Labrador. This time I will not tarry.

So, the inspection shop took in the van with a bus escape hatch and small wood stove with stainless steel chimney. In preparation, I even fixed the broken horn and checked all the lights...as if that would make a difference in a van with a wood stove in it.

Then I took my bicycle out of the van in preparation for a bicycle tour of the seacoast and was almost immediately run over by the chicken farmer's infamous lesbian truck.
I actually recognized the truck with the KTM enduro in the back and started to strain my arthritic knees to catch up when another car, IGNORANT BLIND FUCKING CAGE DRIVER cut me off and forced me into the dirt even though I was already in the bicycle lane.

I calmed down long enough to plan a day of work and reward with the chicken farmer.

The van passed inspection despite having cracked brake pads and not being registered and having a wood stove in the cabin next to a bed and huge wood chopping axe. Safety is not a word used in conjunction with this van. The workers stood around and smiled at the dinosaur. I gave tours and people took their pictures.

"Labrador?" they asked? "Where is that?"

"Well, it's north of Quebec. Then I'm going to visit the wolves in the Arctic because they are all dying as their habitat melts."

"No shit?"

"Yes, see, the atmosphere can only accommodate 350 PPM of CO2..."

Back to Portsmouth and to the city hall where an old lady who disapproved of my furry face immediately decided to flex her bureaucratic muscles.

"You can't have a vehicle registered here and not have a license from here," she said as she looked at my California license from ten years ago.

"But, what can you tell me about the status of this registration?"

"Nothing, until you bring me blah blah blah blah."

I snatched my paperwork back from her before she could confiscate them like a home room teacher taking my star wars photo cards away and telling me, "Oggy, you can pick them up at the end of the day."

Soon, I had my 1974 vespa ciao moped out of the dusty basement and she was firing on her one cylinder> I would take the Vespa to Labrador if I have to because the wolves are that important. The chicken farmer returned with eggs and a mission to the farm.

Off we went to chickenland to retrieve mislaid helmets, then back to Rye where snooty snobs shuffle service workers around like chickens laying screened porch eggs. Tradesmen who can not afford to live in Rye must commute to Rye to dig up hedges and install pompous stone walls in a reminder of what I saw in Santa Monica where proud Mexicans living 5 to a room in The Valley took the bus 2 hours to cut lawns near beach-side swimming pools where frail pharmaceutical widows drool on their false teeth and plastic tits. Now a carpenter has to be thankful to build some fucking addition to a house 50 miles away? You want this room a different color? How about I piss on the wall? Would that work for you? What shade of piss yellow do you prefer?

So, an hour of work accomplished by 4 PM, we fled the snob village, passing sweating and grunting laborers WHO ACTUALLY DO WORK FOR Financial SYSTEMS ANALYSTS who can't spell work. (God, PLEASE LET THE WRATH OF THE Abenaki Indian tribe wreck havoc upon these cowardly charlatan pencil pushing calculator lovers in their false stone mansions! What sacrifice do I have to make to you so a plague of hurricanes will wipe from the earth the political boundaries that enable such unjust defacto slavery?)

Not long after that we passed the menagerie of lawn ornaments on our way to a hot dog BBQ in a mosquito swamp near Berwick.

Most of the time was spent searching the dirt for a missing seat mount bolt but I was glad that not too much had changed because it was already a little shock to have a day with the chicken farmer that didn't involve a toxic scorpion bowl at Kim Lai. If there hadn't been some unexpected crisis the whole friendship would've probably collapsed because I need fully functioning friends like I need a perforated heart. Although this friend, who also took these pictures, bought me soda and pizza and cooked me hot dogs and then I let him buy his own ice cream as he drove me home. He should've dropped me off in Rochester and let me walk 30 miles home with a "cheapskate" sign on my gullet. Next time, ice cream is my treat!

Then I return home to hunt for my DMV paperwork and finally find the stickers with my poverty-ridden IRS paperwork. This completes the saga. The van is registered. Inspected. Insured. Tucked in and tuned up. The wolves are literally hanging on for their lives in the Arctic and I feel a responsibility to address their concerns even if it means defending their dens with my beard and bad breath.

Orchard Thieves

Just to keep the record straight, here's an example of a gigantic book with some attempt to entertain the reader. Moby Dick is peppered with entertaining passages but a stand-up-and-applaud one can be found merely 4 pages into Ishmael's justification of his desire to go to sea as a paid sailor instead of a paying passenger:

"The act of paying is perhaps the most uncomfortable infliction that the two orchard thieves entailed upon us."

This guy slings his pen like a lion tamer. Calling Adam and Eve orchard thieves in a tossed off, pretty much expendable line is ballsy. If I wrote that line I'd be calling all my friends to brag about it, but old Herman Melville is just getting warmed up for 550 more pages. This is some gifted writing because the humor is focused on you getting the joke on your own rather than a big dance to get you to laugh or no laugh at all.

