Electronic Writer

Round Two

I went back the next day to the same Coffeeshop, and they offer FREE wireless Internet for their customers.

This chicken has found a new coop!

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An Evening Out

I have been told that we create our own reality. And, I am starting to believe it. Although the coffee shop is not new, it is new to me. The scene is really good. Weather Report is playing in the main room. The coffee is strong. The are copies of poetry-related things and glass bricks. It is cool. In fact, the scene is pretty nice.

The feeling here is academic and open-minded. People are arguing about the value of religion in our world, among people finishing their next paper. It is a great scene

Independent coffeeshops have an inherent disingenuousness that makes them really attractive. While Starbucks has been stone-washed and sterilized into conformity–the very element that makes them a successful business, indie-coffee houses can display graffiti on the walls as art, publicize local art shows, and play alternative (and even offensive) music.

I have found Independent coffee houses to be moody–closer to the human spirit than any other establishment. You know when your favorite barrista is working, and the lattes are just better. While the coffee is consistent in the Other, the workers are faceless and nameless and may express themselves in subtle and corporate-approved forms.

It is sort of the prozac of the industry. The Other gets to be a nice and steady establishment–slightly better than normal. On the other hand, the Independent Coffee shops are like real people. Real moody people. They complain, and kick, and scream, and they are have good days, and bad days. They are, in short human, and it is the inconsistency that makes them interesting.

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http://www.commondreams.org/views04/1124-11.htm

This is a great article with very specific steps to end our occupation of Iraq. This is worth the read.

That literature list with all the books on it (a couple of posts ago) was inappropriate. I don’t need to go spouting the number of books that I have read. If you want to talk literature, I’d love to do it. But, I certainly do not need to brag about my good fortune for having read so much literature.

So, my apologies.

I was, however, reacting to my current favorite idiot http://tahoediary.blogspot.com/. He has his little blog out there (don’t misinterpret–I am glad that he is writing) and he claims to be part of the Right Wing Conspiracy! So, I read some of his post looking for some evidence to support his claims.

What I found, however, was a bunch of garbage! I found nothing of substance, an unusually large image of his cat, and this literature list where he claims that having read 33 of the 101 must-read books is an accomplishment!

I am sorry, Mr. Right Wing Conspirator–if you want to be part of your group,CONSPIRE! Do something with your blog. Make it interesting. Make it caustic. Say something! (You might want to consider what you tell people about your relationship with your cat . . . .) But, just posting mundane links doesn’t make you part of the conspiracy. Instead, it renders you to a much lower position–merely background fuzz or perhaps an info-mercial.

Ah, yes. The Sacred Institution of Marriage

If I hear one more “deeply religious” person tell me that the motivation behind same-sex marriages is the “tax break,” I am going to vomit. The core of that statement has a deeper, more sinister message. It implies that same-sex relationships are founded out of necessity and usership of our system–not out of love. It would be a slippery-slope for me to continue by thinking that perhaps gays and lesbians cannot even experience love because “it goes against nature.” Although, I recognize the logical fallacy of that claim, I bet there are others out there who don’t. Slippery-slope or not, there are those who would not stop there with their fuzzy logic and overgeneralizations . . . .

I am a straight, single male who has never been married–which, probably disqualifies me from making statements about gays, lesbians, and even married (I think we should call them “natural” –at least that is what THEY would prefer) couples. So, rather than talk about them, I am going to espouse some historical trivia about their precious institution called “marriage.”

Marriage was Based Upon Practical Reasons

Way back when, at the time marriages were founded, the ceremony held a dual role in society. There was the traditional role where a couple asks for communal recognition of their previously-existing relationship. The participants already HAD a relationship. They were simply asking for everyone else to recongnize it.

In addition, marriage had a practical side to it. As the kids got married, it became time for them to move out of their parents’ houses and get a place of their own. So, the entire community would assemble together and give them gifts–all of the things necessary to maintain/run a household. Couple that with a nice dowry, and voila–parents could get the spare room and the office back–all in a good weekend.

The idea that their relatioship is being “blessed” by God was tacked on somewhere by the men in charge. A religious element probably existed somewhere as part of the process because many early communities were formed around spiritual groups, but the ceremony of marriage itself was really devised for practical reasons.

