A guy walks into a bar, all upset, plops down on a stool and loudly announces “All lawyers are assholes!”  Another guy down the bar replies “Hey pal, I heard that remark and I resent it!”  First guy says “Why?  Are you a lawyer?”  “Oh no, I’m an asshole.”   Now that I have your attention, and one hopes, put a smile on your face, I want to publickly thank and heap beaucoups of kudos on SuSu, aka Kathy, my erstwhile soulmate, un-indicted co-conspirator, and partner in crime.  She spent several grueling hours today fixing my e-mail.  It  seems that Yahoo screwed up somehow and hundreds of e-mails from April on got lost somewhere in cyberspace.  Anyway, she fixed it all up, and I am way grateful and appreciative.  So there!  Watch this space for a rant about the trials and tribulations of being a street peddler, replete with the story of the fat Polish twins.

I got out of bed this morning to blog about how much I love being in bed.  Well, okay, that’s not strictly true.  I partly got out of bed because I thought I had to go to the outhouse, but it was a false alarm.  As a rule, I only get out of bed when I sort of have to–like when I sort of have to go to work, or tend to a bodily function I don’t want to be functioning in bed.

And to be really strictly true, what I call bed is not what many people would consider to be a proper specimen of the set of bed-like objects.  I sleep on this folding cot made of aluminum tubing and nylon canvas.  The tubing is broken, the result of an awkward landing one night to avoid squashing a cat who had pre-empted my space, and is propped up on a piece of lichenaceous firewood to keep the whole shebang from collapsing.  Soft is provided by a piece of old sofa cushioning, which is maybe two-thirds as long as I am.  I sleep in an old Coleman sleeping bag.  The whole works sort of crackles sometimes, due to the newspapers between sleeping bag and cot, which are there because the ceiling leaks right above the place my feet go.

Other than that, and the soft whisper of the box fan which keeps air circulating in the winter when most all the windows are sealed up, it is totally quiet.  There’s the occasional gunshot–this is Alaska, after all–but there is virtually no traffic noise, no sirens (think about that–how often do you hear sirens?  We might hear a siren once a month, if that.), no street noise.  It is peaceful.  And comfy.  I haven’t mentioned the posh part of my bed, a new feather pillow that I can scrunch and pummel to my little heart’s content.

Being in bed is particularly interesting due to Muffin, cute and chubby tabbycat who has bonded with me.  When I am ready to go down, I get settled down in bed, get my t-shirt wrapped around my head to keep out excess light, and get the pillow arranged.  Then Muffin comes padding up in the semi-dark and picks a  comfy spot om me to curl up on.  She is quite tolerant –when I have to get up to take a leak or something, she gets off, waits patiently unto the commotion stops, and hops back up.  There is something amazingly comforting about having a cat sleeping on you.

Once settled in for sleep, the best part of sleeping is dreaming.  I have very vivid and bizarre dreams, some of which are lucid which is really a lot of fun.  I often wake up in the wee smalls with fibromyalgia pain or something, and I just enjoy lying there, listening to the quiet, thinking about what I have to do the following day.

In winter, the best part of being in bed is being warm.  We have a woodstove in the living room, an oil burner in the back of the trailer, and a few ceramic heaters placed startegically here and there, but the place never really gets warm when it is , say, 30 degrees below zero outside.  As a rule, the only time in winter I am really warm is when I am in bed, or working outside and thanks to my hernia, I don’t do much if any work outside any more.  Sometimes in winter, I spend over 12 hours a day in bed.  As a Libra, the symmetry pleases me–in the summer, I spend 12 or more hours a day working.  Winter is for sleeping and reading and doing crossword puzzles and being nostalgic for summer.

We have a lot of fun making up names for our nutty seasons.  We don’t have spring, we have breakup.  We don’t have autumn to speak up, summer just sort of quantum leaps into winter.  Lacking hardwoods, we don’t have much in the way of gawkable fall foliage.  Someone once told me that on the previous year, he got drunk and missed summer.  Someone else said we have teo seasons, road construction and winter.  The most bleak, and arguably most accurate, summary was this:  we have two seasons–Winter’s Coming, and Winter’s Here.

Our record-breaking spell of hot dry weather finally ended, and so I am getting a day or two  off from working my stand.  As usual, I work harder on my day off than when I am working the stand.  I started by fixing breakfast for SuSu (aka Kathy) and I, then did some housework.  Now I am catching up on my blogging, then to do an e-mail or two, then more housework, to be foillowed  up with a video orgy (Jimmy Neutron, Monster Ball, and Poor White Trash).  Anyway, I want to preface my latest rant by saying that I love this country.  As a lad, I lived next to the Susquehanna River (the largest non-navigable river int he world), and had a great view of the Cumberland Gap.  Travelling through the southwest on my way to Alaska, I loved the rock formations and the elegant austere ambiance of the desert.  Here, there is so much to love I won’t even try to mention it all, but high on the list is Denali (I’ve seen him almost every day for over ten years, still takes my breath away), I love getting water from the artesian spring near our place, I love seeing a zillion stars,, and the Northern  Lights in the winter, I love driving down a dirt road and coming upon a bald eagle sitting arrogantly in a tree, and I love seeing fireweed in the summer.  (The preceding sentence would have given my freshman comp prof a heart attack, but Miss Harpster has long since gone to the great classroom in the sky, I’m sure.)

