Moving

The bed feels strangely uncooperative. Sleep comes in starts and fits. I ache in places I did not think a person could ache in. Now I know what a football turf toe injury must feel like. The sucker seems stuck in a perennial pain gear. Water, which usually helps those hamstring muscles relax for an hour or two has no effect on woe-toe. Thank the pharmacological god above for bringing Vicodin to the world. I still can't sleep but I don't care.

The guitar might have to wait weeks before I can furtively muster up the grip necessary to play a glissando or two. Chords might be months away due to swollen and inflexible fingers. My Les Paul Custom mocks me every time I gimp on past knowing my arms and shoulders can't take the weight right now. Even doing necessary private business hurts with these limbs and digits agonies.

Denial is such a strong place to fixate on within a mind. Oh, we can save a few bucks if we cut the cove and trim on the linoleum. Being ignorant, and now having to pay for my sins on several levels, I had no idea the cove trim was where all the work on linoleum floor prep would be. In desperation, as the spasms began to pop on every inch of my body, just scraping the whole damn floor away seemed much easier.

Of course, the old washer had some valve issues. And, who would have thought so much water remains in a machine after the clothes are done? Did I say heavy and extremely messy? I was lucky a good friend, and even more fortunately because he is a plumbing contractor, happened by to see if we needed some help. Total disaster averted, but the growing realization of how pathetic this mind and body have aged into wiped all that denial away.

Yes, and now all those bucks saved must go to the physical therapist and drugs necessary to prop my body up like El Cid before the final charge and move. Mercifully the place has a pool, and my body still floats.

Peer Pressure

Back in the 1980s a Canadian band, Red Rider, had a huge hit. The big tune was Lunatic Fringe. The song remains a rock station staple after 25 years. Yes, it owes a lot to some Pink Floyd sounds from the decade before, but stands alone as that singular identifier of a peculiar type of public personality that has amused and pissed us all off for these many years.

Today we live in a world where any amusement over the lunatic fringe wore off long ago, and we find exasperated contempt for the current lunatic binge howling extremist positions of idiocy fed by dense ignorance, or by unspeakable acts of violence over the smallest perceived slight. How did so many people get caught imbibing on this decade's lunatic binge?

Here is a tough segue way, but needed background. I'm a fan of computers. Once upon a time zone change, I pounded keys on a little Osborne 1 and felt immediately empowered. I loved the little machine, which looked when folded up like a small sewing machine. It had a small 5" screen with two floppy drives, and impressed the hell out of my biz mates. The Osborne 1 cost about $1,800 at the time of purchase. Funny, every new personal computer each time I upgraded usually cost me roughly this $1,800 amount.

I moved from floppy to floppy to CD-ROM to DVD-ROM to UBS ports with memory sticks to the Internet, and finally to the poor house over all the computers I have hammered on over two-plus decades . The last several years, due to a crippled economy, has seen my face a lot less in a public place hanging with like minded art and culture mongers of Main Street. I have been alone in my zone with my current pc board of choice.

I read to try and keep up with today, and glean gobs of economic news from a bunch of sources. I find I have a lot of company staying off the streets these days. This past decade has seen every job created become just another lost job. Men took it in the shorts this decade in a huge way with construction, financial service and manufacturing nose diving into the ground. Since the start of this recession 82% of all workers cashiered have been men.

So, I have a ton of company I never see, hanging in their caves banging on keyboards to some vague unseen audience, who may or may not agree with anything being imprinted on some server and fed to some monitor, which feeds the lunatic-binge-juice of displacement.

The last time I remember so many out-of-it people inhabiting a common area that impinged on my good times was back in the K to 12 years.

When I think of my old school days, I remember crappy-stupid behavior found immediate smack-down by those in control. Teachers were in charge in the classrooms, but teachers could always be ignored, and profs never followed you home to beat on you, or toilet paper your parents house. Tough big kids could be a force on the playground, but the real power was held by groups of students in class, and out in the yard, who were the ultimate committees to approve acceptance or finger rejection. Most kids from third grade through high school lived by the rules of approval from peer social groups. Today those who get the cold shoulder at school or on the job can do really bad things.

