Crossings

Dear Students.

2008-09-04T10:15:00.000-07:00

Dear Students,
(an open letter from the prince of darkness)

The circular thought propelling this awakening student body into fervent, even heated discussion about a few small pieces of paper and their rubber counterparts generates in me a swell of confidence and personal satisfaction. Not only are you all chasing each other's tails, declaring free speech rights and sexual enlightenment, but you've also diverted yourselves from making a sound moral judgement on the topic. What could be more gratifying?

To support my perseverant mission to divert human behavior from good action, I find your contribution remarkably substantial. Special thanks to those business advocates that are creating a stir about the injustice of a business person being robbed of her advertisement fee. Truly, it is such a shame to see an honest woman's hard earned money be taken from her with nothing in return to fill her latex lined hands (a devil's playground.) And this red herring of an issue has kept a large portion of the interested parties distracted from my motives.

And of course, there are the cynics. Thanks to you, people are condemning the people who were in charge of the people who were in charge of the people that tore out those coupons. You doubt everyone, and your constant Get-to-the-bottom-of-this attitude tends to attract others to your conspiratorial ways.

But, I never could have done things without those free speech activists. Without you all, I never would have been able to get people to completely ignore the relevant appropriateness of a word, picture, or coupon. You have been at the forefront of the movement to disregard decency and replace it with flagrant, obtrusive arguments that protect a persons right, damn-it responsibility, to flood the media with my messages of violence and self-gratification.

Thanks to you, I worry less about the diminishing portion of society that seeks to act on behalf of what they call "goodness," "moral Righteousness," or "virtue."

My beloved student body, I would be worried that you might make a judgement of your own if you knew the truth. If you knew the meaning of self-control. If you really did see the results of your actions in the bigger picture.

Ninety percent of higher education students are sexually active.
Close to a million teenagers in the United States become pregnant each year. A number higher than that of any other country in the world.
In 2004, 586 human lives were lost to abortion in ada county alone.
One out of five college women report involuntary sexual intercourse.

This, and people like Bob Beers still adhere to a belief that american culture oppresses a woman's right to fornicate, claiming that "Society was able to defend against the desires of genitals by creating a system of values that demonized sex."

It is this pure denial and denunciation of those values that have made the United States a leader in my movement to burden the world with health, financial, ethical, and moral depravity by convincing them that they are enlightened sexual beings with a freedom (responsibility!) to indulge in the physical pleasures of the body without regard to the above stated physical, social, and moral ramifications.

It is my most esteemed desire to continue the desecration of all things good and wholesome in this world with you as my primary subjects.

There is truly nothing more gratifying than to know that the very people from whom I wish to steal a living essence and those who are helping me do so are one in the same.

With the utmost in sincerity,
Satan
AKA Beezlebub
AKA Lucifer
AKA The Dark One.

Waking Dreams

2008-08-07T08:44:00.000-07:00

It's that state of mind in between sleep and lucidity where you experience those strange, unexplainable things called dreams. It happened to me this morning. Just before I woke up, I was driving down a mountain road with my father. He let me drive, which is the first clue that this wasn't reality.
He'd just come to pick me up from a movie that I was watching with some friends, in some outdoor theater surrounded by nature, but still providing comfortable seating AND cup holders. The movie had a lot of animals in it, pigs mostly. It was something about pigs escaping from their pen by the assistance of a kamikaze gorilla.
I was there with Jackie, who was all together disappointed with the film. I felt the same way, but I was to be damned before I left without getting my money's worth. Anyway, that's not the point.
I was driving down this road.
The elk appeared as we turned the corner, and he was standing on two feet. He wasn't standing on his hind legs, but he only had two feet. And his head. This elk's head, it was antlers. Actually, they weren't even elkish antlers. They were antler's of a moose. But I was dreaming, so this was totally normal.
So this headless, two footed elk is some kind of sight to see and I slow the vehicle as we see another pickup ahead of us pulling over to the side of the road. The guys in the other car looked excited, moving quickly and pulling out weapons. They were poachers.
My dad. He hates poachers.
They used all manner of merciless weaponry to bring down this amazingly unique elk. A camera, as it were, doesn't shoot to kill.
My dad pulled his truck over (as he was driving now, because this is the stuff of dreams, completely incontinuous)
I know there was water by the road, and we saw a huge snake across the way, which was the elk, but in snake form. The elk-snake (snelk?) was dying.
We watched as the murderous poachers bagged their claim, turning away to look across the water which had grown crystal clear and calm. We looked at our reflections in the watery mirror.
My dad (the real life guy) is a man of humble wishes. His biggest aspiration has always been to live on a waterside property away from the noise and clutter of cities where he could explore the terrain all day with nothing to bother or interrupt.
In my dream, I watched as he stared up at the cliffs that rose above the water. The cliffs were bare at first, clean and natural. Then, as we looked on, they like...grew developments. They were these big apartment buildings that went in and out of the earth and eventually enveloped all of our surroundings, effectively fencing us off from the pristine land, barring us from entry.
He fell to his knees, my dad's head hanging in his rough hands.

