The Infantalism of Equating Brutality With Truth; a Brief Word.

Many if not most of us recall childhood dares, drinking pond water, burning cigarettes on our arms, sticking fingers through fences for angry dogs to bite, shit like that. Most fundamentally the ritual of dare is a common agreement to 'believe' that all randomly thought-up unpleasantries are necessarily and unquestionably a perfectly valid challenge to a boy's emerging manhood. Refusing to take on a given dare was bad enough, would get you laughed at for a weekend or so. But the more unforgivable crime by far was to call out the naked emperor, dare not to dare, point out that it was all ridiculous bullshit and everyone knew it. Such heresy gets one shunned and bullied for months on end; even a childhood entire.

As with the boy so with the man.  Those who most passionately denounce 'political correctness', who hold it to be far more than a silly neuroticism at worst, but as a uniquely menacing evil or historically extreme tyranny do not really believe these grandiose things they say.  They equate a willingness to condemn abstract strangers with heroic honesty because they have never outgrown the need to 'win' at invented measures of toughness, and they resent those of us who have achieved this particular maturity.  That would be the meat of what's it's all bout anyhow.

Fuck Twitter?

"Don't be a good German" yes alright. But where's the threshold?  When do you start making napalm? Burgling gunstores and heading for the hills?  Citizen internment camps? Alien internment camps?  What meaningful violations of liberty could there be when we willfully give away everything about ourselves for the illusion of being very important in the world?  When we use the barest scrap of what is known of ongoing events as pretense to grandly declare they prove our most basic beliefs or presuppositions? If you were to state out loud that individuals are not murdered or countries bombed for the sake of giving you or me a spotlight, that events do not happen for the sake of giving us something to comment upon, everyone would agree that of course not, don't be a fool. Still we act as if this is so.

Fascism does not require a sudden turn to the right among the general public, (or even for 'good men to do nothing' per se.) It requires only the same number of right-wing dicks as there ever are while everyone else treats belief as personal flair or accessory, a pretense for argument to add adrenaline to your gin at parties, the cheap illusion of being personal party to great events without truly sticking your neck out, emotionally I mean.  Of truly doing the work of presenting an ideal before the public which they may well reject. Not voting because it changes nothing and everyone all knows the system's rigged anyway man.

Understand that I'm not calling for any knee-jerk moderation quietism or wait as euphemism for never.  Nothing like that.  But the truth of the matter is that anything less then marching on DC right now with your provisional revolutionary council is in fact accepting the system.  This being the case you had might as well say fuck it and vote. Your side may lose, and whoever wins will disappoint you as they always have and always will.  This is a certainty. There will be multiple times between now and the day we die when this 'civic engagement' shall indeed seem as futile as we ourselves are, but I say again that you are already accepting this if you are not marching on the palace gun in hand.  There is no such thing as being above the disappointment while saying I told you so. We are of the disappointment.  Born to it.  It is not a thing that is subject to personal choice. 

And while I'm being all old man anyway might I kindly suggest that you give up the thrill of being party to global debate long enough to pay attention to local issues?  Because that shit matters alright?  Because at this point in time it is not the feds who most threaten liberty. It is town and state level governments who heap the most abuse on immigrants and minorities; who pass the most insanely open strutting white man gun laws while passing the most bizarrely esoteric restrictions on abortion and birth control.  The nutters reliably show up at every local election, (They are obsessed with assurance that they are the social norm) while we comment on the presidential pageant a full goddamn year before any votes are cast.  Most US communities have about two elections of greater or lesser scale per year. Show the fuck up for all of them.  Voting can be drudgery and there is again the existential depression of moving the wall six inches.  What of it?  The same goes for the shaving showering and laundering we do every day because everybody else does.  You get a free styrofoam coffee and everything if you do it so fucking do it.  And if you need to feel grandly inspired to pencil a dot and get a coffee than grow the fuck up man.

To get back to the threshold I confess I have no idea where it would be.  Part of me hopes that tyranny will be blindingly obvious in a 1984 sort of way because than there'd be little left to subjective judgement plus there'd be uniforms and all that cool prog rock shit. Seriously though does anybody know.  African Americans have in the main been incredibly patient with us, frankly more than Thomas Jefferson would consider worth the cost of peace and we all know the irony there. Should we be that patient, or is the rightful threshold for burning the fucker down and starting over again lower than that.  None of us know; because we're comfortable, and while some of us rural white men have family members who LARP as freedom fighting guerrillas none of us really expect that we'll ever have to do this.  I only know it's gonna be a fucking drag when Fyfe joins ISIS man because than the Feds are going to get all up in my business too and I don't even like it when fucking rent-a-cops get in my business. The world is a shit burden to have no doubt but still it is ours.   

There is No Rocky Mountain Way 3

In the morning we left in a jarringly quick way given the meandering night; stopping only at McDonalds.  Micheal was coming down from his adrenaline or maybe just non-sleep and handed me the wheel of his Grand Am just as we climbed past Park City.  He slept most of the way to Cheyenne and I drove through the Wyoming waste on a warm day with freakishly persistent greenery and a soundtrack of dudebro rot that did at least include System Of A Down who I dig fuck what you think.  The Wyoming stretch of I-80 was surreal as always; well filled with Denver-Salt Lake & Midwest-West Coast traffic in spite of the complete absence of locals.  The biggest city in Wyoming is this transitory snake, and I reflected on how much the pulse of my own North Platte Ne depended on passers through on the interstate or UP railroad.

I reflected on this even more when we stopped in Rawlins for gas and lunch; and also so Micheal could go on Craigslist and attempt to trade his Grand-Am for an RV on the spot. It was very quiet and there was wind.  He found no local biters but did make a potential contact in Sheridan.  I informed him that this was very far away, and this disappointed him, though Very Far Away means nothing in Wyoming and I'm sure there was a childlike vagueness in his understanding of what I meant by it.

There were two TV's in the truck stop. One played a high school football game from somewhere in the Wasatch Front suburbs. We had crossed millions of acres to reach a point where Salt Lake was still The City.  The other TV played pro rodeo because of course. This however was quickly replaced by a Broncos game.  It was Sunday; the place with the lonely locals one finds in any rural truck stop, trying to live vicariously though eccentrics between cities; two dollars a pop for the right to loiter.

