The Index

This is for you. Other’s might read it, but it is for you. We are uniquely joined and this is all relevant to you where it will not be for all. Besides, I am hardly relevant to anyone else.

My Sons,

People leave stuff behind. Isn’t that so? We die and what is left is the sum of our existence. Some compile hordes of possessions, homes and cars, wives and wine cellars. Some leave legacies. Some leave hearts and kidneys and other physiological knickknacks. Most of us leave behind memories. What will I leave you? Money, perhaps a business, a legacy it might be true, certainly lots of memories of which most I am proud and more than a few ashamed, but really, the one thing that seems that most of us parents should leave behind is this . . . a handbook.

Now, this handbook is a compendium of my thoughts on certain subjects as far-reaching as god and sex, to a good hike and growing melons. I have lived many lives before I have lived with you and I hope to live a few more once you have moved on. Of my lives thus lived, a few have not really been worth living, a few have lacked ambition and I have dallied with the frivolous for periods longer than a wise man would.

I am writing this now because I recognize life is indeed full of phases and I’m no longer speaking about mine. I’m thinking specifically of you. I suspect I will be tuned in and out same as a radio station as you create your own lives or life as it may be. I’m wise enough to know what you find in here will likely never provide those “eureka” moments. Yet, even without the revelation of startling brilliance, I wish my father had left this handbook for me and his father could have before that.

Maybe you will see I have written this book to simply define myself, to affirm my beliefs and to observe whether or not they look foolish written down. Certainly, I would like to think you will be stunned by the accuracy of my predictions and the wisdom of my thoughts, if not at least you should have a good laugh. And what of my deepest thoughts, the ones we never get to around the dinner table. What about God and Socrates, liquors and liqueurs, heaven and hell? While I do believe that God exists, how can that be when God would have had to have created existence? Is duality, the concept of good and evil, an invention of man and if it is, what is good? If the heart of a corporation is greed and greed is evil, how can a Christian nation be married to corporations?

So while it may not appear that I have time let alone the interest to consider such things, I do. I think about them all the time. I relish having a discussion now and then over a cup of coffee or a few bottles of beer. I read a book or two as you well know. These are things I can do now. They happen now. Less rather than more as I get older, that’s for sure.

Someday sons, I will likely be a burden. My withering mind and body will frustrate you. Your high expectations of me will certainly falter, sooner I suspect than later and your regard of me as an asset will slowly move to the other side of the ledger column. Then in those waning days of my life, when a simple day is a complexity for my mind and a struggle for my body, the opportunity for me to pour out anything, any wisdom any help will be trapped inside a helmet of exhausted brain cells and a look of befuddlement.

This is where you go boys. You are growing or dying, same as a tree, a plant or a multinational. Your grandpa told me that enough times that I have it well remembered. How crappy is it that we reach our physical optimum before 30 and our mental stratus too and then we spend the next 50 years only growing hair in places where it didn’t during the first 30 and losing it where it once did?

If this sounds bitter, I am not. If this sounds remorseful, at times I am. I do cry over spilled milk so to speak as you should too. Having regrets isn’t bad and I scoff at those who say they have none. What you do with any day of your life matters because any day is uncertain even in the most certain of times. Living and existing are two different things and I hope I have taught you that living is more essential the existing.

So what’s this handbook all about? How is it formatted? Sons, I have always lived in the indexes of books. They are a beautiful place, a database so neatly organized for us surgeons who simply wish to slice through the places where we have no interest in the heart of whatever matter we’re interested in. Thus alphabetically, I give you this index as a starter. And since it is thus, it is fittingly situated at the beginning of this book because as the writer I can put the index anywhere I want.

I’m implying that I do not intend for you boys to read it from here to there. I can’t help but want that from the egotistical side, but I understand that time is a precious thing and . . . well . . . .I’ll probably be dead anyway and you won’t have to explain.

Love, dad

Back in my intro on the Advice & Disclaimer page, I wrote something pretty important. Well, I think it’s important anyway. Here is what I wrote, “What you do with any day of your life matters because any day is uncertain even in the most certain of times. Living and existing are two different things and I hope I have taught you that living is more essential the existing.”

Funny though, I am editing this passage today, several years after writing this and I realize there is a parallel line out of a movie called the Shawshank Redemption in which the character wisely says, “Get busy living or get busy dying.” Though we should treat every day as special and we should pack life into it, we don’t. It’s just not possible because we are flawed. The most memorable people are those who despite their flaws live life in the most enviable ways. It’s not money or fame or crap like that, it is the stuff you do, the stuff you record into your memory and the wisdom you gain from participating in life. My sons, when it comes to life….don’t be lazy.

A firestorm issue.  Many believe abortion is killing and that God has made it more than clear this is wrong. Many believe it is not killing and not morally wrong. And some believe abortion is killing but it is still acceptable. Abortion is a moral choice and a moral implication that has an argument for consequence. As a society, we are better off because of abortion. Huh? Yes, we are, for instance, crime rates dropped after abortion was legalized. Does that mean abortion is “good?” Where is the fine line to what we believe is morally wrong or morally right drawn? Is your God the reference from which we start? We can not agree. Then we should not be forced to. Legalized abortion serves those who want, need and believe in it. For those who wish to burn me at the stake I ask a simple question, when is life conceived? The idea of life is conception. Have we aborted life when we imagined having sex? How does your god feel about that? I certainly don’t know. I know very little about god.

I believe abortion is the elimination of a potential human being if that human being had been successfully carried to term. I’m not dodging the killing part, we are killing the likely outcome, but not the certain one. Did you have sex with her? Did you conceive? Did you abort the chance with birth control? For those who paint the issue as black and white, yes or no, you are a hypocrite and I’m fairly certain damned to the hell you’ve conceived.

The last word here, is this, are we better off as a society because of abortion?  The answer is yes.  That in itself does not justify abortion, it is simply an outcome.

Aging sucks. Anyone who says it doesn’t is full of crap. The mind dulls, your physical self diminishes and your healing process slows. There is nothing good in that!

Most people tend to think Alcoholism is simply dependence on drinking alcohol. There is another side called alcohol abuse. You are kids growing up fast, so we will have a chat about the abuse side of alcoholism. First off, wiki says this of alcoholism,

“In a medical context, alcoholism is said to exist when two or more of the following conditions are present: a person drinks large amounts over a long time period, has difficulty cutting down, acquiring and drinking alcohol takes up a great deal of time, alcohol is strongly desired, usage results in not fulfilling responsibilities, usage results in social problems, usage results in health problems, usage results in risky situations, withdrawal occurs when stopping, and alcohol tolerance has occurred with use.”

There is no question that drinking kills nearly every part of your body. Now abusing alcohol or in the case of idiot college students, binge drinking is bad too. Binge drinking is associated with neurocognitive deficits of frontal lobe processing and impaired working memory as well as delayed auditory and verbal memory deficits. It is also associated with running naked down the street at 2am and long sobbing delusional phone calls with old girlfriends. Binge drinking is bad.

I don’t particularly think either of you will become alcoholics because it seems we are not predisposed to it. Neither your mom or I drink a lot or get drunk or binge. I drink during the week but have the ability to stop when needed. I do believe the drinks I do have add to my weight and are bad in general for my health. So yeah, I should drink less too, my waning cognitive abilities are precious.

I don’t know much, but one thing I know is that farms are full of industrial zones full of stuff that can make you sick. Pesticides, herbicides, fungicides, and fertilizers are not good for you. Now they do disperse and the residue is little, but I’ll tell you what boys, farmers themselves live in an industrial zone and it is not healthy for them.

What below are the biggest seed companies in the world accounting for two-thirds of all seeds sold. Something there you notice? Chemical companies. Chemical companies own the seed companies. If you are a farmer, you will buy the seed company chemical package and apply it as told if you want your seeds “warranted.” This boys, is not sci-fi….this is reality.

You are going to hear a lot of crap about how robots and automation are going to destroy jobs, destroy the world, etc.  Automation threatens old people the most.  Technological change is happening so quickly it is hard to keep up and old people, like myself, are not wanton for change.  This is one reason Trump during his tenure was so popular.  A lot of people resent change, they want things the way they were.  Of course, what they are forgetting to admit is that when they were young, the old people felt the same way because all those people who hate change once benefited from it greatly.   There is a way to protect old people from change, that is the type of change that wipes out jobs.  That fix requires wage guarantees or something spiffy like that in which the government, through taxation would help old people offset any new job which paid less.  This would keep people in the workforce and likely assuage old people who hate change and want things the way they were when they were young.

Automation is good.  It is actually great.  So are robots.  There is concern over Artificial Intelligence.  I think that is something that needs a hard look.  But you know sons, as you can see in this handbook, I’m good with short thoughts, not long ones…at least not that I am willing to talk about.  I know you bore easily.

Ever depressed, ever wondering what you are here for?  Ever wonder about the true meaning of life?  By now you should know that religion is a farce, an invention to create order that fooled simpletons.  That’s pretty clear of me, likely a lot of people disagree.  Whatever.     Now that if you are feeling lost, or hollow or empty please learn these words well, “creating beauty and appreciating beauty is what life is about.”  This is hardly the only place you will find these words in my handbook.  I want to whack you with this idea so many times you will never forget it.   Yes, you can create art or things, but real beauty starts with your behavior, how kind you are and the things you do and create from that beauty.  Feeling down, talk to a lonely person, show some interest.  Open the door and smile at the person as they walk through and yes, create.  Write words, paint something or design a tool, a line or two of code or hell, create a really tight budget for yourself.  Doing is beautiful.  Now that too creates a need for you to recognize beauty too.  Again, not just art or something created, but actions, even inactions are soul warming and provoking in the most special of ways.

You cannot escape a world of marketing or the people railroaded into believing one thing, you are not beautiful the way you are.   Corporations spend billions making you doubt how good you look.  Trust me, you both look good.   The point is, the corporations make you feel you have to buy something.  The right clothes, the right shampoo, the right mouth wash, without these things you are not in the same league with all the beautiful people.   Of course, this is crap.  It’s all crap.  Shower, wear clean clothes, be polite, be the best person you can be.  That is beauty in itself.  Simpletons buy shit to make themselves different.  Living simply is sublime.

While making yourself look like a social misfit is easy (and most certainly a lucrative market for profiteers) a truly fascinating way to navigate social structure is at the opposite end, to be a chameleon. To have the ability to adapt and blend in with any situation is the ultimate way of surfing society. And why should you? Why not be different? Why blend in?

I can’t help but wonder what oddball temptations will afflict you during your teenage years. Will you be disaffected? Will you try to make yourself look weird or odd to throw people off? I have a hoot and always have with my peers and nowadays with my peers’ children who make themselves with colored hairdos, shaved heads, piercing, tattoos, themed clothing and cigarettes. And if you do those things, I’m going to laugh at you. So if it’s years from now and you’re finally getting around to reading this, well, now you know why I laughed at you during this phase.

Trying to hurt yourself, being self-destructive is an old teenage device that haunts every civilization and probably most others we haven’t been introduced to as of yet. Your friends who mutilate their bodies with jewelry and tattoos are not special; they’re just supporting the industry that makes a buck off of disaffected pissed-off teenagers.

That is what being different has become, not something you try inside yourself, but something you buy and put on. Therein is my reasoning on blending in versus standing out. If you want to be different, start by looking like everyone else, then spend the rest of your effort considering how you can rise above and truly be different as a person. This is no small task. In fact, it takes effort and struggle and that is why most teenagers would rather waste some money on a tattoo or a slick piece of clothing, because, well it’s a whole hell of a lot easier. It is not necessarily a proven path to greatness or whatever it is you desire, but it does open doors that can lead pretty much anywhere you want them to go.

It’s odd this concept of “best friends.” Some friends sustain and some friends are like fires and embers. Your best friend is the person you think of right now as your friend. Mine is your mom. You’re a pretty good friend too. I can’t imagine when you will not be my best friends. I don’t want to imagine that. In life, you will have friends, some at times, your best and some lifelong. I wish that for you, both types long-lasting and short, both are of value. Friendship is not loyalty. It’s honesty and empathy and a deep sense of caring. It is all built on the foundation of mutual respect.

Bias is prejudice while bigotry is intolerance towards those who don’t share our opinion.  Yes, I too can be bigoted and biased, it is a weakness and hard to overcome especially if you are my age.  You are a biased and bigoted young man.   Those who deny that of themselves are fucking liars.  (I’m a bigot about that, eh.)  It should be a lifelong journey to fend off these feelings inside of you when they arise.   Dwell on why you thought what you thought.  Learn from your weaknesses.   It is not simply about racism or some other big brand issue, this is about politics, God and many other things.  Obviously, I am biased about religions and do my best to not be bigoted about them.

Wiki says “Biology is the natural science that involves the study of life and living organisms, including their physical and chemical structure, function, development and evolution. Modern biology is a vast field, composed of many branches.” I know you have an interest in Biology. Maybe a passion. The world has done a lot of things with Biology. Made stuff, structured it, defined it layered it manipulated it. Some of the stuff we do with biology is really cool. Some not so much. Some evil. Now I am speaking to you Noah. Now what you do with your interest in Biology I don’t know. What you become or get to, well, I only hope you do good with the power you learn and know…well I hope you do good with it. And son, that means don’t do bad in the name of good. That’s not a religious thing, that is the moral identity you own. It’s your dilemma.

Yes, for at least 60 years or more cave dwellers of all types have had the old “birds and the bee’s” talk with their children . . . except for me. My father evidently so repressed by the conservative religious and conservative cultural community into which I was raised, failed to have such a discussion with me out of embarrassment or perhaps knowledge the second coming of Christ was so eminent my reproductive skills were not going to be necessary. I love my pop to death as you well know and have always tried my best to model myself after him in his parenting skills because he was absolutely awesome, except in this. Since I have two little boys I knew damn well I was going to have to step it up. I took it upon myself to canvas friends to hear stories about birds-and-the-bees talks and whether any good came from them.

Instead what I have heard borders more on comedy sketches and slapstick than it does on much of anything helpful. Quite interestingly I have found many others who swear that they were skipped over in that important discussion too. It occurred to me that parents have long held that the “birds and the bee’s” talk is so full of great significance and revelation that us youngsters are simply struck with that magic eureka moment that we forever embrace, remember verbatim and fanatically fall in line with. This is one of those times when parents greatly overestimate their oratorical skills, let alone their timing.

Much like anything else us parents try to teach you, hellions, there is little doubt only a fine line between not saying enough and berating you to death. Certainly, many parents leave the most important subject matter in the copious space of locked up discussions we should have had but didn’t because it was just to awkward to bring up.

I’m at a family party. I’m sitting next to your uncle. A cousin is showing off her latest tattoo. Another cousin shows off his. Your uncle and I have a conversation in which I say, “piercing and tattoos are a sign of weakness.” He doesn’t understand at first so I explain my reasoning. His sister-in-law is listening. “Oh my god,” she says, “you need to talk to my girls.” So the sister-in-law steers her daughters over to me and I explain politely, “tattoos and oddball piercing are a sign of individual weakness, a personality failing because the easiest thing to do is to look different than it is to be different.” The girls are absolutely repulsed by such a suggestion, especially the younger one. “You’re wrong,” she says. “It’s just the opposite.”

“Why,” I ask the older one, “do you want to pierce your nose?”

“Because no one thinks I’ll do it,” she says.

“So mutilating yourself is your way of throwing other people’s expectations of you in the trash bin?”

“Well . . . yes.”

“That to me defines your cause with weakness, not moral mind you, but a weakness of your person, of your faith in yourself and of your desire to make your own self rather than the one someone else like your mom or dad want you to be.”

“You’re right about I want to be my own person.”

“So instead of being your own person, it’s better or at least easier to show off your ability to now make your own independent decisions by mutilating yourself.”

“Yup.”

This reasoning is akin to why a great number of dead people kill themselves, to prove to the ones they love that they could do it.

Tattoos are also messages. I’ll grant that some people use tattoos to declare something of their heart. They declare love. They declare their commitment to religion. They offer commentary. I call these tattoos unique failures of branding as if they think what’s printed on the outside confirms what’s on the inside when in reality, experience changes you every day and the complexity of you is more often much less than your brand. Ironically, your brand proclaims your short fallings and failures and rarely your strengths.

What the fuck is Boeing doing in my index? Well you little turkeys, Boeing was big in my little life. Your grandpa was a Boeing man. Lots of shit happened with Boeing that made me suspect large corporations were not a good place for one’s soul. When the SST failed as a project, Boeing laid off thousands. Every week my dad would lament “toteming” which I came to find out meant selecting which employees you wanted to most keep and which you would let go. What occurred to me, little teen me was this, if my father is toteming a shit load of employees, who was toteming my father? Seattle was a company town, a Boeing company town. What you hear about coal mines and Detroit, that was Seattle, we had Boeing. What I learned was that you could never trust a large company to employ you for a career. Boeing lost my trust.

Another thing that happened which killed my respect for Boeing happened in 2001, Phil Condit the CEO ripped Boeing out of Seattle and moved the world headquarters to Chicago. Seattle he said wasn’t good enough. Fuck you Phil. Everyone hates Howard Schultz for selling the Sonics (rightfully so) but hating Phil would be more appropriate. Fuck you Phil.

