Thursday, September 14, 2006

sick as a dawg

Went to bed at 4:30 yesterday afternoon and woke up this morning at 7:30. If my math's right that's 15 hours of sleep.

Here's a post I sent to the St. John's College Alumni Mailing List, of which I have been a member since 1994: (The un-narrator is making me cut and paste it here...)

Hatch just got pretty much washed down to the Gulf, I wonder where
they were in their harvest? It's been very wet and stormy around here
for more days than usual.

In other chile news, a collective of growers from Chimayo continue in
their legal struggles over trademarks and preservation.

In news of the strange thoughts that go through my mind at 11:00 at
night in the local Albertson's:

This can't go on. It's unsustainable and revving completely out of
control. Shelf after shelf, aisle after aisle, inks, dyes, plastics,
cardboard, sucrose, fructose, corn starch, hydrogenated this and that,
processed, packaged, brightly colored hardly edible swill. Everything
for sale either candy or salt. Forty different "choices" for tortilla
chips, a hundred hundred toothpastes, crowning endless canyons of
distance foods, orange juice from three continents, cheap prewashed
mixed greens in a bag from Salinas that make one wonder "who
fertilized, pesticided, picked and washed?" 18-wheelers on the forlorn
unwinding interstates of America, hauling pallets of strawberries from
Argentina, trains carrying shipping containers through the
owl-and-whiptail dawn of the Mojave and the containers from a barge in
Long Beach, loaded in Taiwan, each container stacked with plastic forks, 10% post-consumer recycled paper napkins, discount mouthwash, the panoply of deodorant and antiperspirant and deodorant/antiperspirant, antibacterial hand soaps, toothpicks (from the soft woods of the rainforests of equatorial Indonesia), tampons,sanitary pads, juice drinks, nail clippers, disposable razors, tender baby squash from Ecuador, socks three pair to a pack knee high and nylon, canned clams, oysters, tuna, salmon, crab, scallops each pound a memorial to roughly 100 pounds of other sea life exterminated, endless rivers of juice, of syrup, of cooking oil, of car parts and paper and batteries (lithium are the longest lasting, innards mined strip-wise) and plastic cups and lawn chairs and mops, brooms,dustpans, garbage bags, and toxic cleaners, degreasers, disinfectants and.

For a few moments I could not move, under those manic cheery light. How have we become used to this? Inevitably, to what slavering, rabid desperate vicious animals will we be reduced when it crashes up against the necessary limits that it absolutely must crash up against?

My Johnny friends largely didn't want to hear my apocalyptic rant. Funny how it is sometimes: we see something as if it's crystal clear, express it, only to find that for others things just aren't that way at all.

The un-narrator also reminds me that "brotherly and harmonious action" ought to be "brotherly and sisterly harmonious action." Except that an exact quote of BobBill's text don't read that way.
Just the way the chapter heading isn't "To Significant Others" but "To The Wives."

Time passes.

Writing a Pick for a reading of a play featuring Ed Asner. He lives here, yet Gene Hackman keeps getting voted Best Local Celebrity. Asner's good for way more fun, the way we see it.

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