Click Bait!

Oh, My God!  The Jolie-Pitt Divorce is getting Ugly!  Nobody saw this coming, but we’re all going to watch it go away, aren’t we?

Oh, My God!  Look at Tiger Woods with no shirt on!  I wonder what he’s advertising?  Have women forgotten that he’s a dickhead?  When you have that much money, does it matter?

Oh, Look!  That lake is mysteriously disappearing!  Wait a minute, haven’t we already seen that?  Like, about a dozen times?

Oh, Look!  The DEA has listed Charlotte’s Web as a Schedule 1 drug because a company wants to monopolize it!  Wait, No!  That’s wrong, the story was a lie!  Gee, what if Facebook looked it up on Snopes before they ran it, rather than leave the work to the readers?

Oh, Look!  Over on the side of my Facebook page!  3500 people are talking about Earl Thomas!  4,000 people are talking about Sarah Michelle Gellar, and two hundred and forty thousand of them are talking about Elton John talking about George Michael!  Don’t any of them have anything better to do?  How does Facebook know who we’re talking about?  Oh, Look, there’s More!

Ooh!  I must do this quiz, to find out how smart I am!  Oh, Look!  There’s a puzzle!  A Survey!  Why is it 2:00 in the afternoon and I’m still in my bathrobe?

I don’t have time for this shit.  Especially since it is becoming all too obvious that George Orwell got it all wrong.  The dystopian world he pictured in 1984 did not look beyond the TV screen and see the Smartphone waiting to give us even more Big Brother than we could have imagined.  Beyond that, they’ve found a way to make us like it!  Here, click on this, Like that, Share that with your friends!

This is no dreary world of shortages, unhappiness, and gray concrete.  This world is full of color, and sound, and action, right out of Shakespeare: “…a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing!”

Meanwhile, the planet continues to spin on its slightly wobbly axis, the bombs continue to fall, and people continue to die under them, like always.  And, of course, we’re paying for everything.

We’re picking up the tab for those bombs, and the jets out of which they drop, and the training of the people that fly them and do the dropping.  We’re paying for all the click-bait on Facebook, too.  Every time we get sucked into an attractive headline, or a picture of an attractive person with much skin exposed, somewhere a cash register dings.  The cost of those ads is called “overhead”, and is rolled into the price of the goods.  Quite often, if something is advertised on Facebook at a discounted price, it turns out that is a rip-off, the actual identical product can be found on Amazon or elsewhere for half the so-called “discount”.  So, the corollary rule to the one that says the Lottery is a Tax on Those Who Are Bad at Math is this:  Facebook is where friends go to find a product that brings them joy, but they want to pay even more!

I like to use Facebook to keep up with the friends and extended family, see what the kids are up to, what milestones have been born or celebrated.  I also like to use it to share my own stories from time to time, at the risk of inviting comment or criticism.  What I don’t like is when a useful app like Facebook becomes an avenue to distract me from the truth, or tell me lies, or feed me bullshit, or cost me money.

What I realize is that it’s up to me to control what shows up on my page.  When one of my friends continually dumps bullshit or fake news on my timeline, they get unfollowed.  When ads pop up that annoy me, those companies get blocked.  And above all, I recognize Facebook for the ultimate time waster that it is, and never, ever click on the bait that appears, the pop-up ads, the sponsored posts.  Each one spawns a dozen.

The other thing is that, scattered among the click bait and fake news, there are posts from real people telling the truth about what is going on in the world.  And that is the other thing that Orwell did not see, that instant electronic communication can also enable massive change in the world, can keep us talking to each other and sharing our truths.  It gives one the hope that a revolution in the sense that we can decide as a people to stop dropping bombs on each other, and that the world does not consist of us and them, that the shared best interests of all humans include peace and freedom and a right to happiness can come about because we all share the truth as it happens, and we don’t have to kill each other to do it.  That’s where our friends come in.  We trust each other to speak the truth, and share it when we find it.

I think, at the end of the day, that is what it’s all about.  :-{)}

Two plus Two equals What?

So it looks like this is how it works:  A few days ago, President-elect Trump tweeted that the contract with Boeing to build the next two Air Force One planes was, “...too expensive, 4 billion dollars!  Cancel It!”  Boeing’s stock took a nose dive, and publicists and politicians all over the globe got in front of microphones and bleated endlessly, with some agitation, that it was not true!  Boeing has only been working on a lousy $150 million project to talk about it.  They don’t have the specs yet to even start asking how much, so somebody pulled that number out of their ass.

