A River Story: The Stirring and Piteous Case of an Old Fashion Homestead Razing

It’s a late August morning when I arrive and pull my truck to the side of the road. In the years since I’ve last been here last, the road’s been paved wider and there’s barely enough room for me to park the truck on the gravel shoulder. There’s far more traffic too, even at this early hour and even for this quiet road. One car races by, narrowly missing me. I reserve little doubt that the motorist clearly saw me. He attempted instead to make a point of his nausea with me being parked so close to, what he contemptuously believes to be his own personal thoroughfare. Replying with an illustration of my own subtle distain, I hoist a single fingered salute in his direction. The air is cool, you might even say brisk, but this August has been hotter than any I can remember. In a few hours I’m sure it won’t disappoint. A band of murky orange clouds smolder on the eastern horizon where the sun promises to rise. To watch the sky lighten in the still air of the morning is a privilege that I indulge myself in. I concluded long ago that sunsets are for hapless poets, teenage lovers, and people who have apparitions of enjoying nature but only within the confines of human convenience. But sunrises on the other hand must be earned. Watching the sun rise out over the world takes an act of purposeful discipline. I begin attending to the job of removing the canoe from the roof of my truck. The night before, in what can only be described as a spectacle of sweat, swirling mosquitoes and uncontrolled convulsions of four-letter words, I affixed the ancient behemoth to the Ford and looking at it now, adhered so neatly, I hardly dare remove it. The 1952 Grumman is a relic of whose origins remain a mystery. It was a fixture alongside our family’s barn in south-eastern Wisconsin for as long as I can remember. It’s dented, scratched and has three holes in the bottom that suspiciously look as if they were put there by a 45 caliber pistol. My dad, seizing an opportunity at masculine ingenuity, had run half-inch bolts through the holes and from time to time a healthy dose of rubber silicone glue was needed to ensure its seaworthiness. Rendering a slapdash verdict, I raise my knife to the ropes that held the canoe steadfast and cut them. Pulling the beast from the roof it’s suddenly like a whale out of the water as it tumbles to the ground. I jumped back anticipating it smashing into me like a spooked horse. After a few moments of convulsing wildly it comes to a rest. Much older than the 10 year old boy of my past, who needed to con unsuspecting friends into helping me to drag it, I now easily lift it from the bow and pull it along the gravel and to the banks of the river. The aluminum across the gravel is like the screeching of a Martini-pickled mother-in-law. But once at the bank, and after sliding the oversized tin can into the water, it becomes a different beast all together. The canoe is light and nimble as the unseen fingers of current tug gently at the hull and with a slight hop, we’re off. The river is an old friend and looking back, I must admit rather grudgingly, one of my better ones. Growing up a farm kid, the river running through our property was as much a part of my childhood as my mom and dad, the sandbox, the old green barn to the north of our house or the tire swing tied to that massive red oak. It feels like home, but I prepare myself. This is to be a trip paid in homage, it is a good bye of sorts, a journey along a path that will take me thorugh flashbacks of my childhood, innocent and carefree but end in a sudden, undeniable modern realization of what lies ahead for this river. The sun has just begun to peek above the horizon as I round my first bend. Streams, creeks, rivers, whatever you call them, they are engrained into our conscience, they are history before us, a story of time written across the landscape. They carried Native Americans along routes to sacred hunting grounds and the earliest explorers paddled them into wild and untamed new worlds. Their power is unimaginable. They can flood their surroundings in seconds, destroying all that lie in their path, and yet in the same breath gently bring water from far off sources to the forests and fields downstream, spreading life. This river knew me as a pink shouldered boy too young yet to notice girls, when I knew nothing of IRAs, and before I knew houses could be upside down. The world since then has grown and yet time seems to have frozen this place into a museum. Progress has not yet made it to the banks of this river. Gliding silently along, there is only the cadence of my paddle and the drops of water that fall from it. Peering into the heavily canopied forest, there is a light fog still clinging stubbornly to the forest floor. The sunlight has just now broken through the leaves, spilling scattered puddles of light across a mossy green carpet. Huge cottonwoods, weeping willows and silver birch line the shores; years of flood and frost have mangled their low hanging branches into the shapes of dilapidated play ground equipment, long deserted. These magnificent trees seem almost watchful over me, their roots imprisoning them to an eternal guardianship over this place. Like giant soldiers from a JRR Tolkien novel, they peer down as I float by. My nostrils are suddenly filled with the rich and heavy scent of rain in the distance. The muggy August morning is about to fracture. A gentle rolling breeze has kept the bugs at bay and the sun is now a phantom behind the clouds. A crack of thunder in the distance dazes me into a foggy memory of youth. It was near this spot that I once came as close to death as a young 15 year old might. In the summer before my freshman year, I had stuffed a pack with modest provisions and canoed 6 or 7 miles downstream from my house. The river was low that summer. We had been plagued with drought for months and where water had traditionally been shallow, numerous sandbars had now formed. It was one of these sandbars I thought would be a perfect place to build camp. Feeling rather smug, I built a fire and cooked rations of Spam, stolen from my mother’s cupboard and watched the sun sink in the sky without a care in the world. Sometime around 2 am that night, I awoke to the clap of thunder and the gentle pitter-patter of rain on my tent. With-in seconds the pitter-patter had turned to a hammering down pour. Reaching for my lantern, I looking down and noticed water several inches deep. During a normal summer the sandbar would be under seven or eight feet of water. A massive lump formed in my throat. Rushing from my tent, I searched for the canoe, but it was gone. I had failed to tie it to anything the night before, feeling no need to do so. In a panic, I tried gathering up my camping gear, a foot of water was now swirling at my ankles. As I un-staked my tent the true power of a mere twelve inches of water made an ever-lasting impression on my psyche as the water pulled the tent effortlessly from my clinched hands. Somehow I managed to grab my life jacket seconds before the tent vanished into the blackness of the raging storm. Just as the current knocked me from my feet, I was able to wrestle it on and a watery abyss suddenly enveloped me. To this day, I have never experienced anything like it. Suddenly, over the roar of the rain and thunder, to my ears came what I can only describe as a low, thundering growl, rumbling through the blackness. Gasping for air and being tossed like a rag doll, my head pulled under, then back above, I was suddenly hit square in the face by what felt like a brick wall. In an instant, I found myself completely submerged and unable to tell neither which way I was facing, nor which way was up or down. I surfaced what felt like several minutes later, only to find myself in the center of an electrical storm beggaring description. Lightning flashed everywhere and my surroundings looked as though they were being illuminated by a strobe light. A seemily foreign world enveloped me, catching glimpses of my surroundings only in erratic flashes. It completely disoriented me. The water slammed me from one side of the shore to the other. Low hanging branches reached for me like the cold boney fingers of the grim reaper. And then everything went black. I’m not sure how long I was out, but I woke suddenly, on my back and staring up at a full moon and wispy gray clouds. A dull pain throbbed in the back of my head and I could still see faint flashes of lightning in the distance as the passing storm raged on to the east of me. Finding myself floating in a backwater eddy, I peered through the moonlit darkness at an unfamiliar looking river bloated with flood. Paddling myself into the main current, I let it take me. Barefoot and having little more on than some cut off jeans, I was 10 miles from home and floating now in the wrong direction all together. I was without my canoe and without any supplies. Drifting along for what seemed to be an hour, I caught a glimpse of something silver and foreign in the inky blackness ahead. Tangled in the branches of an old willow tree was the canoe. Swimming to it, I somehow monkeyed myself into the hull. I waited the night out cold, alone and with a new found respect for the river, water, and the wild. The next day to my relief I discovered I was only a short mile from where the river went under the bridge at old Highway 67. Once there I flagged down a driver who took a chance on a skinny half naked kid alongside the road. Now all these years later I’m peering down into the same water, clear as gin, sad I suppose that this is the last I’ll ever see it so lucid, so pristine, and so untouched. Not more than a half mile to the north lay the unmistakable manifestation of Progress. A vast cesspool of new construction, land, that only weeks ago looked very much as it had for over a hundred years, now stands absolutely devoured. The area, once a family farm, tilled by countless generations, is a wasteland where the preemptive stages of what they call growth now stretch out over a thousand acres. It is a landscape void of any character or reason. Farming has always been hard work, and it never paid well. Even as the government seemed to come to its senses during the 1980s, passing legislation that helped families keep their farms, Big-Farm-a, as I call it, squeezed the chance at any real profit from the husband and wife dairy farmers. Tyrants have long realized that land is a scared birth-rite, and to take it, by means of taxation, bribery, eminent domain or rapacious persuasion is a psychological means of warfare, leading to eventual slavery by the state. Regardless of the terms of this sale, the signatures on the contract weren’t yet dry when the army of bulldozers, excavators, back-hoes, and dump trucks laid siege to the land. The mayor with various cronies of political hierarchy were there to witness the groundbreaking, as were some lawyer types, developers, bankers and investors. Standing in the middle of the chaos that was to be, stood the empty farmhouse, the symbolic enemy, what it represented was in sharp contrast to everything the developers planned on building in its place. The razing of the old homestead was to be celebrated by the pale-faced hacks who watered at the mouth by the mere thought of its demise. A lone bulldozer set forth at accomplishing the task at hand. It came from the north and struck the house with full force. The lawyers and the banker-backed developers stood in perverted anticipation. But the structure did not immediately fall. The operator looked on in amazement. He readied the machine for another blow. The mayor peered on with distain, how this dilapidated little shack dare stand in the way of progress he thought. The bulldozer struck again with full force. The old farm house shuttered but stood on rebelliously. But in the end, it was only made of wood, and the bulldozer of iron, fueled by diesel, greed and the full momentum of progress behind it. When the house was gone the mayor and the stiffs in the suits stood triumphantly for pictures on the newly conquered ground. Construction trailers were brought in at once and placed at the site of the old homestead and a flag was raised in victory over the farm. And then began the rape and pillage. Earthmovers rolled in, by the dozens. There was a sick feeling of inhumanness that hung in the air; a sense of an almost robotic, unfeeling movement. Nothing with a soul could do what was being done there. The machines sheared the ground and peeled earth back, crops still in place, like skin scalped from the skull. Total destruction and extermination of any human spirit left in this place was the goal. With-in a few days the once teaming landscape was reduced to a barren wasteland. Dust blew across the real estate as if it were a desert. There was about as much life left there as was on the moon. So much as I once believed that a God would never allow such a faith befall this place, I also now come to the realization that it is lost. A family of Canada geese floats past my canoe, a proud hen with five goslings in tow. A nervous gander swims at a distance and gives me the evil eye. Martin Luther King, Jr. said once, “if I knew the end was to come tomorrow, I would still plant my apple tree.” The tiny family swims on and out of sight, unaware of the destruction that awaits them. Or perhaps they are all too aware and instead wish to heed the mind set of Dr. King and swim on. My take out spot is just ahead. I have stashed a bike somewhere there in the cattails as a means by which to get back to my truck some twelve miles or so upstream. I’ve been to this place many times before. Here the river narrows and the water flows faster than anywhere else. A chessboard of rocks sticks out from the surface and the water rushing around them is like a chorus. I used to love spending time here at the end of each trip simply sitting and listening to the water. So assuring was that sound, assuring that there existed something so much more complex than our own derisory existence. Assuring that something as random as rocks placed in the water by time could reverberate a sound so diverse in its simplicity. These waters have called to me my whole life. From the pre-pubescent boy who gathered river rocks, to the adolescent who tried to forget the hardships of high school here or the young man who sat in this very spot trying to gather the courage to tackle the life ahead of him, I have relied on this river for so much strength, and now there is nothing I can do to protect it. I pull the canoe from the water one last time, leaving it in the bulrushes a dozen or so feet from shore as a fitting final resting spot, here at the river where it belongs. As I walk to the road, I can hear the water behind me. It’s a sad voice that seems not to understand my parting. I don’t answer, I simply turn my back and walk away.

