Ongka's Big Moka

The gods must have been crazy to show a bunch of hard-partying, state school kids a movie about a tribe in Papua, New Guinea that selects a new "head honcho" to enrich so that everyone can have a chance to participate in the fun, but that's exactly what happened when a class in Cultural Anthropology tore its way through my crowd. After that, the stoners went wild with late night discussions about society's failings. Why couldn't Americans be, like, more hip? Yeah, right. Why? 

Most of the time, our talks took place in the off-campus living rooms of rich suburban hippies whose parents bought them cars and homes to go back to after school. We'd be eating their mama's carefully shipped food like starving charity cases, when I'd been cooking all my life. Pot makes the crazy kids even nuttier, so I sat on my growing unease with my hands tucked between my knees most of the time, in the freezing old houses we rented for cheap. It never seemed warm enough, no matter how many layers we put on.

But, the idea was interesting. If a group of people agreed to it, could you actually give away all of your stuff to someone else without being a total asshole about it? It seemed doubtful, the way hippie kids tried to outdo each other over things like mixed tapes of live Dead shows, while they argued about who had the best collection. The hippies at school were some of the worst kinds of kids, too: petty, deceitful, spiteful, arrogant, defensive, condescending, overly competitive, and cheap. They wouldn't give anyone a loose joint for free, let alone the whole dime bag. These kids were gonna grow up to save the world? It's 2017, and guess what? I'm still waiting on that.

Otter Baby

People tend to have an overly romantic view of animal life, like they are perfect little beings eating, grooming, and mating out in the wild without interference from man, which is about as plausible as this: I came out of my mother's womb wreathed in a cloud of fluffy pink cotton candy. No? It's some of the worst ignorance, and naivety at its crassest, often greatly acerbated by the idiocy of those who are most public with their views, the dreaded high school drop-out that is the bipolar bisexual former cheerleader, and now "Hollywood's Newest Sweetheart"!

I saw a film with a well-known, spray-painted, bobblehead blond floating on a surfboard in a Japanese sea (she was there illegally) to protest dolphin deaths from fishermen while the documentary was being filmed, of course, which is kind of like applauding a hooker walking by you on the street dressed in a furry dolphin suit, just for handing out XXX flyers to the tourists milling around Times Square. Something doesn't fit, and who cares about you, anyway? No one wants you here! It's a pointless protest designed to highlight an illicit business through the pointing out of another more immoral practice, which is like washing your muddy hands in filthy sewer water. Who has the higher ground here, anyway: the hooker, er, actress, or the dolphin-killer? Dirty business, indeed.

The animal kingdom is rife with crime. We learned about the other side of nature with our guide Mike, during our Yellowstone adventures off the beaten path (http://mariedoucette.blogspot.com/2010/07/american-bison-of-yellowstones-lamar.html). By the way, you should always travel with a certified guide before embarking off-trail, and those Indian students still living in New Jersey, this definitely means you, because bears hunt in the woods, even wealthy students from their richer dads who are sent here from overseas for school (http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/23/nyregion/black-bear-kills-rutgers-student-during-a-hike-in-new-jersey.html?_r=0). We have our towns to live in, and they have the world. Get it? Anyway, Mike told us the story of an evil bear he saw killing without any need for hunting, just to do it. Yep, a psychopathic killer bear roams Yellowstone National Park. Have a safe trip there this summer, by the way!

And so, it was with little surprise that the cute and gentle otters of my youth (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emmet_Otter%27s_Jug-Band_Christmas) turned out to be criminal masterminds of their own kind. Otters are extremely successful in the wild, except when their parents are dead, which has launched a rescue effort of its own, too, because pups left marooned on their own in the water will die. I'm not saying you shouldn't assist in rescue efforts if you live near the water, nor should you club them to death, either. It's just that otters live larger lives than you thought, though cuddly stuffed animals at Christmas are just adorable, with some of the proceeds going towards rescue work.

It's just that some single male otters grab pups from out of the arms of their smaller mothers, to hold them hostage by threatening drowning, if she doesn't feed the bigger male first. Oh? Don't know that one? Okay, well here it is: male otters sometimes grab a pup and push its head underwater until the mother hunts for shellfish to satisfy its hunger, upon which the pup (hopefully) will be released back to its waiting mother, who now has to fish for the both of them. It would be weird to me, except for this: how many single mothers do you know who are underfed, underpaid, and extremely overworked? Not ringing any bells?

Okay. How's this: when was the last time you met an overwrought rich white Rep...er, male, in business? In fact, every time a single woman is "let go" from her job, she now has no health insurance for her dependent children, because women are overwhelmingly given custody of their children in divorces. And why is that? I think we all know why that is, but I'll spell it out for you here: because we don't murder our own children as often as men do, or the children of other people. It's counter-intuitive to our nature; to labor so long to produce a child that someone else can quickly take away from you. Uh uh. I don't think so.