The warmth held until Laramie. There I saw the fog over the last mountains before the plains returned and considered taking the 2-lane cutoff towards Ft. Collins to avoid it. But on the other hand fuck that shit because driving through fog is awesome. I used to find it intolerably frightening but now I find it awesome.  The climb off the Laramie mts; a stray arm off the westward veering main trunk of the Rockies, is always Tolkienesque and of course even more so now with all this dope-ass magic mist about. I could see well enough to maintain emergency-brake space from our neighbors and maintained a speed of about 70.  The fog kept all the way down to Cheyenne and it was so sweet; except it was 45 degree when we got there, and I was in a t-shirt. 

At night, when one comes into the only settlement larger than a village from eternity away, the lights of Cheyeene look impressive. On this gray day on the edge of town it was the raw, isolated grimy and mercenary aspects of the place that shone through.  Micheal needed to take a leak. He limped in fact from the pain in his kidneys and spoke of visiting a hospital upon reaching Denver to have them checked; though this plan was later forgotten in his word salad of calling women, making jokes about sexually humiliating women and so on and so forth.  I was worried about the temperature for when I reached the Denver streets though I knew the South Platte Valley forms a protective bowl between the mountains and high plains for its downtown.

It was sunset by the state line and full dark by FoCo. Micheal was wide awake now, his dude bro ipod replaced by local pop radio that he took to at a level which surprised me.  He inquired me about the Colorado weed laws and when I informed him that you can't smoke & drive or smoke right there on the sidewalk etc he seemed angered and expected me to explain these outrages. This I could not of course do.  But I did point out that one could after all walk into a dispensary and buy precise measures in sealed jars or fantastic forms from professional handlers to openly own for oneself, and that this would always feel liberating for any smoker over twenty five. These professionals to be sure are occasionally still a bit self-consciously smug about being such. A few are as obnoxious as a 90's acupuncturist or microbrewer.  Denver has always been a magnet for such boutique snobbery though this is a forgivable trifle in the end. Micheal asked me where the dispensaries were and was strangely disappointed by my answer of everywhere. 

We arrived on the city along the Park Avenue spur into downtown. Micheal barely avoided homicide while both trying to drive through Bronco fans and chatting with a woman in Golden who wanted to meet at a hotel. He'd forgotten about seeing a doctor for his kidneys and was back to perpetually dosing himself with soda, coffee and adrenaline with no actual water. He had trouble finding a parking spot and seemed to blame me when he wondered into a mildly shady looking hood along 24th Avenue. I reminded him that I was interested in the weed farm job he had spoken of and he'd said that he would have to wait three days now as we had arrived late. I recognized the shiftiness of the answer though I did expect it mainly.  I told him to call me in three days then which I did not expect and he has indeed not called to this very now.  We have parted ways and perhaps he himself was conned after all.  Perhaps he is dead; eaten by matriarchal pagans, it happens sometimes.

I found some fellow travelers on the 16th Street Mall. Dusty clothes, bandannas, pocket knives, face tattoos, dreadlocks dogs and donated food. Hippie and punk mated into one twenty-first century being; a union of American streams as old as Natty Bumppo. I chatted them up on the knowledge of survival here and they were good folk happy to help. They gave me a dab of hash which was very strong and along with a pint of PBR I had bought I soon found myself lost in a city I was not unfamiliar with. In my haze I had forgotten that the downtown streets here are slanted at the angle of the river while neighborhood streets are terrestrially straight. Even in the dead of night it was at least much warmer than it had been in Cheyenne, the bowl was doing its job.  I wondered past the Co Capitol and the Greyhound station and the theater block four or five times before finally finding the traveling crew again at about four in the morning. They were happy both to see me and to share a blanket.    

There is no Rocky Mountain Way 2

Michael does adrenaline.  He smokes weed and also does adrenaline though he doesn't drink.  As a child he nearly died when he learned of a food dye allergy by eating it and was prescribed an epi pen to carry about.  He took to it and was soon buying black market epi pens for fifty dollars a pop while selling a few of these on the side to make ends.  He assured me that it's good for you and perhaps the man is able to survive a longer drowning or more massive blood loss than you or I could.  I don't know.  I do know that he's a very chittery and scatterbrained man and that we didn't make it out of Salt Lake that night. 

Michael wanted to go to a strip club before leaving because he heard that they were forbidden in Utah.  Which isn't true though they are harassed discouraged and rudely zoned, same as in other conservative states.  So I directed him to a place on South State that I had noticed, I forget the name.  It was a decent club on the tolerable side of depressing and with its own house DJ.  I drank well gin while Michael drank coke.  He told me he had orders from his prospective employer to find one man and two hot women for work at a pot farm in the mountains of CO, near Georgetown.  I told him that I couldn't find the women from where I was but would gladly offer my own labor.  "So you're coming then" he asked me and I said yes. 

He had been unaware that the fastest way to Denver from Salt Lake was through Wyoming.  He asked me if Wyoming was dull and I said that yes it most certainly was, and we'd be driving through it in the dead of night furthermore which disturbed him.  After this we went to the rear lot to smoke weed.  The police showed up in two cars with lights blaring which led Michael to throw his bracelet sneak-a-toke over a wall and run.  He later told me that the pipe had cost him eighty dollars but no it didn't.  The police had come for a fugitive.  An assault with a deadly weapon from somewhere out in the Mormon desert who had decided to hit up the club.  The cops were done with their business and gone in five minutes and there was little for me to do but to stand by Michael's Grand Am waiting to see if my ride out would return.  After about twenty minutes he did return just as I was about to take my money and go, and we got in his car and rolled away. 

The incident left Michael scared and very agitated.  So instead of leaving he followed his GPS to a truck stop on the edge of town where the freeways to Vegas and Reno mate.  There we stopped.  I slept in the back seat while he mainly smoked outside; wondering inside the main building and out again all throughout the night.  Next to us were ski-kid looking folk from Sacramento except it was too early to ski.    

There is no Rocky Mountain Way

On account of being less than honest about my ability to pay the Ankenbrand sisters left me Shanghaied in Salt Lake instead of on to the northwest. I feel guilty and hope that Becky does not remain angry at me for too long.  It was delusional and rotten I know but still I did need the journey and now I have it.

On the first day I went to Salt Lake City's excellent library with its shops and its street performers and its three hours of free internet.  There I put out a call for a rideshare to Denver figuring that making it so far as that with its easy connections to Nebraska would be two thirds of the battle.  Or perhaps I could tap into the remains of my cousin's drug connections while there, for I was lost and free to do anything.  I had a mind to be home by Thanksgiving at the latest while part of me realized that if not than what of it?  Later I made ten dollars watering doomed October plants for a woman who drank coffee in a thick bathrobe on a ninety degree afternoon.  She was Janie from Oregon and she ran a Quizno's.