Evertte Ruess, Mystery of the American West

(Posted as it first appeared in The Prairie Times, Elbert County, Colorado, January 2010).............................................................In the autumn of 1934, a pair of sheepherders in the middle of the Utah wilderness were rather taken aback when a boy, no more than twenty years old, alone and riding a burro, happened into their camp out of nowhere. As twilight gave in to night, the threesome sat around an arid desert campfire. Their topic of conversation can only be speculated at, however, Everett Ruess, the burro riding boy, almost certainly did the majority of the talking. The sheep wranglers probably sat and listened, somewhat suspiciously, as Evertt told them of how he had been born in California and that at age 16 saddled a burro and traveled east and into the desert wilderness with little more than provisions of raisins and rice. And perhaps the pair grew even doubtful of this young man’s sanity as he explained how he had traded works with the famous American West artist, Maynard Dixon or how he had been the photography subject of the prized photojournalist Dorothea Lange. Regardless of what the shepherds thought of this boy’s stories, they decided they liked him, and as morning dawned out across the painted desert, Everett Ruess would break from camp, his new friends giving a gentle wave as he rode off. He would never be seen again, vanishing forever into the serene Utah wilderness. Sometime later a search party of Escalante cowboys would come across a makeshift camp, and two burros, but Everett Ruess now belonged to the ages. And so began the legend. Almost six decades before Chris McCandless would venture into the north expanses of Alaska on his own attempt “to kill the false spiritual being with-in”, Everett Ruess trekked into the vast American West, exploring the Canyon de Chelle, Grand Canyon, and what is now Yosemite and Sequioa National Parks. And he did it alone. His travels are well documented by photographs, journal entries and letters home to his parents, but rich with legend and myth. His motives were largely unknown, and his eerie disappearance only fuels the cult like following in certain American history circles. So when in March of 2009 a small group of individuals from the University of Colorado had announced they had found the remains of the most famous missing person in the history of the American West, some had feelings of melancholy ripple through their hearts. The discovery actually began in November 1934, when Aneth Nez, a Navajo indian had noticed a young white man roaming the area around Comb Ridge in the Utah wilderness. A week later Nez witnessed the same boy rundown, murdered and robbed by three Ute natives. Because of rising tensions between the Navajo and Ute at the time and for fear of government retribution because a white boy had been murdered at the hands of Native Americans, Nez said nothing. He instead waited until almost sundown, gathered the boy’s remains and buried them in a small crevasse on a near by ridge. That story would remain his secret until 1971, when he confessed the tale only to his daughter and a Navajo medicine man. His daughter, Daisy Johnson, facing her own mortality some 40 years later, confided in her brother Denny Bellson of their grandfather’s amazing confession. Bellson, who lived just minutes from the area where Aneth Nez had seen the boy murdered, was gripped with a passion to find the site where his father had said he buried the boy in the fall of 1934. Over the next several weeks, Bellson searched the Comb Ridge area looking for the grave. One day he came across an almost indiscernible crack in the sandstone. He peered through the narrow fracture and there at the bootom of the shallow crevasse, he found the scattered bones of a human skeleton. In the year that was to follow, the FBI would investigate the scene and conclude it was that of a traditional Navajo burial. DNA would be taken and compared to relatives of Everett Ruess’s, and found to be inconclusive. It seemed the Everett Rues mystery was to remain just that, a mystery. Then in January 2009, a team of experts in Navajo archeology and a forensic anthropologist from the University of Colorado in Boulder returned to the site to give the remains the proper forensic examination they had deserved. By early 2009, they had reconstructed the skull and examined enough of the bones, comparing them to physical descriptions and excellent photographs of the living Ruess to come to the, in their opinion, positive conclusion that the remains found on the Comb Ridge were in fact those of Everett Ruess. “I’d take this to court. This IS Everett Ruess.”, said Dennis Van Gerven, the anthropologist in charge. However, just when relatives were ready to take custody of the bones found in the desert crevasse, they decided on a second opinion, urged on by Utah state archeologist, Kevin Jones. The Armed Forces DNA Identification Laboratory conducted the new DNA tests and concluded that the DNA samples irrefutably proved the body in the Utah desert, found by Denny Bellson, were not that of long famed Evertt Ruess. Ruess’s family has accepted these results as final. Van Gerven, from the Boulder, Colorado study, still argues his bone comparisons are evidence enough that the remains cannot be anyone else’s but Ruess. So once again, it seems for now at least, the American West is united with one of its greatest unsolved mystery. Or maybe perhaps we like to still believe that in this world of satellites and thermal imagining, micro-processors and DNA spiral helixes, that there are some mysteries, some unsolved stories and romances of the wilds we’d rather just not have the answer to. Whatever the case, whenever we venture out, into a wild world we’ve never been, we still evoke the feeling in ourselves that people like Ervertt Ruess, Thoreau, and Muir understood. We stand beside them, and we hear the whispers as the wind ripples across the ridges and through the ancient pine laced canyons. Go out, explore, live, and never cease to wonder. Ben Fulton, “Utah Scientists question Everett Ruess DNA Findings”, Salt Lake Tribune, 02 July 2009 David Roberts, “Finding Everett Ruess”, National Geographic Adventurer, 01 May 2009 Paul Foy, “Remains Found in Utah not poet Everett Ruess”, Associated Press, 21 October 2009

A Peculiar Odyssey of Survival, Revenge and Retribution; The Unbelievable Tale of Hugh Glass.