Mothers fight harder for the children they love, and by extension, the children of the world, animals and human alike, though if the choice was down to my own kind and the otter pup, I'd like to think I'd choose a human baby first! That's what my mom did. What would you do? Think about it, especially during your next "cruelty-free" vegan sandwich, packaged by...well, you don't really care about the "who, how, or why" of it, do you? As long as none of those cute furry lil animals were hurt, right? That way, if they do get hurt, you can swoop in as their champion to save the day, while the cameras are still rolling!

Oh, well. Shooting starts at 6:00 a.m. for the newest "save the animals" commercial, and you need to hire your own driver for going to the set and back, and, well...this is uncomfortable, but...we've been having a resurgence of "homelessness" in New York City recently. Maybe you should hire a bodyguard? Just for the ride into town and back, though. Or, I don't know, you could just step over the bodies you see on the street every time you come into town, like you normally do when you're horrified to find yourself walking on the same city streets as those other people much lowlier than you. I bet they'd even eat real meat because they're so hungry, those filthy animals! Where's my cute little otter doll for the ride into the city? "Save the otters for me!"

Dark and Light

 

You might not know it, but advertisers fucking hate you. So do their useless product generators, and their insane marketing people. They hate you, too. I mean, really hate you. Your hair is bad, your skin is bad, your weight is bad....everything about you is bad, Bad, BAD!, in ever increasingly hysteric tones. I am (of course) the greatest evil in their Bizarro* world, because I am immune to programming, which sucks for them (or you, if you read this and recognize yourself in it).

Gen X'ers, like hep cats, jazz aficionados, flappers, and every other original generation before them, are particularly offensive to the "sell-at-all" costs crowd, because we are not a marketing trend. How do you reach a demo with no pigeon-holed stereotype? You can't, thus the hatred hardily mixed with fear and loathing (thanks, Hunter S. Thompson). No one can get inside your head if you know who you are, the essence that is YOU, because you can't be commoditized.

The chains that bind us to oppression are often of our own choosing. My father used to tell me that the greatest prisons are the ones people create in their own minds, and that is true. How can you be a wage slave unless you sign on the dotted line to the contract that binds you to someone else, most likely a stranger without your best interest at heart? When you do react against it, there's a steady stream of vindictive slurs tailor-made just for you, like "Darkie" or "Pasty".

Don't believe me? OK, check this piece of weirdness out. "Your skin is too dark! Buy this": (insert brand name here). "Oh, yeah? Well, I think your skin is too light. Buy this": (insert competing brand from same company here). Freaked out, yet? Welcome to my world. 

You can have all the lotions you want, if you'd only buy into it.

http://bit.ly/1jgA2FF

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bizarro_World

Badass Dragonfly

Me and a young dragonfly, on a beautiful Spring day.

Last week I walked out of the library on a beautifully sunny, warmly seasonal day to spot one very active dragonfly flitting about the entrance. I could tell right away that it wasn't a full grown insect by the size of it, but this little guy already had moxie. I watched it fly around it for awhile before I took out my smartphone to snap a few pics, fretting that the automatic door to the library would draw it in and seal its' young fate forever, before life really began. 

Within minutes I had a lot more to worry about, because I inevitably began attracting attention, which happens every single day of my life. Often I can channel those attentions and energies into more constructive actions, but not always. 

First, some older guy passing by wanted to pick it up and move it after I pointed it out. He worried in imitation of me, upping the conversational ante a notch by saying that the youngster would immediately get crushed by a passerby. He then went one "douchebag" move further, placing his socked Birkenstock foot right next to the bug to make it fly away, supposedly making his point about its' safety by its' immobility. It hadn't moved at all in response to him, unlike the fluttery open-wing display the young bug had flashed at me when I got closer to it earlier.

But that's not all, folks. Two pale hipster chicks with matching skinny jeans, face piercings, and large tats wanted to "help" out, too! I warned one of them away by pointing out her big dog jerking about on a small leash, with the well-known fact that dogs like to chase and eat bugs. Amateurs. One of them decided to get a piece of paper from within the building for emergency bug transport, thus opening and closing the very door I was trying to keep shut once again, which I kept repeating futilely to the small crowd. 

I think she thought she was an expert on all things related to bugs by stint of the rather odd and prominently displayed tattoo on her forearm of a lady's head inside a set of spider legs. It resembled her and her friend, who looked almost the same to me, but apparently I was way wrong about that, too! Oh...that's not what I meant by "Animal Behaviorist", out-of-touch hipster. They always kinda suck.

Finally, one of my older retiree friends from yoga saved me from the gathering crowd by simply passing by. It had gotten way out of hand over this one bug, so I just walked away from the situation. 

We chatted as we walked uphill about tai chi, yoga, seasonal storms and flooding, how water always flows downhill, and realtors that take advantage of your relative ignorance by selling you a place on the cheap that floods with each passing storm because you didn't research water tables before buying the house you now own (which is really about the inanity inherent in the human condition), and then finally, I looked at her tote bag printed with Northwestern Native motifs from her cruise to Alaska, because I know about that stuff, too. She looked a bit pale and exhausted as we parted ways at the corner.