Despite that, given the level of response to that single tweet, and the wide-spread nature of the response from all directions, would it surprise you to see on the front page of one of the scandal sheets on display at the checkout stands of our local grocer (all but the “family friendly” ones, anyway) a headline that shouted, “Trump Cancels $4 Billion Air Force One Project!

My first thought was, “Are you kidding?  Do you not know that all of Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Fox News, CNN, and all the rest of the chatterverse has been debunking that story within the hour?”  Then I realized; they don’t care.  Their audience doesn’t read anything they don’t already know, and don’t care to start now, thank you very much.

My second thought was, “Who exactly do we have in this country capable of designing, building and flying what will probably be the second most complicated flying machine this side of the Space Shuttle.  I mean, besides Boeing.  Nobody, right?  So you really are full of doo-doo to even suggest it, right?  So, who are you trying to fool?”  The answer is:  the same people who elected him.

I supported President Obama, and to this day believe he did as good as he possibly could given the level of attack that started the day after his first election from all sides.  He ran a clean ship, and got the trains running on time, at some level.  All the bullshit they threw at him was based on lies, the new currency of politics in America.  At the time, most profoundly expressed on the night of his inauguration, the spirit that flooded the airwaves felt like a sign that a change was gonna be here.  It gave me hope.  Still does.

But it occurs to me: Now, the shoe is on the other foot.  The pendulum has swung to the opposite extreme.  However, the process is the same, just for a different group.

Obama gathered the poor, the dispossessed, the young, college educated ones, some of the working class and built an organization on their efforts, Organizing for America.  Trump made those people the enemy and built his winning coalition on the backs of the scandal sheet readers, the Fox News quoters, the haters and the fringers on the opposite side from the radical left.

Obama got his money from the lawyers, and the rich liberals.  Trump got his from the capitalists, and the rich conservatives.  And here’s the thing:  Just like Obama in 2008, Trump in 2016 has given his followers hope!

You can see them everywhere, the Trump folks.  “I’m with Her” is a message that has disappeared from the bumpers of America, but Trump rides everyone’s ass these days.  They walk with a form of victory strut, the one we did when Obama won, he was our man, and we grinned from ear to ear.  Now it’s them, and we look away.

But in the back of our minds, we are thinking:  He promised a whole bunch of things to a whole bunch of people, and now he’s gotta come through for them, and he’s got four years to do it.  He’s gotta build a wall, then deport a bunch of nonwhite people.  Then he’s gotta start my mine back up, or my logging crew, or my auto plant job.  He’s gotta slap China around, even though they buy so many of our T-bills that if they quit buying them we’d see the full faith and credit of the United States of America go up in smoke faster than you can say leveraged buyout.  He’s gotta slap the Russians around, even though he personally owes them millions, we hear.

And all the time, we’re going to be riding his ass like a loan shark on payday.  All those liberals and progressives are still here (you saw the vote totals), and we’re not having any of this, thank you very much.

The difference is, we’re going to fight back with the truth.  We’re not going to pass on fake news, that’s their thing.  We’re going to ignore his wife, as long as she stops plagiarizing, and his kids, who will hopefully sit down and shut up for the next four years.  We’re going to talk policy, and facts; we’re going to insist on reasonability, and cooperation, and building community, and shining a light on things going on around us.  When they go low, we’re going to go high, just like Ms Obama said.

What else can we do?  :-{)}

Granddaughters

“Poppy, come play with me!  I’m bored!”, she said.

I’m the last resort, these days, if there’s nothing better on TV, and her cousin isn’t available to yammer endlessly over the facetime phone.  I accept my lowly status, knowing the near future will reveal to her my true nature as a dork.  I’ll take what I can get.  She’s ten now, and we all know what happens to them when they turn fourteen.

“I’ll tell you what,” she said.  “Let’s make a bet.  We’ll play UNO, and the first one to win two games wins the bet, and the loser has to be their servant, until mommy comes home.”  “Done”, I said.  “I’ll shuffle the first round.”

Of course, she had to summarize the deal in a written contract, with signatures in duplicate.  I explained that one signature was in cursive, one was printed, and she liked that, because it gave her a chance to show off her flowing signature.  This kid likes to nail down the details.  She’ll go far.