A New Year’s Eve squall blew hard outside Fort Henry, a dilapidated scattering of trapper’s cabins in what is now modern day Yellowstone Park. The year was 1823 when, at the door appeared a grizzled and near lifeless silhouette. The crowd inside, a fur trading expedition surely a bit inebriated from the celebratory sour mash, looked on with shock at the figure in the tavern’s vestibule. Surely it must be a ghost they thought, a ghost from their past. But the man at the door, his eyes slivered in hate was very much alive. And the trip he had endured over the past 4 months is quite possibly the greatest feat of human endurance in history. In August, 1833, Hugh Glass, all ready a well known trapper, replied to an advertisement placed in the Missouri Gazette by General William Ashley. General Ashley desired 100 brazen men to forge a new trapping route north through the uncharted wilderness of the Missouri River Valley. Glass’s wilderness resume’ was impressive. As a young man he had been attacked, held captive and then sentences to death by Pawnee Indians. The day of his scheduled execution, in a state of affairs, which to this day remains a mystery, Glass was not only able to convince the chief to spare his life, but later adopt him as an honorary Pawnee Indian. General Ashley was so impressed with Glass that he hired him almost at once. Shortly after the expedition began, the General appointed a member of the group, a Mr. Andrew Henry to lead 13 men further up the river, through the Yellowstone Valley and to relieve traders at Fort Henry. Hugh Glass was among the men chosen to make the five month journey. It was hard, difficult country, a land of big valleys, gorges cut out of solid rock and to the east, the Great Plains that stretched to Mexico in the south and the Mississippi to the east. It was also dangerous land, filled with hostile and unreceptive Native Americans. The most intolerant of these tribes were the Arikara. The Arikara, originally a peacefully people from the Dakota Territory had, by 1830, almost vanished from slaughter and their populations run thin by small pox. Ironically, it wasn’t Indians that Hugh Glass encountered on a warm August day, it was instead a grizzly bear he surprised not far from camp. Glass had rounded a bend on a deer trail and come upon a large female grizzly. Startled, the bear charged. The hunter was unable to raise his rifle in time, and the bear hit him with the full force of a freight train. Five inch claws slashed and massive jaws clamped down on his head and shoulder, viciously shaking the hunter about. Glass was a stubborn survivor and even against the 900 pound bear, he proved somewhat difficult to kill. Grabbing his knife, Glass swung back fiercely. His swings were accurate and deliberate, and when the other trappers arrived, having heard the roars of the bear, they found a appallingly wounded Hugh Glass, lying next to a lifeless bear. In the attack, Glass had suffered a broken leg and arm. The skin on his upper back had been peeled back like an orange and his face, neck, and scalp were ripped and torn from numerous swings of the bear’s claws. The first responders initially thought Glass was dead. It was not until Andrew Henry, the expedition’s leader arrived that Glass let out a weak and obscure groan, shocking the gathered trappers. Gasping for air and bleeding profusely, Henry was certain the man would hardly live another hour. At the time of the attack, the group was breaking camp and intended to head out as soon as possible. They were in the heart of Arikara country and could hardly afford to wait any longer. Henry, a devote Christian, felt it necessary that Hugh Glass receive a proper burial. He asked for volunteers, and when no one stepped forward, he upped the ante. Henry included a hefty bonus to whoever would stay back with Glass, and bury him when he died. A young man near the back of the crowd, Jim Bridger, a boy of only 17 stepped forward. He was in desperate need of money and the promise of an extra bonus, equivalent to one month’s pay was irresistible. Another man, Thomas Fitzpatrick volunteered for the extra money. Henry’s volunteers would not likely wait long for Glass’s death and would follow the expedition’s trail north and then west and catch up in a few days. Almost at once, the rest of the trappers pulled up stakes and headed up the Missouri River and out of the dangerous Arikara Indian country. The others were no sooner out of sight than Bridger and Fitzpatrick began digging Glass’s grave. Once dug, they rolled him into it, where he landed with a thump, and covered him with a large buffalo hide and waited. What the volunteers thought would be a quick death turned out to be nothing of the sort. The old honorary Pawnee Indian was a stubborn old warrior and refused to die. What Bridger and Fitzgerald though would take minutes, lagged into hours, and as night began to fall, the two white men became increasingly nervous of the looming danger of the Arikara. Throughout the night, Glass fell in and out of consciousness. His gurgled gasps for air likely drove the two volunteers nearly mad. Somewhere in the darkness of night, the two fell asleep. As they awoke in the morning, they fully intended to find Glass dead. But he was not. Fitzgerald argued to leave Glass where he lay, and make a run for it. It was only a matter of time before an Arikara hunting party would pass their way. Bridger strongly opposed leaving the near dead Glass, but the elder Fitzgerald’s perseverance finally triumphed and he and Bridger grabbed Glass’s prized Hawken rifle, his hunting knife, and other provisions, threw a few shovelfuls of sandy earth on top of him and hurried up stream to catch up to the expedition. Early the next morning the duo caught up with Henry and the others and reported that Hugh Glass has succumbed to his injuries and was now dead and buried. That should have been the end of that. However, in the hours after Bridger and Fitzgerald’s hasty retreat, Glass on some detached and dim level of consciousness, mustered enough strength, through either pure will power or pure resentment, to sit up in his own shallow grave. The world around him was burly, but he was fully aware that he had been betrayed. Perhaps the rage now brewing ever stronger helped to pull him from the grave. Once on flat ground, he set his own broken leg. Glass knew he was literally hundreds of miles from safety and was in the middle of hostile Arikara country. An expert on wilderness living and survival he knew safety lie only in Fort Kiowa, some 250 miles to the west. Unable to stand, Glass began to crawl. His wounds were infected so badly that the skin began to die. Somewhere along the route, fearing gangrene, he tipped a rotting log and under it found a slew of maggots, at which point he laid his injured back into the squirming pile until they hate ate away the dying and infected flesh. Meanwhile, the original expedition had traveled up along the Missouri River and then later the Grand River. Glass knew that this would be far too dangerous an endeavor so he chose to crawl south, to the Cheyenne River. And crawl he did. For six weeks. He had set his leg, but it was still too badly broken to support his weight. He ate berries and robbed ground-nesting birds of their eggs. He crawled to a recent buffalo kill and stayed three days at its side eating the meat. When he made it to the banks of the Cheyenne River, sometime in mid-September, his wounds had almost entirely healed. On the river’s bank he fashioned a crude raft and took the river into Fort Kiowa, another two week journey. He survived on frogs, raw minnows and river slime scooped by hand. Finally, upon arriving in Fort Kiowa in the cold days of early October, Glass rested only a few short days before hitching up with another trapping outfit headed in the direction of The Bighorn River. He planned, once at the Big Horn, of leaving the outfit to hunt down his old party and seek revenge on Bridger and Fitzgerald. The trapping outfit he was traveling with to The Bighorn River was being led by an experienced woodsman named Toussaint Charbonneau. Somewhere, miles into the trip, the party suffered hostile native attacks that left all but Charbonneau and Glass dead. Glass had once again narrowly escaped death. Afterwards, Glass parted ways with Charbonneau, who chose to continue traveling west with a tribe of Mandan Indians. It would be a snowy December night before Glass finally arrived at Fort Henry at the mouth of the Yellowstone River. The past four months had taken him over 600 miles across the most dangerous land in the Western reaches of the United States. By this time, he was again nearly starving and pushed on by what can only be speculated as pure hate and revenge. As he opened the door to the tavern where the company of his former expedition now sat, merrily gulping holiday ale, celebration must have surely turned to disbelief. Shock filled the room and a nervous Bridger stepped back and into a far corner of the open room. Glass held no reservations as to why he had come and boldly announced he was there to kill Bridger and Fitzgerald. Pacing the room until he found Bridger, the old trapper lowered his rifle in line with the 17 year old boy. Bridger, who had every intention of staying with Glass, was so shocked and his guilt so apparent, that Glass, the hardened man who had crawled two months through a living hell, the man who hid from Indians, watched members of his own party murdered and ate rotting meat from the corpses of animals, forgave him almost immediately. But, the older Fitzgerald was another story. Glass asked the whereabouts of Fitzgerald and Andrew Henry had to inform Glass, that Fitzgerald had quit the expedition to join the Army. Upon hearing this news, Glass halfheartedly joined the trappers in the New Year’s celebration, but, as he drank the warm beer, his mind was on Fitzgerald. In the days that followed, Glass acquired as much information as he could regarding the current location of Fitzgerald and tracked him to an army installation in Fort Atkinson, 30 miles north of modern day Omaha, Nebraska. It was the early summer months of 1824. Glass was stopped shortly before entering camp by the army Captain Bennett Riley. For months, word had spread of Glass’s search for the solider Fitzgerald and Captain Riley was not in any mood to have a man under his command murdered. Informing Glass that killing a soldier in the United States Army would result in his hanging, Glass reserved himself. He asked only that Fitzgerald return to him his prized Hawken rifle, to which Fitzgerald complied. And then Glass disappeared. An account of Glass being wounded by arrow one year later would surface in Naval medical records and it is known that he survived the attack, but nothing was to be written, or heard of Hugh Glass afterwards. In a tale that could only have originated in the vast expanses of the American West, Glass embodied the grit, determination and sheer will power of the early American spirit. His intentions slightly skewed, he never the less survived a mountain man’s peril, and then appropriately and fittingly vanished into legend. Bruce Bradley, Hugh Glass, 1999 John Myers, The Saga of Hugh Glass: Pirate, Pawnee and Mountain Man, 1976 Robert Mc Clung, Hugh Glass: Mountain Man, Left for Dead, 1993

The Evolutionary Result of 4 Billion Years.

The oldest civilazations on Earth..the indigenous aboriginies of Austrailia, the Quechua, Jiraro, and Pano of South America.....the Inuit and Metis of Canada....they live with barely any material items what-so-ever.

We are taught/conditioned to believe these people are less 'developed', that their brains aren't as large, that they are savages, thieves, beggars; people who are starving, poor and destitute.

Nothing could be farther from the truth.

They are the evolutionary result of 4 billion years.

I consider them the most advanced cultures on Earth. They live in absolute peace with one another, and in complete harmony with the planet. They have a reverent spiritual connection with the energy of life that we haven't evovled long enough to understand.

A Tale of Loathing and Sorrow so near the Mountains

In-between me and the hills lie what we have been conditioned to believe is civilization. Hoards of grossly convinced people who dare not even look to the west, lest, they might have to consider something greater than their own measly existence in their common and custom built neighborhoods of perfection.

But yet, these are the people whose homes I am in daily and who serve as my masters, hour after unbearable hour.

These people exhibit no desire for anything beyond the front door of their home. And in fact, choose an existence that secludes them as much as possible from such passions or desires.

They all talk the same, act the same and exhibit no qualities that would make them stand out in my mind as to make them recognizable if I were to meet them a year later.

I can see it in their eyes as we speak, that they think lowly of me. If their hearts permitted them to do so, I feel that they might even pity me, because I did not live like them. They must believe in their own delusional psyche, that I yearn for nothing else as to emulate their existence on Earth. They have known nothing else for so long, or perhaps never, their entire lives.

They have no wonder in their eyes. There is no curiosity that burns in their expression at all. Their skin is pale and the wrinkles around their eyes are those of squinting to better read some hand-held device of convenience rather than the squint one has when gazing out upon a hidden valley landscape, so wide, and in such detail, that no two eyes planted in a single skull could ever imagine to absorb.

These people think to themselves when they look at me, I am what they were warned about. I was the example of what mistakes they could make if they didn't go to college, get married, buy that big house. I am the photo negative of what they always strived to become; the person they were most afraid of becoming.