Boolean algebra is the algebra of two values. These are usually taken to be 0 and 1 although ⊥ and T, false and true, etc. are also in common use. It is important because Boolean algebra, as the calculus of two values is fundamental to digital logic, computer programming, and mathematical logic, and is also used in other areas of mathematics such as set theory and statistics, child-rearing, flawed anti-drug campaigns and political justifications for killing people and gutting mountains for minerals. One of my favorite lines explaining Boolean algebra comes (well it came) from Wikipedia in which the author wrote, “Boolean algebra is the algebra of values from any Boolean algebra as a model of the laws of Boolean algebra.” (I kid you not!)

Really smart people (like the person who wrote that in Wiki) are few and far in between. Appreciate them, even if you don’t always understand them. So why, dad, why worry about Boolean Logic? Well….because it is really really awesome and though I could hardly keep a conversation going on Boolean Algebra during a drunken brawl in a whore house parking lot, I do know just enough to sometimes apply it and more often appreciate its application by smartypants people who understand it better than I do. It will serve you well to do the same.

You will find throughout this handbook that logic and it’s misuse are often fun things for me to dwell on. In fact, I am sure I’m misusing logic to the point that eyebrows of much better experts raise up like teepees to the sky. Many bad decisions in life are made from the very simple If / Then statement. If you do A the result will be B. The actual math operators if / then are beautiful and flawless. The problem is they guarantee little truth. The person who uses such operators must actually use wise construction sets of inputs and outcomes. At the very least, we must include much much more often the concept of elseif. Consider the following statements.

“If you do drugs, you will become a drug addict.”

“If you do drugs, your life will be ruined.”

“If you have unprotected sex, you will get a sexually transmitted disease.”

“If you have unprotected sex, you will get pregnant.”

“If you drive drunk, you will kill somebody.”

The fact is these are all untrue. While the risk is much higher to become a drug addict, or have an STD or become a vehicular homicidal drunkard by doing A, the fact is there is only a risk of B not a sure outcome. Such are the decisions you will make be based on the same flawed logic produced by If / Then statements. If I speed I will not be late. If I do drugs I will not become an addict. If I have unprotected sex I will not get an STD. All these statements are just as untrue since the risk is there that the opposite might come true.

Rarely is life simply if / then. Most often it is if, elseif, elseif, elseif, elseif, elseif, then. Meaning that one if has many possible outcomes. The narrower the mind, the less elseifs. Consider that last sentence your best way to measure yourself. Considering all your options and all the risks will likely lead to a much richer world for you. Or else…….

The truth is out there. Just about every question we would have is answered. All of it awaits in the bowels of any decent bookstore. The problem, the truth you seek and the answers you wish for are buried under piles of rotten literature, the girth which one life cannot surmount. The good stuff is there, just extremely difficult to find. Thus a bookstore offers a look at life, beauty awaits, it’s shrouded by the volumes of simpletons.

It is true, the best job I ever had, was working nights at a bookstore in Sun Valley.

Oakley Sunglasses, 3 bucks to make 4 bucks to land on our shores from china or Italy and voila, $180 to own. We are all fools for brands. We should look down at our clothes, our style-wear like sunglasses and we should not have to think where all of our money goes. Get unbranded, go read my Being Different entry. It has a lot to do with people purchasing things to make them feel different, the same goes for cool.

I recommend that you learn to budget everything, yes, of course, I mean money but definitely, absolutely, learn to budget time. Budgeting is a merciless process that simply supposes that you have a finite source of something and that you better admit you cannot spend more than you have.

With money, I can’t help but challenge the age hardened wisdom of “save your money.” I think that’s hogwash. Saving your money does nothing but create a pile of money. If you are only doing a good thing by saving it, you are aggrieving your own belief system by ever spending any of it. Indeed, I want you to spend every cent you make! Ha, my father would do a flip if he heard that one! And so would most others. The catch here is on how you spend your money. If I was to categorize how you spend money, here are the key methods.

1. Buy for need
2. Buy for want
3. Buy for others needs
4. Buy more money

It is up to the individual to decide where they budget their money. Most seem bent on short-term gratification as if they never developed any money skills since they were 8.

Budgeting encompasses much more than money. Time, really demands the most ardent attention when it comes to budgets. Time is brutally finite in our lives. Existence is time and without it we are merely Gods. Time demands a budget and fools never do.

Somewhere throughout time, you two will sit through oddball exercises such as determining how many days of your life you spend sleeping, eating or if you’re especially challenged pissing or brushing your gums. And it will be plain to see that from a fairly long life, you will have spent a great amount of it doing . . . well . . . nothing. I’m not suggesting you budget sleep as some do. Attempting to constrain human maintenance is akin to having jet mechanics work on the impellers when the plane is aloft. Perhaps someday they will and perhaps someday you will, but it will take some work to convince me. What I’m suggesting about budgeting time is one of contemplating a most dreaded concept, obligation. You must be diligent in addressing the giving of obligation very carefully and proceed forward cautiously.

A person who uses strength or power to harm or intimidate those who are weaker. It’s pretty obvious to you that bullies when you were young, were simply the bigger boys or girls who could exert physical threat to get their way. It becomes more nuanced in your teenage years. The threats often are about exclusion from a group you wish to be part of or worse, verbal ridicule. People who make fun of you typically are just fucking assholes who need their bullying ways….adjusted. Now your first thought might be to bully the bullies. That can work. Especially when it comes to violence. If someone strikes at you, you strike back. I’ve always given you the green light to do so. But verbal striking back usually entails escalation and that can get really messy fast. Of course, so can violence. Here’s something I will tell you about violence. If you are around a mean terrible physical bully, you will have to be ready to escalate the violence when you lose. That is crazy I know. That is something to think of, because if things go bad, you end up in jail. Let me tell you a story. I was a 7th grader. The bully was a 9th grader with friends and they liked intimidating little 7th graders. They did this to a lot of 7th graders. So I was harassed, my books flipped in the hallway and finally, I snapped. I went after the guy. Guess what? I got pushed down and put in a chokehold and verbally ridiculed but he stopped there. He was ready for me and physically stronger. He was also better at physical violence. So when he saw me the next time he hurled some verbal abuse. Guess what, I didn’t have books in my hand so I stepped right at him and he, of course, pushed me away. Laughing all the way as he and his buds walked away. I was pissed off. So, I hit him from behind. He fell forward and he came around fast on me. This is junior high. It was not a title fight. It was a hissy fit match between a couple of boys. I would love to tell you that I kicked his ass. I didn’t. He went for the chokehold again so this time I grabbed his balls through his jeans. He let go and I let go. So the next day when I saw him, he looked at me and snickered. I went at him again. When he went for my neck I dropped to the floor and tried to trip him over. It didn’t work, but he couldn’t get free of me. This consumed me, every waking moment was this fucker and how I wanted to kill him. Every daydream I had was of him knocked out with a bloodied face. The thing of it was, even though I was on the losing end with these skirmishes, nothing that bad was happening to me. I didn’t have a black eye, didn’t have a broken bone. I had a torn shirt I had to explain with a lie to my mom. The next time I saw him, I didn’t even wait, I just ran and tackled him low and I got him down. He was screaming at me and this time the hall monitor, a teacher caught us. Unbelievably, the teacher just separated us and sent us on our way. As you might think, all my friends and others were talking about how they wanted to beat that guy up too. Everyone hated the guy, but I was the only guy actually doing something about it until another 7th grader, a guy who I didn’t really know very well attacked the 9th grader. He actually just walked up and punched the bully in the nose. I was so jealous I hadn’t done that. The other thing was that this happened in the lunchroom during lunch. I was just shit in the hallways. This was the real deal. So they both went to the principal’s office, both were suspended for a week and suddenly my bully problem was solved. When the 9th grader came back he ignored the shit out of me. For a long time, I felt jealous and weak for not being the one to successfully punch the guy in the face. Then Bill, the guy who did the punch, started hanging with me some because of a mutual class. We were outside having lunch on the lawn with some other friends and they were kidding me and him about all that had happened and he said something to them, but really to me that changed everything for me. He said that I was the toughest kid at school because I never stopped fighting back and wouldn’t run away. He looked at me and said, “no one is tougher than you.” I can’t tell you how that made me feel. Even today I can remember that feeling. I was a pretty good athlete, but I was not a guy who got into fights. To this day, I still don’t.

Being relentless is good. Just understand that once you go this route, it escalates.

So what do you do? The best way is to turn the crowd against the bully. That’s my favorite. Another way is to ignore the bully, walk away. But really, walking away leaves doubt and you have to live with that. I don’t like that and don’t think you will either. You will be taught at school to tell the adults about bullies, report them. Sigh, I don’t want you to be the snitch either. It’s complex.

I guess I want to know about it. I want to know the situation and give you advice. Trust me someday on this.

Caning as I see it would be binding a person to a post and then beating them with a cane.   I am definitely in favor of caning.  We could enact punishment for certain offenses, such as drunk driving, common thievery, shoplifting and such crimes with a good public caning.  Some people might find this idea controversial.

I don’t think you can fathom a friend until that friend is lost. Nor can one so easily glamorize the good things and forget about the bad traits that such a friend may have had until he is in your memory and nowhere else. With our lives so intertwined for so long I knew most every good and bad trait of him and yes, he of me. We knew every part of each other and still not only liked each other but respected each other and respected our differences. And along the way, we piled up many good memories, funny memories and wonderful times. What is lost, nothing but the memories we would have made….

What a cool device. They manipulate us. We stare at them. This is quite bad. Likely, you are doing it at this very moment. Shame on you.

Charlie Chaplin was a goofball actor during the black and white days of movies. A lot of his stuff didn’t even have a soundtrack. But no goof ball he was. He showed us that in one movie, in one scene in one moment that he something greater than an actor.  He wrote this scene, performed it and pulled off something few others could.  Some people didn’t like him for that, but his convictions and his willingness to take risks based on them serves as an example for all of us.

You know, for the longest time as a kid, I knew I was circumcised because everyone said I was, but I had no clue as to what that meant. Eventually, I got it. It, of course, is a popular religious practice in which some of the hood of skin over the end of your penis is clipped off. This is usually done shortly after your birth but can be done just about any time in your life. Most boys and men in this world are not circumcised though the majority around you are. You know your status and must wonder what mom and dad were thinking and why you are as you are. Many people feel that circumcision is a form of mutilation and a form of human rights abuse. A recent study has concluded that circumcised penises are less sensitive to fine touch. On the other side of the argument right next to the religious fanatics stands a group of medical professionals who would concur there are several “possible” health benefits from circumcision including a lower risk of penile cancer, a lower risk of getting infected with AIDs and I’m sure other diseases and things I am still unaware of.

As of today, we are not required to have paperwork on us at all times to prove we are citizens. Well, okay that statement is true for most of us. DHS, Department of Homeland Security might confront you and ask for proof of your citizenship. Your problem, you don’t have it on you. You rarely do, usually you do to cross an international border, but otherwise is locked away safe. You could be an illegal alien, an immigrant from Italy or Honduras. You see, we are bigoted as hell, because we all feel we should not have to carry around paperwork showing we belong here unless that is, unless a person looks different, then we will lock them up unless they produce papers. It’s like Nazi Germany. That is how fucked up we are as a nation right now.

There are actually different types of denial. Some say the change has nothing to do with human impact. Some say it will do the earth good and some say other shit. Go read Global Warming on that. But here, here is a discussion on Fox News, you get what denial is all about. Jeeze it’s good. Notice how Tucker Carlson talks over Bill Nye more and more, that is how denial works.

Okay, look, a side note on Bill Nye.  He was or is a Mechanical Engineer.  Back in the 80s he tried his hand at stand up comedy in Seattle.  I saw him several times.  He transformed himself into the Science Guy and made his mark with his TV show.   Today he is called on to talk about all sorts of science stuff, in this case on Fox news (opinion show with bias) to talk about climate change.  Nye is not a scientist, but he is well versed and delivers the message well.  He’s not perfect at it, but again he is not a scientist.   So you see how things work, TV shows like the one above purposely find guests who are not always the most qualified, they get guests that will get them the most viewers and at times serve their own purpose.  Lucky for truth, Nye does a stand up job.

Go read “Liberal and Conservative, get this straight I am both” and also read “Illiberism”

Alright, you both suck as this sooooo, I must suck at it too.  I can’t image how I fucked this up.   Okay, one of you or both suffer from narcissism (excessive or erotic interest in oneself and one’s physical appearance.)  But really being decent at conversation.

I have a simple and entirely brilliant way to reduce emotions, intimidation and fear when our police approach people; arm them with a coffee cup. Here is a situation, you are standing alone when a police officer approaches you and stands near or inside your personal space. How do you feel? They are in uniform with a bulletproof vest, gun and mace. It’s pretty intimidating. Now, imagine this again, but put a coffee cup in the officer’s hand. The feeling you have is recognizably different. In fact, putting many things into the officer’s hand works wonders, but coffee, a soft drink or a water bottle likely works best. It would be my suggestion, that law enforcement instructs officers (in certain situations, not all) to additionally arm themselves with a coffee cup. This might seem extremely inane and insignificant, but I ask you to become a 3rd person spectator and realize this scene. If you see a police officer with a coffee cup in hand talking to a person you will find your perspective of their relationship completely different than had s/he approached without it. If the officer doesn’t have a coffee cup, you think “what is wrong?” Your perception changes when the officer has a coffee cup. You think, “they must know each other.”

Imagine my surprise that when I canvased several police officers about my coffee cup idea, I received, erm….scoffs at my naiveté. “People already think we just sit around coffee shops all day and drink coffee with each other.” Another officer said, “people think we are just entitled, government employees.” They were fairly unanimous in thinking the coffee cup idea was good but the general backlash from the public that thinks they are slackers would be huge.

See “Pandemics.”

You never ever would hardly think that you would belong to a cult. Belonging is something our egos wish for so it is easy to deny yet easier to imagine. Cults come in all forms and sizes. There is the cult of me and large ornate organizations called religions that all qualify as cults. I recommend staying out of cults. See also gangs, religions, teams and governments

Exploring and being curious is a wonderful thing. So being curious about sex, drugs, fast cars or seeing what happens when you light a balloon of argon gas on fire or what results in jumping off a roof into the shallow end of the pool or ……..wait. Curiosity is complicated and full of many bad decisions. The goal is to survive your bad choices and of course that everyone else survives your bad choices too. See risk.

I wish I was more like him. I wish I was better like he was. I wish you knew the best of him, not the one you know, the old frail guy who lost his memories, his action, his dynamic. If he is the measure of the man, the husband, and the father that I should have been and be, then I have failed you.

Your Dad is a wonderful beautiful great man who at various times is flawed for what I am sure are good reasons.

This hearkens back to the early 80s when film was film and digital was still being imagined, thus this was scanned to digital in the 2000s from a photo that was beat, traveled and weary (I’m describing the photo, not me you jerks.)

Death is the end of life as we know it. Death is thus far (as of 2018) inevitable. Death does not start another life.

Death should be put off for as long as possible. However, youth is fleeting, accept that. Take care of your heart, your hips and your knees so that while you live you are not dead, for death has taken many people long before they actually have died.

Okay, none of us are completely sane; the truth is being anxious or maniacal or psychotic is kind of normal. And I mean a little of each, not a lot. But the one thing that plagues many of us is depression. It comes and goes, sometimes with anxiety, but not on your schedule, it comes and goes as it pleases. I do not think of myself as getting depressed. I get into a funk and I lose motivation to do much. I don’t sleep at night, I worry. I think of how inept and stupid I have been in my life…alright, it’s depression. But I will not kid you that I know depression, I hardly can touch what I know many people deal with and some not so successfully. I’m a wannabe at depression; I hope to keep it that way.

A fairly intelligent person I know who deals with depression sent me the following video and I have to agree it nails it on the head, how is it I can be depressed when the pressure I feel is self-imposed and there is really nothing rotten going on. How can I feel this way?

For the longest time, I trusted Webster’s as the definitive source for correct spelling, correct definitions and most sourly the correct listing of what is and what is not a word. In some ways it was humorous to find old dictionaries which lacked modern words such as nuclear or airplane. Those dictionaries exist today, just look in the family attic to find such historic memorabilia. So obviously, a dictionary is a snapshot in time and language is not locked to it. If that is so, then every damn rule we adhere to in writing is …living….changing.

This change occurs for one of several reasons.

The first is the popular misuse of the English language. A typical example would be the professional sports interview in which the athlete says “I am good” and having countless jocks reinforce the misuse never once correctly uttering “I am well.”

The second is, the cute engineer who morphs words into new meanings, such as “bugs” and “spam.”

The third, invention. Think of words, quarks, digital or even words like airplane or television.

Another way is this, this spewing of words largely unedited by hacks like me paying little attention to editing, so that layers upon layers of misuse add up to credibility simply from the lack of a good person called an editor.

Hell, there are too many ways English changes. But what is interesting about that is that some character at Webster decides for us. So it’s all about commerce. Language boys is ruled by industry, not by academics.

When I was a kid, every corporation, every large company was run by an old white man. Back then the funny story about diversity was how there were only a few CEOs with beards. I kid you not. I remember a story about how Phil Knight of Nike was one of those “bearded execs.” Well, then we broke the color barrier with a black man. Then a woman CEO. This all happened many years ago. You would think by the time you are reading this, there would be lots of diversity in our corporate leadership. Nope. It is changing but it is changing slowly, sort of like Congress. It’s really white men still to this day. It is fairly embarrassing to see how prominent it is. Now part of this too is about what each person is attracted to and in no way am I suggesting that we should have some equal split of leadership positions between men and women. I do think men have certain leadership characteristics born to the fact they have testicles but that is also true about women leaders who don’t. If given a choice, I would choose a female to be president because I would be hoping she had the empathy that seems missing these days.