***

The nature of dreams is unexplainable. They just happen and we don't know why. But when I woke up this morning, I remembered my dad. To see him in such despair, a truly hopeless state, chokes my heart. I said a prayer for him as I woke.

2008-08-06T10:44:00.000-07:00

A cooler two garbage bags of "luggage" and four folding chairs, shades, and the ubiquitous hawaiian t-shirt. The road trip has begun. a few left turns and a stretch of highway that passes the last gas stop for miles and we're officially stuck together for two hours. It doesn't matter how many times you've traveled, or who you're going with, but it seems that right at this point of no return you hear it. Four words that turn any road trip into a disaster.
"i"
The person speaking has declared their subject.
"Have"
With a second word we are getting nearer to a complete thought. There is a demanding situation erupting.
"To"
Please god. NO.
"Pee"
The words sink in slowly amongst the other passengers of the vehicle. Suddenly, the family has turned against their member for his lack of forethought.
The replies come at once.
Mom, "I told you to go."
Brother growls, and punches his sibling.
Dad pauses until everybody is finished. He knows his reply is the awaited ruling. Alleviation or misery.
The hammer falls.
"You can hold it."

***

"That cloud looks like a mouse."
I'm Riding in the bed of my father's ford truck with three kids on our way to a concert in the hills. The conversation is so stimulating.
"No it doesn't."
Of course, A brother will never let his sister be right, even in the matter of cloud watching.
"it Looks like a donkey," brother Devon Says with an authoritative air. he's the oldest and expects his statements to be regarded as pure fact.
` Sean, the middle child asks me what I think, but I'm too busy pondering the possibilities myself. DOnkey? I don't know, I don't see any legs. Unless the bunny ears that are now taking shape in my imagination are supposed to be considered donkey legs. And the mouse doesn't have a tail.
"No."
I've reached my conclusion.
"It is most certainly, a rabbit."
"What!?" All three of them have the same initial response and soon the conversation erupts into a firm argument.
I drift away, taking a different shape as the engine pulls us closer to our destination.

***

It's Time.

2008-07-25T09:45:00.000-07:00

Six Fifty Nine in the morning - My alarm will go off in one se... My alarm is going off
Was I dreaming?
How long was I asleep?
In the daily life of an individual, so much revolves around the clock. My cyclical lifestyle suspends from the long hand and the short hand, every second propelling me forward.
I wonder what this life and world would be like without the clock. Without this imaginary series of twelve numbers that are ruled by sixty of these seemingly arbitrarily denominated ticks, things would be different, perhaps more free. Imagine life without the boundaries of deadlines. No due dates. No bed times. In reality, it's impossible but it's not so hard to fathom in a dream...

This morning in the coffee shop. A boy and a girl sit on a comfortable couch they've become familiar with. She has work soon. The two lovers sit under the horrible scrutiny of the round disk placed ominously on the wall above them. They have fifteen minutes to enjoy themselves, yet many of them are spent in dread of the coming time.
In a dream there would be no clock. There would be only the single moment shared between two people who so obviously want nothing but each other's company. There is no fifteen minutes from now. There is only now. Right now.

People like me, though, never really live outside of the restrictions of time. Time, this invention created by man to keep things in ordered synchronization. It moves faster and faster. How does one move beyond these restrictions without leaving behind the obvious responsibilities of the modern world?

I'm a dreamer who wants to escape the sometimes pacifying restraints of modern life. I want to live freely without doing what other people to tell me. I want personal ownership of myself. If I could, I would escape to the hills and start my own life.
Like this guy I read about who took his family away from civilization and founded a kingdom in the South American wilderness. He just left one day, blazing a trail for his family and anyone else who wanted to join.
What I write is often related to civilization and it's absurd activities, almost always a frustrated rant about what man-at-large is doing to continue his life of constant consumption. So, it would be hypocritical of me to say that we should leave everything behind, but I just wonder why we think happiness is so far away. Men, especially those with power, are always so obsessed with growth. The day is always almost over, even before it starts and we're thinking decades into the future. We want to travel through space, conquer the human genome, replicate intelligence and secure a life of uninterrupted leisure.
Men are being shot into space with thoughts of a futuristic phenomenon that will reveal the truth of the universe, finally breaking open the eternal mysteries of existence.
What I see is a world that leaves the present in search of the future, and when they get back it's all history.