However, I loathe and despise the goverment of this country and many of its laws.  I despise the hypocrisy of a land which routinely  criticises other countries for their civil rights failing, while having a dismal, pathetic record of its own in that department.  Most of all, Ihate this country’s penal system.  It is  a brutal dehumanizing affair, in which the only people who have a chance of getting fair treatment are rich white people. (OJ?  As far as I can see. he became an honorary white person the day he won the Heisman.)  A number of years ago, President Johnson called for a war of poverty.  Over the years, this mutated into a war on poor people.

Here is one example: you get busted for a little bit of crack, and you get a much stiffer sentence than if you were busted for classic.  Why?  Simply because crack is mostly a drug of poor (and non-white) people, while classic (that is, regular old snortable coke) is mostly used by white folks.  Another thing–you hear about celebrity busts from time to time–when was the last time a celebrity drew hard time?  And speaking about hard time–

This country seems to think, as a whole, that it is better to lock up social problems than it is to cure them.  On this entire earth, there are only two countries who have a greater percentage of their populations behind bars than does the US of A.  Those two contries are South Africa and the former Siviet Union.  Good company, huh?  And then there’s the death penalty.

The Untied States (sic) is the ONLY western nation which still routinely murders its citizens who run afoull of the law.  So many death row inmates are found to be innocent (say by DNA testing, or by last-minute confessions of others) that the stories no longer even make the headlines.  What could be more horrible–with the possible exception of being buried alive–than being an innocent on death row, counting the days until someone straps you down and a doctor (a doctor!) coldly and deliberately injects poison into your veins?  This is surely cruel, but not unusual, so I guess it must be constitutional.

Another way this country is fubar is in the drug laws, which I already touched on.  There are upwards of a million people behind bars for breaking pot laws.  And how is this for hypocrisy–despite the fact that it is possible (if you are fairly well-off and well-connectewd) to get permission to grow your own pot to releive certain medical symptoms, under the law (“the law is a ass, a idiot”–Dickens), marijuana is a Class 1 Narcotic (Calss 1 means drugs with no recognized medical use.  This, to put it tersely if vulgarly, sucks.  It sucks doggie dicks yay long and yay big around.  And even if you have no compassion for the million of so folks in durance vile (which in past years included SuSu and moi), maybe the fact that it is costing society roughly FIFTY BILLION DOLLARS to keep these folks imprisoned will get your attention.  And for a drug which has never killed anyone,and which tends to discourage users from getting violent (or from getting much of anything else done, to be fair about it).

A wiser man than I once observed that America is the only country which went from being primitive to being decadent without ever having been civilized.  He was an optimist.

This go-round, I’ll be talking about two of the  “damned human race”‘s (as Mark Twain put it) worst ideas–sexual mutilation and organized religion.  If this neither upsets you or offends you, I have failed.

Most of us, when we think about sexual mutilation, it is either in the context of psychopathic killers or obscure tribal practices in some place like Bumfuck, Egypt.  Female circumcision is pretty heinous,  and I imagine is roundly condemned by all right-thinking people.  Not that we Americans much give a damn about what happens in the rest of the world, as long as we have cheap gas for our SUVs, and can super-size  our kids’ Happy Meals so they can get as fat as their parents.  No, what I am about to address is cruel, horrid, and despicable–and it happens many times a day here in the good old US of A.  I am talking about regular old male circumcision.  So what’s the big deal, you may ask?  Well, MC, like FC, reduces sensation, making sex less pleasurable.  The only reason MC is really done is to make it harder for little boys to jerk off.  I have a pretty strong stomach for guts and gore, but the very idea of someone, for whatever reason, whacking off part of my willy just creeps me out to the max.  I mean, it has to hurt like hell.  And don’t try to tell me that infants don’t feel pain like adults, they just can’t let others  know about it as well as adults.  If you are a parent and you had your kid circumsized, I feel he has every right to cut your throat while you’re asleep.  Payback is sweet.

What’s more, I contend (free doctoral dissertation idea ahead) that every circumsized male has a deep reservoir of subliminal rage directed at women in general and his mother in particular.  I would bet the rent that the vast majority of serial killers who prey on women are circumsized.  Circumcisim is fucked up, and the sooner it goes the way of buggy whips and whale-oil fired reading lamps, the better.

What is also fucked up is organized religion, all of which are more or less fucked up, with the possible exception of Ba’Hai, Cat Stevens notwithstanding.  Then again, no one knows anything about it, or cares, Cat Stevens etc.  Why do I say this?  Well, look at all the missionaries who did their level pest to destroy tribal cultures (I think I’ll leave in the preceding typo, sort of Freudian.)  Look at the Spanish Inquisition.  At my grandmother’s funeral some years back, the officiating sky pilot (who never even met Mama while she was alive) went on and on about this weird and distasteful idea known as the resurrection of the body–sounded like night of the living dead to me.  And all those religions which mandate circumcision are way fucked up.  Which brings me to Jews.

I feel sorry for Jews, and not just because everyone on the planet, it seems some times, hates them or fears them.  If you are an Orthodox Jew, you don’t have a piddly ten commandments, you have about 450.  And their god doesn’t discriminate–eating off the wrong plate is as bad as knifing your neighbor for no good reason.  And you wanna talk about capricious and arbitrary–just read the book of Job sometime–all his troubles resulted from what was no better than a bar bet between God and Satan (who sounds a lot like God’s equal in the story).  And if that weren’t enough, with the zillions of rites and rituals and seders  of Lebanon and bar mitsvahs and bas  mitzvahs and so on, you don’t even get the promise of eternal life–when yer dead, yer dead.

Oh and lest I sound too discriminatory, let me close with one little comment on Catholicism–how do you get a nun pregnant?  Dress her up like an altar boy.