If it means you compromised your moral integrity, No. Never.

Just think, when you were unaware, a little human puddle, you had no such list as the “Don’t Do List.” But with awareness, came the construction of a completely insurmountable mountain that will crush your free will until one day you step up and cast it off like Superman would thus be claiming control of this list for yourself and with it, the cherished notion of independence.

It starts out so innocently. Don’t touch the fire, you’ll get burned. Don’t crawl under the car, you’ll get run over. You even add to the list yourself, don’t stick the hairpin into the electrical outlet, you’ll get bad-shiggy. Much of the list is justified with the most simplistic form the of the IF / THEN statement, if you do A the result will be B. The irony of these lists are the flagrant untruths sewn into their logic statements as discussed under Boolean Logic, Threatening “If you do drugs, you will become a drug addict.” “If you have unprotected sex, you will get a sexually transmitted disease.” “If you drive drunk, you will kill somebody.” Us parents will spew such seemingly logical rules that we hardly ever check to qualify their accuracy. While the risk is much higher to become a drug addict, or have an STD or become a vehicular homicidal drunkard by doing A, the fact is there is only a risk of B, not a sure outcome.

You figure this out too. You figure out that our logic is flawed. So the older you get the more you are to likely challenge the newest additions we heap onto your mountainous list. “Don’t do internet chat rooms, you’ll be lured by a pedophile.” “Don’t run stop signs on your bicycle, you’ll get hit by a car.” To some logical or sometimes illogical degree, you will challenge the list and I pray that you are lucky in your errors, so that the risk you take does not really mess up the rest of your life.

Duality, wow…what a concept to think about. Where did duality come from? God? Man? Willy Wonka? Willy Wonka…..why Willy Wonka? Duality, the concept of good and evil, right and wrong and a host of other choices is not so black and white….hmmm…black and white. And Willy blurred ones perceptions didn’t he? Crazy or sane……Please keep in mind that many many people are interested in making things very black and white, very objective. Heaven or hell, as if it is all a choice. Indeed the order of the world rests solely on the concept of order and what we define as rules and what rules we are willing to live by. But is it really that objective, that simple? Of course not. The harder you see people attempt to drive the black and white, the less they are willing to see the gray, well they are dangerous fools, I hope neither I nor you ever are of that camp.

Driving a car is one of the most anticipated things in your life. Right along with “doing it” with a girlfriend, you will have lusted for driving with a lifelong infatuation that borders on a single-mindedness that only puberty could derail. And despite your raging hormones, I’m not sure which is more highly anticipated. While driving a car equates to freedom and many many other machismo types of feelings and realities, driving a car is also the most dangerous thing you will likely do. Oh, you can do stupid things, jump off cliffs in the winter or run stop signs on your bike, perhaps have unprotected sex with a dorm full of drug addicts, but driving a car is incredibly underrated as a weapon of mass destruction. Thousands of pounds of mass, spewing velocity like cats do hairballs, you are fooled into thinking you can control the beast. You are wrong. Cars do not follow every command and one day, one day you will make a mistake and I pray that you not only not kill yourself, but I pray you kill no one else. Boys, a couple of thousand pounds of mass will crush the life out of a human no matter it is going 60 miles per hour or 6.

So think, as you pull up to the end of our street, looking left for approaching traffic, seeing none you begin to anticipate sliding out into the street. You look right, no cars….THUMP! That pedestrian was your father returning from his run. Ouch.

Now at the same time, there are thousands upon thousands of drivers out there who are inept fools who put your life and mine in danger almost every day we drive. You will always be taught defensive driving and I hope we will all go to one of those cool driving schools together where we get to do spinouts and cone racing. I wouldn’t mind learning how to hold the steering wheel so that when the airbag deploys from a wreck, my hands don’t fly up and break my nose. Somehow, I hope you can check your hormones into the glove box because one foolish decision behind the wheel will forever shadow what was supposed to be a bright life, whether it yours or someone else.

Every day in a car, on a bike, running or walking, we are taking a chance that some hairball doesn’t kill us. We need to be diligent to give those hairballs as few opportunities as possible. I hope you remember well not ever to be a hairball. Oh, you will pull some hairball moves all right. Just be lucky.

There are sooooo many drugs out there. They are being invented daily. The government can’t keep pace controlling them. Certainly, there are 2 varieties, drugs sold by multi-giant corporations for excessively high costs and drugs sold by ruthless cartels that have excessively high risks. Neither sons are safe.

A lifelong battle for all is with ones ego. The insecure wish to be famous, the secure wish to be anonymous and the rest of us wish to consider the consequences of each. Your ego is a precious egg. Heat your ego and the egg will grow larger a unique feat! A large ego is a most fragile cargo, one which I hope you never carry. The weight of it can crush itself, let alone the person carrying it. For that reason, I urge you to pick anonymity over publicity. However . . . without ego, you are a paper wafer in a twister. I have taught you to ski, to hike in the wilderness, to play chess and I have taught you base 2. Belief in yourself is your base, others belief in you is an illusion that can hold you as heroin grips the addicted.

Famous people can’t go anywhere, not shopping, not to a drive-in without being watched. They can’t walk across a room at a party, can’t stand in line, nor can they ever have a normal night out. Now, this may not seem all that bad, but it is horrible if you are not perfect, for we as a society love to pry. We hold you to a higher standard, expect that you would never cheat, never lie or never behave poorly … and when you do, we crucify you.

I love to eat. It is a favorite pastime. That is one reason I exercise so much. If I didn’t I would be the size of a blimp. It is said that it is wise to eat in moderation. I agree. And I agree that it is wise to eat a little of a lot of things instead of just a favorite thing or two. We don’t eat enough plant life. We should eat more plants and fewer steak burritos. I have a lot of plant-eating to do because I am steak burrito imbalanced.

Our desire to eat is a demon. Some…okay most of us eat too much. The pleasure of taste is insurmountable. Our neurotic insecurities and other psychosis cause us to wrestle with eating as if the need to eat itself was the demon. Clearly, food is necessary, taste is wonderful and our world is complicated by oral fixations.

Bon appétit!

Is the Electoral College a good thing?  No.  Nope.  It’s a way of giving bigots a bigger more powerful voice in our democracy when it is not in our best interests.  In fact, we already empower bigotry throughout 2 senators a state system which gives disproportionate power to fewer people, that states with tiny populations are given equal power in the Senate.  However, I do believe that we should allow for underpopulated states to be represented with the power given under the current system.  But the Electoral College, it needs to go.

Found this on the Web – Once you read and understand these two words, go to Social Justice

Equality is the effect of treating each as without difference; each individual is considered without the counting of their measurable attributes; treated as the same of those with differing attributes

Equity refers to fairness and equality in outcomes, not just in supports and opportunity.

Is existence time? This seems logical to me, since thought requires time, math the organic core we use to unravel existence requires operators and thus, time and tasting chocolate chip cookie dough ice cream takes time too. I could hardly decide whether existence is order or chaos or the concept of ideas. I exist. You exist. Does Han Solo exist? He is a fictional character! What exactly is existence? Some people can argue for hours and days and years on whether existence should be defined as a First-Level Predicate or an old-fashioned Proposition.

What is clear is that existence is a word in our language used to describe something it cannot. Be judicious in how you use it.

There is undoubtedly life out there somewhere. Intelligent …. who knows. We surely don’t. Someday maybe astronaut-from-another-planet may show up and surprise us, but he/she/it has already had several thousand years to do so and though some think certain earthly occurrences…Christ….the pyramids…..southwestern cultures that up and left are all indications of us earthlings not being alone, I personally am not on board with that concept. But really, I don’t know and it is highly unlikely anyone else does either.

With my glowering condemnation of religion, many would say I am faithless. That is untrue. I believe strongly in the existence of a thing the rest of the world refers to as God. I think using a name implies too much, for our language is so small. Sons, when I ski or find myself deep in some groove, lost in the act, the mechanics and concentration, that sons is when I am closest to the-thing-formerly-known-as-God. Have faith, yours please, not something spoon-fed from an organization.

One of my favorite pieces of graffiti that I was ever lucky enough to read was in a University of Washington lecture hall bathroom stall in which was inscribed this fine line, “Kill fanatics.” The irony, only a fanatic could write such a thing. It was and is still a great joke. Fanatics are unfortunately everywhere. Here at a time when you are still too young to understand the conflict of thought, we gave huge wars & brutal terrorism all because of fanatics. We have clerics and TV evangelicals spewing venom and hate. They are religious zealots. You know they have lost grip with reality when they say those who want peace are for war so we must war against the peaceful. They are the ones who would crucify Jesus because they would call him the anti-Christ out of mistrust. They would scorn Muhammad rather than give up their hatred. Ask a person, would they die for their God? Would they walk into a fire for their God? If the answer is unquestioningly “yes” then they are fanatical about their religion and a threat to truly becoming closer to understanding their own relationship with God. They are failures.

Now in that paragraph is enough evidence that I’m the anti-Christ for some when I am nothing more than one who is willing to question rather than one who is willing to fold. I’m not above belief or faith. To believe in God which I do, faith is required. To pretend I know God or that I am promoted personally because of my blind faith is a most horrible thing. Fanatics will certainly call me a heretic and that is their unmasking. Behold those who condemn others in the name of their God are hypocrites.

In other ways, fanaticism does not have to be associated with religion but can be rooted in cults of personality, video games, TV shows and of course, writers and fathers. I have faith that you will question authority and question a joiners mentality; make sure you always do.

I often say, we need only fear those who manipulate us with fear. Our government does that, the media and the free press, certainly the church does. So am I suggesting we throw off those institutions? If I did, especially when it comes to the government, I would be summoned before the courts and sent off to jail, because we are not allowed to do that in this country. Therein lies an insidious threat, our government may be corrupt manipulators, but we must fight them only on their playing field by their rules.

Now, fear is indeed a mighty tool used by many. You can hardly watch five minutes of news without a newscaster saying something dazzling like, “killer fire-breathing cockroaches invade state! More after these words from our sponsors.”

Advertisers love it too. You are encouraged to buy things for one of two basic reasons, neither of which includes the simple premise that you might actually need the item. No, advertising uses sex and fear as it’s two primary weapons for selling crap to you.

So there is hardly a safe haven from fear because using fear works. It always has and always will. You need to study fear and control it.

The U.S. Flag is our flag. It does not belong to the military or the Republicans or any other group. It belongs to us. Respect the flag as representative of us, for those who have died for us (not just military people you idiot) and respect it for Democracy which allows us freedoms which do include protest. See Flag, USA – Kneeling for my thoughts on kneeling before the flag.

So the kneeling was for a reason. You know Colin Kaepernick was pissed off that defenseless blacks were and are getting shot, often by police. I believe Kaeperenick still feels this way. So how should we feel about this/ How do I feel about this? This is what Beto O’Rourke answered at a political forum to a question from the floor. He said, “And so non-violently, peacefully, while the eyes of this country are watching these games, they take a knee, to bring our attention and our focus to this problem, to ensure that we fix it. That is why they do it, and I can think of nothing more American than to peacefully stand up, or take a knee, for your rights, anytime, anywhere, anyplace.” I can’t think of framing it better than O’Rourke does.

That my boys is why our flag and our country are so great. Because we can protest and we can say things are not right. That is why the free press matters too. Nowhere in this world does freedom of speech mean so much. Enjoy it.

Freedom is the ability to take care of oneself. If you have to have the water come from the tap, electricity from the outlet, food from the store, then you are a hostage to the system which provides it. (No it’s not bad to have water from the tap or food from the store, but having the ability to go elsewhere provides you the ultimate freedom few have.) No one but you gives freedom while many take it from you. Obligation robs freedom from your soul too. Be diligent. Be free.

Flying over Lake Yellowstone circa 1990. No payments. No obligations….no money in the bank!

Being and living free upsets people who think of themselves as free.  Huh?  Yes, people resent people who live free.  Here, I’ll let Jack Nicholson explain this to you.

The term these days, Freedom of Speech is very abused. A lot of people seem to think they can say anything they want, such as Nazis (aka White Nationalists) and these people are wrong. We should prosecute and lock up people who abuse our Freedom of Speech. We should respect and love our freedom enough to fight for it. When people abuse it, we should not simply shut them up, we should prosecute them as the law stipulates. The problems we have on Facebook, social media and with hate groups is that we are not putting them in jail for breaking the law.

Free Speech does not allow you to say many things. You are breaking the law if you do the following.
-Incite violence and hate
-Intentionally Defame (including libel and slander)
-Promote Child pornography
-Perjury
-Blackmail
-Incitement to imminent lawless action
-True threats
-Solicitations to commit crimes
-Treason

It is clear that knowingly fabricating threats to our public safety is illegal and the person saying or publishing that is breaking the law. A person may not yell “Fire” in the movie theater to create panic when there is no fire nor may a person promote violence against others. The scale and setting of the lawbreaker who creates such lies should be punished to the level and girth of their lies. Social media banning lawbreakers is a step to silence people who threaten us with inciteful hate speech and the treasonous rewriting of current history, but it is up to our US Justice Department to protect us from those who do not respect our Constitution by prosecuting them in court. We should ask our government why they have not prosecuted people who are violating the very laws we have concerning freedom of speech.

Hey there, this took me a long time to write and I’m writing it because I see how you need fun, both of you.  I spent a lot of years in my life having fun.  Okay, I probably spent too many years having fun.  Hmmm…can you do that?  Well, damn it, I grind my teeth when I type this, but life needs balance.  Gawd…..erm….crap I hated writing that.  But well, shit why am I writing this?   Maybe in a way, you two are not as good at having fun as I was as a way of the world restoring balance.  It bothers me.    So let’s talk fun.  What is fun?  According to google, fun is being amused, entertained pleasured and excited and play is engaging in an activity for enjoyment.   Read that again, google thinks fun and play are like….fuck me….google makes fun and play sound like masturbation!    Fun and play is not masturbation.   Masturbation does nothing for your soul and fun and play definitely do.  Fun and play can be had anywhere, but in my life, it happened in the mountains.  Fun and play were skiing.  Fun was a face full of powder snow.  Fun and play were looking up at something you skied, perhaps seeing your tracks and feeling “wow.”   Fun and play are not about saying wow; it’s about absorbing the power of wow.  Definitely not thrillseeking, but yes, that too delivers the same feeling (especially if you live through whatever the hell you are doing.)   What I am telling you knuckleheads is that you need to have fun and you need to play.  Gaming is amusing and pleasing, but it is just a form of masturbation.   There is the term, “all work and no play makes jack a dull boy.”  Go play.  Go have fun.

…okay look, this is advice that we keep between ourselves. You brothers can talk about it, but please, I didn’t really give you this advice. Here’s the deal, when you are single and looking for a girlfriend, not a fucking hookup you perverts, but when you are asking a girl out…un…which should be all the time, you should not ask or focus on one girl. Be interested in a few or several. Jesus, you horn dog that does not mean you’re supposed to be fucking them all. Get a grip. Here’s the deal, if you chase one girl, hoping it leads to a long wonderful relationship, well…it might. The fact is this, you need to be asking lots of girls out and going for coffee or dates or whatever the hell you young people do. It’s just way more healthy to be asking and going out with more than one. Now with that said, once you figure out you really like someone and she really likes you, that’s when you quit going out with others.

Look down at that pizza, the pizza you have eaten for a lifetime and realize that it contains a lot of ….engineered food. So as we wonder about life, lives and many other things such as the consequences of fooling around with nature, understand that genetic engineering is already loose. It shall not be contained or restrained and it will likely at some point crush or nearly crush our increasingly fragile world. On the other hand, we may get lucky as hell and have 18-year-old bodies for eternity.

How can a minority rule so handily in our country? Huh? That happens, you ask. Well hell yes. Most blame the electoral college in which George W Bush and Donald Trump became presidents without a majority. That’s not gerrymandering. Gerrymandering is about our Representative in Congress and how it has been really fucked with so that democracy is not functioning correctly because a minority has control consistancy. Here of course is John Oliver to explain this correctly to you.

In about 1976 I wrote an English paper on something called the “Greenhouse Effect.” It was based on a nondescript article on how we are heating up the earth by burning lots of fossil fuels. I have no idea how or why I was attracted to that article, but it has made me realize we often know the freight train is coming, we are just slow to move off the tracks. Can you stop Global Warming? No. You can achieve great things, but I’m not sure you can pull that off. I then would recommend anticipating its arrival. That is, not only would I recommend getting off the tracks before the train arrives, I would consider how one might profit from the knowledge that it is coming no matter what.

Those who deny Climate Change are simpletons and fools and regrettably the most selfish assholes in the world because they are living well today at your expense.

I’ll try to keep updates to links current, this is from the Fall of 2018. Click Here for Report on the Pacific Northwest.

Can you believe in God without believing in Gods existence? Absolutely. God created existence so God must simply transcend everything we know about existence and for that matter, non-existence. Know this about God, you know absolutely nothing about God and any time you do, you are being a pompous egotistical fool.