I can feel they truly loathe me. At one time I thought maybe they envied me. I thought maybe they envied my freedom, my care free nature, my life free of stress, my stroll, my free spirit, my travels into and onto hidden mountain paths, down wild streams, my nights out under the stars.

I had not lost faith in humanity.

But I now understand their arrogance forbids them from believing that anything other than their own example of existence is, in fact, perfection.

I now understand that they sense my free spirit, but don't understand what it to be---

only that it is something inferior and to be quashed and exterminated. They see others like me and feel us to be cousins of the last surviving strain of Small Pox and that we must either be disinfected or simply wiped clean from the face of existence all together, preferably in some single ‘shock and awe-like’ moment of complete finalidity.

Near the end of the day, and it seems every day, no matter where, a gentle breeze stirs somewhere in the high alpine places, unseen from where I might be, and it floats down along the mountain valleys and through the hidden creek canyons; picking up the scents and energy of a spirit that, as a species most of us now find unrecognizable. And then, perhaps a hundred miles or more from where it may have originated, it empties into the populous, the cancer of growth, of human development, the tidy neighborhoods of suburbia. Like a quiet almost undiscerning wave, it can be felt, but it brings with it a primitive voice of who we once were and where we once came from, and what we once understood. I can almost hear something in the breeze, something that is beyond words, it is too complicated in its simplicity.

And for a moment, I feel energized and renewed and ready to face any obstacle. And it make makes me glad to live where I do.

And in its single second life, the breeze carries with it a message for anyone else who might care to listen...

-a voice screeches from an adjacent room,

"...can you PLEASE shut that window!"

The Night They Came for Arlo Booth.

It's a quiet night in a suburb just outside Omaha, Nebraska. A giant orange harvest moon lies heavy and low in an unusually warm autumn night as Arlo Booth walks the kitchen trash out to the curb. He's a father of three and works as an independent data analysist in the city. Wendy, his wife and he have been married for twelve years.

He pauses for just a moment and peers up at the sky and thinks to himself what an amazing life he has. Born and farmed raised on the broad expanses of the Nebraska prairie, he graduated from a class of 27 and went to college at the University of Missouri where he majored in Statistics and Mathematics. From rather meager beginnings he built a reputation in the technology field as a no nonsense, hardworking expert on everything technical. After a brief reflection, he closes the lid on the trash can, worried only of the neighborhood raccoons and heads back in the house, entirely unaware of the eyes on him.

A block away in a Ford Eco-Line van labeled on the side: "Action Electric", sit half a dozen employees of the Department of Justice. They are battle-hardened soldiers recently back from Afghanistan where they have accumilated extensive experience in the art of search, seizure, and detainment of enemy combatants. A decade of war has hardened their emotions and whittled their senses to a point. They are exactly what the Department of Homeland Security and Department of Justice had in mind, and tonight they have their sights squarely on Arlo Booth.

In the van, the group commander is given the go, via satellite phone, from Washington DC, and the arrest is a green light. The van speeds ahead to the driveway of Booth's home and the six figures in black ski masks lunge from the van doors, taking evasive positions around the home. Information gathered through recent surveillance has indicated that the family's two dogs are alert to strange movements and sounds so they are lured through the doggy door at the rear of the house. As soon as the dogs are out, their throats are slashed and they are drug from the yard. Booth's wife is in a hallway off the kitchen when the group breeches the home and she is quickly subdued with the butt end of a rifle. The children are sleeping as the militants enter the master bedroom bathroom. There they find a startled Mr. Booth preparing for bed. He is thrown to the ground, and hog tied with thick black zip-ties as a black hood is wrapped around his head and secured. He is drug off through the house and out the back door to the van. The van races off into the night. The entire operation takes little more than 90 seconds.

Arlo Booth has just been arrested as a potential enemy combatant and threat to the ruling authority of Office of President of the United States. He is given no legal counsel, no one is told of his where abouts, he simply vanishes from the face the Earth.

But this is America, how could such a thing happen, and why?

Six months earlier, under cover of darkness, while the country was dizzy from New Year celebratory spirits, and the news media was covering holiday shopping trends, the commander in chief was signing into existence a law that would fundamentally change the United States of America forever. The bill had been forged onto parchment with a hurried nervousness by a government who felt the ever looming danger of an enemy like none they had ever faced in the past.

This enemy is well informed.

It can organize through and across the internet in a matter of minutes.

It is educated, indomitable, and has been backed into a corner by ever increasing taxes, tolls, fees, and licensing.

The government, side by side with their financial backers in multi-national corporations, mega-banks, and ruling class families had been caught somewhat off guard when the approval ratings of their boy in the Oval Office fell to a level never seen by a sitting President. That coupled with the even more dismal numbers of their ‘bought and paid for’ members of Congress, warranted action.

This new bill, the NDAA, which stands for the National Defense Authorization Act, authorizes the President to order the

“detention of persons the government suspects of involvement in terrorism, or has generated controversy, or potential implications for abuse of Presidential authority”.

In tradition with tyrants of the past and dictators who’ve leveled entire contrasting opposition, this new, modern Office of the President must ensure the agenda of its financiers, the faceless, nameless specters that slither in smoke-filled back rooms and shadowy corridors slightly out of sight from the populous, but never the less, direct the face of spurious freedom and admiration that is our President.

What did Arlo Booth do to warrant such action? Perhaps it was because he recently began home-schooling his children. Maybe it was because he was growing a winter beard, a dumb contest with his brother, but it was a little too shaggy and un-Christian like. He had recently joined the Sierra club after being polite to a street corner activist in Boulder, Colorado the month before last, maybe that shot up a red flag? Whatever, the reason, the government needs little to label a citizen a terrorist. And, here in this new America, one need not need be labeled a terrorist anyhow, they simply need to be opposed to the agenda of the sitting administration.

The night is near, when they too, may come for you.

Coming Soon...

'The Butchering of the Spring Herd'

.....a piece on the indoctrination of America's youth, over the past 20 years, into contemporary and socially accepted slavery.

Fear the Round Eye-ed Devil

Fifty years ago, very few people had ever heard of depression, there were barely any cases of cancer, heart disease, diabetes, or autism and kids didn’t walk into their schools and blow away their classmates before premeditatingly killing themselves.

The divorce rate was next to nothing, there was no such thing as a “misery index” and no one ever thought of prescribing you a pill to ease the suffering of symptoms, they cured or treated the actual disease instead.

So, now today, what do we do different then we did fifty years ago?

I remembered an article I read in 1990 on the growing problem in Japan of ‘Karoshi’, the early deaths of seemily healthy people, a sudden spike in cancer rates, heart attacks of 40-somethings, coupled with a rise in school-place disobedience, and ever-increasing violent crime committed by youth, in a country that, historically had been one of the safest countries on Earth. The article was on the over-worked Japanese citizen, the break-down of the traditional Japanese family, the sudden aspiration of the average Japanese to abandon age-old Japanese culture and indulge in wanting to be more ‘Western’. However, Japan was on top of the world. They were the leaders in technological development, their economy was on fire; arguably the best in the world, and their work habits were touted as the envy of the world by the American government.

That was 1990.

So what happened?

Tokyo became the most polluted city on Earth. Suicide became the number one killer of citizens between the ages of 18 and 34. The divorce rate rivaled that of America. Seniors were being institutionalized in record numbers.

Cases of rape went up.

Cases of murder went up (in a nation where it was once unheard of).

Cancer, heart attacks, diabetes, and stroke went up.

Finally, Japan’s economy imploded. In what the United Nations celestially named the “Japanese Asset Price Bubble”, Japan collapsed into a dark economic recession.

Rewind, several hundred years: when the first Europeans came to Japan, they marveled and noted at the amazing Japanese craftsmanship and fine metalwork. Japan was a land of old traditions, of discipline, of respect for elders, and of harmony with the land. The Japanese family was the core unit of its civilization. Elders were respected as fountains of wisdom and cared for in such a manner. Children were revered as the future and vigilantly nurtured and taught time-honored Japanese customs. And it remained that way for the following centuries.

Shortly before WWII, Japan had abandoned very little of its traditional ways, and its average income per citizen was nearly 10X that of an American, and goods and services in Japan cost less than half of equal services in the States.
Enter World War II.

Following the war, the United States began an aggressive campaign to rebuild the economy of Japan. So-called American experts were rushed to newly built schools and Japanese children were taken from the villages and taught the ‘Western’ work ethic, all in the name to rebuild its country. Women were drug from the home, children were sent to school seven days a week, and school-aged boys as well as grown men were taught that working until you dropped dead was a noble and honorable way to die.

The aggressive campaign to rebuild Japan by the United States government was an experiment and prototype of how they would later rebuild the American curriculum here at home. The problem is we implemented it before we finished out experiment with Japan, or did we?

The collapse of the Japanese economic machine led to a time period that traditionalists call the “Lost Decade”. In a state of panic and despair the Japanese government and educational system went into emergency mode. They convened and looked back over the last 50 years to see just why they ended up in the state they did.

The Japanese began a campaign to return Japan to its days of glory. They took the idea of building itself in the image of the United States and abolished it. They fundamentally rebuilt their education philosophy. Along with science, math and technology, they began to once again teach Japanese history, tradition, and culture. Class weeks were cut from six or seven days a week to five days a week, and in many parts of the country, four and even three. Businesses implemented a new theory called the Tokyo Way, defined as: progress by improvement throughout all aspects of life. Traditional and ancient family values were encouraged. Next, they scattered the central bank to the wind, empowering once again, the independent community bank, breaking the chains of financial serfdom that nameless, faceless bankers had imposed on them a half century earlier.