I'd heard that Salt Lake City wasn't nearly so Mormon as rural Utah but still I had my lingering stereotypes and up to a point I was pleasently surprised by the place.  Salt Lake proper is in the main a groovy western city of a similar feel to various Cali or northwest cities.  There are plenty of hip eateries & bars, and the mountains that surround the city covered in a medieval fantasy of cloud at most times of the day.  Still Salt Lake does have its disappointments.  Brigham Young's original plan of wide streets and big blocks laid the groundwork for suburbanization and the car long before either existed as such and the city cleary does suffer from the mass suburbanization of the Wasatch Front.  Rough neighborhoods ring downtown in every direction but the east towards The Avenues and Utah U.  The south and west sides are particularly poor off with the west side reminding me so much of a big North Platte with its wide lots and unkempt yards as to annihilate my illusion of time.  Salt Lake has vaguely countercultural themed shops and people but really no place where they congregate to form a haven.  The cops are pushy and numerous and the trolley they built for the Olympics is rode by few and kills people more often than what's ideal for such things.  The library, where you can see the misty mountains from all upper floors, is truly the best thing about the place and in the main I was glad to get to Denver as quickly as I have.

The first night I stayed out and the rain that almost never comes to Salt Lake came that night.  There was a hard north wind and the water came down off and on again from midnight to dawn.  It's a harsh thing and impossible to prepare for.  Still I'd invented a busking scheme of offering cowboy nihilist poetry in a minimalist style and made eight dollars and a big gulp spiked with vodka in this way.  Another week of this and perhaps I'd have enough for the Amtrak failing all else.  On Main Street there slept another man in broad streetlight, sprawled over a trolley station near entire with a case of Keystones by his side.  This was a Fuck the World Man good and true.

On the second day I hiked to the university to nap. steal the days N.Y.T. and buy a cheap USB adaptor to charge my phone.  Then I went to the Emigrant Canyon park and birdbathed in it's restroom.  IT was dreary but strangely warm in spite of that.

That night while perched on State Street I met Isaiah. Isaiah was flying a sing across the country west to east and rambled something about having not slept for three days.  He had fliers from several of the tourist spots around town and hotel ads from the like of the Sheraton and Holiday Inns.  He said I appeared cool and claimed to have several plans for finding a place to stay while we shared a cigarillo.

At one AM while feeding on a given beer and pizza I came across a very drunk man challenging random drivers to a fight outside of a flophouse/transit house thing that I had noticed before.  It appeared to have once been a nice hotel that now had wanderers in the lobby at all hoursand a stack of shopping carts behind the front desk.

It was when the man fell down that I noticed he had one leg, and after I helped him to his foot once and then again and then again he offered to let me crash in his apartment for the night in turn.  He said that he was the manager of the building and that his uncle owned the place.  His key anyhow did fit the lock after some prolonged suspense and I helped him back up twice more on our way to the elevator.

His name was Savage and he appeared to be a Latino of around my own age.  He was again very drunk and hard to understand but from what I gleaned he was from the Lancaster/Palmdale area of Socal and had his leg shot off in a gang fight there. He did have a prosthetic that hung halfway outside his open window with ruined blinds from some violent affair.  There was a broken glass about the table from the same incident and a working VCR with such titles as Corpse Bride and Jack Frost 2 for feeding it.

The neighbor Joe came over and we smoked a bowl of what was frankly the lowest-quality weed I've had for some time though it did serve.  We smoked while Savage spoke of his prowess in fighting even after losing his leg and also the son he saw occasionally and clearly loved very much.  He asked me for assurance that I was only half-white and I said yes; he had it right exactly.

Eventually Savage got a buzz from outside and asked me to go down to see if it was a casual girlfriend that he either wanted to come up or didn't, I don't remember.  I went downstairs seeing the cameras about feeling weary over whether my authority as agent of the manager would be recognized.  At the front I found a woman named Summer who was indeed there for Savage and also a street man who said I wanted to come in for a drink of water.  As agent of the manager I could not accept this and he accepted gracefully.

Summer and Savage split a bowl of meth while she demanded food that Savage didn't have and I slept. Whether he had really won as many fights on one leg as he claimed I'm not sure.  But I was concerned that he might forgotten letting me in upon awaking and there was the broken glass on the table.  When morning came he did remember and all was fine.

On the third day I was in the library watching the towels of cloud when I got a text asking me if I still needed a ride to Denver.  I replied that yes I did and was delighted to be getting a ride so quickly or at least maybe so.  I was fully aware of how Craigslist worked.  Still he replied back and said we were leaving tonight.  I told him I was at the library which he did not know the location of.  I told him I was at South 4th and West Temple when he on West 4th and North Temple.  There was an hour of circling and running.  He sent a text saying he thought I was bullshitting him and was about to ditch my ass.  Someone gave me a fried zucchini sandwich.  Finally we met in front of the depot.

Micheal was a Texas needler of El Paso by way of Austin with the not-that-southern accent to prove it.  A nu metal bro of twenty nine who addition to tattooing also fronted a band so hyper-derivative of Staind as to break the obscene. What Micheal mainly was though as it soon became clear was a travelling hustler of some kind.  Partly in drugs though not strictly or even primarily so.  He picked me up in a 2003 Grand Am that he had bought two hours before, claiming to have abandoned a broken down van that contained a PS 4 several handguns and five thousand dollars in cash all now impounded and under the watchful eye of Micheal's high-class insurance man.  After picking me up so hurriedly Micheal spent two hours wondering Salt Lake in circles while calling three different women back and forth.  It was during this time that I got a good look of the west side and near suburbs.  When it was finally well into dark Micheal started to call Denver women and we pulled into 7-11 for gas and smokes.

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P.S.  The handwritten notes of this account have been autographed by a certain B.A.M.; a train riding woman of about 24 I'd say currently camped in Denver.  B.A.M. says hi.

Final FC top 10

1. Barcelona
2. Juventus
3. Bayern Munich
4. Real Madrid
5. Paris St. Germain
6. Chelsea
7. Benfica
8. Arsenal
9. Atletico Madrid
10 Racing Club

Brief Notes From the Gallery

I was there on Wednesday, when Nebraska became the most conservative US state by some measure to repeal the death penalty of it's own accord.  I felt the tension, at times feeling near-resigned that the 32 votes that sent the repeal to the governor's desk would be cut by political pressure to the 29 which would not be enough to override his veto.  This nearly happened, but in the end the bill was sustained by the 30 votes which were exactly enough; with Tyson Larson of O'Neil coming within micrometers of flipping to the good guys to make it 31.  There were at least half a dozen senators who spent this journey riding the fence between voting for/against the filibuster on the bill and the proper bill itself; and in watching the final debate on Wednesday it was clear that their flip-flops were not the result of bloodless calculation but of painfully sincere internal conflict.  It is only by the merest butterfly flap that this conservative state did the shockingly right thing.