See also god, Religion, Duality, Fanaticism, Meaning of Life, Beauty, Books of God, My god

A lesser form of God used to demean your or someone else’s belief in a particular God.

So as a society, world or whatever, we need duality, good and evil to serve as the foundation to having order. Order includes laws, accepted behaviors and other crap. We first used physical violence to distinguish good and evil, well, not good and evil, but winners from losers. Then came the concept of religion. Yes, religion was the tool in which humankind found order from chaos. So religion introduced morality among other things. So did god create us or did we invent god?

If you want to be happy in life, simply be grateful.  I once heard your mother speak these words.  Simply put, one of the most amazing things she has ever said to me.  Therein lies a challenge for each of us, to find things to be grateful about.  If you do, happiness is there with you.  Nothing else is what we know as being happy, the rest is a lie.

Guns serve a purpose, to end life. They don’t defend, don’t subsist don’t do anything but kill. Their presence intimidates and adds danger. Whether you like them or not, you can’t make them go away. They exist, same as you. So we control them. We always have. We make rules and expect people to follow those rules. Many people don’t follow the rules. The constitution allows for the citizens of the USA to bear arms and there is a powerful industry wrought with money, with employees who would lose their jobs, lose their homes, their families, if we controlled guns to a degree that actually made sense.

It would be like ending the drug testing business. There would simply be too many financial victims. Politics does not allow for that.

What makes sense? I would start by eliminating any gun specifically made for killing people, the industry rebranded these weapons as “sports rifles.” Masterfully done actually, guns for war and killing human life is now just a sports rifle.

Did you know that gun sales typically spike upward when we have a Democrat in the White House. That’s because gun manufacturers use fear of gun control to manipulate their customers into buying more guns. If you look at the percentage of Americans who own guns, you will find the percentage has not changed much; what has changed is the number of guns a typical gun owner owns. When I was young, gun control meant our guns were pistols with clips of 9 or fewer bullets and we had shotguns and hunting rifles. There were no military-style weapons. As a country we have been fooled by the manufacturers; we’ve been suckered into a horrible place.

I once remember watching a comedian, Chris Rock I think, who did an excellent routine on guns. He said guns should be cheap and easy to get, but bullets he said, bullets should cost like $10,000 each. That boys, I liked a lot.

You’d think I would be against gun ownership.  I’m not.  Our problem here boys, is that we don’t respect guns, we just tend to respect the idea of gun ownership.  Sadly very few people respect guns.  I doubt I do enough, but you know the truth about me and why I would have a gun.  I believe in hunting and to some degree using a gun for survival.  It is hard to explain, but I think you will get this when I write these words, a gun is not a penis, don’t be a dumbass and own a gun, then treat it like your penis.

Boys, this is really sage advice from your old man…..enjoy your hair while you have it.

Happiness is not something that finds you. You find it. You earn it by learning to be grateful about the things you have, the people you know, and the life you have been given.  The Dahlia Lama is wrong, life is not about happiness. Life is about creating beauty. Certainly, there is beauty in the acts that also create happiness, and happiness can be very beautiful, but little Lama, selfishness is exclusive of beauty and too often the case it is inclusive in one’s happiness.

Like fanatics, I hate haters.

At this point, as a business owner, as an American and as a father, Universal Healthcare must be made a basic human right. To say all the countries around us in Europe and even next door in Canada are failures is complete bullshit.

This starts with Duality and you can read that tab. But let’s forget that for a moment and talk about these two places. Whether they are mental or physical or both, religion relies on keeping you in line with the threat of hell and the promise of heaven. I believe parents call this the “carrot and the stick syndrome.”

Now you have a problem with heaven, you just don’t know it. Heaven is so fucking perfect, you know nothing but a real good time, a really great time. In fact you never have a bad time. Your problem, if you don’t have bad, how is it that you can know good?

Here’s one quote by some dude on the internet “Heaven is a philosophically incoherent idea with tons of problems such as free will, competing desires, eternity, boredom, the problem of irredeemable evil, emotion and memory, uncompensated wishes etc.

Hell is easy. Simply take your worst experiences and that is hell.”

You see boys, the concept of heaven and hell, the carrot and the stick was how we created order in this world. I want to send a big shoutout to religion for this. Of course, that shoutout is buried under the burden of millions of bodies of heathens religion has killed, but it is still a shout out.

So I don’t believe in heaven or hell. Really neither does anyone else. Religious fanatics who believe in it have simply not bothered to spend any time figuring out that it is pure bunk. Their ego is in their way.

Hiking is the best form of exercise ever invented; imagine…it was the reason to stand up and walk. A really good cheap date even when you are not poor, hiking into the mountains, along with a shore or into the desert, makes one feel small in a big world….something that makes one person want to be close to the person they’re with. Aside from that, it’s a way to see the best part of our earth.

In the Tetons circa 1990. Backpacking in October with only a day pack stuffed with a sleeping bag, bivouac bag and a very small amount of food. Camped with a guy named Pete who snapped this shot.

Want the full version of how Christmas came to be celebrated.  This pieces from AdamRuinsEverything does it quite well.

Ya, there is a history to Halloween, but really let’s just have you learn about your history with Halloween and why do you go door-to-door seeking candy.  Time for Drunk History.

Home Ec was something long offered to girls in the public school system when I was a kid. Girls went to Home Ec while the boys went to wood and metal shop. Sexist! Sexist and something easy to cut as school budgets tightened. I never went to Home Economics when I was a kid because I was a boy. What a mistake! Anyone, boys included, should be taught to cook and take care of their clothes. My oh my what a mess of ourselves we make because we have not been taught those things.

Houses of God are indicative of the very problem with religion. They are built on a foundation of ego. A church or chapel or mosque or whatever could be a place of community but it is not. It is a place of division and waste and sadness for in the structure is the weight of duality, a weight no foundation can hold. Community is ruptured by the exclusion of non-belief. Ego, group ego and power of churches is on vivid display in our world. Look at the churches that flaunt wealth and the political power they hold. These churches and their people are evil. They will rot in the hell they believe in. Where would we be today if the money in buildings and land to house god actually housed those in need?

You hunt mainly for one of two reasons. The first of which is hunting for a trophy and the second, of course, is hunting for consumption. Now hunting for a trophy is a form of machismo that needs to be retired. It is selfish and wasteful. For the last 100 years, the ability for any cheeseball to bag some incredible hunk of burning love moose or tiger or pheasant is no longer hard, but simply made so easy there is no machismo left in such an act. And what of that Hemmingwayesque macho crap, when pride is propped? Bogus! I am reminded that John Autobahn the man synonymous with bird appreciation, actually killed birds to collect them. And now, as historians look back, they shake their heads in wonder that such a man would kill off rare birds just to collect them.

I eat meat, thus I will forever be unappreciative of those who waste it. And in the arena of hunting and meat, I am uniquely qualified with the experience to know and appreciate hunters, game wardens and landowners who understand subsistence and how they qualify themselves from those who don’t. I have hunted and not just with a select group of friends; I have sat around big camps nursing liquor bottles and frying pans. I have worked in a custom meat shop for several fall seasons, and have met and spoken with hundreds of hunters bringing what they killed to the shop for processing. And I too, have hiked in the wilderness and come upon the bloodied remains of half butchered elk and deer and have seen more than most. There are those who scoff at the drunk, the unappreciative, the unskilled and I understand their feelings. Worried that some drunk half-wit might shoot them by accident, worried that their shot, so careful and planned might waste meat, worried about the waste and debauchery they see among their hunting peers and how they are bitter at how hunting has become an industry of gun manufacturers, clothing companies, retailers and the National Rifle Association; I know they would run them out of the woods long before I would.

So sons, hunt if you wish, but waste not. You must learn how to butcher. You must learn how your shot must strike the animal correctly so you don’t splatter shrapnel through the meat. You must never wound, never let the animal drag itself away. If you shall hunt, understand the life you have taken shall be given for your life to live.

This is true the opposite of liberal. Do not hold disdain for a conservative as the opposite of a liberal. Illiberal opposes liberal principles and seeks to restrict freedom, freedom to behave as you wish and freedom to react and speak as you wish. There is little doubt in my mind you will find conflict on this in your mind. By now you have come across left-wing or right-wing ideologues who are quite often illiberal, meaning they will belittle you, demonize you and seek to ostracize you. They will make you afraid to speak up and say what is on your mind. This first happens with your mom and dad. You think mom and dad are full of shit but I’m not going to be the one to tell them that. Then you hear a teacher, especially a college professor that says things that you wish to argue and yet with them too, you keep your mouth shut because you are afraid of the consequences. Illiberalists, both right-wing, and left-wing seek to silence you and that my boys is bad news because we get used to it and eventually our free world turns into a fake democracy where our voices and votes mean little if anything at all.

I do not equate illiberalism and conservatism in the same way. Yes, conservatives are cautious and hesitant to change in politics and religion (broad stereotype), while illiberalists want to force change without the voice of dissent or as we see on Fox News, illiberalists want to keep things as they are without the voice of dissent. Now it is not just Fox News that sprays illiberalism with such force. Many good and just social causes that we believe in are often shrouded with illiberalism. It is one reason I am extremely careful in understanding how the word equity is used these days because while I believe and fight for equality, I fear the use of equity as a tool has fallen too often into the hands of illiberalists.

Immigration is not a problem.  We are all immigrants.  We could end immigration problems, (that is in this moment defined as illegal immigrants flooding our country) in one easy fell swoop.  You simply punish the employers of illegal immigrants with jail.  Illegal Immigrants wouldn’t come to America if there were no jobs.

A form of gambling that has morphed into something more profitable (usually) than the legalized gambling industry. The key players in the insurance industry are called actuaries. Actuaries are usually very smart math guys who figure out the odds on what they insure and it is their job to make sure the companies they work for never go out of business by paying out more than they collect.

Whenever you hear of an insurance group lobbying for some change to the law as is often the case in the healthcare industry, you can pretty much count on the motivation for such lobbying, the desire to improve the odds of making money.

Is it bad to insure, bad to have insurance companies? No, I think not. Insurance provides the path for people who cannot afford items …. wait, it provides a path for people who buy things they cannot afford to lose to have those things with less risk….ah….It provides a path for the bank which lent you the money to buy the house, to recoup the money when you accidentally burn it down.

Insurers are in business to make money. They have actuaries and other marketing professionals to make sure they make money. Their CEOs are paid incredible sums of money (derived from our premiums) to make money. The best ways to make money is to insure the best risks and not insure poor ones. Since the payouts are so numerous and ongoing, insurance companies also will fight, deny and cheat people out of claim money due to help their bottom line. When it comes to insuring cars or property, it’s like just wrong! However, when it comes to health it is evil. Insurance companies have made health insurance so complicated and confusing that few people can understand it and when they do, the insurance companies will still insist they are right and you are wrong. It is very hard to fight.

Our healthcare system is starting to come apart at the seams. There is no doubt many reasons why. The way the FDA manages large corporate drug companies is most certainly a big problem. But really, health care relies on individual commitment to be healthy. We choose the easy way out too often, putting off our health in favor of taking it easy or eating too much or substituting what we should be doing for our health by taking health-enhancing drugs. Then when our bodies can no longer reliably support life, we call upon doctors, specialists and drug companies to perform miracles, bypass surgery, transplants, transfusions and a symphony of pills and injections to keep our bodies going.

Health Insurance has become a weight around our collective necks. The large insurers and health care providers have replaced our relationship with our doctors with a system to minimize their costs. Insurance, after all, is a gambling proposition.

Be careful of your desire to promote healthy living to lower health care costs. So easy it would be to condemn smokers, make them pay more or better yet, not be saddled with their health care costs at all. But what about you…do you ski? That is a dangerous sport, isn’t it? Should we insure skiers, rock climbers, para-gliders? These are all dangerous sports, likely producing horrific injuries. Shouldn’t we only insure healthy and safe people? Oooppps.

Thus, you can see, the only answer is universal health care and that at this point it has become a human right to have access to that care.

1. the exercise of the intellect at the expense of the emotions.

It seems that there are a lot of people demonizing being intellectual.   Those people are fools.  Realize and promote being intellectual.

Read the web-sourced definition below. Then proceed to read my thoughts.

lib·er·al
/ˈlib(ə)rəl/Submit
adjective
1.
open to new behavior or opinions and willing to discard traditional values. “they have more liberal views toward marriage and divorce than some people”
2.
(of education) concerned mainly with broadening a person’s general knowledge and experience, rather than with technical or professional training.
synonyms: wide-ranging, broad-based, general
“a liberal education”
noun
1.
a person of liberal views.

Also from the web, here is what I think of conservatism. “Conservative comes from the Latin conservare, which can be translated as “to keep intact” or “to preserve or maintain.” There’s nothing about the word conservative that implies support for markets or religion. Conservative simply means you want to conserve the way things are.”

In our current media and web platforms, we have come to define liberal as being very left-wing democrat and conservative as being very right-wing republican. This is wrong. When you watch a TV news commentator or college professor demonize conservatives or liberals, they are so off base you should discredit their entire diatribe as garbage.

Okay boys, here we go. I am very liberal. I’m probably writing this manual because I am liberal. That is good. You can be conservative and that too is good. In fact, I am a conservative. Yes, I join groups (go Falcons, chase purity (body not soul) and enjoy and believe in authority. I do believe in maintaining social structures as well as my own life. None of these are easy to do, but I try, especially while my liberal mind seeks change.

Make no mistake we should live in a liberal society. The opposite is very bad. Yea, those are societies run with socialism, communism, fascism, authoritarianism, ego-driven dictatorships and weird political extremes like North Korea, China, and Trump-world. The very form of democracy is liberal. I don’t know what you will be politically and maybe Haidt’s post I have here under the Moral Mind heading will help you understand yourself better…and me too, but whatever it is, relish liberalism for it allows for your freedom and the ability to direct oneself.

Please see “Illiberal”

How simple it is that through belief in God, we can achieve life after death? It is very convenient. The problem is simple of course, life implies too much and too little at the same time. For neither can biological life exist after death nor can life exist in a place that transcends existence; that boys is some deep shit.

Study this and study how this happens on TV, in Classrooms, and among friends.

Loyalty is very very misused in our world. Vocabulary.com says this of loyalty,

“If you are faithful and devoted to someone or something, you’re loyal. … Loyal comes from the Old French word loial which means something like “legal,” but if someone is only loyal to you because the law requires him to be, that’s not true loyalty, which should come from the heart, not a contract.”

Many people, especially friends measure friendship on your loyalty. These are not friends. These are people who seek to use you to their advantage and not yours. Loyalty is often used to make you compromise your own values not enforce them. Friendship requires mutual respect and the courage to accept a person in whole. A friend who expects loyalty is sending you a very clear message, they expect you to submit. Therein lies the accuracy of the definition above, be loyal with your heart.

Here is your challenge, to resist those who would manipulate you. This will be difficult for your mother and I have raised you largely through one form of manipulation or another. Thus as you approach independence, you will seek to throw off the chains we have wrapped around you to flee into the waiting arms of other people who will manipulate you. Good luck!

Boys I have smoked dope. Evidently, this means I could be president but not a Supreme Court justice. I first smoked dope because I was curious and I wanted to be cool around my chosen peers. Therein lays a weakness that shaped me as a teenager that I pray won’t shape you. My prayers will do little or no good. You will make foolish egotistical decisions that have more to do with who you’re hanging out with than what I or your mom will ever have to say. So trying to fit in and be cool was one of the reasons. The other, curiosity is a fascinating beast. Curiosity kills, that is true. All sorts of safe and sane people and evangelists will preach that. But curiosity is also a wonderful thing. Discovery is paramount to the nature of beauty so how do you measure between discovery and death?

It’s rather simple I think. I have navigated a course nowhere near the brink of death and have discovered much, self-discovered a bunch and have the urge still to this day to be curious.

Of course, we didn’t know if we would become ardent potheads, didn’t really care all that much to worry about it and often wondered what else we should try other than pot. I will admit this, I tried a lot of things and I’m lucky as a hellhound in a cathouse that I’m not totally messed up from things I have tried.

I do have friends who still smoke. And I know plenty of young people who do. Certain ones who smoke a lot have dulled their wit and drenched the fire in their soul. That saddens me. While pot may not be addictive like some drugs, its long-term consequences are very noticeable.

On the other side of the spectrum is a group of people I readily advocate the use of marijuana. I’m not writing just of cancer patients, I’m writing about horribly uptight people who are going to need some type of mind-altering substance to help them cope. Drinking a lot of wine is eventually going to mess you up.

You need to make sure the one you marry is sexually compatible with you. That you enjoy each other may seem a crazy thing to think necessary to suggest, but plenty of women would disappoint you and well don’t tell your ego but you will likely disappoint as well. However, sons if you are virgins when you marry or marry a virgin, well…I truly hope for the best and wish you a lifetime of happiness.

Even mom says to not do this.

Jeez, I like a good steak. I love smoked meats. Chicken, pork, salmon too. I would not make a very good vegetarian. The meat industry sucks, the concept of stockyards is bad. I still like meat.