Ex:

"And, doubtless, my going on this whaling voyage, formed part of the grand programme of Providence that was drawn up a long time ago. It came in as a sort of brief interlude and solo between more extensive performances. I take it that this part of the bill must have run something like this:

'Grand Contested Election for the Presidency of the United States

WHALING VOYAGE BY ONE ISHMAEL

BLOODY BATTLE IN AFGHANISTAN'

Though I cannot tell why it was exactly that those stage managers, the Fates, put me down for this shabby part of a whaling voyage, when others were set down for magnificent parts in high tragedies, and short and easy parts in genteel comedies, and jolly parts in farces--though I cannot tell why this was exactly; yet, now that I recall all the circumstances, I think I can see a little into the springs and motives which being cunningly presented to me under various disguises, induced me to set about performing the part I did, besides cajoling me into the delusion that it was a choice resulting from my own unbiased freewill and discriminating judgment."

How is that for a long sentence? Go ahead and read it twice. I read it three times before I figured out what the hell he was saying and it's really a funny way of saying, "I wanted to believe I am the master of my own destiny but that's all bullshit."

And the list of grand design that Melville intentionally set in smaller type point. It's a joke that he's telling on himself in such a subtle way that I can already tell, 5 pages into it, that he's at the peak of his powers.

I like to talk about timing when it comes to writing. A book like this, 540 pages long, was written in less than one year in 1850. Written by hand on a farm in western Mass. In a situation like that he's got to be in The Zone when he puts pen to paper. I should point out that there's evidence that Melville met H. D. Thoreau via joint friend Nathaniel Hawthorne while in Concord. I see similarities in Melville and Emerson and Thoreau. The word "Providence" was used more by these three writers than anyone in history. If you can use the word "Providence" even once in every day conversation then you are guaranteed to impress people. They all must've been touched a little because no amount of editing or education would produce this kind of writing. It's pure personality shining through in every word.

I've been talking about writing my Santa Cruz book for a few years now. But there's a fluidity to my prose that I haven't mastered. Personal essays and political rants are easy but I want to combine that with a third person narrator who exchanges some of his bitterness for some of my wit. 500 pages get written fast when you write obtuse sentences as long as most paragraphs. When it goes on as smoothly as this then you don't have to go back and retouch it. Of course there is the awful possibility that lightweight first person humor writers like me have no business writing serious third person novels but I choose to ignore that until it has been proven.

If I'm stating the obvious that Moby Dick is well written then I apologize. I bow before his talent.

Icarus or Prometheus?

Joplin, MO is across the state from St. Louis so the Mosaic floor wasn't damaged. But I reflected on this tornado season in the Midwest and compare it to the deer slalom on I-70. Someone is going to get killed and some deer are going to die. It's unavoidable based on that configuration of highways splitting wildlife habitat in half. From a global POV we only inhabit a little bit of space but from the point of view of a deer or turtle we are the black plague come to life. A world class sprinter couldn't cross that interstate at midnight. It was an unbroken chain of trucks and cars in four lanes. One need only use their eyes to see that isn't going to last. In a similar situation the warming of the world is creating a abundance of rain in some places and a deficiency in others. However, when a group-think experiment gone terribly wrong is taking place then we've got Atlas Shrugged being released as a feature film the same year the climate finally fights back against the beating Industrialists like John Galt have been giving her for 500 years. I think that's a noteworthy coincidence because a freethinking person would've recognized the peril involved in drilling for oil, refining it and then burning it on a scale of 7 billion people.

I want to photograph a city street with 10 or 20 thousand silverback gorillas all walking to work with briefcases. "The world with 7 billion silver back gorillas" Because although we use far more resources than a gorilla our bodies don't take up too much more space. It's only if a silverback gorilla got his thinking so completely twisted around that he procreated beyond the capacity of his habitat and he started building higher and higher buildings to enable him to continually enslave poorer apes. The total earth population of gorillas is probably a couple thousand.* You could fit them all into Fenway Park. And they manufacture nothing but manage to survive and raise young'uns. And they precede us on the mammal tree. My point is that if there were 7 billion gorillas on earth devouring every resource and destroying the climate and only 10,000 humans all either in zoos or protective sanctuaries, what would you think? Would you think, "Boy, those gorillas are pretty smart." I guess we are the most clever animal out there in the sense that a virus can develop an immunity to empirical data. That takes a prolonged propaganda campaign of the kind to be found in Edward Bernay's book and Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand.

The debate for today is if we are symbolically following in the footsteps of Prometheus who stole fire from Zeus and gave it to mankind (a kind of forbidden fruit fable) or Icarus, who flew too close to the sun and burned the wax from his wings and fell to his death.

Anyone have an opinion before I tell you why you are wrong?

