The Case of the Missing Truss, or Nasrudin Rides Again!

In case you didn’t know, Nasrudin was a great sage (Suni, Sunni, Zuni, Bugsbunni, whatever) who was notorious for being absent-minded.  He once rode  his donkey  furiously around the village, darting this way and that.  A neighbor hailed him, asked him what was up.  “I’m looking for my donkey,” he replied.  Kathy and I do this all the time.  Just this morning, she told me about searching for a boot liner–she found it in one of her boots (they are supposed to go left liner/left boot, right liner/right boot)–she had both in one boot.  Once I spent a while looking for a lost earring, found it tangled in my hair.  This morning, I outdid myself.

A number of years ago, I stupidly tried to heave a 100-pound propane tank up out of the snowbank it had fallen over into.  Snap, crackle, pop!  Instant hernia.  Since then, I have worn a truss religiously (burning the incense keeps the smell down).  Usually, I carefully leave it in my trousers when I undress for bed, along with my jockey shorts, and one sock.  The other sock usually winds up in the microwave, or the cat’s litter box, somewhere.  No matter.  Socks are cheap and plentiful.  But I digress.

This morning, I got up, donned my bifocals, and got my trou off the table, where I had carefully laid them on top of the clutter the night before.  I noted that the clutter had gotten up to five levels.  I gotta do something about that.  Then I saw it.  Actually, I didn’t see it.  The truss, that is.  I was aghast.  In fact, I was two or three ghasts.  I need that truss.  I have to wear it when I lift anything heavy.  Without it, I have to sit down to pee.  I stifled my inclination to bitch and curse and rave–didn’t wanna wake the kittens (awwww!)–and started searching.  Under the table, nope.  On the chair, nope.   Under my shirt, nope.  In the microwave, nope.  (No, I didn’t look in the fridge–that would be silly.) Then paranoia set in.

My god, what if a really kinky burglar had come in during the night?  (I can’t lock my door from the inside, which is why I sleep with a .38 special revolver originally issued to the Argentine police during the infamous Peron era.)  I checked my pants–my wallet was still there.  Checked my shirt pocket–my wad of cash was still there.  Finally, I found my b-list truss, the one with the really crappy buckles with little metal teeth that catch in my shorts, and the sprung elastic.  Carefully climbed into it, not wanting to snag anything important on the metal teeth.  Of course, I no sooner had the damn thing on when I spied my  good truss.  It was on top of the  cardboard box on top of the litter box, under my lunchbox.  I felt woozy–must have been the boxing match.

So, I retrieved the thing, finished getting dressed, and  had coffee.

Note to self:  in the future, have coffee, THEN start getting dressed.

When honor students go bad. . . .

It seems there is this 16 year old honor student, name withheld, the kind of kid whose parents put  those obnoxious little “My kid is better than your kid” stickers on both bumpers of the minivan.  She plays clarinet.  She’s active in sports, basketball and volleyball.  She sings in the choir–honors choir, that is.  She pretty much seems to be the perfect kid, if a tad overweight (more on that later), except for one little thing.  She had her mother killed.  By her boyfriends, a couple of chunky-looking thugs in their twenties.

The remains of her mother were found in the charred wreckage of her van.  According to the police report, boyfriend number one, also name withheld, abducted her and bashed her brains out with some sort of blunt instrument.  The other boyfriend was involved as well, I don’t recall the details.  Both of them look like proper thugs, one with thinning blode hair, one with a shaved head, both kinda chunky, both half again as old as the girl. They had been in jail for a day or so, when the girl was also jailed.  It seems that the killing had been her idea all along.  She even timed it so that she would have an alibi at a volleyball tourney when her little friends would be doing the dirty deed.  Evidently, the plan at first had been to abduct mom, steal mom’s car and wreck it, make it look like a drunk driving accident.  Maybe Mommy had a taste for the sauce, who knows?

The cops are still trying to figure out the motive. but the girl’s on-line journal said that her mom grounded her and withheld food from her due to her weight, evidently threatened to send her to fat camp.  I guess the girl figured if she did in Mommy–or got one or two of her squeezes to do it–she could eat all she wants.  Hope she likes a starchy diet–prison food tends to be like that.