And that's called "Mid-afternoon" to me, kids. I have a feeling me and the juvenile dragonfly I left by the library are going to be just fine without a group of well-intentioned helpers. Let's just call it "instinct" for today's lesson about appropriateness.  Enjoy the weather today. It's perfection.

The Rabbit Head

WTF?!

I was on my way to the library, when I saw this from across the street. I had to cross the street for a closer look. Sometimes I see random objects hung in the chain link fence, like the skateboard sold at the dollar store or a missing baby sock, but this stuffed animal took me way back, to a time when me and my brother outgrew our childhood toys forever. 

Instead of play, my Barbie doll got a Mohawk haircut that I dunked into a paper cup of blue food coloring on the kitchen counter, and we froze my brother's Stretch Armstrong doll in the freezer, just for kicks, to see what the red goo inside would do. It cracked into big chunks after we took it out and threw him onto the hard kitchen tiles. Oh. Neat! 
After that initial experimentation, everything we had was up for grabs. 

Oh, I see. It's "Don't let this be you!" in kid-talk.

My Kermit the Frog doll was hung by a rope-fashioned noose from the top of the stairs by my brother and our cousin, as a tribal warning to me when I came through the front door about what was in store. Aha! Something was afoot with those boys, and methinks our childhood is officially over. I could fight the tides that be, but true to me, I shrugged it off and joined in the fun. 

Kermie went into the dryer, Barbie was blown to bits by firecrackers (after she drag raced Mad Max style a few times in several horribly disfiguring crash-and-burn scenarios), and then we just simply tore things apart. The next year in junior high school, we read Lord of the Flies for the first time. Lesson learned.

The Perfect Summer: August in New York

Beautiful fluffy clouds, after a recent, brief summer rain. So normal!

We've had a cooler than average summer this year, which has made me extremely happy. First of all, there's no power outages, outrageously high utility bills, or constantly running air conditioning that's smells moldy from old filters; a huge break indeed. 

A symphony of beautiful weather set in the skies.

But more importantly, this crucial respite from insanely high temperatures gives the Earth a chance to cool down after many years of escalating global warming, temperatures so high from human waste, that we have melted polar ice caps and destroyed entire coral reefs from artificially warm waters, as well as displacing human populations from their sea level homes.

Ah! Another gorgeous sunset behind a stand of large trees.

It comes as no surprise to me that it's been one of the best summers I've had in a long, long time. I sleep comfortably every night with a fan blowing and open windows. I wake up happy and refreshed from actual cooled air that I can comfortably breathe in when I open the curtains to let in the beautiful morning daylight. 

The  glow of an orange sunset; a New York summer's day.

This is the kind of summer I remember from my youth: warm, sunny days with cool, breezy nights. It's also no coincidence that these are optimal growing conditions for this area, as one recent broadcast on local news suggested. A berry farmer in New Jersey said this was by far the best bumper crop they've ever seen, with the longer season extending the harvest to December.

The daylight's music fades, as the night chimes in.

Still, true to a human's ridiculously selfish nature, many an idiot talking head has loudly grumbled on-air, like some grade-school fuck-up on summer break, that all this "horrible" cool air is wrecking their friggin' beach time, to which I say this: go fuck yourself. I mean it!

A cloud adds punctuation, a single note at the end of the day.

If your spoiled bitch ass is bothered by the planet cooling itself back into good health, then go buy yourself a stupid fucking tanning bed and burn yourself into a compulsively fried oblivion, because we've had enough of your stupid fucking bullshit.

The perfect light.

Or, go buy a cheapo ticket to Boca in Florida, where you can bake your brains out (what's left of them, anyway) in some generically bland condo, you short-sighted, evil, corporate-owned cunt. I hate you! 
This is war >:o(

The music winds down, and the light grows softer.

For the rest of the decent Americans and other people like me, I raise my glass of freshly squeezed organic lemonade in your direction, as I put my feet up on the wood railing of an old house somewhere in the Hudson River Valley region, watching another spectacular light show that's delivered free of charge by Mother Nature herself. 

Perfect pink and orange lighting.

It's some of the best light I've ever seen in our skies, which is also not a surprise to me, a long-time watcher of weather and clouds. I'm rooting for Planet Earth all the way, (which we are just a small part of, despite the blown up arrogance and tiny penis insecurity of some fucking on-air tool), every single day, with every seemingly "small" choice I make, many of them at the grocery store, when I choose local and fresh organic foods, higher priced as they may be than the high fructose shit on sale for a rip-off $.79, now that word has spread about food and beverage company's poison profits, the shit that also seeps into our groundwater and land with every acid rainfall we have, with yet another weirdo tropical storm that we endure. Who do you want to see win? I know my choice (and my conscience) is clear. Asshat.

Wow...

...pink and purple clouds say "goodnight"...

...to another perfect day in the Hudson Valley.