She won the first game in record time, before even half the draw pile was exhausted.  I complained bitterly about the obviously poor shuffle, until she pointed out that I had done it.

I came back and won the second game in grand fashion, having a run of blue cards left after she pulled a wild card and declared for blue. She complained that I must have cheated, somehow, as I went into my victory dance.

But it all fell apart on the third game.  I got stuck on blue and had to draw endless reds, greens and yellows before I could match the one on the pile.  She seemed to take particular pleasure in showering me with penalty cards that made me draw even more cards.  Her victory dance when she UNO’d out with a pile still in my hands circumnavigated the living room.

Now I was in thrall for the next several hours, and it did not look good for my dignity.  The first thing she did was write out a script for a scatological self-denunciation that she had me deliver as a rap tune, followed by singing a Christmas carol, all the while being recorded on her cell phone.  Heaven help me if it hits Youtube.

Then she handed me a puppet, a theme, a setting and a problem, and commanded me to invent a puppet show on the spot that fit.  Fortunately, my hand was too big for the puppet, so I wound up operating Harley Hog, the leather-jacket-clad yellow pig, as he engaged in a confrontation with said puppet, a fearsome dragon with big eyes.  We lost, of course.  In the nick of time, her mother showed up, and I was saved from further indignity and abuse.  I tell you, it’s hard being the adult around here, sometimes… :-{)}

The Hawaiian Beach Mystery

I worked with a guy once, Otto was his name, back in the ‘70s when I was an apprentice machinist at the logging yarder manufacturer on Harbor Island.  He ran the Bridgeport section and the screw machines, making all the pins and small rollers on an old mechanical forerunner to today’s CNC lathes, his hands constantly bathed in cutting oil that flooded the tooling as the machine ran.

He told me about how he worked at Paccar after the war for 17 years, and how, for all of those 17 years he ran the same horizontal boring mill every day on day shift, and how for all of those years he made the same part, a winch housing for an Army tank, over and over again.  He said, “Every night when I go to sleep I close my eyes, and I can see every hole in that casting, its size and tolerance, and the distance between it and all the other holes on the part.  I can literally run that part in my sleep, and I will carry that with me into my grave.”

He had been stationed at Pearl Harbor during the war, where he worked in a chrome shop, which brings me to the heart of the story.  Somewhere along the way he picked up an old military 45 Harley Davidson and, over the course of a whole year, he chromed every single part on that bike.

“I used to keep it under a tarp on the beach,” he said.  “The shop was near the water, and the barracks was over on the other side, so nobody went there much.  I worked the night shift, so I started out by tearing that bike down right there on the beach, everything, down to the motor, where I just pulled the covers off both sides and the cylinders and heads off the top.  I did pull every nut and bolt and stud off and chromed them, too.  I started with the frame, then the front end, the wheels, every spoke.  It was really something.”

“So what happened to it?” I asked.  “Ah, well, my time came up, and I was ready to get out of there by then, so I sold it to another grunt, and then I came home.  That would have been about 1946 or so.  I imagine it’s still there, somewhere. I think he gave me $100 for it.”

I imagine it’s still there, somewhere… sounds like a quest to me!  Next time I get to Oahu, I’m gonna start poking around, finding old timers to talk to.  “You ever hear about an old flathead 45 with chrome everything floating around?”  You can drive every road on the island in a day if you push it.  It’s gotta still be there somewhere, right?

And if I find the person who owns it now, have I got a story for them! :-{)}

Auction Dreams

In the old days, hereinafter referred to as “The Good Old Days”, meaning, of course, as far back as I can remember, with all the bad parts filtered out, leaving us with the operative term “old”, government entities of the city, county and state persuasions who had built up fleets of vehicles were required by ordinance to dispose of the unwanted parts of said fleets by way of public auctions.  Those of us who spent their time maintaining and repairing those fleets were well aware of the fact that, due to fleet management practices then in vogue, quite often those vehicles were sent to auction after a pre-planned number of miles were accumulated, or years in service realized, when they were still in good shape, with many miles still to come.  That is why, if you were at one of the auctions, you could look around and recognize many of your fellow employees, often with bidder numbers in hand.

We were not alone in this, of course.  In TGOD, many a taxi fleet was built on out-of-service police cars, from the Dodge Diplomats through the Chevy Caprices to the Ford Crown Vics, a nationwide trend, with the taxi fleets reflecting the makeup of the local police department cruisers with about a two-year lag, a process that continues today, though Priuses have supplanted Police cruisers in many cases, and the Uber drivers of the world encouraged to buy Camrys and Hondas instead.