Can we trust our Military? Hell no. Does that mean I don’t love and appreciate our military? No again. I respect those who serve, love the freedoms they have fought for and really do feel we need a good military. So dad, WTF, what’s with not trusting them? Sons, it’s like this, the military of many nations have a bad rep for a good reason. They overthrow governments. They often have leaders who get a little too big for their britches and take charge…without a vote. When our military lies I get prickly. I don’t like it. So for instance I posted this a while back on FB. It’s very troublesome to me that we just let our military in an official capacity lie and get away with it. When our military lies to us I think we should go batshit crazy.

She is flawless. Right.

I was her third child. I was a bit of a surprise. I can’t imagine how I tested her resolve to not give me to someone else. I miss her much and wish you two had gotten to know her.

I loved her quite much.

Well, it’s science you know. Me being the way I am is not my fault. This is about 30 minutes, watch it.

So let’s just pretend that Haidt is pretty right about the foundations of morality, which are Harm/Care, Fairness, Group Loyalty,  Authority, and Purity/Sanctity.  When I watch people now, I see something because of how Haidt points out that we all possess these traits, but goes on to say we value them at different levels.  (Watch the Moral Mind video.)  And so on any given day on Cable News, you can find people on display telling you which of these moral traits they hold in more esteem.  Obviously, the conservatives are into loyalty and authority.   Liberals are into Fairness.  What is astounding is how they are willing to ignore the truth or just lie when it comes to supporting their moral prerogatives.    Trump tells lies at an alarming rate and yes, he is an authoritarian and he demands loyalty.   He wants you to ignore his constant lying.   You might think he wrote the following words,

“If people want to really blow up one figure here or one word there, I would argue that they’re missing the forest for the trees. I think that there’s a lot of people more concerned about being precisely, factually, and semantically correct than about being morally right.”    

I hate Trump when he lies to support his bullshit.  But surprise, those are not Trump’s words.  Those are the words of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the New York Congresswoman after she made several misrepresentations (aka lies) about defense spending.  Obviously, her moral banner is not group and loyalty; she is really all about fairness.   Unfortunately, she feels the same as Trump does when it comes to supporting her moral foundation, lying is sort of immaterial.   That my boys is uncool.  Extremely uncool.

In life, you will have friends, bosses and people you vote for.  You need to keep track, not simply of how they value each of these moral foundations, but how extreme are they when it comes to whether the truth matters.  It does and always will.  I know you have already had teachers that are very pissed off with men, especially white men.  Those teachers are flawed the same as Ocasio-Cortez and Donald Trump.  When you have a beer with friends or sit in a meeting at work, understand the moral fibers and use the clues they give you to discern if they are fairly normal people are fucking crazy lunatics no matter their politics.

Plates of earth pushed begrudgingly together. Hot pimples of gastro fuel belching forth. Inverse ice carvings carved by ice, even to this day as the earth warms. What is this? What does this make? Art. Majesty. Passion. Mountains of course. Big crazy lumps of earth on our fragile world. Fragile yes. Incredibly thin is this crust on which we live. Thin! And below, a core of liquid fire. Our thin crust on which we live floats. Oh…you know this.

I like mountains as many others love the sea, it makes me feel small. Very small. Could it be they somehow ignite a concoction of feelings and thoughts by just observing them? Could it be that despite climbing them, baring them of trees, building roads up them and even now blowing them up for the minerals below that mountains will always be mysterious? I look at them in awe.

Are there some movies that I would like you to see one day. Yes.

Rear Window (1954)

Harold and Maude (1971)

Blazing Saddles (1974)

Animal House (1978)

Diva (1981)

Raising Arizona (1987)

Leon: The Professional (1994)

Shawshank Redemption (1994)

American Beauty (1999)

V is for Vendetta (2005)

The Big Short (2015)

Straight Outta Compton (2015)

Blackkklansman (2018)

Okay, I will throw in a few more when I think about it. And yes, there are lots of good movies, but these delivered a message in a very good way which is what movie making and telling stories is all about. Laughing as I look at the titles above, yes Animal House taught me something.

“The essence of soul is explained in music and ones love for it.” Sons, of all the words I have written here, I am most proud of these and hope forever that your souls thrive.

Most classical music is dead, same as many dead languages like Latin. Ha. Now it won’t be just the religious fanatics who want to shoot me. There is a small group of composers and musicians who are creating new and exciting pieces of classical-like music. These composers are different than the horde of composers who are creating simply more classical music. Unfortunately, none of these people have much of an audience since we have commercially tuned our ear to that of a 12 year upper middle-class white girl.

Essentially we have freedom of the Press.  Thank goodness we have that.  It is really under attack these days by people who don’t like being sullied for their politics. The free press means something. Protect it.

Freedom of the Press is not very perfect.  If you are a news outlet, you essentially want people to buy their news from you rather than others.  We, with a few exceptions, have for-profit companies providing our news.  Typically they use two devices to get us to pay attention, fear, and sex.  Please realize that all use these devices, just some do it to a greater extent and some to a lessor. There are many Americans at the extremes who don’t care if they’re telling the truth, they feel the ends justify the means. It’s very clear if you get your news from the bottom third of this chart, you are hearing and spreading lies. When I notice a friend re-posting or sharing something that is a lie, I tend to message them to tell them so they can fix their post or unshare it. Imagine my chagrin when a few of those friends in this last year have responded to me that lying is unimportant because it’s really about supporting an idea they believe in. That really is the frightening power of the lower third of the media companies listed, they lie for good reason, the people who tune in seem to be counting on just that. The media companies listed in that lower section are why the USA is so divided today, they seek to polarize us. Visit adfontesmedia.com to learn about how this chart has been created.

This term, “fake news” was popularized by our 45th President, yes Mr. Trump. But hold on there, other Presidents demonized the press, so Trump was hardly the first. However, Trump has had success in making people doubt the news and he has done it so successfully that he has survived many failures by simply creating doubt and about something I call “whataboutism” which you will find as a subject in the Ws of this index.

So what is fake news? I think it really does exist and it is not simply liberal and/or conservative. It is a product of all-day news channels that need to fill their time somehow. So they have introduced long periods of Analysis and Opinion shows. These shows aren’t news. They largely spread yackity yak yak. Be careful whom you listen to for their opinion, sort of how you are listening to me right now.

Want to really understand the history of Fake News and where it comes from…. this is worth your time.  (this is in 3 parts)

Corporate news is bad shit. There are 3 types of corporate news, Broadcasters, chains of Newspapers and chains of local news stations. For years, corporate broadcasters worked to provide the highest integrity and the most investigative reporting. They were always fighting for the highest ratings. Well, they were sitting on their pompous butts and Fox News showed up. Fox simply outfoxed them. How? It was pretty damn simple really. Fox decided that 40 percent of the viewership was conservative. They craftily branded themselves as “fair and balanced” and then went into right wing politics. Their news, their analysis and their opinion are all conservative. They became the biggest cable news channel easily. They left the other cable guys to fight for the remaining 60 percent.

Never underestimate how news channels wish to manipulate you into watching them. Their number one tactic is now fear. That is old hat now, and again Fox News has brought a new tactic, it’s called conspiracy theory. In this case, they build trust by continuing to make the public mistrust others.

The same has been done with newspapers and local broadcasters. When I was young, no corporation or anyone was allowed to own more than a few newspapers and a few local stations, but that changed a while back and now many are owned by a few.

Unfortunately, there is bias now in our local stations which is forced out into our marketplace by a national organization with a political bent. Here’s a great piece by John Oliver to explain this to you.

Well….damn it, it started with a guy named Ted Turner who was attempting to nationalize his cable channel.  So he created CNN as a 24 hour news channel.  Everyone else soon followed.  There was an inherent problem with this concept, there really isn’t enough news to keep us engaged.  We lack the context to so much of it.  So the news soon dramatically upped the analysis and commentary.

Really, it is that we ended the fairness princess for the broadcasters back in the 80s and then Rupert Murdock politicized the news in a way to seize market.  The truest sense of evil are the talking heads who spend a moment on the truth and then make it into something that it is not.

Shawn Hannity is of course evil as are the others on Fox, but just as evil is Don Lemon and Rachel Maddow.  They are all bad for us and bad for our country.  We must learn to muzzle them and to realize that opinion people like them are evil fucks.  All of them, not some of them.

Yeah, sooner or later that finger of yours is going up that nose. Try to be discrete about it, okay.

Obligation is the most insidious of words and it hides behind some very noble traits. Honoring your obligations is indeed an important element in the foundation of your honor and the respect you receive. Thus it should be paramount for you to understand and respect how important obligating yourself is.

If you have to pay rent or if you buy a car on credit, you obligate yourself to make payments. That is true, I guess unless you are wealthy. But obligation is predatory in nature and most of us give time without realizing the value of what we have given and most certainly, you have asked for time without respecting the worth of what you ask for. A simple way to be wealthy is to have only what you can buy. That is wealth. See also: Budget

This is not quite ready for me to write about….still developing.

Find peace inside yourself. That is impossible, same as all of us agreeing on one God. The world population exists on so many different levels. I think a few people get very close to complete peace. I don’t think I am good enough to do even that. I wish I was. That is not an excuse not to try, I do and I will, but ego and fear haunt me that same as they will you.

I love the peace symbol for all the wrong reasons. I love irony. The peace symbol was created by this dude over in England. He combined semaphore symbols (N and D for Nuclear Disarmament) into what we simply know as the peace symbol. Why do I find such humor in this? Ha. Because this is what peaceful religions like Christianity make of this symbol.

“Throughout the last 2,000 years (I guess that is before 1958 when it was created) this (the peace sign) symbol has designated hatred of Christians. Nero, who despised Christians, crucified the Apostle Peter on a cross head downward. This hideous event resembled the Teutonic cross and became a popular pagan insignia of the day. Thereafter, this sign became known as the ‘Neronic cross.’   This is from a Christian website.

I am sure, that if Christ ever does return, Christians will murder him for being the anti-Christ.

World Peace is a contradiction. The problem is in having rules, having order. Without total chaos, world peace is impossible. And chaos…….is rarely peaceful.

Ya, I had this.  Yes, it is hereditary.  Yes, you need to pay attention.

You, or your concerned spouse can find out more by going to perthes.org or clicking on the image above.  I limped.  I fell on my face.   I was 5.    I had a lousy version of it.  Thankfully it goes away, at least it did for me.  This in due to your grandmother praying to God (you know the correct god) over and over until God relented and healed me.

I was always an asshole about pets……I’m sure I have good reasons why as people who happily take on pets have good reasons too. The duality of pet ownership is akin to the duality of most moral dilemmas, there is no right or wrong, only choice. My aversion is deeper than the swollen eyes, itchy skin and runny nose. I hate dog hair on clothes and furniture. I hate shit on the carpet, half eaten what-was-suppose-to-be-my dinner on the floor and I hate the grass-lawn heel-poop-slide too. The pet, a pet of any sort demands obligation, the most insidious of demands. In this world where few understand its responsibility, pets regularly suffer the consequence. That is horrible. Pets have few rights and they have nothing to protect themselves from neglect.

So many kids want pets, but few are ever true in the time they are willing to give to that pet. Think of what they would have to give up to do so? Aha…most never do, for the time given to a pet means that time for something else no longer exists. What do you give up to have a pet? What activity, what sports, what video game? A pet is a partner in many ways, and you must give in a partnership to receive…or at least you should. I hope you realize that before you neglect your own pet.

….and 12 years later, we get a fucking dog!

I’m not into slurs and hate speech, but… (by the way the video below is not comedy.)

You know, one way of fixing a lot of problems sons and I mean a lot of problems is to have fewer people on this planet. (ah…the bad guy in Avengers Infinity War believes this. His way of fixing the world was to kill off half of literally everyone. We call this genocide. It’s evil.) Now having fewer people on the planet without genocide is unlikely for several reasons so there is no quick fix. I have had some very complex discussions on this topic with some very smart people and I have yet to find a way . . . a path you might say to a reasonable solution.

Now dad, how on earth did you end up talking with smart people about population control? That I suppose is a legitimate question to ask. It might surprise your mother among others to find out that once upon a time in one of my different lives, I was a moderator on the internet for an environmentally-themed news show on television. And since I was one of the moderators, people mistook me as an expert and thus a lot of people talked to me as if I was their peer on topics, well such as population control.

First and foremost, the bible has screwed us. It says to basically go out and propagate like rabbits. And we have such a sex drive that this indeed seems to correspond to Gods wishes. If you do you are being good and if you don’t well…you are by definition a big ass failure in God’s eyes. Oddly, medicine and healthcare across the world is keeping people alive, perhaps longer but certainly long enough to procreate more and then well, we have gotten a lot better at feeding more people. The earth is producing quite a harvest.

Now if that is all not bad enough, that religion, medicine and food is not conspiring against this premise (that we need less people on this earth) there are a couple of other arguments that are … un … well challenging.

First of these is the presumption that our blue and green ball can’t support more people. Certainly, if we were more frugal, we could use less resources and forward the idea of sustainability for a few more generations. But there are some very smart people out there who believe this….that one day, when there are too many people, nature will adjust. How? Famine. Disease. Something nasty and drastic.

Indeed we are more and more fragile as people and as a society and world. Antibiotics that used to work don’t. New, hard to control viruses appear, bird flu and bees, not the birds and bees of the old at all. More to think about is how technology has made us vulnerable. Can you kill and slaughter an animal and then eat it? Can you sustain yourself off the land? You two might be able to because I took some time to teach you. I often say freedom is neither given nor earned; freedom is simply the ability to take care of oneself. Adaptation to change may be the most important trait you have.

Think of the natural disaster that awaits when the magnetic pole shifts. When the sun flares a big one. When global warming really messes up the earth. When the earth’s crust busts a seam and spews its belly-fire into our precious atmosphere. We are screwed. There is no doubt.

But wait. Should you worry about that? Should you fear that? Should you dig a hole in the ground and bury your food and water? No sons no. Please live for today. Not yesterday. Not for tomorrow. Living in fear of tomorrow’s possibilities is living in a prison today.

But do you suppose the smart people who told me that earth’s population will be self-regulated by nature are right? Certainly, the biblical nut cases, the Muslims too and the Jews will all kill each other during the argument of who has the honor of killing a heretic like me, but I do find it sad, that ambitious quests to limit population with our own intellect is not worthy of effort because god told us not to or because the intellectuals say that nature will take care of it anyway.

My current thinking is this, porn is not all bad . . . certainly, the plots suck and the acting is suspect, but porn could be fairly useful. Now, this is not an endorsement of the pathetic underpinnings of the porn industry. There is a tragic history of drug abuse, emotional degrading and abuse that grip pornography like ivy does a tower.   And what does it make you feel about yourself, that your cock is not long enough, or that your body is not attractive or you really aren’t interested in doing all of those things they are doing in porn.  And what is porn? In some cultures, it’s an uncovered face. In ours, well it’s hard to tell these days as the lines blur contemptuously between those who want you to watch at most any cost versus those who shudder at the thought. I guess what I’m saying is this, you have to learn from somewhere and I’m wondering right this moment who is going to teach you about pleasing your sexual partner.  Watching porn with your partner seems to me to be a simple solution.   Of course, better yet is having a very experienced lover who is willing to teach you, BUT DON’T EVER TELL ANYONE I SAID SO.

There have been a lot of presidents, some great ones and some shitty ones. This is historical, not simply impressions.

So I’ve been alive for a long time now, here are the ones I have survived.

Eisenhower – a General in our Army who became president until I was about 4. Do you really think I can remember anything about him? He was a war hero and cool. I remember nothing.

Kennedy – the Catholic President. Screwed Marilyn Monore while married. Charismatic, handsome and the fucker who led us into the Vietnam War. Yet, jeez we all loved him, especially after he was assassinated. Un Oh. You haven’t had to deal with that much. He was shot dead while riding in a car with his wife.

Johnson – sworn in once Kennedy was pronounced dead. He was a sly politician who was really not so bad of a leader. Won the next election by portraying his rival as someone who would destroy the planet with nuclear war. As I said, sly.

Nixon – okay cool factoid, yes I saw him get nominated to become the Republican nominee in Miami in 1968. Nixon, wow, lots to write but I don’t and you certainly don’t have the bandwidth to deal with it in this handbook. First off, elected to two terms. Had to resign before he served out his second term because of Watergate. Watergate is where he broke the fucking law and I mean BROKE THE FUCKING LAW. Nixon rode political happenings like surfers ride waves. He did it out of convenience for the furtherance of his career. The balls though of this Republican President hung low. He froze prices and wages when we were in economic crisis. Imagine anyone doing that nowadays. When I say froze prices and wages, I mean he said no one could raise the price of anything and no one could give a raise to anyone. That my boys, is the definition of balls.

Gerald Ford – second non-elected president of my time to replace an elected president. And I mean non-elected. Nixon’s vice president was a guy named Agnew. He got caught up in being a crook ahead of Nixon and was forced to resign. Ford was an appointed Vice President. Ford is remembered for 3 things. 1 – He pardoned Nixon which pissed off a lot of people. 2 – He was an atrocious golfer who was known for hitting errant shots that beaned bystanders. I love him for that because he loved golf despite how bad he was at it, and 3) He was married to Betty Ford, a drug abuser first lady we all grew to love and now when you hear of famous people going to the “Betty Ford Clinic” that means they are going to her clinic founded in her name to get clean.