Which brings me to say that though I hate 'horse-race' politics as much as anyone I cannot help but to remember the thrill of it all more than anything, the sight of yays and nays adding up on the board until the very last name, (Lincoln's own Baker) put repeal over the top, the explosion of applause.  As much as I try to realize that good should be done for it's own sake and fear those who seek to be a part of some Great Historical Epic, I cannot help but to have been enthralled by the gravity in that room, in the eyes of the world beaming down on my little prairie city and being personally invested in something.... well, Great.  I was a part of something historically Great and Good and  nothing can take this away from me.  I know that's not the point of it.  I know that getting the state out of the killing business is the point of it, that grinding away at the hierarchical worldview and self-righteous misanthropy that the death penalty embodies is the point of it.  It's not about giving any buzz of pride or purpose to myself and I know that but still 'I' was there and 'I' Was a Part of This.  You understand?   And though I hate 'Great Man' style thinking as much as anyone I cannot help but feel the greatest admiration for Senator Chambers, who is my hero thank you very much, at the way he stood confident and composed while his life's work hung on an atomic edge.  How the man stood sonfident and composed for forty years.

There was, quite naturally, a great deal of religious talk in the room, from both sides.  This is not really my cup of tea but of course I cannot control how other people reason.  Religion is rorschach; and what struck me about the religious arguments of death penalty supporters was how their faiths seemed much more about aggrandizing themselves than aggrandizing their god; speaking of 'not bearing the sword in vain' and generally betraying a belief (or more openly boasting than 'betraying') that all people outside of their pure communities of like minds are barbarians who must be controlled by fear to stave off chaos.  Senator Brasch of the rural northeast and North Platte's own Mike Groene were especially guilty off such talk. With Groene in particular hilariously claiming that 'justice does not change.'  As this man however mentally ill does not seem to be mentally challenged I assume he knows that English common law once executed people for minor pilfering and a hundred other things, that the death penalty has never been the natural common sense penalty for murder but has in fact been a means for authority that knows itself to be artificial to assert itself through horror.  And if 'justice does not change' than what anyway is the point of having living legislators debating proposed laws for the living? 

Such chowderheads have suffered a deep blow to their-self image here;  that of being part of the Red Nation of manly asskickers showing those hippie wimps on the coasts what's what.  They will naturally try to reinstate the death penalty here as quickly as possible through either the unicam or the ballot.  They could succeed, just as they could have just as easily have won this round as lost it.  But they aren't as guaranteed to succeed as they might think.  The status quo is on our side now.  There is meaningful power in this.  And there is some truth the fear of liberal slippery slopes.  Once everyone on a block realizes that all of them together have been secretly agreeing with the hippies this whole time things do begin to snowball.  We see this with current gay marriage and weed legalization movements.  Perhaps support for the death penalty remains a make-or-break requirement for the majority of Nebraska voters or perhaps not.  We shall see.  Come what may the great triumph for liberty that happened on Wednesday can never be taken from us, and we will never yield.

FC top 10

1. Bayern Munich\
2. Barcelona
3. Juventus
4. Real Madrid
5. Paris St. Germain
6. Chelsea
7. Cruziero
8. Benfica
9. Atletico Madrid
10 Manchester City

Brief Childhood Notes

The worst injury of my life so far happened when I was nine years old.  I was riding my bike in flip flops that got caught in the slats of the pedals and left me unable to control where I was going.  I ended up plowing into an old chevy's rear windshield head first and splitting a section of my brow open down to the skull.  I remember looking at my reflection in the windsheild seeing the blood and feeling mortified.  I went to the nearest house for help which was a halfway house as it so happens.  I asked the recovering crack addict/car thief there if I was going to die and he said no.  He got the ambulance on the way got a towel for the bleeding and was perfectly kind in every way.  At the hospital the doc needed to scrape bits of glass off of my skull before he put in the stitches and this I'll always remember as very awful.  Overall the wound wasn't anywhere near life-threatening but I still remember feeling very sore and bruised if if I had the flu for several days after.  I can't imagine what the pain must be like for people who sustain truly dangerous injuries, a bullet to the liver with the bleeding stopped just in time or what have you.

On that note I recall someone else in the North Platte ER at the same time.  A visitor from Arizona who found out the wrong way that a scorpion had made home in their luggage.  Any one-doctor clinic in Nebraska has rattlesnake anti-venom but of course there's none such for scorpion stings, why would there be.  So the ER doc was on the phone with a Phoenix hospital trying to find out how to keep the victim alive and in agony long enough for her immune system to break down the venom without help. I would guess with some confidence if she survived.  It would have been major news if someone had died of a scorpion sting in North Platte, probably talked about to this day even, and there was no such news.  Still though.

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My classmate Tyler Heim (we weren't friends per se though we got along well enough) shotgunned the top of his head off in an apparent hunting accident out in the wilds beyond Imperial at the beginning of the 99-2000 winter.  All evidence, anyway, suggests that it was an accident.  They found the dead pheasant that he was apparently marching to retrieve when he slipped on a creek bank....; and of course deliberate suicides rarely have quite that much of an absurd spontaneity to them.  Still it is possible.  He was in some light legal trouble, harassing animals at the park or some such, and though he got only probation for it we all know how awful that first taste of trouble can be when you're young and you haven't experienced the real pain of ruin, mortality, existential dread.  He was also an infamously terrible student (as was I at the time) at a total loss for what to do after senior year was done. 

Still the evidence does point towards accident; and this brought great comfort to the surviving class of 2000.  Though at this point in my life I've no idea why.  The magnitude of my grief was based far more on being our first grief than whatever our personal closeness to the boy was.  He was buried at the Imperial cemetery, and I made the drive out to see him once or twice in my dying teens; feeling terribly sensitive and noble for doing so.  Now my grandparents are dead, my mother smokes at 57 and a pair of college classmates who were younger than me are gone.  Perspective. 

I've met Tyler's older sister three or four times in the years since and we've always get along well. She's married with kids teaching grade school in Denver or is it Littleton to be precise?  His parents kept the Christmas tree they were going to decorate on his return up for six months; all the way to the next summer when it had long gone to dead sticks. 

FC top 10

1.  Barcelona
2. Bayern Munich
3. Juventus
4. Real Madrid
5. Paris St. Germain
6. Chelsea
7. Porto
8. Cruziero
9. Atletico Madrid
10. Arsenal. 