There is a certain excitement to be had as the successful bidder at an auction, and after a few years I had it down to a science.  One year, for example, the State Patrol was auctioning off a small fleet of Harleys down at the GSA warehouse complex off C street south of Auburn, and I was busy at an ABATE function outside of Cle Elum, so I coached my wife to go to the auction and bid for us.

“Here’s how you do it,” I said, before I left on Friday. “Get there nice and early, get your bidder number, then go check out the bikes.  I have learned that the first one to sell is usually cheaper than the ones that follow, because people get excited, and bid more and more as the supply dwindles.  So that’s the one you set your mind on, and here’s how it will go.”  In this case, we set the price we were willing to pay for a 1980 Harley FLH at $1800, in 1983.  “Count backwards from 1800 in fifty dollar increments about six times, which brings you to 1550.  Typically, the auctioneer will try to get the bidding to jump in $100 increments after the initial rush, and will ask for 50 if they can’t get 100.  Ideally, you are waiting for the bids to slow down, then jump in at the even 100 after the first $50 jump has been bid.  Then, when the opposing bidder raises it another $50, you counter immediately at the next $100, with no hesitation or delay.  Usually, after two or three of those, if the auction is down to you and one other bidder, you will have led them to believe you are willing to pay whatever it takes to get that bike, and they will drop out and leave you holding the high bid, and you win!”

And that’s how it worked out in this case.  A friend showed up at the run site Sunday morning who I knew was planning on attending the auction and told me some woman bought the first bike that sold, which was how I learned we had added another Harley to the stable.  That one proved to be a pretty nice bike, for an old Shovelhead.

I used that technique many times over the years, on cars and trucks and motorcycles, mostly successfully.  Sometimes you just get outbid, and you have to drop out when your limit arrives and let it go.  Other times, strange things can happen.

I remember one particular auction in Auburn, for the state again this time, and we were looking for a truck.  The first pickup to be offered, an old Dodge with lots of miles and severe dents on all surfaces, came up, and the auctioneer started out with a typical ploy, “Who’ll give me $1000 for this fine piece of equipment?”  Some rookie in the audience got excited and raised his hand.  “I will!”  The auctioneer smiled, as a titter of laughter swept through the crowd, and went into his spiel: “Okay, I have $1000, who’ll give me $1200?”  Nothing from the crowd.  “How about $1100, now $1100, bid 11… how about $1050?  $1000 is bid, now $1050… 1050… 1050… sold, for $1000!”  That’s how you know you paid way too much, if your first bid is the last one.  Live and learn…

Another time, this one a Harley Auction for King County, held in a yard at the north end of Boeing Field, demonstrates how the forces of the universe, Lady Luck, or one’s own personal Karma can ebb and flow, with unpredictable results.  My buddy and I had decided to buy one or two 1973 Harleys at the auction as investments for resale, so we were in place when the bikes came up.  Typically, there were about 30 people in the crowd who were only there for the motorcycles, not interested in anything else.  The wrinkle here that was thrown in by the auctioneer was that the bikes were offered on an “any or all” basis, meaning that the successful high bidder on the first one could take any or all of them at that price each.  My partner and I had determined that our price was going to be $1400, and that we would both bid, but not against each other.  The auction started, and the bids quickly shot past our $1400 limit, upon which I dropped out, but my partner, who was caught up in auction fever, stayed in, right up to the point where he bid $1750, and the winning bid was $1800.  The auctioneer asked the high bidder how many he wanted, and he pointed to the two nicest ones, out of 6 total bikes.  He then turned to my partner and asked, “How about you?  How many do you want at this price?”  My partner indicated the third bike and said he’d take that one.  “Sold,” said the auctioneer, then started the process over again with the fourth bike.  As usual, the bidding got higher, with the prices hitting $2000, except for the last bike, a beat up old training bike with 47000 miles on it that went for $1200.  So another auction ended, with the successful bidders headed off to the office to pay for their purchases, and the rest of the Harley folks headed for their cars.  I stuck around to wait for my partner to come back with the paperwork so we could get the bike home.  After a few minutes, he came back, with a staff person in tow, and they both were agitated. He actually interrupted the auction in progress, a major breach of etiquette, and complained to the auctioneer, “My bid was $1750, but they say I have to pay $1800, and that’s not fair!”  The auctioneer tried to explain that, when he was offered the choice of bike, it was at the final bid price, not his last bid.  When my partner remained adamant, the auctioneer reached out and took his bidder number from his hands and said, “Ok, you are out!  Everybody, this one Harley is now up for bid again, how much for it!?”  The thing was, all the Harley guys had departed by that time, and there I was, ready and willing.  I got the bike for $1350.  We could not have pulled that one off if we had it planned, we later decided. Sometimes you just get lucky…and that's how it used to go, back in The Good Old Days.   :-{)}  