I think that without even looking into it very deeply the chances that mankind is lurching madly and violently, via wars and genocide and waste toward a utopia is very unlikely.
Atlas Shurgged basically argued that all waste, death, destruction, greed, and violence are broken eggs in the omlette of a peaceful and waste free world. Does this make sense to anyone?
At one time I felt that this was true because Rand used the most clever argumentation skill which is to propose the opposite. I've learned this one well enough to use it against her. She presented her ideal man, John Galt, a self-interested, guilt-free, emotionally independent free thinking electrical engineer. The short explanation she gives is that if this isn't the ideal man then let's examine the exact opposite characteristics and see if they hold up. I really applaud this method of debate because it plays with the mind and if well manipulated in her fictional world you can reach no other conclusion except that rational self-interest in the form of emotional independence is preferable to the co-dependent disaster that most of us live with. Of course. When given the two extremes the John Galt one is better. And if Galt is persecuted through the whole book not because of what he represents but because the failures of the world (me and you) can't even live with ourselves because Galt is alive, then he becomes even more attractive. Galt becomes the underdog and we identify with him even if we are at heart looters and mooches living in their father's attic apartment and driving his car for slave-made ice cream and buckwheat soba noodle stir fry.

That's the argument of the opposites.

But here is where I use it against Rand by saying, first of all, a utopia that is reached via genocide sounds PRETTY FUCKING SUSPICIOUS. Second of all, if conservation, humility and compassion are the trademarks of the self-sufficient Amish farmer and Kenneth Lay and Jeff Skilling are the embodiment of pure self-interest (persecuted because we are self-loathing moochers) then what is that utopia going to look like? If the maxim of your actions justifies unlimited use of planetary resources then isn't it possible physics will not accommodate your goals of a waste free energy source? I think the hell-bent exploitation of the planet has been fundamentally for the good of humanity...the pursuit of waste free energy, long life, human knowledge centralized in one globally accessible location, mattresses that don't burn when your crack pipe turns over, etc. Ok. So, we've gotten a little off track with toys and gadgets and multiple cars so movie stars can go in circles to a studio. See, none of this is part of the equation/resource budget plan. It's all frivolous but the waste is concrete and the consequences are real.

So, you might look at my life and say it's unrealistic. Low resource ride sharing mass transit hell. What good is it doing? Who knows? Well how realistic is it that the resources of the planet will only be used in critical operations? It's ludicrous, correct? But, the equation Ayn Rand's giants of industry map out demands that the resources be used exclusively for developing certain improvements. The finite nature of our natural habitat absolutely requires a very tight budget when it comes to resources. VERY VERY TIGHT BUDGET. Go on a trip to Labrador with me and you will know the meaning of a VERY VERY TIGHT BUDGET. Because if my budget gets stretched even a tiny bit I KNOW that Ellesmere Island will never be reached. This is as close to a privately funded moon mission as I can get. There is a point I will reach where there is no return and there is a point I will reach where there is no going on. My destination is close to the North Pole. It's going to be down to the pennies and fingernails. I know this. And the place Rand's theory falls apart is where she almost guarantees an oasis of peace because "the great minds will prevail" but she is assuming resources are so unlimited we can frivolously waste them in pursuit of video games and nothing will happen to impede our progress like a tornado six miles wide.

I already know Rand's defense of our planetary exploitation: Someone will make a tornado-proof house. That's the basis of her philosophy. Humans will adapt to anything because a free thinking, guilt free John Galt will always find a way to adapt. But the theory breaks down when the John Galts of the world ARE CAUSING THE NEED FOR THE JOHN GALTS OF THE WORLD. We're not at the mercy of nature, we're at the mercy of unnatural disasters caused in the pursuit of streaming video. The Amish don't need John Galt and they aren't fucking everything up. Their solution to tornadoes will probably not include geoengineering...which will be Galt's first plan of attack...because he's so smart.

This isn't a well thought out essay so don't feel bad if none of this makes sense. Years ago, I tried to write philosophical essays and, speaking of conservation, managed to take 5 pages to say a page's worth of arguments.

I guess if everything but the environment were progressing smoothly then I would jump on Rand's ship and sign up for the solar energy engineer degree at M.I.T.

BUT LITTLE RESEMBLES RAND'S UTOPIA!

Did anyone read how there are 30,000 prisoners in California who have to be released? That's more than the total population of Earth's silverback gorillas! And they are surplus criminals! Jesus Christ!
And the general adaptability of mankind hasn't changed at all. All that has changed is our means of communication. We have almost 3 million people in jail in the US alone. What possible utopia is going to exist with 2% of the population going to jail?

There's a fundamental flaw in the ethics we're being taught and my mission is to find it and change it. Right now you could say we've exchanged a stable climate for internet access. Rand suggests that's a fair trade but she's exercising control over all the other inhabitants on earth which, I think, negates any positive accomplishments. Otherwise, you have a pathological pursuit of self-interests provided you disregard the existence of anything else living.

I have an affinity for the Kogi tribe. I think: How will this affect the Kogi living on a mountain-top in Colombia? And if I suspect it will affect them negatively then I must change my course of action. And I will end with this question for Ayn Rand: If I suspect my actions will hurt the Kogi and I do them anyway then what kind of a person does that make me? What value does anything I do have? And if I don't even consider the Kogi then I'm not an ethically thinking human and have already joined the worst company in history so there is no argument to be had.

*It's less than 50K or about the capacity of Angels Stadium in Anaheim.