FC top 10

1. Bayern Munich
2. Barcelona
3. Juventus
4. Paris St. Germain
5. Real Madrid
6. Cruziero
7. Atletico Madrid
8. Lyon
9. Arsenal
10. Porto

For Da Police

On Tuesday the unicameral was near-unanimous in support of a symbolic resolution giving police a pat on the back.        That was sweet of them, to be sure; and of course the resolution was drawn up in reaction to the latest controversy involving Senator Chambers.       Ernie's statement, for the record was an intentionally provocative statement in response to the sort of culture war tree pissing bill that has actually been historically rare in Nebraska, conservative as it indeed is.  A senator from the Sarpy County suburbs introduced a bill that would legalize concealed guns in bars & liquor serving restaurants, invoking ISIS & the 'radicalized world situation' as rationale.  It was precisely the sort of absurd, asinine, Merica Fuck Yeah statement (which again is comparatively rare in Nebraska government) that Ernie Chambers has always loved to pounce on with pungent reminders of real problems faced by real people, and he did indeed do his thing here. Bringing up tensions between the black community and police may seem irrelevant in this case but then what is 'relevant'  in the face of absurdity anyhow.  The truth is that there is indeed social privilege involved in an environment that not only encourages white male 'heads of household' to LARP as petty Lancelots but passes laws to support this childish fiction; and Chambers statement was again a deliberately brutal reminder that the government of a free people has real duties in the real world.

At any rate there is of course no actual contest between people who support the police and people who oppose them.  If those who theatrically support the police take pleasure in being more righteous than Others that deep down even they know aren't there than I suppose there's no stopping them. But of course only a tiny handful of dogmatic anarchists reject the utilitarian need for law enforcement; and of course it goes without saying, ( I know I say nothing radical here but only what people already know) that acknowledging the practical need for police does not in any way require a presumption that police are exceptionally virtuous.  Police work is not exceptionally dangerous  ( Thus not exceptionally heroic if one buys into that perverse reasoning) and there are few outside the jobs themselves who would suggest that plumbers electricians or dentists are entitled to admiration even though society does indeed require such skills.  People rob houses and people made of the same mischievous human stuff have to go catch them. There's an obvious 'Watching the Watchman' problem at work here.  And though democracy is theoretically designed to balance the practical need for authority with the dangers of authority it's quite clear that the balance is not yet ideal.  It simply does no good to wish police to be noble through force of will; and it is downright perverse to get a vicarious sense of power through identifying with someone else's civil authority and calling this duty.
I would like to close here by saying that even if one does think that the police are overwhelmingly good guys and that claims of institutional racism are overblown, even dangerous; well, I am not one to make a god of populist intuition.  To endow 'common sense' with infallible powers of determining truth is itself a defiance of common sense.  Inherent reasoning skills can and must be polished through education.  Even so I would go so far to say that our baseline powers of human reasoning are hardly weak, and that the reason that different communities perceive police as a positive or negative force it because of perfectly accurate perceptions of whether the police have been a positive or negative force upon their communities.  To put it more simply,  police are despised in places where it is not 'believed'; but factually known, that they have caused more harm than good.  One may say that you need only do nothing illegal and thus have no reason to fear the police.  Very well, yet in communities where the police are generally reviled; well, of course there's no such thing as criminality being general to any community.  Since society is nowhere near as racist as us liberals carry on and since you of course or no racist I'm sure you'd agree that in not even the most notorious urban neighborhood will one find vast rings of hoodlums eternally stealing the same wallet from each other like a line of cartoon food chain fish.

There is indeed a close relation between pharisaic shows of being pro-police and fantasies of shooting down terrorists in the Applebee's parking lot.  Both delusions are based on the presumption that people outside one's own social group are far more brutal and feral than any creature recognizable as human has ever been.  It is based on the presumption of being exclusively righteous and pure in a world full of devils; a world where only the brave violence of long, strong, big tall manly men (like oneself, naturally) can protect the small flames of decency from the savage human default.  If such a worldview is not based on racism per se; then it is a close enough sibling of racism to be the same moral poison.

FC top 10

1. Bayern Munich
2. Barcelona
3. Juventus
4. Real Madrid
5. Cruzeiro
6. Paris St. Germain
7. Chelsea
8. Atletico Madrid
9. Porto
10. Boca Juniors.

There is No Foreign Policy Expertise Except Conservatism!

    In regards to Iran we should let yesterday's stunt by GOP Senators serve as a reminder that conservative foreign policy is premised upon being tougher braver and manlier than the hippies and that there is simply no greater logic end or rationale beyond that.
 
 I recall reading about a plan in the aftermath of 9/11 for placing suspected terrorists in domestic prison from within the Bush administration. Or in other words a plan to treat them as if they were just another class of criminals from within the Bush administration, that supposedly shockingly weak option which only the most flaming liberals would consider sufficient for the most Evil Beasts to ever live.
  
The reasons for why this plan was scrapped in favor of Guantanamo and all the now familiar atrocities are in fact somewhat arbitrary. This conservative administration could have chosen to deal with terrorists through our civil law if different moods led to taking different advise or a butterfly flapped its wings. And if this had been the course that a Republican White House happened to choose we can be rest assured that conservatives would have considered it to be the self-evident, common sense default way that Strong Leaders deal with such evil, just as they consider the path of torture and secret confinement that 'their' administration did choose to be such a default in the path that our history happened to take. We should understand that these people are in no way hardened "realists". They are not rationally assessing the risk/reward values of different tactics and have no interest in trying to. Rather there is an emotional need to presume their own superior hardness that precedes whatever someone in their tribe might choose to do.
The second Iraq war was an obviously just act of self defense because conservative white men said so in a stern voice and because those damned alien hippies said that it wasn't. Benghazi is a 'scandal' because of the circular assumption that Democratic administrations are weak and that therefore anything that goes wrong in foreign affairs is proof of Democratic weakness. Negotiating with Iran is weak because a Democratic president is doing so, and never mind that negotiating with enemies has been utterly normal since the days when god-kings were building piles of severed heads.

    Just as there are people who are able to feel moral only in contrast to imaginary godless decadents or able to feel civilized only in contrast to ethnic Others foreign and domestic so there are those who are able to feel brave and strong only in contrast to cartoon straw hippies. There are such people in every society and it is only the happenstance of our military being uniquely powerful which makes our jingoists uniquely dangerous when they gain control of it. Meanwhile it is futile for Democrats to try to match a conservative measure of courage that it wholly fungible self serving and dare I say 'relativist'; as Kerry and Hillary Clinton famously did in voting for the Iraq War. You had might as well be the total peacenik that they shall will themselves into seeing you as no matter what you do.