The results? Destroying the national bank (the equivalent to the Federal Reserve in the US) rendered the nameless and faceless multi-nationalists powerless. Japanese citizens now pay no income tax. In 2010, Japan’s GDP growth was 4%, the highest in the world, while the Japanese workforce has actually shrunken. Citizens are spending less time at work, more time in their homes, and more time with family and parents. The government empowered the citizen and stopped the crippling regulation of day to day life. Only about 12% of the nation of Japan has tillable land suitable for farming, yet government regulations now favor the independent merchant, tradesman and farmer. Japan imports very little food. Japanese farmers were once again allowed to practice centuries-old farming techniques and their yield increased. Local and independent farmers now support a nation of millions on only a tiny slice of tillable land.

The education system in this country is little more than day care for the family that has been enslaved to corporate America. It’s simple really. The multi-national banking system loans the money to corporate America so the banking institutions own the companies we work for. The banks give us credit cards that we rack up with debt, they then manipulate currency volume and interests rates to keep inflation at an attractive level for them. We get our paychecks which we use to pay off our debt, in a sense giving it right back to the banks that we all work for. We essentially work for free.

Until we learn to live debt free, and America once again becomes a nation of independent citizens, independent of debt and independently skilled we will always be a nation enslaved and eternally indentured to our employer. Until we structure our society back to where family, friends, and community is the central and sacred focal point of existence instead of our place of employment and our co-workers, and chase for the dollar to pay our ever mounting debt, we are a nation and civilization doomed.

The Strange, Sad Saga of a Boy and His Mountain

"If America could be, once again, a nation of self-reliant farmers, craftsmen, hunters, ranchers, and artists, then the rich would have little power to dominate others."
--Edward Abbey

There was once a boy.

And he lived in a small wooden house that sat in a green valley next to a mountain made of black granite.

He lived there with his father and his mother and his little sister. Every morning he would wake up and he would go downstairs and his mother would make him and his sister a breakfast of eggs from the family's chickens, and bacon from the family’s hogs, and toast that she had burnt from the bread she had made herself. His mother would spread butter on it, churned from cream given by their dairy cow and dab on honey she had bought from the bee keeper that lived on the same gravel road as they did.

And the boy was happy.

His father was a carpenter. And he built furniture, and cabinets, and sometimes barns and sheds, and houses. He had learned to be a carpenter from another carpenter when he was a young man, and generations of knowledge cost him nothing.

After his breakfast, and after his father had gone to his workshop to build, his mother would teach the boy and his sister history, and geography, and math, and reading at the kitchen table. They learned everything they needed to know right there in the family’s own home.

But his mother only taught them for a few hours each day and for only a few days each week. She knew that children have imaginations and are naturally restless, and have a curiosity that can only be full filled with the play that children know. So she would let them loose into the green valley where they lived. His sister and he would run through the green grass, in the shadow of the big mountain and they would run to the creek that ran along the family’s property. They would flip over rocks in the creek, and catch frogs, and fish, and chase dragonflies. Their lungs were filled with pure mountain air and their eyes saw everything. Sometimes in the heat of the day, they would work the handle of the pump next to the house and out would come the coldest, freshest water that came from deep with-in the Earth, which had flowed from some ancient spring. Throughout the day they could smell the scent of laundry drying on the line and even at the youngest age, the boy somehow, felt deep inside, a remarkable comfort.

When the sun had begun to sink in the sky, the boy and his sister would head for home. Tired and dirty they would sit around the table there in that little wooden house, in that green valley, in the shadow of that great mountain and they would give thanks to all that they had been blessed with.

And so the years went by, and the boy and his sister, and his mother and father lived right there, in that little valley.

And the boy grew abled with his curiosity and wonderment.

One day up the gravel road came a car, and into the driveway it pulled. The boy and his sister ran through the wild flowers of spring to see who this stranger was. When they got to the house, the boy could see a man talking with his mother. He was a tall, pale and gaunt man in a black suit who spoke in a convincing voice. At a point in the conversation he turned and looked directly at the boy, winking with a black and soulless eye.

The man told the boy’s mother that there was a huge world beyond this little valley. A world where there was much to have, much to own. A world where there were stores for eggs, and stores for furniture, and where heat came from a furnace that needed no hand-cut wood. Where you could dial on a device that had no cords and talk with a neighbor, and where there were machines that would send mail in seconds.

But the boy’s mother told the man that everything they needed was right here in this valley. That they had a cow for their milk, chicken and hogs for their food, and her husband made all the furniture they needed. There was a pump for their water, and on the property that had been in her family for over 200 years there were trees that gave them firewood in the winter and shade in the summer.

She told the man that, for them, every necessity was free.

But the man was persuasive, and his words were crafty and soon the boy’s mother was not herself.

The next day, the boy and his sister came downstairs as they always had, except things were very different. The boy’s mother seemed rushed and indifferent, she told them to eat quickly and that she would be taking them to school. The boy seemed confused. He had always been taught everything he needed to know right there at the kitchen table. The boy’s mother explained to him that there were teachers at the big school that knew far more than she did and that this is where his sister and he would be going from now on.

The boy’s mother rushed them into the car and then to school. The school was a busy and chaotic place. During class the boy grew restless. He was surrounded by walls and there were no windows. Instead of just a few short hours of learning, he spent the entire day in one small room for five straight days. The teachers at the school spent very little time teaching; instead they pointed out things on overhead projectors and then assigned him to do busy work when he got home, and when he got home from school it was all ready dark.

Everything was now very different.

Several weeks passed. But the boy had always liked to learn and read and study. And soon it was time for a test. When the boy had been taught at home, his mother never tested him, she knew he had learned what she was teaching, because she had taught him. And when the teacher passed it out, the boy found the test to be filled with trick questions, written to confuse and manipulate. The boy filled in the answers the best he could, but left feeling defeated and humiliated.

He couldn’t wait to go home that day, to a place where he felt safe, and where things made sense.

But when he got home he saw a familiar car sitting in the driveway. He found the man talking again with his mother. The man told his mother now that her children were no longer at home, she should take a job outside the house. The man said that she was a victim of a male dominated world, where men had collectively enslaved women to existences of mere motherhood, and that a huge world awaited her. The boy’s mother said that her children were still young, and that they needed a mother who was at home. She told the man that her job as a mother and as a wife was an important one. She told him that her kids still needed her. But again the man was convincing and he was sly, he said her children were in the good hands of the others now. He told her it takes many to raise a child.

So the boy’s mother soon got a job outside the home.

She drove long miles to and from work every day but the wage she earned barely afforded her the gas in her car and the new stress in her life. But the man had convinced her that a job outside of the home was a far more dignified life than one spent serving a man’s home and his children.

The boy was soon in trouble with his teachers. A young boy was never meant to sit in small rooms for weeks on end, so he had grown restless, and the gray walls had turned him bored. His teachers soon arranged a meeting with his parents where they were told their little boy suffered from a disease, a disease that caused the mind to wander and to dream. And that there was a pill that must be administered to heal the boy of this infirmity. The boy, upon learning he had been living with such imperfection, grew depressed. But the pill was strong and it worked quickly and efficiently. Soon the boy didn't dream of a world outside of school, he was no longer curious, he no longer felt the urge to wonder.

The man in the black suit then paid a visit to the boy’s father too. The man told his father, “look at your wife, she works and works, and here you are, working from home for such meager pay.”

So the boy’s father quit working for himself and took a job in the city.

Now when the boy and his sister got home from school, there was rarely anyone home. Soon his sister was left to the wolves, searching for acceptance elsewhere.

The boy’s mother and father soon sold the cow and the hogs and the chickens. With both of them working, there was now no longer any time to care for the animals.

Groceries were now expensive.

There was no longer anytime to cut firewood on weekends, so the boy’s father bought a furnace that ran on natural gas.

Heating their home was now very expensive.

The boy’s mother and father spent very little time together. They both grew close to others at work, and told those people of their dreams, and complained to these co-workers of their lives at home. When the boy’s mother and father saw each other, it was to discuss the bills and the business that their lives had now become.

Very rarely, when schedules overlapped, they would sit down at the kitchen table like they once had, but they no longer folded their hands in prayer, for there was no time to reflect on what they were thankful for. Resentment and bitterness grew in the belly of the boy’s mother and father, and they both were soon miserable.

The boy’s father grew sick with stress and his mother grew sick with distain. The price of pills and therapy along with groceries and the rest of the new necessities soon were too much to bear,

it seems their new wealth had impoverished them.

The boy’s mother and father soon sold off their family’s green valley to developers. The developers built sprawling subdivisions, Wal-Marts, Starbucks and Applebees. They cut down the trees and named roads after them. But the developers saved the strip of land closest to the black granite mountain, and this is where they built the homes of the rich.

The boy was now almost a man. Years of school had taken the place of his education and he could barely hold a thought in his head. His sister was a mother of her own now and lived in another town. Ready to begin his own life in the world, he looked towards his green valley.

But it was gone.

He took a walk to clear his head by the creek.

But it was now a concrete culvert.

He drove past the urban sprawl to try and once again stand in the shadow of his mountain.

But there was now a gate.

A gate that led through a neighborhood of million dollar estates which now sat in the shadow of the granite peak. Instead of children playing in the green valley, next to the creek, in the shadow of the mountain, adults spoke of mergers, and money, and their golf vacation in Greece last winter.

And just as the boy was about to leave, he noticed a car pulling from the driveway of the largest, most extravagant house, set on the hill closest to the base of the mountain. The car took the winding road down to the gate, the driver gave a quick wave to the thug guard and then drove past the boy. For a split second the boy’s eyes locked with the man behind the wheel as he gave the boy a wink through a cold black eye.