The dope selling expedition

The white ’61 Chevy sailed through the night, as much like a ship at sea as it was a car on the road.  Not only was the front end pretty clapped out by then, the ball joints loose in their sockets and the tie rods tired, but Shifter had fitted it with a foam padded steering wheel that was all of 8” diameter, like a huge fat donut attached to the column.  On a back road like this one somewhere near Elma, with a pronounced crown to the road and the memory of thousands of log truck loads imprinted in the blacktop, driving the car was an exercise in controlled drifting from side to side as the slack shifted from one wheel to the other, requiring correction by the driver.  That’s probably what caught the attention of the cop who was behind them at the time.  Under Lefty’s seat was a pound of the lowest grade of cheap Mexican pot, so when the lights came on it was a special thrill.

Shifter was Lefty’s high school buddy.  He was lean and mean, and could grow a beard years before some of his classmates, the cause of much envy and status among the boys.  They worked together at the smorgasboard restaurant and partied often.  The Chevy was his car, handed down from his big brother.  They had spent all of one night working on it shortly before that trip to Ocean Shores.  They replaced a used clutch disc with a different used clutch disc for some stupid reason.  It didn’t help much that they put it in backwards, either.  They didn’t know any better.  He had to tow it up to the local shop to get it fixed for $20, and for that they stayed up all night and got all dirty.  Good thing they had lots of peed spills.

So the way it started, there was this musician guy, and he had quit his band, but they held on to some of his equipment and promised to pay for it, but never did, and he wanted to repossess it.  A friend of his was an entrepreneurial sort, and he arranged for Shifter and Lefty to accompany him to the band’s house and be the strong-arm goons in case there was any trouble.  There wasn’t, and the payment for their efforts was the bunco Mexican dope, which the musician guy had been burned on during a setup deal in a parking lot on the side of Aurora Avenue North where you pay your money and hope they come back with something and sometimes they do, but it isn’t worth a shit.  They didn’t know any better, so they took it.  It quickly became evident that they were stuck with this stringy bale of raw hemp that smelled bad, and tasted worse than it burned, which it didn’t, much.

Getting rid of this stuff was the problem.  They started in White Center, of course, their home stomping grounds.  In the parking lot of Lou’s or Herfy’s they ran into Pat Goonbart, one of the local potheads, whose claim to fame was that he could roll joints faster than anyone, having practiced to the point where it was one smooth motion, very impressive.  He got stoned a lot for free with that skill of course, which showed he was a pretty sharp guy.  “Hey, Pat”, Lefty yelled out the window. “What’s goin’ on?”  “Not much”, he said, leaning in.  “Hi, Shifter; what are you guys up to?”  “We got a bunch of dope we want to sell”, Lefty replied.  His ears perked up at that.  “Why don’t you climb in the back and take a look?”  “Certainly!”, he said.  “Fuckin’ A!”.  That proved to be a mistake.  Pat was no fool, and he quickly realized what they had.  “This stuff is bunk!” he said.  “Let me outta here.”  So their goose was cooked, since Pat knew everybody and talked to all of them.  They had to get outta town with the dope, find somewhere the local denizens of wouldn’t know them.  Ocean Shores was the place.  Everybody knew it was party central on weekends, even in October.  Yeah, right.  So off they went, figuring to sleep in the car or get a hotel room with all the money they made selling dope to the tourists at $10 a bag.  Sure, Eddie.  They didn’t know any better, and it sounded like a good idea at the time.