Dean's List

2008-07-24T09:29:00.000-07:00

After yesterday's post, I went to work with more frustration than usual towards our country's government and it's current economic situation. Fellow cooks and servers kept their distance as I grumbled about that movin' and shakin' fifties steady-goers.
Dean, our 64-year-old staple of the waitstaff, must have sensed my uneasy demeanor after the shift, because as I walked to the bar at the end of yet another sluggish night (it seems we feel the effects of a slumping economy in the real world too) he had already pulled up a chair and Jeff, the bartender that always knows your name, had already poured me a beer; Chimay in a half glass.
The conversation quickly moved from the sticky situation of an absent portion of ravioli to more personal exo-work topics. Dean, as I said, is very perceptive. Insightful too. It was refreshing to hear Dean tell ME about the housing collapse in detail I had missed.
In his sixty four years walking this planet, he had captured some experience beyond my own and was friendly enough to share some of it with me. He drew correlations of our nation's current situation to its history, which evidently manages to repeat itself quite quickly.
He compared the 1920's to the early 2000's, saying the invention of this magical thing called "credit" coaxed people into taking out loans to buy anything from brand-new refrigerators to those cutting edge contraptions known as "cars." Marketing was a brand-new, thriving industry and advertisers were learning how to work people, playing to our most human emotions.
And then, guess what, people got in over their heads and our economy fell into a major collapse, cue nineteen thirties.
Of course, Dean had more to say about the less intense recession of the nineteen seventies citing capitalist ideals of less government restriction inspired investors to dive into the deep end of market uncertainty in search of bigger profits.
Of course, I'm generalizing. Keep in mind that Chimay's alcohol content is close to double that of a regular draft and my embarrassingly low tolerance for the substance becomes apparent soon before I've finished drinking.
But the overwhelming similarities between the credit situation of ninety years ago, the ridiculous war of the sixties, and capitalist agendas to keep government restriction out of corporate rule, it seems three of the biggest tragedies and mistakes of the last century are recurring, this time all at once, at even grander scales.
So now that the capitalists of the seventies realized they had it all wrong when they kept government from stepping in and keeping them on steady reigns; now that they've failed to produce anything other than a mountain of money that was lost just as quickly as it was found, they're asking the government (and now doubt the taxpayers) to bail them out.
I am no anti-capitalist, but I am no fan of getting our government even deeper into debt when more ominous issues are staring us in the face. Social security is a lost-cause and the war in Iraq is backpedaling and still costing billions. This, while an ever-growing number of Americans ignore the idea that the dollar has nothing more than an imaginary value and the price of oil increases as the world market moves away from the dollar standard in favor of the euro (see Iranian Oil Bourse).
So, the house passed the "American Housing Rescue and Foreclosure Prevention Act," which extends an indefinite line of credit to mortgage lenders so they can get people to refinance potentially costing over $100 billion, says the congressional budget office, in taxpayers money that has to come from somewhere.
That's right, once the senate passes the act into law tomorrow, we will have clinched an unprecedented breach of the government and corporate boundaries. Corporate America and America are teaming up, passing monopoly money through a revolving door that no one else wants to walk through. The value of the american dollar drops to zero on the global market, and then what?
Dean in his wisdom expresses his worries. "What I think about, is the young people. I'm sixty-four years old. I've had a great life. But what about you?"
I finish my beer with soft eyes.
"I don't know."
"I really think it's going to be worse than what people are saying."
I can only shrug.
What now?

Sheltered

2008-07-23T12:06:00.000-07:00

The Giant Pool of Money

Fannie May and Freddie Mac sound more like a be-bop couple from the nineteen fifties than the two hugest US mortgage broker companies that own close to half of our nations mortgage debt. And after finding out about congress's plan to hand over $25 billion to these companies by buying their worthless stock and giving them loans to keep them from going bankrupt, it sounded even more confusing. Why should a greaser and his poodle-skirt gal get all that money?
Further research proved my preconceptions to be a bit skewed. Fannie and Freddie represent more than just era of pop culture. They are the very incarnation of the stereotypical corporation that goes around buying up everything they can in order to turn a profit for their white collared share holders.
These are the same guys that came up with the ingeniously designed "mortgage backed security." Which was basically a nugget of your mortgage turned into a stock share and then sold on wallstreet. An entire industry erupted to sell these securities, providing obscenely high-paying jobs for kids right out of college.
And when there were no more mortgages to sell, there were guys strolling strip malls in suits and ties, practically giving them away. They were called NINA (No Income No Asset) loans, and they were basically as easy as 1...
Seriously. That easy. "Can I have some money."
And the banks were like, "sure."
No credit check. No down payment. No job verification. Nothing.
Banks were taking loans out from other, bigger banks, so they could give people these mortgages, and then they would sell the mortgage to someone else, so they could break them up into chunks and sell them to other brokers. There was a ridiculously long and confusing chain of people who owned parts of millions of easy-to-get high-risk mortgages.
And then, imagine this, it became evident that people had been lying. People who had told the banks they were responsible enough to take care of a home, started defualting on their loans. It was happening at an alarming rate. Some loans defaulted on the very first payment.
The chain reaction was devastating. Banks couldn't give out mortgages, anyone who could own a house already had one, and nobody was buying. So when a mortgage worth $200,000 two years ago goes into defualt, the property value drops, people lose their houses and banks lose money.
And finally Freddie and Fannie are feeling the effects, begging for some a life preserver, asking our government to clean up the mess made by greedy number crunchers.
Congress's plan smells like socialism. And Frannie and Freddie are so heavy they could take our government down with it. What happens when a U.S. treasury bond loses its value, just like those mortgage backed securities, because congress decided to invest in a couple of falling giants?
Those two soda sipping, drive thru movie going bopsters should have cooled down when they had the chance.