Carter – a Democrat. A peanut farmer. He had been a submarine commander in the Navy. A pretty decent guy. Actually, of all the Presidents that I can recall, Carter is the nicest. He was also a crappy president because he had the noble idea that we should clean up all of the wasteful government spending. What that meant was that all of the boondoggle federal spending was to go away if he had his way. This, of course, pissed off everyone including his own party, senators, and representatives. They immediately threw him under the bus and told him to fuck off. He’ll be remembered for his dumbfuck brother, peanuts, Habitat for Humanity and his toothy smile. Even his wife was classy.

Reagan – Jesus, he is considered one of our greatest presidents. He solved a lot of economic woes as women, empowered for equal rights went to work. All of sudden our USA workforce grew like crazy and we increased our productivity substantially as well as our household incomes with two people working. This was bad shit of course. While equal rights are paramount, Reagan benefited by seeing the American Family crumble. He’ll be remembered from the crumbling of the Berlin Wall. What that means is that with our economy humming along, he put a shit-ton into military spending and dared the Soviet Union to keep up. They couldn’t. The Russians will forever be pissed off. By the time he finished serving his second term, Reagan’s brain was gone much like grandpas. He was not as great as he is remembered. Did I mention, he was a Hollywood Film Actor by trade. Also, he survived an assassination attempt.

Bush, the First – a swarmy interesting man who swam the channels of government waiting to become King. From CIA director to Ambassador to China, Bush the First, was really damned good at understanding the game of politics. He was stuck trying to carry on the Reagan tradition. It was pretty messy when it was handed to him. He really did nothing to make it better.

Clinton, the husband – Bill Clinton was the greatest president of my time. It’s not that he was a great man, no, he had great timing. First off, he saw our country to a balanced budget. This hadn’t happened in over a hundred years and it has not happened since. He was great at everything he did….except for being a really good husband. You see, he was getting blowjobs in the oval office and they weren’t coming from Hillary. This infuriated Republicans. They wanted him out and spent his second term harassing him. Didn’t matter. He was good. Also of note, of my presidents, he was the first to have never served in the military. He also smoked pot.

Bush, the Second – generally Bush the Second is regarded as a complete dimwit. He is not the sharpest tool in the shed but he represented Americana which people missed ever since Reagan took it away. He got us into trouble including a lot of warfare to benefit his friend Dick Chaney, but as his followers claim, the road to hell is paved with great fucking intentions. He can throw down on his father for winning a second term when his father did not.

Obama – Kids, the moment Oprah wheeled him out, we all knew he was going to be president. It was how fast that surprised even him. I think of him as a great dude like Carter, incredibly classy and a father figure for our entire nation. He was a pretty good president but not good enough because he didn’t have enough salve and suck ’em up juice to get the two parties to make any peace. To this day, he should be revered for the barriers he just didn’t knock down, he blew them away. It takes a special person to do that.

Trump – mentally unstable, he has a HUGE problem with size issues. like duh, what’s that about, eh; he’s a cheater, a liar and a manipulator of Titanic proportions. He survives by bullying. He is a true misogynist and hateful racist. His prime agenda is to undo everything our first black president did. (The source for these points is his own words.) He is a bizarre man, he seeks to impregnate women. He has an in-suppressible urge to fuck them. (Again, his own words.) He wants a lot of little Trumps. There have been many other men like this before him. It’s just sort of weird watching him as our elected president in our media-crazed world. He makes Taft look like a great president. I’m agnostic, but I pray our nation survives.

Biden – sleepy joe?  I don’t know.  Biden seems like a reasonable placeholder but he is beyond his time and his intellect is likely not sharp enough to run our country when it is so divided.  One thing about Biden, listen to his words and see his deeds, he believes in compromise.  Compromise is how our country works and without it, we are fucked.  Newt Gingrich fucked us over during the Clinton years with a no-compromise tenacity as speaker of the House.  He and the politicians since, both Republican and Democratic who have shelved the need to compromise in favor of the win, are the most un-American, evil fuckers we have in our country.

A really really funny term when you think about it. Time is fucking quality. Having a lack of it is full on shit.  What you do with your time defines the quality of your life but definitely not of time itself.  Live in the present boys and cherish time as the single most valuable resource.

Every living being is racist. You and I are racists. No one is free of this thing. It is not okay to be racist. We all make assumptions whether good or bad, nice or naughty, benevolent or slickly urbane and when it comes to people or a person, assumptions will usually get you into trouble.

Religion is “the bane of God’s existence.”

Religion is the worship of God or, ahem, god. It is severely limited by humankind’s lack of having the capacity to understand God. All religious institutions are hollow failures since each of the thousands that have existed and still exist and yet shall exist in the future are inventions of man. It certainly is pompous to think yours is the one and only religion that represents god. I hope you never subscribe to an earthly religion. I see the lives of too many men, women, children and nations wasted and too often sacrificed in the pursuit of sharing a belief in something that is impossible to do since each of us is unique and that our individual point of view precludes us from sharing something in the exact same way. Alas, it is not from the lack of trying. I have witnessed several groups of men study the Bible with the same quizzical result for years, which is they need more time to study. These coffee table groups are hardly unique as you know, for throughout the world there are scholars, the curious, the troubled, the insecure and the righteous who continue to try every day to prove to themselves and to others that they “know God.”

Believe in yourself; accept yourself as small and God as something so huge that trying to comprehend God is good while it’s the pretending that you do is bad. By now you’ve undoubtedly heard me utter nonsense about beauty and how it is the root of all things remotely of God. This is the path to God that I have found, but to pretend that it has brought me to know God is like pretending dead fish are swimming.

Respect is something you give, something you can earn, it can be not given to you when deserved and you can give it when you shouldn’t and not give it when you should. But what is respect?

My good friend Wiki says, “Respect is taking into consideration the views and desires of others, and including it into your decisions. When you respect another, you factor and weigh their thought’s and desires into your planning and balance it into your decision making.” Anyway, that’s what it means today as I write this. Who knows what it will mean when I am long gone.

So for me, I often give respect quickly, but once I have lost respect for someone, it takes a long long time for me to give it back. Every person is different and each way is okay, EXCEPT in that you should not give respect to someone who does not deserve it and not expect it when it is underserved.

Risk is one badass problem. You must risk. You must risk in everything you do. But……..please be careful. I always say, manage your risk to make for the best outcomes.

We are rock and roll and the music that has sprung forth from rock.  All the iterations over the last decade are from the blues roots rock has, as it wandered into rockabilly.   Now I would suggest you remember it well, because one of these days, someone will apply their cancel culture ways to it, wanting it struck from our history same as everything else that is offensive.  Why?  Come on guys, rock music through rap is misogynistic as hell and full of sex, drugs and roc…. well you get the point, an irony.  Perhaps someone will stand up and finally say, look Mick Jagger was an ass by today’s standards (who knows, maybe an ass whenever in the timeline) but, it is no reason to forget him.

Second Coming Of Christ

Secrets

Secrets, organizational

There will be times, when your sex drive will consume you. This is pretty much true with every young man. And guess what, it’s the same for old men too. So when you look around at your peers and at their dads, we are all in the same boat. Your body conspires against your logical mind and just plain kicks your ass so hard you have no idea there is anything else in the world other than scoring with some chick. That my boys, in those written words is sexist, is sexism and befuddling true and thank small gods and large ones too that it is, for we have pregnancy, babies and something of a future even though we don’t get to be a part of it, because, well, we die.

Sex, reproducing and mating while being a major function in our lives, biologically driven and chemically charged is really still a taboo topic so uncomfortable for most to discuss because we have been culturally taught to make individuals feel embarrassed over their own bodies and their own desires.

Now that’s not to say that it’s okay to let your desires run amok and unchecked. The litany of names we shall call you if that happens runs the gamut of terms you will likely find in any university restroom stall and your life will certainly be set back if not completely shelved in some colorless cell block.

And of course there are sexual criminals; your mother will tell you she has spent years of your lives and hers savagely protecting her cubs from pedophiles and a consortium of other freaks who might harm you. Nowhere can you go, that parents can’t be diligent, can’t be on guard and can’t be overprotective to ensure that some sick wacko doesn’t make off with their girls or boys, even though there is some miniscule chance of that really happening. We have been taught to fear it by our TV news and special fear-mongering press and if you do not buy in on this fear, some do-gooder will likely complain to the authorities that you are being irresponsible and possibly negligent in protecting a young life.

There will be times, when your sex drive will consume you. This is pretty much true with every young man. And guess what, it’s the same for old men too. So when you look around at your peers and at their dads, we are all in the same boat. Your body conspires against your logical mind and just plain kicks your ass so hard you have no idea there is anything else in the world other than scoring with some chick. That my boys, in those written words is sexist, is sexism and befuddling true and thank small gods and large ones too that it is, for we have pregnancy, babies and something of a future even though we don’t get to be a part of it, because, well, we die.

Sex, reproducing and mating while being a major function in our lives, biologically driven and chemically charged is really still a taboo topic so uncomfortable for most to discuss because we have been culturally taught to make individuals feel embarrassed over their own bodies and their own desires.

Now that’s not to say that it’s okay to let your desires run amok and unchecked. The litany of names we shall call you if that happens runs the gamut of terms you will likely find in any university restroom stall and your life will certainly be set back if not completely shelved in some colorless cell block.

And of course there are sexual criminals; your mother will tell you she has spent years of your lives and hers savagely protecting her cubs from pedophiles and a consortium of other freaks who might harm you. Nowhere can you go, that parents can’t be diligent, can’t be on guard and can’t be overprotective to ensure that some sick wacko doesn’t make off with their girls or boys, even though there is some minuscule chance of that really happening. We have been taught to fear it by our TV news and special fear-mongering press and if you do not buy in on this fear, some do-gooder will likely complain to the authorities that you are being irresponsible and possibly negligent in protecting a young life.

My gosh, even without TV much of your young lives, you have seen a lot of violence and have been subject to watching a lot of innuendo and foreplay. Your mother and I have often debated which could be worse. While sex gnaws at your spine like a vicious dog on a bloody pine cone, our Christian nations flirts with the affliction daily, hourly and by the minute on TV, on the radio and through thousands of magazine racks strategically placed throughout the country so that your eyes are never too far away from accidentally causing in you a little extra desire or at the very least a blast of gruesome violence.

So while everywhere you go, there is an overabundance if not a stupendous amount of movies and shows, and advertisements and magazines and books that lure you with sexual undertow if not pornography, the moral pillars of our society actually believe you should be living a cloistered life, repressed from the primal feelings that seem to want to control you. That is really messed up.

Though I am making a point of talking to you about your body, puberty and sex early in your life, chances are you will hear more, earlier and more often at recess on the playground. The school playground is a vile bile-filled cesspool of misinformation, especially when it comes to sex. So many kids come equipped with different armaments. Some with older siblings will paint very vivid imaginative pictures, some with wild imaginations and a couple of accidental glimpses will create interesting Ripley-Believe-It-Or-Not scenarios, some with nearly a decade of late night Cinemax and Playboy Channels will arguably give the most accurate graphic description and of course, some with conservative nutcase parents who lecture them that sex (whatever that is) before marriage is ungodly, a big Sin, wrong wrong wrong, ruinous for girls and chiefly, something you should never talk about…well those ones will likely tell their parents about what they heard on the playground which leads to a couple of hysterical nights at home and then eventually enrollment in a parochial school. I caution you to not be baited into talking about sex. Why? Well, son, if you are still on a playground I hope to hell you really don’t know much about sex, so anything you say is probably wrong. Most kids who talk about sex are really doing it to try to embarrass you. Be careful of them. Shake your head and walk away from them, they are not friends.

While it is true you will be truly screwed up by your sex drive,  First off, sexual conquistadors will talk about their conquests in finite detail to the point you want to flee the room. And you will be jealous because you simply can’t keep pace with such wild abandon. But then reality sets in and you have a sex life, an ongoing sex life with a rich smart woman who is more than somewhat like Audrey Hepburn and you will realize that sex addicts have minimized what could be magnificent lives.

First, I am a sexist pig. Don’t think otherwise.

For centuries women have been most oft placed in a subservient role of being a lesser person with a few exceptions. In the last 100 years, women have been included in the equality of life…..but not entirely. On so many fronts, such as pay for the same job, equality is a fallacy. And, sexism like racism still burns with the blue flicker of hatred in many hearts. For the whole of it, men are to blame. Religion has been man’s tool to keep women subservient. Religion has wronged women since religion was invented by men.

Now, with that said…….men and women are not equal as a large group stereotype. Women have boobs and no penis. Men can’t pass a bowling ball through their vagina. But really, men are typically physically stronger, girls develop certain mental aptitude before boys and beer is sold by seductive women, not seductive men.

Low and behold the root of sexism is sex. So the lesson learned here is that once feminism took hold, we were not supposed to ogle women, but nowadays based on playboy and the media, we are supposed to ogle her, but respect her too. We want her, but we have to suppress the physical urge to just fucking have her. It is a difficult dilemma to understand the difference between an “object” and a “person,” but sons, I know you can do it.

This is really complicated by your sex drive, your urge. Sexism is driven by the failure of not having what one wants. Think of that. When you are around friends who are behaving in a way that objectifies something or someone they want, it is usually because they lack the skill to have what they want. Think of the opposite, those who fuck everything they can and brag of “bagging chicks” or whatever. Their objective sexism by the numbers explains their lack of soul and success in having the one thing they likely won’t.

Please see the heading Social Justice for an important reminder of why equity and equality can be used to create a difference between those who seek social justice and truth.

This is a movie. It’s worth your time. I don’t like prison movies much, but this is definitely worth your time. More about movies that I remember, go to Movies.

The ski business sucks. It sucks because people are trying too hard to make money while hiding under the self-induced hip and cool glaze of trying-very-hard-to-be-part-of-the-cool crowd. The crowd is dwindling. I hung around with that crowd and…well…never fit in too well. I was a Gomer and still am. (What’s a Gomer dad? Ah boys, a different era, Google “Gomer Pyle.”) Anyway, the problem with the ski industry is rooted in one simple characteristic; self promotion rules over ski promotion. IT IS OKAY TO MAKE MONEY; that has never been the problem. No. The problem is “cool.” Unfortunately cool is a marketing thing, an ego thing. That makes me very sad. What is cool is not personality, cool is time slowed down. Do that, and that’s cool! There are some wonderful companies out there that do promote our sport; they are a minority while most clearly do not. They are guilty of industry and innocent of passion. Passion is a mere quiver in the marketing departments tool chest.

What is important?

Raising you to be skiers is the most important ski industry job there is. Raising skiers, that is what skiers must do. Now with that recommendation, I will say the ski industry again is inept and off track. Why? Well, it spends money, lot’s at times in the past attempting to promote family skiing. And to this day many ski areas heavily discount children’s lift tickets. I applaud them. I thank them. Bless you guys for doing that. But……..

Discounting is not promoting. Discounting is not passion.

Indeed, if there was a time to discount it would be during a skiers transition from having mom and dad pay for skiing to when you pay for skiing. This is the time most critical to you boys and to the industry too. For it is easy to love skiing now when we pay for you to go when we ski together and make all the effort to pack and transport you there. It’s when you have to start paying, it’s when you have to pack, it’s when you have to acquire all the gear necessary to go, that my boys is the true test of your passion and love for skiing. That is when the ski industry should make it easy for you to find that passion.

And the industry can. During this important transition, you need to be afforded the opportunity to give service to skiing and be selfless. I know you wish to be ski patrollers and I love that. I hope you do that some day. But what I really wish for you, is to be ski instructors for a few years. Not race coaches, not big mountain skier coaches, I want you to teach beginners and intermediates how to ski. Hell, I don’t want you to teach arcane stupid ski techniques and verbalize to death the complexities of turning right and left. No. I want you to teach them your passion as I have taught you. Lead them down the hill and let them feel the exhilaration of it. The ski industry has a huge disconnect here. Young skiers rarely become instructors now. Look at the average age of ski instructors and you can see the problem. They are too old. I see little activity to change that. Indeed, the ski industry is dying because of this yet they seem oblivious to the importance of growing this community. If the ski industry could do one thing right tomorrow, it would embrace ski instructors in a way that raises their respect and status to a point that non-skiers recognized their importance and stature.

So my boys, as I write this to you, my cheeks redden and my heart pumps a little stronger as I wish for you the same feeling someday about this sport as I write these words now. In 3 weeks the season comes to an end and you will have once again racked up a monstrous number of days of skiing. I will skin a few days in the spring and I hope to take you along on a trip. My passion is to stand on mountain tops with my family.

Skiing, regardless of the industry and self-promoters will survive, because it exists in one’s soul as music does. Respect only the parts of the ski industry that has a passion for our sport. It is clear to see, which companies market passion and which demonstrate it in their actions.

I will do my best here to not write a book…………

Skiing is an athletic endeavor. A person needs certain characteristics to become a skier and then become a better skier. These are not taught traits, but ones that are earned. Go work out. Get some muscles. Be athletic. Then, one can ski. And skiing really is very simple. Balance and weight transfer. Yes, hips and shoulders down the hill.  Yes, press your knees into the hill to carve. Yes, release your knees to slip. Yes yes yes yes yes, so many things to do and remember. But first, the core, balance and weight transfer.

Ski schools and instruction are something that brings a great deal of emotion out in me. Fundamentally, ski instructors are grossly undervalued. Their disregard, their lack of respect, the lack of desire for young adults to become ski (and snowboard) instructors is like looking at a tall tree with dying roots. The tree is dying you idiots out there on the branches!!!! It kills me.