Does Anyone Actually Know Someone who Married for Tax Reasons?

I guess the other big question that I have about the sanctity of marriage relates to a story that has been quoted to me more times than I can count about two little old ladies . . . .

Invariably, the discussion begins with the concept of same-sex relationships, and the return shot is about the tax breaks. How it is not right to use the God-granted institution of marriage for the associated tax breaks. The next step in the argument is then about two, mythical old ladies who wanted to get married-for the tax breaks. Someone thinks that is fine, and someone else thinks it is terrible. My point is: I think it is a lie!

I have heard about the mythical grannies, but have never met anyone from that generation that would mix sexual mores and their reputation for a taxbreak! In all probability, they woukd be a likely group of career taxpayers who would pay more taxes to keep their reputation clean. After all, we are talking about the “Leave it to Beaver” generation with their white-washed reality and no camera shots of the bedroom,

I also have a message for the “au naturale” couples:

If you are married for the tax breaks, go see a counselor. You are an idiot and a loser, and you need spiritual cleansing/replacement treatment, you need to engage the cerebral portions of your brain (go ahead, plug them in–even for a minute–it wont hurt you), and you must cease and desist projecting your inadequecies onto others.

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This list of essential books is floating around in the blogosphere, and I thought I would keep it going. I have bolded the books that I have read.

1. Beowulf
2. Achebe, Chinua – Things Fall Apart
3. Agee, James – A Death in the Family
4. Austen, Jane – Pride and Prejudice
5. Baldwin, James – Go Tell It on the Mountain
6. Beckett, Samuel – Waiting for Godot
7. Bellow, Saul – The Adventures of Augie March
8. Brontë, Charlotte – Jane Eyre
9. Brontë, Emily – Wuthering Heights
10. Camus, Albert – The Stranger
11. Cather, Willa – Death Comes for the Archbishop
12. Chaucer, Geoffrey – The Canterbury Tales
13. Chekhov, Anton – The Cherry Orchard
14. Chopin, Kate – The Awakening
15. Conrad, Joseph – Heart of Darkness
16. Cooper, James Fenimore – The Last of the Mohicans
17. Crane, Stephen – The Red Badge of Courage
18. Dante – Inferno
19. de Cervantes, Miguel – Don Quixote
20. Defoe, Daniel – Robinson Crusoe
21. Dickens, Charles – A Tale of Two Cities
22. Dostoyevsky, Fyodor – Crime and Punishment
23. Douglass, Frederick – Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
24. Dreiser, Theodore – An American Tragedy
25. Dumas, Alexandre – The Three Musketeers
26. Eliot, George – The Mill on the Floss
27. Ellison, Ralph – Invisible Man
28. Emerson, Ralph Waldo – Selected Essays
29. Faulkner, William – As I Lay Dying
30. Faulkner, William – The Sound and the Fury
31. Fielding, Henry – Tom Jones
32. Fitzgerald, F. Scott – The Great Gatsby
33. Flaubert, Gustave – Madame Bovary
34. Ford, Ford Madox – The Good Soldier
35. Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von – Faust
36. Golding, William – Lord of the Flies
37. Hardy, Thomas – Tess of the d’Urbervilles
38. Hawthorne, Nathaniel – The Scarlet Letter
39. Heller, Joseph – Catch 22
40. Hemingway, Ernest – A Farewell to Arms
41. Homer – The Iliad
42. Homer – The Odyssey
43. Hugo, Victor – The Hunchback of Notre Dame
44. Hurston, Zora Neale – Their Eyes Were Watching God
45. Huxley, Aldous – Brave New World
46. Ibsen, Henrik – A Doll’s House
47. James, Henry – The Portrait of a Lady
48. James, Henry – The Turn of the Screw
49. Joyce, James – A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
50. Kafka, Franz – The Metamorphosis
51. Kingston, Maxine Hong – The Woman Warrior
52. Lee, Harper – To Kill a Mockingbird
53. Lewis, Sinclair – Babbitt
54. London, Jack – The Call of the Wild
55. Mann, Thomas – The Magic Mountain
56. Marquez, Gabriel García – One Hundred Years of Solitude
57. Melville, Herman – Bartleby the Scrivener
58. Melville, Herman – Moby Dick
59. Miller, Arthur – The Crucible
60. Morrison, Toni – Beloved
61. O’Connor, Flannery – A Good Man is Hard to Find
62. O’Neill, Eugene – Long Day’s Journey into Night
63. Orwell, George – Animal Farm
64. Pasternak, Boris – Doctor Zhivago
65. Plath, Sylvia – The Bell Jar
66. Poe, Edgar Allan – Selected Tales
67. Proust, Marcel – Swann’s Way
68. Pynchon, Thomas – The Crying of Lot 49
69. Remarque, Erich Maria – All Quiet on the Western Front
70. Rostand, Edmond – Cyrano de Bergerac
71. Roth, Henry – Call It Sleep
72. Salinger, J.D. – The Catcher in the Rye
73. Shakespeare, William – Hamlet
74. Shakespeare, William – Macbeth
75. Shakespeare, William – A Midsummer Night’s Dream
76. Shakespeare, William – Romeo and Juliet
77. Shaw, George Bernard – Pygmalion
78. Shelley, Mary – Frankenstein
79. Silko, Leslie Marmon – Ceremony
80. Solzhenitsyn, Alexander – One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
81. Sophocles – Antigone
82. Sophocles – Oedipus Rex
83. Steinbeck, John – The Grapes of Wrath
84. Stevenson, Robert Louis – Treasure Island
85. Stowe, Harriet Beecher – Uncle Tom’s Cabin
86. Swift, Jonathan – Gulliver’s Travels
87. Thackeray, William – Vanity Fair
88. Thoreau, Henry David – Walden
89. Tolstoy, Leo – War and Peace
90. Turgenev, Ivan – Fathers and Sons
91. Twain, Mark – The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
92. Voltaire – Candide
93. Vonnegut, Kurt Jr. – Slaughterhouse-Five
94. Walker, Alice – The Color Purple
95. Wharton, Edith – The House of Mirth
96. Welty, Eudora – Collected Stories
97. Whitman, Walt – Leaves of Grass
98. Wilde, Oscar – The Picture of Dorian Gray
99. Williams, Tennessee – The Glass Menagerie
100. Woolf, Virginia – To the Lighthouse
101. Wright, Richard – Native Son