A  Spenard Divorce Story

A Spenard divorce is when one spouse gets totally fucking fed up, and kills the other one, usually by shooting him or her.  This bit of Valley trash-speak comes from the fact that Spenard, a rather rough neighborhood in Anchorage, is known for the incidence of various and sundry white-trash type crimes, at least the ones that don’t get perpetrated in Mountain View, which used to be a fairly solid blue-collar community, but now is rife with crack houses and drive-bys.  But I digress.

Anyway, there was this rich white couple–jointly owned a real estate business–and they were in the process of divorcing legally, got to bickering over who would get what.  Hubby thought he was being screwed, so he got his piece and plugged the missus.  Took a pot-shot at her best friend, too, who happened to be in the house at the time.  The perp was sitting quietly, staring at the floor, when the cops arrived.  Nothing unusual so far.

The remarkable thing about this story is the ages of those involved–husband and wife were 72 years old.  Jaysus, talk about when old farts go bad!  I mean, what the hell was he thinking?  Or did he just forget to take his Prozac that day?  Whatever.  Heck, any prison sentence he gets is liable to be a life term.  But it gets better.

Here is the really sad, pathetic part of this whole sordid tale.  The wife’s best friend was quoted in the paper and was talking about the deceased.  “She always dressed so well,”  the grieving friend said.  “And she lived in such a beautiful home.”  Helloooo!  The woman lived for 72 goddamn years and the best thing her best friend can say about her is that she had a big clothes closet in a big house?

Maybe she’s better off dead.  Maybe she will reincarnate into someone who can accomplish something worth mentioning besides being a clothes-horse.  Maybe I should have my head examined.

A Very, Very Extraordinary Weekend

I didn’t post that
headline lightly.  Over the course of my life, I have been
blessed with quite a number of extraordinary weekends, and weeks, or
just plain moments.   Like the time I really pissed off Isaac
Asimov.  Like the honeymoon I spent in England, seeing plays and
going to Stonehenge while tripping on LSD.  Like the time I
totalled my Porsche and walked away from it.  The time I got bored
and went to Iceland for the weekend–didn’t know what I was seeing on
the tour bus, as the tour guides were all on strike and the driver
wasn’t allowed by union regs to say anything.  Then there was the
time I had sex with a progeriatric dwarf.  While her six-foot
husband watched.  At a Mensa convention.  Good times, 
But I digress.  This past weekend goes right up near the top of
the list.

I knew it would be special well in
advance.  Normally in the winter,  when I do a show on the
weekend I need to take a week off to recover.  This weekend,
I had two shows back to back.  My schedule:  Friday night,
drive to the Willow Community Center to set up.  Saturday morning,
drive there and do the show; Saturday night, take everything down and
load my car up, go home and take out the stuff I won’t need for the
Sunday show, and load up the stuff I will need–like three tables and a
chair.  Sunday morning, drive to the Big Lakes Lions
Club sale at the Big Lake Mall; Sunday night, pack up the car again,
come home and collapse. Well, I did it.  And some extraordinary
things happened each show.

Good stuff:  I did much better
financially at Willow than usual, thanks to new merchandise–swords,
battle-axes, vintage jewelry from the 50′s, various other antiques and
collectables.  One sweet old lady forked over $149.00 for a set of
samurai swords for her lucky grandson.  Another guy gave me $69
for a set of battle-axes for his sons.  And I made over $50
selling stuff that hadn’t cost me anything, stuff that was given to me
or that I fished out of the dumpster behind my cabin.  But that’s
another blog.  Then there was the food, which is always
good.  This time, I got a bowl of halibut chowder to die for and a
big hunk of fresh-baked bread–for $3.

I always look to barter with other
boothies, and one stand had some pyrite crystal clusters that were the
best I had ever seen, priced well below normal retail.  I asked if
they did any trade or gave discounts to other dealers.  The woman
looked rueful, said sorry, the stand was being run by a woman’s service
club.  I spent a long time looking at the pyrite, bought a great
cluster for $10–I would have charged at least twice that for it. 
Later in the day, I noticed smaller clusters that I would charge $5
each for–they wanted 50 cents each, so I got eight.  Still later
when I went back again, the woman in charge asked if I would be
interested in buying all they  had.  She showed me this flat
full of awesome clusters and some chunks, maybe sixty pounds or
so.  I gulped, said I’d get back to them.  Later, I made my
low-ball offer, just high enough to not be insulting, low enough to
allow for some extended dickering.  They took my first
offer.  My entire food prep space plus the cover over the cat
litter box is now covered with pyrite crystals.