And then instruction from within is terrible. Ski instruction has been organized, quantified and departmentalized into a terrible bureaucratic politeness of there being a right and wrong way to ski. It is made into a technique laden stew of crap. Everything about sliding on snow is explained and examined and critiqued. Watch instructor clinics (instructors teaching instructors) talk talk talk blah blah blah No one smiles. Words have to be carefully chosen. Right and wrong is quantified. That should be thrown out. Throw it away. Give it over to the race coaches and the silly rules they have to live by. For goodness sake, skiing is supposed to be fun. I would like to slap senseless (an easy feat since they appear senseless to begin with) the knuckleheads who make skiing hard, who make it correct and incorrect. Screw you guys. Go have some fun. Teach that! While I am terribly hard on those who don’t appreciate ski instructors, I equally believe the instruction industry needs to be critical of it’s methods instead of skiing itself.

Now…boys, distilled, for you this means, when you are old teenagers or young adults, instruct; just don’t become a knucklehead who knows too much. Instruct for about 5 years tops and move on. DO NOT become old ski instructors. Old instructors are creepy. (Pretty sure I just offended a whole bunch of friends….)

Unfortunately, skiing is not immune from knuckleheads who are driven to make things very objective. Worse, they take it very seriously. Such is the case with many youth sports, soccer and baseball and yes, ski racing. It is sad to see kids pulled into training instead of skiing, practicing instead of experiencing and learning instead of growing. Ski racing is a collection of as many bad things as good and for me it is a joy to see some individuals who don’t take it quite so seriously as others do really well. Usually, it pisses those who take their sport so seriously and they get mad and try to make those who take things lightly to go away.  Take for instance the rules below that tell you how your ski must be a certain length and width and you can’t have tall ski boots.  (I’m not kidding.)

I have seen too many incredible ski days, days of powder, days of soft bumps, days of joy ignored by a group who are committed to running gates. Some truly have a passion for it. But ski racing is not skiing. Racing is a game of rules, luck and yes, skill. Race and enjoy it, but please don’t take it too seriously. And for you out there who train on powder days…..find the joy of skiing again.

I see this amazing picture (you boys at only 6 and 9) and I smile. I hope you ski together until you are old men and that you smile happily as I do. That is my hope for you.

What is it about such a simple thing is there so much to like? My life has been consumed by skiing and I feel happiest when I am in the mountains, skating down a cat track in the early morning on the way to a run. I click my poles against each other behind my back and smile, grin stupidly and sometimes shriek; this is the feeling we should all be granted to know every day of our lives. Like music, it can connect you to your soul.

Am I a great skier…no…unless greatness is simply defined by passion, then yes. Otherwise, my technique is lacking, my muscles untrustworthy and my desire for objective greatness is missing. (Laughing at myself about a desire for objective greatness, that must have died in my twenties.) I simply love skiing and hope (with some ego involved) that you will too. See Flow, aka the Zone and also Soul.

April 2006 – the last day of the season. Hard to imagine it would end so.

Freestyle skiing has really no freestyle left in it. In accordance with rule-makers, promoters and egos, freestyle skiing was objectified to make money, to make results and to make it an Olympic Sport. So sad. To freakin’ bad! Like many wonderful things, freestyle skiing was dreamed up by passionate schemers. Originally called a “hot dog contest” (I’m not kidding), the first events really didn’t have spectators and the judges were very arbitrary and subjective in their concept of what was a great run. Really subjective would be putting it mildly.

Many great sports have started the same way and most of those have been ruined by promoters and industry. Surfing, mountain biking, climbing, even snowboarding have been raped by opportunists. Like my diatribe on ski instruction, too much is spent on making things right and wrong. We focus on egos, images and brands. The moment you see the branding professionals insidiously pimp out the young hot shots of any sport with sunglasses and footwear….well my boys, the end is near. It’s like watching a balloon filled with helium until it finally explodes.

Even now at your very young age you might have figured out that your father is incredibly smart and at times just as stupid. It would appear to me the two often go hand in hand, or hand and foot or perhaps foot in mouth. People often tell me that I am brilliant, they are mistaking what brilliant is, brilliant I am not. There are moments, I think most people can have them, moments of brilliance, those eureka moments that lights go on inside ones mind and ideas solidify like mud in the desert. If that is brilliance then I am lucky enough to have suffered it at least 3 or 17 times.

I hate being stupid. It is impossible to avoid ones stupidity. There is a raging set of interactives, nuanced subsets of ideas, whirling thoughts, temptations, social interactions and internal & external conflicts that shudders ones intelligence and darkens the intellectual landscape towards a sullen dismal dusk. The darkness of ones stupidity is unfortunately illuminating. It often wears a cape called “your ego.”

Someday young ones, you will recognize the scale of your intellect and how you apply it with the facts that you have learned; you must learn to harness it, be humble about it and come to terms with the fact there are many many smarter people running loose out there as there are dummkopfs.

I bought you your first snowboards…..hopefully, your last. I don’t care much for snowboarding. I want to frame this with that admission.  That does not mean to say that my lack of interest in snowboarding doesn’t mean that I don’t like snowboarders, nor do I think snowboarders shouldn’t be on the hill.  Of course, snowboarders are welcome and wanted.  I want people to come to the mountains and have fun.

Snowboarding is a form of skiing. The snowboard is a mono-ski, it skis over and through the snow. This is an unpopular point because it buffets the coolness of snowboarding and those who promote snowboarding. Traditional Mono-skiing sucks because of mechanics. With ones feet planted side by side and locked together articulating the traditional ski to the side to carve a turn is unnatural. Burton and a few others adopted the stance of the skateboarder and it worked and it worked well.

Snowboarding technology exploded. The ski industry fell in love with it, skier/boarder counts at the ski areas was going up once again and from that good things happened. I think snowboarders ripping cut up powder or cut up crud for that matter led ski designers to those big fat skis we are all standing on, but snowboarding has not integrated so well into our ski areas. Old skiers can bitch about stupid snowboarding kids, but none of that holds much water, because kids can be just as stupid on skis.

The problem is one of safety.  And snowboarders are not to blame, the ski industry is.  When we introduce something new to a ski hill, we are obligated to figure it out and we never really have.   So for instance, why are sledders now allowed to sled on the ski slopes?  That is simple enough to answer, the industry has a reason, sleds can’t turn well to avoid obstacles and they don’t have a braking mechanism.  But snowboards have that and more, so why is it that I have this issue with ski areas and snowboarding?

First, chairlifts and lift lines were not created for snowboarders. Snowboard bindings require the snowboarder to disengage the rear foot so that they proceed through the lift line. This is accomplished by making the snowboarder skid walk in a severe pigeon-toe.  Skiers do not do this, they ski into lift line. There are industry solutions such as gondolas, I am sure other ideas are on there way.

Secondly, snowboarders constantly sit. Sitting on undulating hills is not safe. Sitting at the exit area of ski lifts is not safe, but necessary to remount their rear binding. Oddly, not sitting is something skiers are often taught first.

And thirdly and most importantly, snowboarders have the backside. The backside is a blindside. A blindside on a ski hill is terribly bad. Most skiers have stories of being hit or nearly hit by snowboarders.  I’m getting too old to be hit by anyone.  A skier can hit me too, but statistically, crashes with snowboarders are way too high.  Somehow, we need to address this issue, I chatter (same as a cyclist, “on your right”) or click my ski poles, but these days many people a lot of people have music going in their ears, they will never hear me.  And therein lies something snowboarders themselves have to change, the long swooping right to left or left to right crosses often paying little or no attention to what is coming down the fall line, which at this point is not their fault.  The fault lies with the uphill skier or boarder.  This is wrong, the skier rule is out of date because it was made before snowboarding existed.  That explains the problem, ski areas, to this day, accept snowboarding because of the money it entails, but they as an industry have not grown with snowboarding to adapt their areas and rules for the best fit.

It’s as close as we get to having a pension for all. It will likely be bankrupted by the time you are 65 and benefits will have been slashed accordingly. This is criminal. Social Security is NOT an Entitlement. We all pay into a specific fund and that fund should easily sustain the payments it will make. However….. However, our government took the money from the fund to pay other bills because it was not forbidden to do so. So instead we have a promissory note from the federal government to repay the money. It’s criminal that people in Congress (currently the Republicans) who talk openly about how social security is failing and needs to be cut when in reality they the very thieves who took the money and owe us, the people who paid for it.

If you have not found and read the definitions for Equality and Equity, please do. Now….two new words, correlation, and causation. That is if data correlates with a cause, does that mean what you site the correlation is responsible for the causation. Many many people do this and if you have read my insights on Boolean Logic, you will see that you can get into trouble quickly by jumping to conclusions. This is a problem because I really really have a problem with people seeking social justice because it correlates with a problem but really has no basis in reality. In fact, I saw social justice issues raised at your white-bread little high school and it made me cringe because it was really being used as an excuse for a few mommies who were over managing there precious child’s lives. Ya, I don’t think any of them were black, so don’t stereotype in your mind right now. Stereotype helicopter mommies instead. Thank god, your mother and I did a lot of stupid shit for you, but we never did that.  As an example, have a look at this chart.

Ah…so what does this graph suggest, if you eat organic food your chances of autism go up? Maybe it’s the opposite, maybe autistic people prefer organic food. Just because they correlate, there is no causation here.

When you see data, make certain you can understand the connection.

Here’s the deal, everyone deserves a fair chance, an equal opportunity and that is about equality. We have worked hard to make corrections to this because we have held women and people who are not-white back and then when they have job applications that are not equal, we hire the white guy. Undoing this has created problems, for instance, there are white people who howl in protest for reverse discrimination. Sometimes we label this as equity, a chance to give access to all, not some.

Now I am about to surprise you, I don’t like that, such as making quotas for black people or attempting to make sports equal between the sexes through Title 9. I know I know, I’m liberal and I’m not supposed to think that way. That is because in the pursuit of justice we just can piss on the truth and that my boys chaps my hide. Further, when I see enabling mommies protecting their teenagers’ inability to fucking take care of themselves by playing the equity card, I spit fucking fire.

While we may subvert justice and truth for social justice, which yes, I begrudgingly believe is necessary, I believe I should be in charge of evaluating all decisions by institutions so I can fucking bitch-slap anyone I see as offenders of abusing the term, equity.

Hey, guess what, we are not equal and never will be. Women are different then men. Women want to do different things professionally then men (a broad sweeping statement that yes, the stereotype is true) and we need to acknowledge that it is okay to want to do different things. For instance, it is insane to think we should have the same amount of Doctors, or engineers or teachers or whatever based on the female/male ratio and the ethnic ratio of our country. That is just fucking stupid. But remember, we should honor equality to the bone. You should never think of a race or a sex as being less than you, different yes, but never ever less.

Okay, in the greatest government ever created in the history of the world, yes I’m talking about the old USA, how come….how come we are so fucked up when it comes to solving such a blatant wrong?  Well you know, it’s easy.  First, you have to sedate all of the old people.  They live in the past and the past is pretty racist and sexist.  If you were a white man, you liked it that way.  We have laws which we respect, but really boys many of those laws are not very respectful.  In fact, they are downright wrong, such as labor laws and rights laws that exclude types of workers because those workers were largely women or minorities.  That’s what old white people did.  They created social injustice.

We need to address those laws.  And though I would love to say this is the time to nationalize health care and create a respectable pension program to address social injustice too, I will leave that to another argument.  We use education to create a lifelong pattern of discrimination.   We do this in a couple of ways.  First, we underfund and under-educate kids who attend our public schools.   We do this knowingly.

We don’t really do a very good job educating kids because it would be costly and kids would have to work a lot harder and there would be less summer break and well, we would have to acknowledge how children grow and mature at different paces and that one catch-all safety net is damn stupid because every fucking kid deserves his or her own individual learning plan.

Okay, it’s not just public education.  It’s our colleges and universities and our trade unions.  College should be cheap.  Instead, it is a massive institutional money grab.  How can we have enough minorities applying for jobs if we make the burden of education so unreasonable?   This is the insidious truth of your college education, we can pay for it.   Do not believe the playing field is level, it is tilted and we have made it so.

Trade unions screwed the young too and trade unions have not moved fast enough with technology often times preferring to live in the past and protect the old farts who don’t want to change.  (See Automation and Robots)

Okay, you hang out with conservative friends and they get around to slamming Socialism. First, there are many types of socialism. It’s sort of like plaid. It’s not one color, plaid is many colors and thus so is Socialism. Now I like a lot of types of socialism and anyone who slams Socialism in one wipe of the hand is a complete idiot. And I mean they are complete fucking idiots. The streets we drive on, the water we drink, the police who protect us, the firemen, the armed forces (you get the idea by now) are all Socialism in these United States. We as a society decide to do certain things together for the betterment of all. We also have very successful businesses that are based on a Socialist structure such as REI. REI is owned by it’s members and each member only has 1 vote.

Now your idiot friends have demonized Socialism because of one of the types of Socialism which seeks to nationalize large corporations. That is, some very left-wing Socialists, the Socialist Alternative Party think large corporations should be 1 and only 1 vote for every member of society. This is really a bad idea. Sons, the heart of a corporation is greed. That is a simple prerogative because the leadership of corporations puts earnings for their shareholders above all concerns. If they don’t the highly overpaid corporate leaders are fired and replaced. This comes into direct conflict with the public good at times (at a lot of times) and there needs to be a clear guardian to keep corporations in line. We do a crappy job of it these days with the Republicans in office because they are out for short-term gain and thus there is a rise in the polar opposite, the SA Party for instance.

Now, under Trump, Melania, you will find I have savaged the first lady as a golddigger. On the completely opposite side of the world is a woman named Kshama Sawant. She is a Seattlite, not a dummy but quite smart and a councilperson for the city. Like Melania Trump she immigrated to the USA, but she divorced her husband and found a passion for addressing poverty. Her resolve is to bring about the end of economic inequality. Wow, you think what a good person. I’m afraid not. Sorry.

The SA party is a form of Trotskyism and describes itself in this way (so says wiki) “a national organization fighting in our workplaces, communities, and campuses against the exploitation and injustices people face every day” and “a community of activists fighting against budget cuts in public services; fighting for living wage jobs and militant, democratic unions; and people of all colors speaking out against racism and attacks on immigrants, students organizing against tuition hikes and war, women and men fighting sexism and homophobia”.”

You read that and think, oh shit dad, that doesn’t sound bad. Sigh. But it is. You see, Kshama Sawant hates rich people. She doesn’t believe rich people should exist. She and the SA Party believe the money should be spread so evenly, there would be no rich people. Unfortunately, this has in the past gutted and would gut the very drive for people to succeed and thrive. I don’t know why Sawant doesn’t see this. While she may be disgusted with poverty under the nose of the wealthy, her solution would be ruinous. I don’t think she cares, she is willing to ruin the USA because of her passion for the poor. Sawant is a danger and in that, your conservative friends who demonize Socialism have their poster girl for why that is so. Of course, they are complete idiots for demonizing Socialism in general.

You might think that because I am anti-religion that I would not believe in soul. That is not true. You have a soul. I have a soul. How am I so sure? Well, first because I am smarter than you. (laughing) All right, here is one of the best things I have ever written in my life.

The essence of soul is explained in music and one’s love for it.

I’m listening to music as I write these words and I feel soulful and alive and aware of something I have. When you are depressed or down or feeling without a rudder, listen to some music for a while, especially a little louder than normal. And, if you are alone, dance. If you believe in a higher power (aka the god thing) I guarantee you will be closer to her during those times.

I guess beating you is wrong. It is a great way though for a parent to take his frustration out on a 3 year old who is challenging his or her authority. I did beat you on your ass a few times. I know you found it humiliating. Makes me smile thinking of it. We did time out too. Spanking is going away because it is uncool to beat your child. You might be denied the satisfaction of doing it to your children. You might think I am being quite snarky and sarcastic on this subject. You might be right. If your psyche is totally fucked up from me spanking you, well fuck it, I’m sorry. Now there are some really crazy people out there, people who see spanking as discipline and some who see it is pure outright child abuse. There are people who want to make me feel guilty about spanking you, for gawdsakes which was only a few times. Those people who want to make me feel that are complete assholes because they are extrapolating brain development issues with spankings, which truthfully they still cannot do. Yes, if you were abused over a period of time and with a severity that you cannot fathom, yes yes yes, your brain can be altered in a bad way, but you were not, I did not and fuck all who try to make me feel bad for giving you a couple of spankings. I think I will find those guys and punch them in their noses.

In the broadest sense, sport is something one does, an activity born from having the free time to do it. And it also intones how one goes about that activity. Playing fairly and with integrity is thought of “being a good sport.”

There are several actors which affect sport. These rarely are curtailed and properly corralled. What actors are these? First and foremost is ego, the desire to be first. We are born with it and must challenge ourselves with understanding the desire and effort to be first is not bad, but for far too many being first demands they sacrifice or cheat or gain some advantage through modifying rules. Integrity is a paint job, honesty is masked and then champions are crowned. Rules. Oh, rules, they rule our lives and they rule sports. Bike riders, those drug abusers have so many inane rules governing the design of the bike, the angles of tubes, the material they wear and the help they receive. While their hillbilly cousins the race car drivers drive nothing close to anything stock nor would they be allowed to. To football players in so much padding that insanely hurtful hits are acceptable. Are skiers immune? No. Skis must be so long. Bindings so high. A proper ski suit worn. No boys, ski racing is just as screwed up as most sports. To win one must not be the best. To win, one must obey all the rules and be the best.