When the lights came on Lefty went into flashback mode, to the time when after the community meeting at the drop-in center he noticed that someone had left their keys in their car in the parking lot, so Shifter  snatched them out of the ignition and they came back later and stole the car.  They went for a joyful joy ride until they ran a stop sign on Roxbury at high speed in front of a cop just getting off duty, which in retrospect turned out to be a mistake.  The cop peeled out after them and caught up by the old reservoir, which was surrounded by a thick salal patch in a forest of madrona and hemlock that was the hangout of all the kids in the neighborhood.  As the cop pulled up behind the stalled car, Shifter turned to Lefty and said, “Scoot over next to the door and hold the handle open, but don’t open the door till I say run!”.  Then he rolled down the window as the cop approached.  “You got a license and registration?” asked the fat old officer as he reached the driver’s door.  “Sure”, said Shifter, and then pulled down the visor as if looking for the registration, which wasn’t there.  Then he scooted over a bit and pulled down the other visor, likewise empty.  He scooted over a bit more, opened the glove box door and shouted, “Run!”  Lefty threw the door open and they took off like track stars.  That salal patch had to be 40 feet wide and a good 4 feet deep, and they blew through there like two gazelles beating feet from a hyena.  All the old cop could do was stand there and say bad words out loud.  They stopped to catch their breath on the other side of the patch in the woods, and listened for signs of pursuit.  They knew the patrol cars would be out looking for them, so they had to get through the projects, which were between them and the safety of home base, before he could call out the reserves.

That proved to be a good strategy, as the police naturally assumed it was a couple of bad boys from the projects who did it and concentrated their search in that neighborhood.  They only ran into one prowl car on the way home, cruising down the perimeter road shining his spotlight on all the houses and driveways.  They just had to keep the house itself between them and the spotlight for a bit, then slipped out over the fence in the corner lot and got away clean.  It’s interesting that poor people projects are fenced to keep people in, while rich people projects are fenced to keep them out.

But this time they were far from home in unfamiliar territory, and would have to bullshit their way through it.  Fortunately, they didn’t have any beer with them, and had been smoking only cigarettes on the road, so they got off with a lecture about defective equipment when they said they were headed for Shifter’s uncle’s house in Ocean Shores.

When they got to town they realized they had a problem.  They didn’t know anybody, weren’t old enough to get in the taverns, and there didn’t seem to be any local public events happening that Saturday night where they could mix with our potential clientele.  So they resorted to the desperation move of pulling up alongside some likely customers in a grocery store parking lot and asking out the window, “Hey, do you guys know anyone who wants to buy some pot?”

The first time they tried it actually worked.  Three guys climbed into the back seat and asked to see the merchandise.  They bought one bag for $10 and stole three more from them, assisted by Lefty handing over the entire grocery bag and enabling the old switcheroo con.  I’m sure they had a great laugh over it later, until they smoked the first joint and discovered how badly they had been burned.  By then Shifter and Lefty were already out of town, having realized there was no future in selling bunk dope to strangers in parking lots.  As they sailed down the highway toward home, Shifter and Lefty looked at each other, and, by unspoken agreement, Lefty rolled down the window and threw the remaining bags of worthless dope into the night.  Sic transit Gloria mundus, caveat emptor, and carpe diem.

If God came back to Earth

If God came back to Earth

He’d be pretty disgusted with us, I imagine.  He’d wander the globe for a few hundred years and see what we’ve done to ourselves, and each other, and shake his head.  “Why”, he would ask, “are so many of you rich and provided for beyond any needs you might have, and yet so many others are starving and living hand to mouth?  Why are the rich ones, by and large, living peaceful lives, while so many poor ones are fighting and dying every day?  Did you not listen to my Sermon on the Mount?”

“I thought I made it pretty clear”, he’d say, “that Thou Shalt Not Kill, but look at you, some of you, killing each other right and left, and what’s worse, doing it in my name!  You kill your friends, you kill your enemies, you kill strangers, you even kill your children!  Then I see some apologist trying to say I didn’t mean that, I really meant Thou Shall Not Murder!  Explain how that feels different to the one you killed.”

“Thou Shalt Not Steal, I told you, and look at you, some of you, stealing everything you can lay your hands on every chance you get.  You steal other people’s identities, you steal their trust, you steal their time, you steal their property, and you steal their mate.”

“I gave you dominion over the whole earth, and all its forms of life, and what have you done?  You killed off, exterminated, wiped out many of my most precious lives, often for the most vain and stupid reasons.  You’ve spoiled, plundered and strip mined much of the earth, chopped down way too many trees, poisoned the air and the water, first out of ignorance, and then, when it became all too clear what was going on, you pointed the finger everywhere but at yourselves, and lied about who made money creating the mess.  You have caught most of the fish and oiled the waters as the pollution you spew into the atmosphere has brought about severe changes in the weather.”