US Department of Jobs

Word has come from Washington that a solution to the job crisis looming over this nation may be at hand. Government cronies, at this moment, in cooperation with international business leaders and transnational bankers are conjuring a plan to implement a new governmental department:

The US Department of Jobs.

Really???

Anyone who knows me knows I’ve feared something like this for years. Imagine if you will, a government official handing you a slip of paper. And on that slip of paper is where you are to report the next day for your new job.

Things in this country were bound to get to this point. An economy that jumps about from roaring one minute to reeling in retreat the next, a congress full of bought and paid for impostors, global corporations manipulating our currency, and the overall loss of any imaginative spirit in its citizens.

One of our greatest freedoms is that we can do what we choose when it comes to our profession. We can choose our vocation. We can quit our job anytime we want, we can start our own business if we think we can do it better, and there is no legal penalty for failure.

That is about to change.

Imagine a day when the government ‘assigns’ you a job. If your boss is an idiot, or if you think of a better way to do something, it doesn’t matter. Suck it up buttercup, you’re stuck with this job. Don’t like the wage? Too bad, a government panel has determined that the wage you earn is plenty sufficient for a family of five like yours. You will be given a raise yearly depending on your job performance score. To resign would be illegal.

Now imagine a system by which a government agency will track you throughout your entire working life. A job bureau if you would, organized and patterned after the credit bureau. You will be given a score, much like your credit score. It won’t easily be disputed, and its contents will be kept mostly in secret from you. Your boss will give you quarterly job performance reviews. They will be sterile and consist of vague questions and categories of measure. These performance reviews will be sent, by law, to the job bureau, where tabs will be kept and a score will be rendered. Absences, tardies, and such will smear a blemish upon your job score. Lulls in employment will lower your score. Deviations from dress code will affect your score. Like a medieval marriage between cousins, your credit score and your job score will soon be the two most important numbers in your life.

With the newly created US Department of Jobs, you can petition for a new job, but it won’t be easily. You will need to fill out the proper paperwork….online of course. Then you will need several references, and accompany all pertinent paperwork with copies of past job appraisals, ‘matter of’s’ pertaining to any absences, or tardies or anything of the nature. Several months shall pass, and matters will be complicated. Your denial will come, and the cause will be specified to an insufficient job score rating. You will need to apply for a copy of your job history record from any of the several governmental entities which keep track of such information. The call center will have been outsourced to the slums of East Dzerzhinsk, ironic since this agency falls under the jurisdiction of the US Department of Jobs. You are allowed one copy of your…YOUR job history report a year and you may make 3 disputes in writing every 18 months.

You think you have a better idea on how to do something? You think your boss is an idiot and you could do it better? Ever try dealing with the credit card companies? Well that should give you somewhat of an idea on what you’ll be facing, seens how that’s who runs the company you work for and who is slipping ownership of off-shore accounts under the table to your local congressman, and setting him up with $3000 a night hookers. You think he given two shakes of lamb’s tail what in hell you think?

The US Department of Jobs will be a federal institution, and obstructing its day to day operations will be punishable by federal incarceration. Unions will be seen and made illegal. Working conditions will falter, and working wages will plummet.

Any business is now big business. International corporations will swallow whole the small business owner. Cheap labor flooding into this country every day from Mexico will underscore and underbid the ma and pa service industry. Big business is owned and controlled by big banks. Big banks hold a controlling monetary interest in every single Fortune 500 company on Earth. Those with the gold, make the rules.

Tell your kids, go to school, study real hard, get good grades, do everything the nice teacher tells you to. You want your school score to look good to the US Department of Jobs when employment hand-out time comes. Some will be chosen for higher programming at any of the newly government funded colleges, but most will be assigned to the fields.

Assigned and instituted debt will force us into a lifetime of indentured servitude, while a new monarchy class comes to be…here on American soil. We will be pheasants born to a pre-determined future; assigned a master, and whipped by never ending tolls, levies, fees, licenses, and permits.

A US Department of Jobs will mask nothing more than a kinder, gentler, more socially acceptable US Department of Slavery.

Tragic Thoughts and Epic Revelations of an American Dream

Nobody dreams anymore.

Nobody writes anymore.

Nobody has a burning sense of curiosity.

They just don’t give a shit.

How have we allowed ourselves to become a nation of people waiting for the next big hand out? How have we been allowed to become a nation that is so in debt, so entranced, so desensitized that we just can no longer think, dream, create, invent, organize. We are a nation out of control, spiraling into an abyss where we merely exist. We’re robots, wage slaves. We are focused but it’s straight ahead. We don’t see side to side. We see a yellow flower, and smell the aroma, but we’ve forgotten how to describe it to someone else, and would we even care anyhow? We might but then again, who has the time?

We don’t have any time.

We have created all this technology to supposedly make things faster, make them easier, make our lives simpler, but now we’ve imprisoned ourselves into taking care and maintaining all these creations.

We’re slaves to the possessions we work so hard to afford.

We want, want, want, we’ve created entire industries based and revolving around our wants. Others have forced us to need what we want. The American dream has been taken, captured, held hostage, and hijacked, but when it was finally sold back to us, it was a scheme. Like Flipper at SeaWorld, taken from the sea, placed in a big tank with the sides painted like the ocean. Its water, it’s salty, but it’s not the ocean. The Great American Scheme, the repackaged, redone version of what we were taught in school to chase. I will never let the packaged, government schooling interfere with what I deem an education.

Teachers don’t teach, they supervise. Parents don’t parent, they roll out one kid after another, just like their sister. They never give one second to the reason, the meaning, or the feeling, the instinct that burns in them to parent. They don’t care. Nobody cares. They just continue. In a sense our entire pre-programmed instinct has been completely re-written.

We hunt for money.

We are in survival mode.

Action, reaction; cause to effect.

When was the last time you stood, closed your eyes and filled your lungs with pure air? Feel the air enter, the body take in the air, feel the blood run through your veins, all the while, feel your heart keeping perfect rhythm with the sun, the sky, the light breeze? Would our new species even realize what that was, this humanoid we’ve become, this creature, this monster, this beast craving, and stalking the next dollar? The next dollar to feed its hungry SUV? The stress of a drive home after work, an unknown instinct burning in us to preserve our list of possessions, we seek to support the material beast, a monster made of either steel or fabric, or glass. Consuming our souls, making us want more, bigger, more expensive so we could tell someone that we had more, we had bigger, we payed more.

We’re infected, our brains influxed with a elixir that creeps, and seeks, and flows into the membrane of soft tissue where our morality fibers are wrapped, infesting it and killing it, turning it numb, so the evil instinct of chasing, perusing, and capturing the false idol of salvation becomes our sole desire. We’re drunk with envy of our neighbor. We’re high with a brain dissolving desire to talk of what we have, what we’re going to get, and how much we’re going to spend doing all of it. Our children are no longer our flesh and pour blood in a living, breathing being, they are our material possessions, bred and born to impress, to compete with the others.

We will never do without.

We will never cut back.

We will never cease in our desire to consume more than the next. We will starve ourselves to appear to be eating better than our neighbor. We will steal to appear that we are more generous.

We are no longer human.

In a sick and backwards way, we have returned to the most primitive animals we once were. We have reached the pinnacle of our evolution and are now in a catastrophic plummet in our ability to reason, and comprehend. We are beasts driven mad with our desires, our sick and cross-eyed souls hunt with drooling fangs, tearing through whatever flesh stands in the way of pleasing our perverted, insane compulsions.

It’s is almost complete, we have almost metamorphosed into our new species. We are a society lost, blinded, we have forgotten. We are the final breed of temptation, the final result of greed, the final viral strain of enticement, and the last genetic mutation of gluttony.

A Road of Little Consequence

I was driving down a road of little consequence, just today. A warm, Indian Summer sun sat in a western sky, and the aroma of dry spruce hung heavy in the air. The road was slightly cracked and the center line was faded and veering. The narrow lanes challenged my mind not to wander, but my imagination has always been a rebellious one. My old pick-up, a relic from the Carter administration, was now as much a friend of mine as my dog who sat, loyally as my co-pilot.

The past year had not been an easy one, and for that matter, neither had the one before that. A slew of piss-poor career attempts had left me unemployed and a failed marriage, a few failed relationships, and a group of strangers I believed were my friends had my mood and my mind in a somewhat depressive state. My short-comings and a future of seemingly worse events ahead were becoming thoughts that were beginning to trip over each other in my head. One job in particular that had seen me fired, had subsequently left me especially bitter, and almost unfeeling.

A stainless-steel mug of coffee, poured from my thermos sat cooling in my cup-holder. The broken center-line flashed by, and seemed to hum silently.

The past had left me a pile of debt I could never pay, a home I could no longer live in, a dream extinguished, my talents squandered. I spoke aloud to my dog in a serious tone, “You know, I could pull the truck over here. Right here. You and me, we could hike into those mountains today. Those mountains go on forever, they’re endless. Things get forgotten in those mountains. I’d only take you so far my friend, then I’d let you go to run, some campers would find you, and they would take you home with them. But I’d go further, I’d walk and hike so deep, and so far, until I was sure no one would ever find me. And then….I'd do it. People would find my truck. They’d figure I got lost. They’d even search for me I suppose. But I’d be leaving no wife behind; no children would miss their Dad. So they wouldn’t look that long, or probably even that hard. I’d be someone they could forget about.”