One small off note:  I hate music at
shows, especially at holiday season.  I pretty much hate Christmas
carols.  This time, they kept the PA system turned off, for which
I was profoundly grateful.  But the kid in a neighboring booth
brought along his fiddle to play.  Or rather, practice, played the
same thing over and over and over again.  Finally I could stand no
more of this musical Chinese water torture, approached him and asked if
he took requests.  His little face lit up, and the skinny towhead
thought and said well, it depends if he knew that song. I said “Tell
you what.  I’ll give you a dollar if you will just put that thing
away.”  His face fell.  He picked it up, and demurred. 
I upped the ante to two dollars.  A nearby boothie who had also
been treated to his improptu concert advised him to hold out for
twenty–later in the day, I probably would have paid that much,
too.  He just shook his little head, and I stalked off, muttering
imprecations and thinking about how I might improvise earplugs. 
He held off the rest of the day, however.

The next day I woke up bright and early
and tired.  Okay, it was really dark, but it WAS early.  I
had the car all ready, having moved the tables and chair and stuff all
around the night before.  Drove carefully to Big Lake–the weather
had been awful all weekend, did most of my hundreds of miles driving on
black ice, slush and through rain, snow or sleet.  Got to the
mall, found my space and–wahoo!  They gave me space number one,
the best one available, right between two entrances and next to the
supermarket.  While setting up, a major Lion came by and told me
that the next space was free, so I got two spaces for the price of
one.  Heaven!  I sold and sold and sold, giving discounts on
discounts, button-holing passers-by, making “special” deals with other
boothies and volunteers–”special” meaning that I only made a big
profit as opposed to my usual obscene profit.  When the day was
done, I was literally about ready to fall down.  I reeled and
stumbled like an old tosspot, but I made it home okay.  Little did
I know that the best was yet to come.

Silky seemed especially glad to see
me.  While I was reading the paper, she jumped up in my lap, got
under the paper, and nosed my cap off (when I got home, I was too tired
to deal with my hat and coat, just left them on).  She demanded
lots more attention and pets that usual.  I figured she was glad
to see me.  Then she got into one of the big boxes of knives under
the bed and started shredding boxes.  She has done this before, I
figured she was just beiong frisky, so I got her out, scolded her, and
taped the box shut.  Then she managed to get through the tape and
got stuck in the box.  I was really pissed, dragged her out, and
wrapped a sheet around the box.  A little later, I heard another
noise under the bed and saw all this blood on one of the big boxes
holding a set of saamuroi swords!  OMG!  WTF!! I saw her head
poking out of another box, this one containing a bunch of Buck utility
knives, unsheathed and sharp as hell, and I thought she had cut
herself.  I pulled the box out, and there was Silky and this
little furry sausage-thing.  She had a kitten!  This was
great–her pregnancy had been interminable, over three months.  We
figured she wasn’t gonna deliver and would resorb the kittens. 
This happens sometimes, but there can be complications–like
death.  So I apologized to my sweet Silky cat profusely, and
called Kathy asking what to do–move them to the birthing basket I had
set up months ago, just leave them alone, try to get some soft cloth in
that box, what?  She was still up fortunately, as was Doug, so I
got plenty of good advice.  I slipped some shirts in, and slipped
some knives out, and all seemed well.

This morning when I got up, there were
two more kittens!  Woo hoo!  Then I went out for a while,
came back and saw–kitten number four.  The last one is a little
guy.  At first it was so still, I thought it was dead, but it
finally stirred.  But I am so happy, I am just walking on
air.  All four are striped, more or less monochromatic, white and
various shades of gray.  The oldest in the darkest, the middle two
are medium-gray, and the smallest is light gray.

Stay tuned for blogs of heart-warming kitten antics!

Life is good.

Cat Makes Mega-mess; Lands in Doghouse!

Had you been in the men’s room of the Wasilla Public Library a few minutes ago, you would have seen me grimly rinsing off a moccasin and muttering to myself.