FC top 10

1. Bayern Munich
2. Chelsea
3. Barcelona
4. Juventus
5. Real Madrid
6. Cruziero
7.Paris St. Germain
8. Atletico Madrid
9. Manchester City
10. Porto

Eflections

When I was in jail for my DUI I was locked up with a rapist, among others, one who did in fact give a near stereotypically perfect 'creeper' affect. I remember how he would bird over my shoulder giving me solitaire pointers.  He had the cigarette butt blond Eminem dye job that was popular at the turn of the century and DMX lyrics tattooed on his neck. "Get at me Dog."

His m.o. then again was very much that of the stereotypical stranger in the dark.  He would knock on the doors of elderly women at 4 AM and then set upon them when they answered.  This was of course a horrifying spree for a small community or any community, and I would guess that the Rapist and I (Chris O. or was it Luke R?) still live in the same town to this day with him down at 10th & Van Dorn.  Raping white upper middle class grandmothers will get you sent away for a long time and in itself rightfully so.

I know of course that while stereotypes are occasionally fulfilled, the problem of sexual violence is baked much deeper into the mainstream than anyone wants to accept.  Around this same age I would play Madden and drink with a man who beat his girlfriend.  Deborah and I had a fling behind his back but I did nothing at all to actually help her.  Am I a better person who would do something today?  Well I've not faced the situation directly since then to my knowledge so yes of course I would.  Theoretically that is; same as everyone same as always.  I think Deborah's son would be about twelve now. 

FC top 10

1. Bayern Munich
2. Real Madrid
3. Chelsea
4. Juventus
5. Barcelona
6. Cruziero
7. Atletico Madrid
8. Manchester City
9. Porto
10 Lyon

Everybody Mander

Nebraska & Maine are famously unusual in dividing our presidential electoral votes by congressional district.  (With the two voters representing the Senate decided statewide.)  In 2008 there was a near-as famous incident when President Obama won the Omaha area elector to break up what has of course generally been a reliable GOP monopoly.  Omaha has historically been when of the larger Republican leaning settlements in the US though though it has become a purple swing city in recent years.  This of course puts the GOP in something of a quandary. Red & Blue is not new to this particular century; inner cities have been strongly Democratic and hinterlands strongly Republican for a very long time.  It is the mid-sized cities suburbs and market towns that majorities are won and lost and both parties know this very well.  So if the GOP does face a long-term problem if cannot count on the votes of farm state urban islands out of hand.  Yet at the same time it is unable to moderate its message towards modern urbane respectability; as white rural activists in existential dread of not being the American prototype 'Anymore' are votes that the party needs; and so it is compelled to wage imaginary tribal warfare for exclusive control of the national identity.

The local solution to the half-loss of Omaha seems very simple; both for the above stated reasons and because conservatives are by nature territorial folk who at some level truly believe that they 'own' right-leaning states at not just the practical but also the moral & cosmic levels.  The solution is simply to change Nebraska's allotment of electoral votes to the national norm so that moderate Omaha gets drowned by the rural wave.  There's been a now-annual movement in the not-really nonpartisan unicameral to accomplish this.  It hasn't gone through so far though we may rest assured that the conservative forces who rule the state will keep trying over and over again until they get there way; especially after Omaha goes Democratic again, which is a when and not if proposition. 

The great Senator Chambers however, in that half-trickster half-sincere manner of his; has proposed an alternate solution; to allot our five electors by the vote of five separate geographical districts.      Nebraska's population divided by five is about 376,301 people, rounded up.  This is not quite 80% of Omaha proper, which would under this system would go from toss-up to straight Democratic leaning. The city of Lincoln meanwhile; (which slightly leans Dem in national elections, though this is negated by its strategically arraigned countryside),  would have near-total dominance of a district centered upon itself along with a couple of its satellite towns like Beatrice or Crete.  There'd be a real possibility then, of Nebraska rewarding 40% of its electors to the Democratic candidate instead of maybe 20% as is the case today. Chambers idea will of course never happen for exactly this reason. It's an interesting idea; all the same, and if nothing else does provide a mental exercise for what Nebraska's congressional districts would be if the US House were expanded to 600 or so; which is something that I think should happen. 

If the majority party feels entitled to gerrymander or rewrite the rules in its own favor; why then shouldn't the minority party play the same game as best as it is able?  In its own perverse way it is kind of fun. 

'Believe, Even If It's Wrong'.

Mike Greone is a libertarian activist & newly elected state senator for my hometown of North Platte.  I do not know the details of how he was elected nor how his defeated opponent compared to him on the political scale; it's been a long damn time since I lived there.  I could lookup those details right now but naww.. (It's been a long damn time now since I've lived there you see.) all I can recall right now is that the weather in North Platte is more dramatic than on the eastern plains; more pleasant when pleasant & more miserable when miserable, and that while the  town is often considered to be the cultural border between the mid & mountain west this frontier is really more a transition zone across the Platte Valley than a hard border.  Grand Island is a distinctly Midwestern market town; while North Platte; raw-boned, blue collar, transitory, and hostile towards the merest hint of gentility, is very much of the rural West; more similar in spirit to Rock Springs Elko or Pocatello than Terre Haute or Mason City.  So I'm not surprised that N.P. elected a libertarian tubthumper to the Unicameral.  That is exactly the sort of thing that my town would gladly do.  

Greone anyhow, has recently caused a stir by filibustering a bill which would have required vaccinations against meningitis for adolescent schoolchildren.  This was of course a dick move on his part, a pointless endangerment of public health.  This does of course play into the long overdue blowback against the anti-vaccination movement that has popped up recently, and certainly blogs which are vastly more widely red than more have delved into the latent classism and other post-colonial hangups of this movement, even among the fair-weather west coast liberals among whom it seems to have originated. The latent association of contagious disease with poverty and 'lowness' and the not so latent feeling that viruses are magically self-aware enough to recognize and respect human social status, that of course very important and 'civilized' people are too essentially clean and pure to have to worry about the infection of others.