I could feel my foot easing on the gas pedal to find the brake and a spot to pull the truck to the side. But then something stopped me. I did indeed need to brake, but not because I intended on carrying out my plan, but because ahead of me on this deserted road, high in this mountain pass, was a small bridge. A bridge that ran above a clear creek that like the road, had no name. And scattered like tossed stones to the side were three bikes. Bikes of children, the tires mis-matched, the painted faded and chipped, dropped alongside the road in a hurried enthusiasm. And on that bridge were two boys and a sister, the oldest no more than eight, casting dime-store fishing rods into a stream as pure as their innocence, a summer sun in its twilight at their backs. I slowed the truck and passed, and noticed their pink shoulders and a Tupperware that was one of Mom’s best, filled with thin, hand-dug worms and black dirt.

In a world filled with everyday news of corrupt CEOs, and video game addiction, 3000 calorie Happy Meals, and sub-prime mortgages, for just a brief moment, on a no-name road in a land as green and perfect as Heaven, I glimpsed hope once again.

I pressed on the accelerator as the road ahead of me looked as if it could take me to the ocean, and a smile pulled itself, ever so slightly, out of a corner of my mouth.

The Person Who I am

I am a sitter. A watcher. A person who, by a young age was out of place. Where was I to fit in? I was from a poor home, a home of little monetary privilege, of little luxury, and even less societal fortitude. And so I sat. On the outside, looking in, on the sidelines, watching the game of life played out by others. Others, who grew up with the apparition of wealth and the illusion of their own self-induced enlightenment. As a watcher, a keen observer, I discovered even at a tender age that the wealth I ensued was far greater and was much higher in regard than their false monetary type.
I am a reader. A writer. A critic. A person who researches my interests, and full fills my curiosity by filling my notebooks with useless knowledge, retaining worthless facts. I toil over matters of no value, of little worth, insignificant in their circumstance, useless in day to day conversation; total and complete rubbish.
I am a purist. A believer. A helpless romantic. I live in a time and a place where I don’t belong. I believe in ever-after while surrounded by the temporary. I stroll while the world hurries. I absorb while the rest scans. I am alone in my pursuits. Misunderstood, misjudged, misconstrued.

Bill Gates Punched a Time Card Everyday

When I was a very young man, just starting out in the wonderful world of work, a mentor of sorts, told me to always keep my nose to the grindstone. He went on to explain that good hard work was the secret to success, money, security, and advancement. I cherished that advice as I bit my lip and lowered my shoulder into the great unknown in front of me. As the years went along, I found myself in a number of different disciplines, and I always lived by the motto of the hardest working man I had ever known. Success and fortune awaited me, possibly at any corner of the road in front of me. It was mine for the taking; I was to simply sacrifice the sweat upon my brow, and the spirit that lay deep in my soul. I rode an ocean of differing economic tides and found myself laid off several times, and even fired once for a reason I am still contemplating. Several times throughout my tenure, I wanted to give up, I wanted to give in, and blend in, to perform simply a mediocre job; to behave much like the sprawl of other slackers, but I could almost taste the rewards of my hard work, and dedication.
Almost fifteen years after I had punched the first slot on a timecard, I ran into my mentor. He explained proudly that he was still working for the same company, ‘twenty-four years now, and I still have my nose to the grindstone, working as hard now as I did on my first day.’ While I admired his honest, and sincere enthusiasm in knowing he had always worked with a sincere attitude, and undying devotion to his trade, I couldn’t help but notice, he had gone very little in the success department, and was lagging even further behind in the fortune and security division. That’s when I came to the unsettling conclusion that what I had been taught and conditioned to my whole life was, in the simplest terms I can articulate, a total and complete crock of shit. I started to think of the great success stories of modern times: Bill Gates, Richard Branson, Warren Buffett, they are mavericks; people who didn’t follow the rules. Even historically, the greatest people in our nation’s history have been the individuals, who by their own admission, saw that the people around them were going nowhere and decided instead, to go somewhere. They broke the rules, did things their own way, and forged their own existence. Going into work every day, punching in on time every day, working hard and efficiently every day, only guarantees you’ll do that samething, everyday, for the rest of your life.

Some Thoughts on Things we Have, and the Things We're Going to Get

Have you ever noticed what people talk about? I was at a restaurant eating lunch at a side booth yesterday, with a dozen conversations going on all around me, and it suddenly dawned on me that people, in essence, only talk about two things: things they have and things they are going to get. I don’t think people always used to talk about that. I can remember when my dad’s friends would stop by when I was younger, they would stand in the driveway at my home, and I would rarely hear them having a discussion on what they had or what they were going to buy. They’d talk about the driveway they had just sealed, or how this was going to be a hot summer. My mom’s friends would ask how she made the ice tea, it was so delicious. Now people talk about everything they’ve bought that week, and the things they plan on buying next week. I suppose the only way to prove to someone that you have just as much money, and thus you’re just as good as them, is to buy things, and talk about it, and then explain that you are very much inclined on purchasing quite a bit more, and you’re going to spend a lot of money doing all of it. I don’t think anyone knows how to do without. When my dad was out of work, my family did without. Rough times fall on everyone sooner or later. The difference between now and then is now people refuse to skip a beat. Material items seem more important to people today. People like to tell you what they got, followed immediately by how much they paid for it. I don’t like telling people how much I paid for anything. I figure that’s my business. I don’t care to explain to people what I have either, or what I plan on buying. I really don’t have that much stuff come to think about it. I guess I really don’t have that much to talk about with other people. Maybe that’s why people don’t talk to me.

Telephone Books

I am not so sure I understand any longer why we have telephone books. At one time, the telephone book was a pretty big deal. I can remember my grandmother’s house very well growing up as a child. There was a cupboard next to the phone where she kept all the phone books. Every so often a new one would come in the mail and she would quickly replace the old one with it. It was an exciting moment for her. There were several phone books in that old cupboard. There was one for the small town where she lived. It wasn’t very big, but if you needed to call someone, well at least you had it. Problem was, sooner or later, you would need to call someone who didn’t live in town. That’s why she had a little bit bigger one for the county. I don’t think a lot of people looked at the first few pages of a telephone book, they just simply opened it and found the letter of the last name of the person they wanted to call, and that was that. But there was always a map in the first few pages. I used to love maps. I guess I wanted to go anywhere but where I was.
Now days, there doesn’t seem to be much use for telephone books. We have the internet, where we can find a phone number to anyone, anywhere in the world in a matter of seconds. That doesn’t matter much, because, nobody really has a home phone they answer anymore anyways. We don’t need telephone books anymore. But we still get them. And they are bigger now than they’ve ever been. I can’t seem to figure out whose numbers are even listed in there. No one I ever try to call has a listed number. Maybe it’s unlisted, because I try and call them.
I am not sure why we don’t get a telephone book with peoples cell phone numbers listed in them. You would think that would be more practical. I still see advertisements for people to put advertisements in telephone books. I am not sure people do that anymore, but they must. I don’t think they get a lot of exposure, I don’t know anyone who doesn’t throw out the telephone book the moment they get it.
Telephone books use a lot of paper. These days you’d think we would just do away with them. We could save some trees, and some space in our grandmother’s cupboards.

Fast Food

I have read that Americans have an obsession with fast food. I’ve seen enough headlines that I suppose I believe it. I myself have a habit of making a trip through the McDonalds drive thru every now and then, and I do it for one simple reason: the food tastes good. A lot of experts claim the reason we consume so much fast food is because we live busy lives that leave little time for preparing a meal. I have to disagree. I just don’t think people know how to cook any more. When I was a kid, we would go to my grandma’s house on Sundays. I remember how good her cooking was. I also remember how my mother’s cooking wasn’t as good. As I got older, I attributed the taste of my grandmother’s cooking as something of a sentimental thing rather than superior cooking skills. However, in recent years, I’ve had to revise my theory once more. My grandmother was simply a better cook. My mother, a fine cook herself, wasn’t as good however. And my sister barely knows how to cook at all. I am not exactly sure what to attribute the degenerating cooking skills to. My mother follows the same recipes as my grandmother did, but the food doesn’t taste the same. I suppose it could be the time, or maybe the love. Whatever it is, there’s a secret ingredient missing from today’s home cooking. I am bound and determined to figure out what it is. First, I need to take a trip to Burger King to mull things over.

Houses

They sure build big houses today. Every house I see being built is enormous. Then again people now days don’t have yards. They’ve taken up their entire yard with their big house. Houses have more rooms too. The house I grew up in had a small square living room, one bathroom, two small bedrooms, and a kitchen that had a kitchen table in it. My parents bought it right after they got married, and they still live in it today. It still has the same paint, the same carpet, and it suits them just fine.

Houses built today serve a different purpose. I don’t think people spend as much time outside anymore. They’ve brought the outside inside, or at least they’ve tried. Houses have dining rooms now, and thats where they put the table. That never made any sense to me, cook the food in the kitchen, and cart it into a whole other room. And then when you were done, you have to cart it all the way back. I suppose were not outside as much and could use the exercise. I’ll never understand dens either. Every den I’ve ever seen has a TV in it and perhaps a bookshelf or two and minus the mounted deer head, it looks and functions a lot like a small living room. Most people don’t go in their dens very much, or their family rooms for that matter. Now a family room is what exactly? From what I can see, it’s a living room without the TV. When we wanted to do family things when I was a kid, we turned off the TV, and stayed in the living room. But then again, we had families back then.

Most bedrooms have their own bathrooms today. We had one bathroom, and nobody ever locked the door when they were in it. All five of my brothers and sisters and I would brush our teeth at the same time. When I was seven and my four year old brother had to pee, we both peed at the same time. People don’t have basements anymore either. They have rec rooms. I suppose this is where you do stuff inside instead of outside now. I think people use them mostly for storage though, seems I have to step around a lot of stuff when I am in other people’s rec rooms. People are so lazy they won’t even do stuff inside anymore. And people sure do have a lot of TVs. Every bedroom has a TV now. The living room has a TV. The den has a TV. The rec room has a TV. The kitchen has a TV. Bathrooms have TVs. I know a lot of people who have TVs in their garages. I don’t think we need all those TVs. When we were kids, we had one, and it had four channels. We would get bored watching the same four channels and we’d go outside.