It wasn't always fair. Actually, as I remember, the process was never fair but it worked to keep really stupid behavior from becoming pure anarchy on various campuses of hormone driven social misfits. It was life training. When you graduated, or dropped into the job, employees were working peers, always eager to correct a too eager kiss-ass, smart-ass or lame-ass no matter the time of day. Peers were necessary to keep the world real and the business honest. Peers are the ultimate checks and balance of society.

The computer, and by extension the Internet, works without peers. Out here on the web life moves with fans, trolls, stalkers, friends, bots, spam and family but each individual is without a peer. No one really gives good honest ass-truth on the Internet, because peers do not exist. Without clout and no group control over the true misfits lunacy grows. Subscriptions and like minded social groups can lock out the misfit from little circles but the web is a vast ocean all these little circles swim in, and chances are always good the fringe-buoys will pop up frequently if you are a constant swimmer. Another aspect of why peers have disappeared in cyberspace is the fear of the hacker. Offend the wrong party who has just enough malevolence and learning and you and your machine can suffer some heavy consequences.

A cat has no peer. But, I believe people need peers to keep chaos at a safe distance. Maybe the web will evolve over time and come up with nonthreatening peer-ship to help steward the race through these troubled waters. In the meantime I am now set on a course of more local interaction in public places. I am hopeful the few peers who tag along with me still have the necessary balls of etiquette to politely point out the misplaced nose hair or help me understand that a hummer is not necessarily the cute little bird flitting in my backyard.

Health Care - "On The Road" to Nowhere-

Time to mount the blog-pony today and allow the muse back in the house, because life still matters every day. What a month since mid-July. Contentious news everywhere with a stalled bottomed economy while health care reform talk fills the airwaves and print mediums. Representatives hold town hall meetings and get shouted down by the angry and unruly.

I am not sure why making fundamental changes to such a broken health system here in the U.S. deserves the pitchforks and torch treatment usually reserved for old Universal monsters. You might think that all these average looking white people do not feel the need to eliminate the very real threat of bankruptcy over a medical problem. Maybe these people protesting public discussions on the health issue think the private insurers will resort to payback and raise their deductibles and premiums for having the audacity to propose a public coverage option. No one could be stupid enough to buy into the idea that this is communism or evil socialism with the state dictating to you your medical reality.

When I hear Republicans state their party wants to insure that a government bureaucrat never gets between you and your doctor you know they mean it. But they will not do one thing to keep that insurance company bureaucrat between you and the doctor, because that insurer has paid a whole lot of money to both Republicans and Democrats over the years to make sure the government is totally ineffective and worthless in addressing this important social issue. Granted, Republicans have gotten a far larger share than the Democrats over a 20 year period, but it just goes to show a shrewd gambler will cover both sides of his bet.

What is interesting today is the talk from the health insurers and their PR firms indicating they too want reform, just not a public option which could threaten or impact their profit taking. Insurers really want a double mandate, which means simply that everyone must buy insurance in America, and all companies selling insurance must sell to everyone. We will get some version of this as our health care reform.

The public option is much like the public vote, it stirs the passions and beguiles the believers of the cause that a change to their way of thinking is possible. America has always been about the money, and finding new and ingenious methods of shaking down commoners to reward the powerfully entrenched wealth holders. Nothing in the ballot boxes ever changes that fact. The evidence that each new generation finds a small group of people with a great concept, and that a few of those innovators are rewarded extraordinarily, does not mean that life in the middle or on the bottom has really changed that much.

This is not to say that breakthroughs like the automobile, the airplane, the radio, the television, the Internet, and the bomb over the last century have not had major impacts on how society works. This is only to say people have always been nomadic, and on the move from the dawn of our period on the planet. We have always used communication to further our nomadic quests, and have availed ourselves of ingenious methods from smoke to birds to broaden a talking point's reach. Some group of people always found the biggest club to wield over the competition.

The uses of patriotism, religion and fear of the unknown are the tried and true methods of maintaining obeisance to those in control. How little we have progressed to see these old canards of the corrupt used so effectively on the public today to foil dreams of rights and raising health standards for so many.

Kerouac, Ginsberg and Burroughs knew we were Beat fifty years ago. The toys of escape have changed, but our real fortunes have not.

The Bird is recommended listening and still a great symbol of defiance in either hand.