“I tell you what”, he’d say, “I’m half tempted to wipe the slate clean and try again, like last time, not that this batch of humans has done any better than the last batch.  Better yet, I’ll just sit back and watch you exterminate yourselves and see who comes up next, the cockroaches or the rats and mice.  My bet is on the cockroaches”.

Fortunately for us, God is not coming back.  That’s because he never was there in the first place; we made him up.  Unfortunately for us, that means we really have nobody to blame but ourselves for the shape we’re in, and nobody is going to step in at the last minute and call us all to judgment, let alone fix all our mistakes.  We have to do that.

We have to do it, and we have to get started now, or it will be too late.  It may already be.

Now, for all you true believers who find this idea offensive, I’m sorry, but you have to accept certain things whether you like it or not.  One is that, absent the coordinates of Heaven or Hell, there is no way to prove their existence, so it must be taken on faith.  The second is that, when you look at your beliefs logically, you must realize that, in every case, you have decided to believe a given tenet because someone you respected and trusted told you to do so.  Very few of us have done the research and read the Bible or the Koran or the Bagvad Ghita in its original versions and languages and made up our own minds.  We always take it from someone, ultimately a priest or minister of some sort.  That makes it easy to point out the obvious, that the person who told you what to believe is making a living on that belief, and counting on you for part of his or her income.  They have a direct conflict of interest.

As far as I’m concerned, the only true Christians I have met are bikers, like Wings of Faith.  They have elders, but no church, no tithing, and no expenses.  Everyone else is posturing to one degree or another, or making a living at it.  The televised criminal hucksters are the worst.  True Believers, however, are all over the place, and most of them are dangerous.

And the Bible itself is full of nonsense.  I’ve had Christians tell me, with a straight face, when I asked where all the wives came from to help make all those people named in Genesis, that they were all descended from Eve’s daughters mating with her sons, and it was ok, because “the bloodline was pure back then”, six words that toss everything we’ve learned about genetics out the window.  I guess, since God wiped out that gene pool anyway during the flood, leaving only Noah’s family to repopulate the earth, they must have still been pretty pure, too.  Yeah, right.  I don’t remember hearing about any yellow, brown or black people on the ark, either.

And all of Revelations is nonsense, bullshit dreamed up by old men on hashish to help keep the masses in line, and tithing.  And the Koran is nothing more than a plagiarized copy of the Bible twisted to the Imam’s or the Ayatollah’s best interests, as well.  Oh, oh, someone is now going to call for my execution because I said that.

What makes sense to me is that all religions, all of them, being fabricated from scratch by primitive bronze age tribes and improved on ever since by professionals making a living at it, contain a grain of truth.  That is the concept of the Soul, as an expression of a complex mind having original thoughts becoming something other than the physical body in which the mind lives.  When that body dies, the Soul changes form and substance and becomes a Spirit, which does whatever the mind of the person wanted to do.  If you have led a good life, and you know it, you will self-assign your Spirit to the heaven of your choice, just as you will send yourself to a Hell of your own creation if you have been a bad person in life, because you can’t hide your inner thoughts from yourself without suffering severe mental illness.

So if you’ve been born a Christian or a Muslim, in all their various sects and branches, and accepted all the baggage that comes with it, you will send yourself to Heaven or Hell when you die, and you don’t need Saint Peter to decide.  You already know.  And that Heaven and that Hell exist only because you believe they do, not the other way around.  That’s why in my Heaven, there’s beer, and God rides an old Harley.

In the meantime, why don’t we all start listening to folks like John Lennon, when he said, “Imagine, all the people living for today, and sharing all the world.”?

It doesn’t take a genius or a saint to realize that we’re all in this together, everybody all over the world, and that, until the poorest members of the least of all the tribes in Africa or Bangladesh or the favelas of South America have realized a sense of security brought about by the knowledge that they will always have a place to live, food on the table, and education for their children so the next generation can live better, none of us in our carefully segregated and overly protected enclaves are truly safe.  We are the ones with the means to bring them up to a minimum level of existence, and if we continue to ignore that responsibility it is inevitable that they will drag us down to theirs.  And cockroaches are everywhere. :-{)}