Salvatore (Tore) Allegrezza

I had the honor in January of 2006 to prepare a eulogy for Salvatore (Tore) Allegrezza, the grandfather of three of my friends. I only regret that a sales meeting I was at ran late and I was never able to read it at the funreal. I guess the words hold true for anyone who may have lost someone dear to them.

Few words, if any, can console those who must now share in life's most regrettable and inevitable milestone. I can only imagine how insignificant and feeble my words must be in attempting to ease the pain of those who have lost their beloved.

Perhaps comfort to those in mourning can come in knowing that Tore did not pass on in vain or alone but instead remembered, revered and honored in the company of so many who he had loved and those who had loved him.

Perhaps comfort can come in the hallowed words he spoke while with us, now sincerely and thoughtfully preserved in the memories of those who learned and listened.

And perhaps the hurt can be softened in remembering that each of his kin now carries with them the unequivocal qualities that made him uniquely theirs.

Many times in those final years, I witnessed myself, that out of the darkness and longing, his eyes would lighten as he spoke of days gone by and the kinship and camaraderie he felt with his grandkids and family. This reminds us that the shadow of the inevitable can grow long, and life's twilight can approach, but neither time, nor physical pain and anguish can extinguish the human spirit.

The soul and the spirit of Tore remained bright and alive just below the surface of a physical body that sat old and seemily by-gone.

So you can take comfort in knowing that death did not take Tore from us but merely severed the cold, dark, and heavy shackles of physical life and freed the everlasting and eternal spirit to be reunited with those loved and lost ones that have gone before.

Instead his spirit now resides in our hearts and memories were neither the length of time, the distance of miles, nor the vastness of sky and mountain ranges can keep them apart.

Does Happiness Exists Only with The Ignorant and The Oblivious?

Freddie Mac.

Fannie May.

Barney Frank

General Motors

Dodge

Plymouth

Chrysler

North Korea

Afghanistan

Iraq

Swine Flu

Aids

Cancer

Billy Mays

Michael Jackson

Farah Faucet

Credit Cards

Sub-Prime Loans

Debit

The Homeless

The Forgotten

The Old

The Big Oil Companies

School Shootings

Murder-Suicides

Mery-Killings

Abortion Rights

Medi-Cade

Medi-Care

Social Security

Osama Bin Laden

Hugo Chavez

Kim Jong IL

Trillion Dollar Deficit

Global Warming

Ebola Virus

Haunta Virus

The Plague

and the

Supervalcano under Yellowstone

The Two Week Notice

You’ve found another job. That’s wonderful. You’re excited and delighted at the chance to finally move on from that dead-end labor camp you’ve been going to everyday for the last who knows how long. Your boss is an idiot. The people you work with are a bunch of donkeys, and this one guy you’re pretty sure is a sex offender.

What’s your next step? Well to put in your two-week notice, right? This is, of course, the standard operating practice of thousands of people everyday who have decided to leave their jobs. You wouldn’t want your employer to frown upon you in the now twilight of your career with them, would you? Whoa there fella, stop right there! What are you doing???

Let’s consider an alternative situation, shall we?

The company, for which you work, is a dive of ghastly business practices, lousy management, and poor customer service, has decided they are no longer in need of your services. It seems, their bad business practices throughout the past several months or years, something of which you carry no fault for what-so-ever, has left their bottom line spoiled. An assortment of maladroitly supervised salesman, engineers, and other company brass has let golf outings and three hour lunches get in the way of their jobs.

Now you must go.

You see, for the past two weeks, without warning to you, your boss, along with a collection of other higher-ups have quietly and surreptitiously planning your demise. They have listed ads in the paper, internet, and craigslist, which have prompted several replies. The said interested are willing to work at lesser wages and benefits, and have already come to interview. Of these interview-ees, your smiling boss has chosen one in which to replace you. Your livelihood now sits in limbo. Your wife, your kids, and your home, all lie in complete turmoil. And yet, you are humbly unaware of the life altering, possibly life shattering, events that are to take place in the near future. Everyday, your boss strolls past you and gives you a friendly smile. Work seems slow, so you ask fi you might have anything to worry about, you are thinking of buying your lovely wife something real nice for Valentines Day, and you’re just checking. Your boss puts his hand on your shoulders and looks you square in the eye and with a re-assuring tone, declares, you have nothing to worry about, that you are an asset, that your position is unique and with a wink, and a smile you feel assured.

The next day at work, you arrive to find your boss has taken the day off. You clock in and take a few steps and a senior management type greets you. You’ve seen him at work, but this is the first time, and last time you will exchange words. He is carrying a large white folder, and regretfully announces that there have been some cuts, and you have been chosen to make the sacrificial blood letting. Your gift upon the alter is necessary for the survival of the company, and in a half-backward spin of words, he thanks you for your duty and you are hastily turned around and escorted to the door. You are not given a chance to collect your personal effects, but rather informed that you will need to make an appointment in the coming days to come in and gather your belongings. As quickly as it began, it is now over. In the span of only about one minute, you are now standing, hat in hand, in the parking lot of your former place of employment. Disbelief turns to anger as you drive home. How could they? What are they going to do now? You begin to laugh and wild scenarios play out in your head.

” Boy, they sure are screwed. Who’s going to perform your day to day duties?”, you chuckle slightly.

But you see, my dear friend, the company has had weeks to prepare themselves for this. They informed you of your demise, only after every “t” was crossed and every “i” was dotted. They had all their cards in line. The transition will be very smooth. Your replacement will begin Monday and with-in a couple of weeks, you will be forgotten. You will be nothing more than a distant memory, and then, no one will remember you at all.

Meanwhile, your life will be turned upside down. Your in your late thirties, early forties, finances were always an issue at home, and posed the only real strife between you and your wife, but now will consume and strain your marriage like never before. Your kid’s college fund will be raided to pay the mortgage. Your wife will take up a second job, while you search the want ads, which have shrunk to a sliver over the past year. You sell your two year old car for about four thousand under its blue book value, and buy your brother-in-law’s old beater he keeps around for a winter car. It’s all good though, because he happens to know a guy who is the foreman at the ball bearing factory, and as luck would have it, they are hiring. You get a job testing assembled bearings, and convince yourself that it’s no big deal because it’s just temporary, until you can find something more suiting. Meanwhile, the rest of the economy has slowed down and lay-offs have flooded the job searching market with thousands of individuals like you that will work anywhere. So you hold out. You search here and there, high and low, but nothing. Your new job is an hours drive from home and the company is in an economic slow down of its own, so they have you working ten to twelve hour shifts to cover for the people they’ve laid off. The whole situation really hampers your interviewing time. Meanwhile at home, your wife has secretly been talking to her sister who recently went through a divorce and has the name of her attorney, who more than anyone has convinced her that she is a victim of your shortcomings and is far better off without you. You get served your divorce papers on a Friday right before you get off work, and stay at your brother’s who lives an hour and half from your new job, that isn’t so new anymore because you been there a great unwanted year all ready. Your wife starts seeing a new guy about a month after she files, because she’s all ready wasted enough time with you, and wants to get on with her life. You cant figure out what she sees in him, because he makes less than you do at the bearing factory, but it doesn’t matter much because they have your 401k and twenty-five percent of your gross income in child-support, and ten percent of the rest in alimony to live off of. Your ex quits her job; I mean you’re doing enough work for the both of you anyway. With the extra burden, you decide to pick up some extra hours at the gas station on the way between work and your brother’s house that, he just informed you, is up for sale. Your brother sells his house in May, and tells you the new owners are moving in, in a month. You start looking for places near your works, mentally concreting the fact that you might be a bearing tester and gas station attendant for sometime.

Meanwhile, you’ve picked up some extra hours at the gas station, because all the apartments you can afford now are filled with illegal immigrants and recently released child molesters. You move into your new place and are thrilled because now you’re only ten minutes from either one of your jobs, which allows you to pick up even more hours at both. Its wonderful because you get your kids once a month, but are afraid to let them visit you at home because of the creepy guy who lives right next to you, so you settle for meeting them somewhere in the middle. They call you Duane now instead of dad and you find out you really have nothing in common anymore, and the visits become less, and less eventful. Late one night you’re pulling a double at the gas station, its your weekend to watch the ex-wife’s kids, because she’s with her boyfriend in Puerto Rico for a month, and you’ve stashed them at your mother’s house while you work the graveyard shift. Just after three o’clock a guy walks in and asks for a pack of Marb lights in a box, but you can barley understand him through his thick foriegn accent, but that doesn’t matter, because that’s not what he’s in there for anyway, which becomes rather evident when he pulls out a bat and clubs you in the head. As you’re laying now on the filthy floor of a quick mart working your day off, the assailant swings twice more for good measure as he steals the forty-two dollars out of the register, and flees off into the night. You don’t know it now, because your in a coma, but others can rest assure because the robber was caught a few miles down the road. He gets shipped back to Mexico and crosses the border again three months later just about the time you’re coming out of your coma. The late night beating leaves you drooling uncontrollably from your left side and a wicked bad eye twitch. You’ll need to wear corrective lenses for the rest of your life and piss in a bag, but you’re alive.

Your recent mis-hap has left you unable to work, but now you get to spend the remainder of your days watching “I Love Lucy” re-runs at the under budgeted government homeless shelter.

Which brings us back to our original piece.

Don’t ever put in a two weeks notice. They don’t give you a two weeks notice before they put you in a homeless shelter do they?