I probably shouldn’t complain.  Silky has been an exemplary cat, except that she doesn’t get along with other cats, and has only knocked opne thing down in months.  She is sweet and affectionate and god-natured.  That was then.  This is now.

A few hours ago, I left for the Big Lake Library.  The plan was to get lunch when I returned and then go do laundry.  So I wouldn’t forget it, I put the jug of laundry detergent up on the bed.  A brand-new, 100-ounce jug of liquid laundry detergent.

When I got home, it was on the floor, the top was broken, and there was 100 ounces of liquid lanudry detergent all over the cabin floor, except for what had soaked into the rug, the bottoms of the boxes of merchandise stored under the bed, and the leather soles of my best (and only) dress shoes.  I was fit to be tied.

When I got done yelling and cursing, I mopped up a bunch of the stuff with my dirty laundry so I could at least do the damn laundry.  Went on the porch, dumped a bunch of low-end merchandise out of a big cardboard box and started filling it with detergent-soaked newspapers.  Used most of the last of my fresh water (I don’t have running water n my cabin) to rinse off my hands.  I HATE having my hands sticky or slippery.  I don’t mind getting shit on my hands–literally–but I HATE having them all soapy and slippery.  Go figure. (And ask Kathy about the infamous salmon-sliming incident sometime.  But I digress.)

So I do the laundry, and get a bunch of copies of the Talkeetna Times from the laundromat.  The owner and I agreed, they are mostly just good for soaking stuff up with, anyway.

Got home, hung up the wet stuff–the silk and duo-folds–unloaded the jugs of warm water I knew I would need, and commenced putting down more paper.  Fished a soapy moccasin out of the mess, brought it with me.

So that  brings me full circle.  The incident pretty much knocked my schedule into a cocked hat.  I had wanted to do some research and post a past life reading.  I wanted to go to an NA meeting.  I wanted to do some serious shopping at Fred Meyer.  Well, that can all wait.  I wouldn’t even be here, but I had an appointment to use the computer, plus I wanted to get something quick and easy for dinner at Carr’s.

I did not kill the cat.  Thought about it briefly, but the cat is still existing on this plane. Besides, one thing Kathy and I agree on (I think)–we both despise people who punish critters for behaving like critters.

And what the fuck–the floor has never been cleaner.

“If You’re so Psychic, Why Aren’t You Rich?”

This question comes up a lot in my work and the work done by my wife Kathy, who has done psychic readings professionally for over twenty years.  Sometimes it is a variant  of the  head-game called “Stump the Shaman” in which people ask silly, inappropriate questions, just trying to be cute, or in hopes of showing me up.  (Like the guy who said “How many tattoos do I have, and where are they?”  My reply: “If you can’t answer that question for yourself, you need more help than I can give.”)  Sometimes the questioner is more or less sincere, but so unevolved that he cannot imagine any sort of success that is not coupled with material wealth.  Sometimes the question comes from a client who is impressed by my work,  and knows how modest my life-style is.  (For instance, I live in a 10×12 cabin with no running water; drive a 1988 Dodge Vista that cost $550; sleep between sheets and eat food and use meds I fished out of the local dumpster.)  Well, there are many ways to answer that question, other than the obvious, which is simply “Fuck you.”

But seriously folks, in some traditions, it is considered infra dig at best, sinful at worst, to use ones gifts for material gain.  Other traditions say that if you use your powers to gain wealth, you will lose those powers.  This is fear-based bullshit. The truth–the real answer–is not so pat, not so easy to put into words.  But I’ll try.

For one thing, people who have some considerable degree of psychic ability are  often  highly evolved spiritually, and material wealth is simply not an issue.  I often say that I have never in my life had  less money or more happiness, and I mean it with all the earnestness at my command.  And there are  ways to be rich other than by piling up absurd, not to say obscene, amounts of wealth.  Living in Alaska, anyone who has eyes to see with  and a heart to appreciate with, is rich in beauty, it surrounds us and enriches our lives  in ways that city-dwellers cannot begin to imagine.  By living close to nature and close to Spirit, we have spiritual riches that many, probably most, people cannot hope to attain.