It was only natural that fair-weather libertarians should join fair-weather liberals on the anti-vaxxer boat. Rand Paul's 'parents own their children' comment says all that needs to be said about that.  It plays perfectly into a feudalistic ideal of human being in which 'socialism' is defined as the merest suggestion that such a thing as the public good exists; that 'regular folks' unsubtly understood to be  white male 'heads of household' would be exceptional and socially dominant if only they weren't held back by the unnatural corrupting influence of the state.  The ideal of freedom here is one where White fathers and husbands are masters and no one else is quite human at all; and this again is not so subtly spelled out by the libertarians themselves.  It is of course absurd to hold the State in general or Welfare state in particular as the only true source of Real True Oppression.  Private tyrannies do of course exist within the family workplace etc. etc., and state coercion is not by some magic inherently worse than these private tyrannies; the power to spread contagious disease, at any rate, is certainly oppressive among other bad things, and it is a tyranny that high and low people from all walks of life can and do impose upon each other. Not usually with malice aforethought but what does that matter?  Anyhow we move on.

One quote that struck me as telling in Groene's interview with the Journal Star  was as follows: ""I'm passionate. I've got to stand up. But it's not about me."  Actually dude, if you feel the need to let a stranger know how passionate you are; than yes, it is so totally about you.  I am solidly of the left myself.  I do not mean to propose a knee jerk moderation on al things here and I do not believe that 'compromise' is either inherently virtuous or inherently craven in itself.  But one thing I have noticed in life and find abhorrent is that there are some people who indulge in ethical or political belief the way that other people indulge in drugs.  I shall always hold suspect those who place belief at the core of their being; even when I agree with those beliefs.

This may be because while I've grown into something of a 'hipster' in my adulthood I am still a Nebraskan; my most formative experience with loudly performed subcultural identity shall always be the movement conservatives; the protest -too much patriots and the more Christian than you Christians.   I suspect that part of the increased dogmatism among the right is partly defensive reaction towards loss of social control as the wider US culture slowly grows more socially liberal in spite of the mid-term ballot box.   Part of it as well is I think the 'passion' of conservative media; the vital anger of talk radio and the eternal parade 'greatest outrages of all time' allow for a flamboyant self- expression otherwise forbidden to those who generally emphasize patriarchal sternness.

Senator Jim Stevens of Papillion warned against using the vaccination bill as a 'litmus test'     and that's good advice so far as that goes.  I again do not support or advise knee jerk moderation in any way; but the fact remains that it is by definition rare for first principles to be under true existential threat.  Every basic worldview has survived multiple defeats at both the ballot box and the battlefield and shall continue to do so.  We are all guilty of claiming the last victory are side happened to have was uniquely definitive because reasons but in the end nobody really thinks so.  I'm afraid though that Stevens' admonition is bound to fall on deaf ears to those who emotionally & existentially need  every public controversy to be a great litmus test and morally opposed to the very idea of public good.  

FC Top 10

1. Bayern Munich
2. Real Madrid
3. Chelsea
4. Barcelona
5. Juventus
6 Cruziero
7. Atletico Madrid
8. Porto
9.Manchester City
10. Lyon

Van Halen

Im not old enough to recall any devoted Van Halen fans as such. I did have a babysitter named Jake with blue denim jacket single earring and spiked hair so him maybe? My mother owns '1984' on vinyl because her taste in music is not really bad, she likes J.C. Superstar Carly Simon Queen and I like all them, I guess her taste could be best described as arbitary on account of living a near exclusively rural life and never identifying with any 'scenes' Ive never heard her play or even seen her touch her VH lp anyhow. She is not a 'real' VH fan. This band has always struck me as bland banal and calculated with either David Lee Roth or whoever else and I dont know why they're a cultural thing at all. I dont know who a Van Halen sort of person is.

Is Real Dolls

In regards to this strangeness,   I've no wish to rank myself among those who feel passion vicariously through other people's blood feuds, so this is not a post on Israel/Palestine per se, and I've no interest in weighing whether the occupation of West Bank/Gaz is more or less atrocious than Hamas etc; nor what if anything the supposedly vital question of who is worse should entail for American policy.

This is not about them at any rate but specifically about us.  There has quite clearly arisen a cult of Israel within American politics that has gone far beyond normal friendship between democracies.  Criticism of Israel is viewed as more innately controversial than criticism of friends who are frankly more strategically value as allies, (Canada, the UK, and, yes, France) for reasons that not just irrational but consciously and willingly anti-rational.

Some have attributed right-wing passion for Israel to an apocalyptic strain of Protestantism     which holds an extant and triumphant Jewish State as necessary for the glorious end times to come about according to schedule.  I personally don't think this is quite it.  While it may be disturbing to lsuppose that a major facet of US policy is determined by such morbid superstition; it is also a false comfort to suppose that irrational beliefs are a product of silly superstitious people and their unchosen mental limitations.  The truth is that there are no dumb rednecks and that there are no dumb Bible thumpers.  People who believe brutal things are not inherently dumber than you or I and irrational beliefs are as I've said a conscious rejection of rationality.  There's something else going on here and I'm remineded of this piece of loveliness from one Robert Stacy McCain... 

Swear to God, if they ever want a Gentile prime minister, my first order would be to deploy the IDF in a north-south line, facing east. My second order would be “forward march” and the order to halt would not be given until it was time for the troops to rinse their bayonets in the Jordan. After a brief rest halt, the order “about face” would be given, and the next halt would be at the Mediterranean coast.

I also recall reading George Will columns in the nineties in which he deplored the loss of nationally distinctive for more general imagery on the then brand-new euro notes.  It struck me then and strikes me now as an odd thing for the Very Serious Will to trouble himself about; if a central bank somewhere decides to put the Monopoly Man on true & legal tender what of it?  All the same Will was well and truly bothered.

Let us return then to the point that their are no Dumb Rednecks.  Conservatives are not ignorant to the fact of national and cultural identity being arbitrary things, they are in fact inclined to be more deeply preoccupied with this fact than the loudest stereotype of a post-modern continental.  But whereas the stereotype might feel liberated or amused by the artifice of identity the conservative is depressed and horrified by it.  The various bigotries that hold one's social identity as the only alternative to being evil or lesser is a common way of addressing this existential pain. 

This applies towards our relationship to Israel because Israel is in many ways the last  self-consciously 'natural' nation-state to arise out of the nationalist era of the late 19th and early 20th century.  The nation of Israel is avowedly founded upon one common ethnicity and belief system; the very seemingly tangible & true identity that  conservatives have always longed for the US to have in defiance of us having always been a land of polyglot mutts.  And Israel has of course always had enemies, which have always served the role of reenforcing one's own identity through negative comparison.  These enemies have also compelled Israel to impose a perpetual military draft upon its youth, which may fulfill all sort of authoritarian fantasies of sublimating one's small mortal self to the strong institution, of the mass becoming invincibly strong through universal agreement to partake in some great struggle. 