This is reprinted from Common Dreams

http://www.commondreams.org/news2004/1123-13.htm

Stealing votes in Columbus

by Richard Hayes Phillips, Ph.D.

November 23, 2004

http://www.freepress.org/departments/display/19/2004/914

The court battles have begun in Ohio! The election is going to get messy. There are plenty of angry people who experienced abuse directly.

Read all about it . . . .

http://www.freepress.org/departments/display/19/2004/886

Who said I was paranoid? Why would they say that?

Paranoia runs deep. Or, is it high? Well, I don’t know, really. I have never considered myself to be paranoid before, but I kinda feel that way now. I guess.

Actually, what worries me is that it might not be paranoia. In fact, I spend a great deal of time worrying that this or that were connected in some devious way. There are conspiracy theories running rampant right now, and conspiracy movies are being produced en masse, and what is even worse, is that some of them might be true.

I have always had somewhat of a fancy for conspiracies, in general–it is a natural by-product of an inquisitive mind. You learn to ask questions. You learn to find patterns. And, you look for more questions to ask. The interrelated-ness of life and living is more than just System’s theory. The patterns that tie life together so succinctly is not just Gestalt Theory. Einstein saw existence as a fabric, and that fabric is tied together like many pieces of string from the same ball of yarn.

But, what do we DO about these conspiratorial theories? I think that a better question might be to ask how do we investigate them? Having a specific process to collect information is a way out. It is active. And, it is helpful. If you are willing to share your information, then your efforts will help more people than you might now.

EMTs have this neat little trick that they do when they show up to the scene of any accident. After they make sure that the scene is safe, they immediately check the victim for some basic information (I am overexaggerating, of course–it is more complex than that, but hear me out). They take pulse, bloodpressure, and collect some basic information if the victim is conscious. The call this “establishing the base-line vitals.”

Baseline vitals are important. And, that is where we are in America–right now. We need to establish the Baseline vitals of the country. We need to check what we know, establish a snapshot image of the situation of things as they are at this very moment. And we need to track the progress–improvement, or otherwise.

How we accomplish this tracking is really where we need to begin.

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