And anyway, in point of fact, we do and have used our gifts for gain.  For instance, when my wife was in Nevada on a trip with her son and didn’t have much money, she used her gifts to win at the casinos.  But she didn’t get greedy.  I myself have never, ever left a racetrack a loser.  I get a sense of who will  run in the money, and bet accordingly.  But I don’t get greedy and even try to hit, say, a big trifecta.  A few small winners over the course of the evening is plenty for me.  There are very practical reasons for this too–anyone who wins big at the track or at the casinos gets the attention of the mobsters who run the joints–this can be very hazardous to one’s health.

What’s more, even though our income is close to the federal poverty level–it is around one-third the national average–we are not without material goodies.  Kathy’s trailer, while not even a double-wide and lacking central heating, is replete with more or less valuable art works and museum-quality rocks and crystals and mineral specimens that have come our way through various means over the years.  (FYI, we maintain separate households, for reasons that are not germane here.)   Like more affluent Alaskans, we have an enviable arsenal of guns and rifles and pistols and knives and swords.  I collect coins and first editions–not exactly hobbiers one associates with trailer-trash.  And our collections of metaphysical books ,and various oracles,  are, I think, darn near worthy of the Smithsonian.

So maybe the best answer to the question “If you’re so psychic, why aren’t you rich” is simply this:  “Oh, I am–I just don’t flaunt it.”

On Critters in General, Pets in Particular

A  warning–what follows is not some touchy-feely sentimental thing.  So if you are still upset about what happened to Bambi’s mom, maybe you best not read any farther.

First, a little update on Silky, the perpetually-preggars cat.  Some months ago, Kathy noted that she was getting bulbous, figured she was expecting, I confined her to my cabin, since I didn’t want her giving birth outside.  I blogged about this.  It has been months since Kathy first noticed, and no kittens yet. She may have some sort of feline ob-gyn problem–she is still big, no sign of movement in her belly, but prominent nipples.  After much agonizing, I decided not to take her to the vet, and just  let nature take its course.  If she dies, she dies.  If she does,  I’ll cry for a while, and either let another stray adopt me, or go to a shelter and save some other cat from being killed.  I can’t afford to spend money on a vet–as it is, our housepets get better medical care than  we do– and it’s not like cats are an endangered species or anything.  Meanwhile, she is back to going in and out as she pleases and we are both happier.

Alaskans tend to love critters, but we are not sentimental about them.  (I once read that being sentimental about something means that you love it more than God does.)  For instance, mushers with maybe 30 to 40 dogs in their lot sometimes have a surplus  of puppies to deal with.  The ones that are sickly or weak or just unwanted and unadoptable get culled.  That usually means that someone clubs the little guys to death  It ain’t pretty and it ain’t fun, but that’s the way it is.  I remember one real lean year, we had some sick kittens and barely enough money to feed the healthy ones.  We didn’t even have money to spare for ammo, so we bashed some of them.  Let me tell you, crushing a sick kitten’s skull with a rock is no fucking fun at all.  It is, in fact, heart-rending.  But I  maintain that killing your own sick pet is way superior in many ways to dragging it to a vet  and paying  a stranger to kill it for you.

Still, I cry every time I think about putting down Handout, our old husky.  He got so old and sick (he was 17 or 18 in human years), his winter coat didn’t even grow in.  He slept most of the time and cried the rest of the time. He was going deaf and blind and had been arthritic for years. He stopped eating.  Finally, after much discussion, I went out, petted him and told him how much  I loved him, and put a bullet in his brain.  The last thing he did before he died was lick my hand. I like to think he knew what was going on and was grateful to me for ending his misery.  Some day, when I have gone to spirit, we will laugh and play together again.  Right now, his remains are mostly  bones, out past the dead-end in the muskeg.

For some unfathomable reason, some people can’t deal with  the reality of critters and death.  I remember years ago, some folks were outraged at a PBS animal special that showed a raccoon raiding a rabbit’s nest and chowing down on baby bunnies.  Kathy tells a great story about a nitwit on the ferry who couldn’t deal with a video of a bear catching and eating salmon.  That’s what bears do, for crying out loud.  Sometimes they catch and eat people.  And they don’t kill their prey first–their prey, whether it be moose, seal, or Aunt Sally– dies while they are eating it.