I do not mean to imply that Israel is a fascist country.  It is nothing remotely close to such and it would of course be a horrific slander to say so for obvious reasons.  I say only that 'Israel', not the actual place with flesh & blood people but the "Israel" of the TV news that pops up in the barrroom, is the sort of place that an American who is closer to being fascist than you or I can passionately and unconditionally support as a ritual display of strong identity while he sips his jack & coke.

There are of course issues of Islamophbia as well.  There are those who would Israel as are one true ally against terrorism, and it is clear that such people do not and have never had any interest in winning the 'War on Terror'.  They are not interested in actually reducing the danger of being blown up on a sunny day, but actually long for an eternal and apocalyptic struggle between civilizations so that 'the West' can always be measured as inarguable good against an evil other.

In the main though; in the age of global media; and with the US melting pot adding more and more ingredients at an ever faster clip; the Cult of Israel isn't really about seeing them as heroically besieged by 'terror' but in seeing them as the last great bulwark against post-modern post-nationhood. 

FC top 10

1. Real Madrid
2. Bayern Munich
3. Chelsea
4. Barcelona
5. Juventus
6. Manchester City
7. Cruziero
8. Atletico Madrid
9. Lyon
10. Racing Club.

I Tried So Hard, And Ran So Far, or Is that How it Goes?

                                                                        I

I awoke in what I took to be a Skinimax porn house except no.  Upon reflection it was in truth an unpretentious clapboard house such as one finds in every unpretentious city or town between the Rockies and Atlantic.  It was in California though.  This I sensed infallibly and I'd confidentally guess that it was in San Luis Obispo or there abouts on the central coast, not so far north as Steinbeck country.  At the front door I opened to find a large beach concert in perfect 90's MTV style down to the very look and grain of the film.  The Scissor Sisters were playing.  It was 'Take Your Mama' because I find their newer shit to be too conventionally pop and without distinction.  Still they were playing 'Take Your Mama" in this new pop style of theirs and this saddened me, made me feel my age in a way the 90's of the film did not.

It was then I looked down to find that I was pantsless, I slammed the door mortified in the classic dream trope because it was a papal-sized crowd outside see, at least two stadiums worth.  A white bro asked me who needs pants when I'm having fun and then disappeared.

A woman had been following me this whole time.  I knew this but didn't consider her important enough for acknowledgement until I acknowledged her now. "Who needs pants when you're having fun right?" She was wearing a red shirt and also no pants.  Her face was at least a near-clone of a woman I've seen in waking life.  One who I have never spoken to and have never felt any attraction no frustrated repressed or any other attraction except now I looked up her thighs and thought of the smell of sweat upon the bodies of past lovers, and as I kept looking up to find her vulva the tenderness was such that it was like I was cumming already and I don't know.  It's as if I was my penis at this moment in time as in seeing through the eyes of my penis but that's impossible even if it's true.  It's just too preciously spiritual to be true even if it is true because I am a very serious thinker and writer you see.  James Baldwin was never his own penis through all temptations of Paris fluff. 

I woke up, anyway, without dreaming through the actual rhythms of having sex, neither flustered or aroused, as if I had dreamed of nothing or penicillian. 

                                                                    II

I see the big picture now.  I'm melancholy in June because I know there will be just a handful of days with enough silken warmth to still be loving at 4 AM.  While in earliest January I am energized by the sun being out for not quite a minute more each day, growing stronger as it comes home from Argentina. Summer at any rate can be gross and fetid, which in certain moods makes it hard to find bodies attractive because I take only dispride in being a body.  Winter on the other hand is clean.  The bloodsuckers are all dead and nothing smells like anything.  It's clean.  You've heard the romance of warmth spoken of but I tell you I never feel more aroused then I step out of the shower on a frozen wan noon.  On these days I want nothing but a kitchen of pots boiling distilled water in preperation for nothing.  I want the smell of new paint pristinely white on the walls seven coats worth except dry though and I want the mother-goddes what's her name from Metropolis to have my way with.  If I were a mad billionaire I would waste the earth's water on perpetual showers, giving prostitutes however much extra was required for them to follow the winter with me from pole to pole or camped in the most foodless highlands through fall and spring.

If one more discerning were to suspect some racial element to all this I'm afraid that I cannot tell you for a certain that this isn't so.  It might be and if it were somehow proven so I'd feel bad.  My own guess is that, while I'm quite confident, very much so, of having transcended all that cultural virgin vs. slut nonsense; the more ephemeral notion of 'purity' has evolved into a different form within me that shall probably live for as long as I do.  There's no such thing as being o.k. 

Totes Recall

I remember one of the Cut Scenes from 'The Family Guy' where Ralph finally straight punches Alice.  Before I had entertained vague notions myself that this might be funny but no it wasn't funny.

My memory is dim.  I watched 'The Honeymooners' with my grandparents as a toddler and never since.  Ralph Alice and the neighbor buddy guy were as I recall the only ones ever shown on screen, the last three people in existence.  They chose to live in a New York apartment because, emotionally, spiritually, they had decided that if there were only enough people to settle one place it should be "New York" and I agree.  If I awoke to find myself the last man the first thing I would do is find my best dead neighbor,s bike (or the best bike of a dead neighbor.  It wouldn't matter how good a person they were) and peddle east. In the practical sense it would be some time before wild predators would lose their fear of urban cores with all their disorienting straightness; and there would be canned olives that I could eat forever.  Billions.

I in no way excuse Ralph's threats of violence but charity towards all radical acceptance and all the rest of it yes?  (And with just the three of them to accept anyway it can't be all that radical.)  We should understand that the pressure to reproduce is of course overwhelming.  Alice could be eaten at any time, or wake up newly aware that she has always been a lesbian.  Even so Ralph's longing to be 'the husband' to our new Gaia are in these circumstances quite clearly insane.  The temptation to be a literal God Father to all emerging generations would be there for all of us I suppose and I do not claim that I'd be innocent of this myself.  Still at this reduced human scale it is every bit as evil as any well-known tyrant who scoured his own land to ruin just to remain its only true master.  It is quite obvious that Ralph and the other guy should both be 'The Husband'.  Genetic variety needs every boost available and Alice is going to be 'The Woman' under any arrangement.  She is always going to have this power and both men need to get well and the fuck over if this bothers them. 

It disappoints me truly that these allow the prejudices or mores of the old dead world to effect their minds at all.  Theirs is the power to invent How It's Always Been or What Everyone Knows out of whole cloth, through whim or will; to seize the language of those protest-too-muching dogmatists  who are the most likely culprits for murdering everyone, to take this omnicidal cant and rearrainge it to kqehwporhweirjheopr