small gardens & small government

Others could probably tell you more about the feud between Jane and the Johnsons. I guess I can best tell you about the part regarding Jake and Melissa. To call it a feud is really to describe how little goes on around here. Jane always called it her feud but I doubt the Johnsons even knew that Jane was upset.  See Jane was one of those long legged beauties who liked things just so. She had her farm stand out on the highway and everything about it was - well, just so. The stand was filled with tomatoes and onions and whatever else was in season but it was famous for it's sweet blue corn, which Jane grew. Perhaps it was just the corn or it coulda been Jane's long legs and smooth French accent that filled the parking to overflow in the sweet corn season. See that was the crux of it. The Johnsons piled the edge of their corn field with old tires and junk of every description. "RIGHT BEHIND HER PARKING!" Oh sure Jane asked 'em to clean it up when she first opened the...

  "Nobody goes there anymore, it's too crowded" supposedly Yogi Berra offered this brilliance regarding a popular restaurant. I'd like to offer my own Yogi-ism - There is about a 50/50 chance I won't send this to you.  It's the Sunday before Christmas Deb's getting ready to go to church and I'm at the keyboard with a neck that smells like Ben Gay. OK not real Ben Gay some generic that Deb buys. The generic smell is however better than the 'real' Tiger Balm that Deb rubbed on my neck that smelled so loudly of 'real' mint that I was constantly looking around for the chewing gum to make sure I didn't have some stuck on me. With a sore neck ya don't want to be looking around!   The music is a mix of uptempo blues mostly 'cause I need the rhythm to pull this writtin' out of my head . The song playing right now is Two-Headed Woman written by Junior Wells but this version is performed by Willie Dixon. If Youtube pulls up the...

 So how do you like politics now? I believe I left you last time with the notion "If you don't like politics vote for less government!" Simple fact is politics will always be as nasty as the government is big. If government had no say in the issues that effect your life why would you care who the President is. If Congress had no power would you find your TV filled with ads announcing what a slimeball your Congressman is.  If the Supreme Court decided one esoteric case on a dispute between States every two or three years would you really care who did what in high school?   The funny thing is most Ds and Rs agree government should solve this problem or that, they just disagree on which problems they want government to solve. Than if you're a 'good citizen' you work your tail off to help get 'your guy' elected. Perhaps donating time or money certainly making compromises with the hope that it will all add up on election day and you'll 'win'. B...

  In the 70's CoEvolution Quarterly stood as the child of The Whole Earth Catalog. The Whole Earth Catalog was the hippie 'tool' catalog (think Google not Sears Roebucks catalog) much as the Pope is just another Catholic. While the Catalog had reviews and some conversational tidbits the Quarterly was the inverse. Essentially, the hippies of the 60's had bought the 'tools' and wanted to talk about using them, what they had found out, and what they were looking towards doing with them. The Quarterly and the Catalog were the progenitors of what I consider to be some of the most interesting niches of modern study. You didn't have to be sitting in an outhouse in Vermont to find them fascinating.   The music is from the Wayback machine landing me in the same time period as the Catalog and Quarterly. It's a mix of Paul Simon, Van Morrison, and starts with Crosby Stills & Nash  Suite: Judy Blue Eyes     Like seeds in a garden the ideas and experiences chr...

Read any good books lately? That's the way Dick used to open the Friday Morning Breakfast Club. I became a member of this wonderful little group, as everyone did, by showing up. My first visit was as the driver for Karl Hess who was their speaker on that particular Friday. I knew nothing about Karl Hess at the time and didn't have a clue that I was blithely ignoring a man with a deeply interesting life and simply trying to keep my just off shift bartender eyes open and on the road. I think I was invited to be the driver for Mr Hess both because Mary Margret his hostess had a thing for me and the local Libertarians weren't known for having running cars. (mine was a Mustang II - which was a name Ford had slapped on a car that became the Pinto so....)  The Friday Morning Breakfast Club was a salon in the French tradition mixed with a TED talk. I was a bartender at a strip club and not exactly stretching my brain. A cup of coffee and listening to Karl inspired me to come back...

 I'm stuck in a loop. I think that's what software programmers call it. I know the roots of this hopelessness are firmly planted in the utter destruction of our cabin and property in the forest fire that I alluded to in the last blog's prologue. Knowing the source of a polluted stream doesn't really help if your just wallowing in it. It's the wallowing that is the loop. A sporadic series of should haves and could haves that leave you so second guessed out that I've got little mental energy to accomplish all but the littlest things. Musically speaking I got da blues!   The music is Billie Holiday - Lady in Autumn.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Npoe5XeeMYE&list=PLbYb5_Imn1rsDMoIU38jxi_O0aRaYj4CG 'cause given my mood - well, it was the obvious choice.   If you're a libertarian like me it's hard not to on occasion reflect on a woman who's life included heroin abuse, alcohol abuse, abusive relationships and died at 44. The line between libert...

So I spent yesterday preparing a whole post on evil bleeping grackles. Not a re-post of my blog from a year ago.  Nope this was an entirely new rant, think Jaws II. This was about how flocks of little birds each taking one peck at your garden can turn you into the crazy old guy in the backyard rocking. muttering and waving his arms. After concluding the piece I had to put it aside because something was just wrong with it. I had wanted to share how grackles were like bindweed. Bindweed had the week before been pecking away at my time as I tried to control 'that' weed. I'd also wanted to drop over to politics and talk about how a small ($12 million) tax increase being proposed for our community when added to the various other State and district tax increases were like a flock of grackles pecking me to death. The metaphor was solid but there was something karmically off. Not just my writing, something else.  God clearly is a comedian. Hand him a set-up about a thousa...