And yet the athletes we love most are the ones who teeter-totter on the brink of rules and etiquette violations like overly large trucks on windy cliff-side roads. To become the best now depends on officials and coaches liking you and passing you on. To become the best, you must give up most else in your lives. Even now, the state soccer league says if you are to go to the next level, you must quit all other sports or make them a much lower priority. You must wear Nike branded clothing to practices. You must play most of the year. You must not miss practices if you want to play in the games. How does a 10-year-old develop such a passion? I don’t know. I want you to have a passion for skiing. And we do ski much. But without exposure to many other sports, how will you know what it is you like? Too often parents and sports associations are making decisions for their children which promote imbalanced lives and a concept of self-winning that is bad for us and bad for their kids.

Passion is discovered.

Dad, you ask, is it my imagination or are hardcore sports fans more conservative than liberal. Sons, I say, you notice correctly, kind of. The truth is that sports are mostly politically bent one way or another. WWE and NASCAR have a conservative following. NBA is more liberal and the NFL….kind of in the middle.

Now I know, that after reading that introduction you are thinking, what the hell dad are you doing talking about politics under Sports Fans. Well, boys, it’s like this, we each value stuff differently. Sports teams and being a fan of them brings with it an emotional attachment of sorts that legitimizes our reason to give a shit about them. Conservatives care about the sanctity of the institution, believes in its authority and is loyal to that team more than us liberals. We liberals are more fairweather team sports guys or we grab ahold of the underdog. That’s not a straight rule, that my boys is a guideline….like the pirates’ code. Really, the pirate’s code is the same sort of thing. How is this important? Well, team sports and sports fans are played out before your eyes like no other business. Nowhere do you get to see management, personal performance and success or failure played so publically. Thus, I am a fan. I like watching how coaches get teams to overachieve while some underachieve. That is telling and should be a learning moment for us. Always take it that way, study the game, the management, the leadership. It’s worth it.

Football is a great sport. Possibly the best sport for kids to play because it essentially teaches them all how important structure and teamwork are. You have to take on a role and do your job well for the team to succeed. There is nothing else like it. A Tackle or Guard may never score a touchdown let alone touch the ball, yet their importance is critical to a teams success. Imagine this, football is the best way for children to learn how social and business structures are run and how they will find ways to fit in and be useful. Girls need football too, it shouldn’t be a boys sport.

Now I know, I know. Football is dangerous. See next term, Football, Making it Safer for how that can be accomplished.

Yes, tackle football is dangerous. Don’t fight that premise. It’s really not good to have your kid get his helmet smashed into. So, should we all be playing flag football? Hell no. That is totally lame. The quickest and best method to fix football safety is to not allow plastic on the field. No plastic helmets and no plastic shoulder pads. (Laughing, no metal either!) I should think a hardness test could be employed to regulate padding and helmets. It’s pretty simple really. Problem fixed.

Perversion is so pervasive in sports it is hard for me to begin. Here are a few perversions, the first ten that came to mind.

1. Cheaters
2. Rule makers
3. Advertising Revenue
4. Marketers/Branding Experts who alchemy the concept of cool via stars, because stars damn it are humans
5. Governing Bodies of Sports and their fabrication of industries such as the drug testing Gestapo
6. Spectators instead of sportsmen
7. Helmets, padding and other high tech equipment that allows sports to be played more brutally
8. Select Sports (any youth sports program that demands nearly full-time participation.)
9. Coaches and parents who brand children as losers.
10. The greed for objectivity when the subjective beauty of one catch, one swing, one jump or one-shot is worth everything to see and the final score so little.

Sons, a sport is about leisure. For some, it is a profession. What makes sports so intriguing are the moments when someone or some team performs unique feats, no, not going undefeated. It’s beauty. It’s the immaculate reception. It’s the phenomenal fall. Or a marvelous recovery. The more promoters make a sport objective the less we love it.

Wow….youth sports is complex, simple, full of good stereotypes, pathetic stereotypes, sad and laughable all in one muddy pile.

Both of your closets and drawers are littered with jerseys, pants, hats, padding and protective cups of baseball, swim and soccer teams. We are a skiing family, thus the seasonal conflict of football and basketball never really fared much attention, but oh we spent plenty of time on the sidelines of games in which you played. And me? A sucker indeed for I often coached your teams.

There are two groups who really screw up youth sports and make them not a lot of fun and sometimes pure hell. Those groups are easily definable and identified as group 1) children and group 2) parents. Both can be despicable and utterly demonizing. The best youth sports are played without them…..

You will likely steal something someday. It was hard to imagine you will not. I stole a piece of bubblegum when I was around 12. I think it was 2 cents worth and I did it because of peer pressure. My friends were doing it and they got me to do it too. Shame on me. And you know, it is one of those acts that I will always remember and always think about and be remorseful about . . . a simple piece of bubblegum. I can only hope that if you do steal something someday, that it has the same effect on you as it did on me; you will likely never steal again.

I played the drums for a lot of years, twenty or so. I got to be okay at the drums, never really good. It wasn’t from lack of practice. I practiced around 5 hours a week, every week. Practice doesn’t make one better, golf has recently taught me that. No. It is struggling to be better that makes one better. We all start off with different skill sets and different aptitudes. From no matter where you start, struggling to improve is the only way to really improve. So one day when you are trying really hard at something and failing, and trying again and again, perhaps you are on the path you need to be on. Let that be a comfort to you.

Summit Changed Our World…but really I still feel what I wrote about Pets is true (under Pets you dummy) and that few people really honor their pets with the attention they truly deserve.

I am again going to use Oliver to explain this. He starts his piece with Dr. Oz and weight loss, but moves completely into suplements and how poorly they are regulated. Especially interesting is the testing done on some products and there having no match between what is on the label and what is inside. Here’s Johnny.

There is one likely way we can have sustainability on this earth, fewer people. This goes against the church and against the basic desire built into you to fuck. So we have abortion, birth control and Draconian governments like the Chinese who have suppressed births. None of it works smoothly and then we have a lot of good intentioned people and non-profits like the Gates Foundation that promote child health. Child health is good…less children die…and of course, our world population rises. This is all wrong. It’s seriously messed up.

Now, what is really unfunny, is this, smart people who understand these world problems are having fewer children. This means the proportionate amount of ignorant people who procreate like rabbits is going up. I guess the cynic in me would say this, smart people who understand this problem will eventually profit the most. Wow, that is really cynical.

It is far too seldom that people acknowledge the good our tax dollars do. Instead, we focus on the bad. We focus on $500 hammers the military bought. We focus on DSHS mistakes with child custody issues and the resulting lawsuits that follow. We demonize governmental employees and we savage our governmental structure like wild dogs on a carcass every time we get near an election. Is it not fascinating in fact, that our political leaders (the ones we have put in charge of our tax money) are the ones most often with their teeth sunk deepest in the meat?

While we should be always critical of our governments, always question and always hold them accountable, we should do a much more reasonable job of recognizing the value of what our government provides. There are thousands upon thousands of employees who do wonderful things and contractors who provide wonderful structures and services that we need to do a much better job of appreciating.

About 34% of your income is going to make it to a city, county, state or our federal government…or to a P.U.D., a school levy or perhaps a fire district. Wow, that’s a lot…34%!!! Um….no not really. In fact, our overall tax percentage has been pretty much the same or declining despite conservatives claiming our tax rates are always increasing. So it is not true that tax rates are going up. Perhaps as a taxpayer, we should be proud of what we have and what our parents and their parents built and serviced rather than spit on it with disdain as a waste of our money.

When I hear anti-tax champions, they love to denigrate our country by making paying taxes something wrong. To me, we need to be prudent taxpayers and champions of getting our moneys worth. A true champion would not decry paying taxes but work to ensure our taxes are well spent.

NOTE: Taxes and war. Tax money is really not paying for the war here in 2007. No, we don’t have enough money to pay for it. Instead, we are creating debt, a massive amount of it that you will have to pay for. So, the irresponsible spending today is burdening you. I’m sorry about that.

There is fungus amongst us. They grow out. They grow in. Like virginity they are overrated; it is true I have pulled mine out with pliers.

The First Lady of the USA cira 2018!

“engaging in romantic relationships for money rather than love”

Back in the day when we were completely sexists, we would call a woman who searched out rich men to marry a “golddigger.” It was not a polite term, especially when hissed by someone like your grandmother. I suppose we would say the same thing of a man doing the same, but in those days women were not rich. (I’m not kidding. We didn’t allow for women to be kick ass in business.)

Melania is a golddigger and she dug up Donald and let him impregnate her as he is driven to do with women. Sometimes disingenuous people get what they deserve.

Your first lady is adored by Christian Evangelicals even though she was a bit of a sinner earlier in life. Interesting that she has not repented. They love her anyway because you know they are hypocrites and they are all going to burn in their hell together for fucking ever.

The philosopher Kayne West wrote this about gold diggers:

She take my money when I’m in need
Yeah, she’s a triflin’ friend indeed
Oh, she’s a gold digger
Way over town, that digs on me
Now, I ain’t sayin’ she a gold digger
(When I’m in need) But she ain’t messin’ with no broke niggas
(She give me money) Now, I ain’t sayin’ she a gold digger
(When I’m in need) But she ain’t messin’ with no broke niggas
(I gotta leave) Get down girl, go ‘head, get down
(I gotta leave) Get down girl, go ‘head, get down
(I gotta leave) Get down girl, go ‘head, get down
(I gotta leave) Get down girl, go ‘head
Cutie the bomb, met her at a beauty salon
With a baby Louis Vuitton under her underarm
She said: “I can tell you rock, I can tell by your charm
Far as girls, you got a flock
I can tell by your charm and your arm.”
But I’m lookin’ for the one, have you seen her?
My psychic told me she’ll have a ass like Serena
Trina, Jennifer Lopez, four kids
And I gotta take all they bad asses to ShowBiz?
Okay, get your kids, but then they got their friends
I pulled up in the Benz, they all got up in
We all went to din’ and then I had to pay
If you fuckin’ with this girl, then you better be paid
You know why? It take too much to touch her
From what I heard she got a baby by Busta
My best friend said she used to fuck with Usher
I don’t care what none of y’all say, I still love her
Now, I ain’t sayin’ she a gold digger
(When I’m in need) But she ain’t messin’ with no broke niggas
(She give me money) Now, I ain’t sayin’ she a gold digger
(When I’m in need) But she ain’t messin’ with no broke niggas
(I gotta leave) Get down girl, go ‘head, get down
(I gotta leave) Get down girl, go ‘head, get down
(I gotta leave) Get down girl, go ‘head, get down
(I gotta leave) Get down girl, go ‘head
Eighteen years, eighteen years
She got one of your kids, got you for eighteen years
I know somebody payin’ child support for one of his kids
His baby mama car and crib is bigger than his
You will see him on TV any given Sunday
Win the Super Bowl and drive off in a Hyundai
She was supposed to buy your shorty Tyco with your money
She went to the doctor, got lipo with your money
She walkin’ around lookin’ like Michael with your money
Shoulda got that insured, Geico for your money
If you ain’t no punk
Holla, “We want prenup! We want prenup!” (Yeah!)
It’s somethin’ that you need to have
‘Cause when she leave yo’ ass, she gon’ leave with half
Eighteen years, eighteen years
And on the 18th birthday he found out it wasn’t his?!
Now, I ain’t sayin’ she a gold digger
(When I’m in need) But she ain’t messin’ with no broke niggas
(She give me money) Now, I ain’t sayin’ she a gold digger
(When I’m in need) But she ain’t messin’ with no broke niggas
(I gotta leave) Get down girl, go ‘head, get down
(I gotta leave) Get down girl, go ‘head, get down
(I gotta leave) Get down girl, go ‘head, get down
(I gotta leave) Get down girl, go ‘head
Now, I ain’t sayin’ you a gold digger, you got needs
You don’t want a dude to smoke but he can’t buy weed
You go out to eat, he can’t pay, y’all can’t leave
There’s dishes in the back, he gotta roll up his sleeves
But while y’all washin’, watch him
He gon’ make it to a Benz out of that Datsun
He got that ambition, baby, look at his eyes
This week he moppin’ floors, next week it’s the fries
So stick by his side
I know there’s dudes ballin’, and yeah, that’s nice
And they gonna keep callin’ and tryin’, but you stay right, girl
And when you get on, he’ll leave yo’ ass for a white girl
Get down girl, go ‘head, get down
(I gotta leave) Get down girl, go ‘head, get down
(I gotta leave) Get down girl, go ‘head, get down
(I gotta leave) Get down girl, go ‘head
Let me hear that back

Do you have to even wonder if Melania gives a shit about any broke niggas?

Are you a Republican or a Democrat. I’d like to think you are neither. We think like a lot of Democrats do but then we think like Republicans too. Saying you have to be one or the other is like saying you like one knee better than the other. You might, but you really feel pretty much the same about both. Some countries, many in fact run multiple party systems. They are not really better than our two-party system here in the USA, it’s just that I am not big on labels, especially when there are so many idiots in each party.

Let me be concise, I was a parent who had you vaccinated.  God knows all the shit they vaccinated you for.   There was always a fringe element of whacky hippies that thought vaccinations were bad.  They didn’t vaccinate their kids and relied on us to provide them a herd immunity.  That really didn’t bother me because well…what if they were right?   I guess you have to trust someone or something.  People trust in god.  I tend to trust in science.   The covid 19 pandemic really brought out the worst in the human race.  People politicized the vaccination and fucked the concept of science over and that is a bad thing.  At least science continually vets itself in a world where it seems no one else does.

Vegan

Video Games, desktop

Video Games, handheld

Incredibly overrated and part of a taboo system of sexuality where losing your virginity is often considered a bad thing if you are a girl and a good thing if you are a boy. That is a fucked up system.

Thank you Edwin Starr for those words.

Wiki says that whataboutism “is a variant of the tu quoque logical fallacy that attempts to discredit an opponent’s position by charging them with hypocrisy without directly refuting or disproving their argument, which in the United States is particularly associated with Soviet and Russian propaganda.” Politicians across the world have embraced it to turn the focus away from their own behavior or decisions. Please learn how to properly debate a person who uses this technique. It is fairly evil.

One reason we are having a lot of environmental issues such as climate change is because of the growing number of people on our earth. Now if we were growing just a little bit every year, we could all ignore it for quite a few generations. That is not the case. If you read up, you can find that better healthcare, the promotion of births to protect religions and other oddballs things all contribute to more people on our earth. My generation is way too selfish and chicken-shit to figure out a solution. Good luck.

Okay,  here’s the straight stuff on yoga, it’s generally pretty darn good for you.  In fact, if you have inherited any of my body characteristics, you should definitely do yoga, you’re going to need it.  Like all angry old men, I cannot do a regular yoga class.  I don’t bend, I veer.  I tip like a glass on the edge of a table.  I grunt and breathe like a balloon expelling air.  If I attempt a regular class and am still alive by Savasana, you will find me asleep and snoring, disturbing the relaxation of everyone else.   Someday you will too. I don’t do yoga because no one in town offers my type of yoga.

Now the yoga I need is with a youthful, understanding lovely female guide…no, not the teacher, she is a guide.  You know, someone who actually knows yoga, she would be there to correct all the miscues by the actual teacher. The class, you see,  would be taught by a 50-year-old slightly overweight retired chain-smoking dude with a name like Moses, or Crank or Mack or Hector.   He would very likely have a criminal history.  He would be something of the spiritual guide, uttering encouragement with his raspy voice and teasing sarcasm like, “I hope you all wiped your ass today, we’re about to do downward facing dog.” We would hydrate ourselves with Bud Lite or Coors depending on whether we were doing Hatha or Yin but most certainly we would never be caught dead doing Jivamukti because men don’t want to touch each other like that and this class boys, this class is made up of old crusty farts like me who don’t want to see any flexible men or women next to us while we are doing yoga.   Old farts hate youthful men and the 70% of the class that was still wearing MAGA hats would still consider a flexible man a fag.

But disdain and jealous MAGA men are not why I caution you to not get seriously into yoga for it is plain and simple to see how serious yoga people have strange-looking bodies that resemble modernist dancers pretending they were in auto accidents.  It is just not normal when they move.  I pity them, their bodies are so loose their joints move about as if were skeletons encased in jelly.

I hope too that you take care of yourselves. Your body is indeed a temple and I have discovered as well as most every aging person has that you should never take for granted the ease in which you might walk across a room or lift a glass let alone ski or bike or perhaps even the most special thing of all, to be able to think clearly. Is it worth being fanatical about being in shape? I don’t think so. It matters that you do take care of yourself. Don’t eat too much, exercise enough. That’s the ticket. I will be disappointed in you if you’re fat or simply without any tone. I suppose if I find that you’ve become a physical god, I might not be as disappointed but I certainly will read back over this little handbook here wondering where I might have fed you the wrong diet of information. Along with this line, if you don’t read or challenge yourself mentally, I will be equally disappointed in you. And I don’t want to hear excuses. I don’t want to know about that bum knee or your fading eyesight or the headaches or how you’re just too damn busy. That’s all crap because those are all the excuses I’ve tried out.