Nature is red in tooth and claw.  And there is lots of nature up here.  If you can’t deal with it, best stay out of Alaska, maybe go to Disney World.  And try not to think about Bambi.

“Trust your feelings, Luke!”

Yoda said that, or something like that, in Star Wars.  I tell myself that, over and over again. I have to, having a legacy of years of pretty much using only half my brain–the left half, the logical, rational side.  Not that there was all that much there anyway, thanks to a case of Narcissistic Personality Disorder that raged undiagnosed for most of my life.  Sheesh–my yod must have been working overtime a lot of years.  But I digress.  There are times  when I don’t “feel” like opening shop.  I figure I’m just being lazy, ignore my feelings, open shop anyway  and don’t do any business.  But where I really have to be vigilant about trusting my feelings, or intuition, or the voices in my head, is when I do shamanic past life readings.

A lotta years ago, Kathy asked me if I could do a shamanic past life reading.  I never had, nor had I ever heard of anyone doing  one.  In tribal cultures that I know of, folks don’t spend a lot of time thinking about past lives, being kinda busy surviving the current one.  Anyway, I gave it a shot, and the rest is history.  But it’s hard.

Like when I did the reading for a client  who once died by drowning.  Fine, now I know what it’s like to drown–not fun, I assure you.  Ditto with the client who burned to death.  Way not fun!  But the hardest, the most challenging thing, is just believing what I “see” and hear, just trusting my guides, my intuition, whatever.

Sometimes the stuff I get seems so far-out, or so pat, or just so cliched—like when  a client is a historical figure, or at least someone prominent– that I  am uneasy, thinking that the client will either think I am totally nuts, or just fabricating this stuff out of whole cloth, playing some sort of Gypsy-like cold reading scam.  But time and time again, the readings that I worry the most about are the ones that get the most validation.  Kathy is great at this–often she will do a web search and dig up some historical stuff that fits hand in glove with the weird shit that popped into my pointy little head.  Other times it will be the client who does the validating, and comes back to me with info that makes the reading make sense to me.

I am kind of like a sentient TV who sometimes makes value judgements on the programs it receives.  The receiver thing is a very useful metaphor–you know how a  radio gets a real strong signal in loud and clear, while a weak or distant signal just comes in fits and starts.  For me, the “signal strength” is the degree of karmic significance the past life has.  Sometimes the most intriguing lives to the client are the ones that are the least significant (this makes sense, now that I think of it–the insignificant ones are the least challenging, the easiest to deal with), they want more details than I can honestly give, and we both end up a tad frustrated. Best case scenario is, the client grows, maybe wakes up a little.  Worst case scenario is, the client goes away mad and I get stiffed.  But what the heck, I’m not in this for the money anyway.

Peddling knives and rocks and stuff feeds my body; doing shamanic work feeds my soul.

Yaaaah, my stereo’s possessed!

First, the stereo.  It is a modest thing, an old Sharp 3-CD jobbie, kinda obsolete–no station search feature, for one thing–and the CD player doesn’t work, but that’s okay, I have a little CD boombox patched into the video input.  And it sounds pretty good, and it does have a remote, and it gets the smooth jazz station that Kathy and I usually listen to.  Got it for like $15 or so from some folks at the flea market.  But I digress.

Anyway this morning I’m puttering around, getting dressed and stuff, generally acting like Ozzie Nelson looking for his favorite cardigan. (“Harriet, I’m worried about the boys!”).  Anyway, at some point, I notice the darn thing had turned itself on.  I putter around some more, notice it has changed it’s own settings, from video to tape 2 or something.  This has me concerned–then the penny dropped, and I realized that the remote was buried somewhere under the clutter.  I dug it out, hit  the power button; problem solved, I thought.

Nope.  I notice the damn radio is turned on.  I hit the power switch again ad the video input comes on.  I can’t get the darn thing to turn off.  I’m thinking about unplugging the sucker, but this is only a last resort.  Then I notice the damn radio is slowly changing station settings.  The AM radio was slowly going from 901 to 902 to 903.

Finally I solved the “mystery.”  The thing had been turned off all along–it was the clock trying to tell me it was nine in the morning, then nine oh one, etc.  When I thought I was turning it off, I was turning it on and so forth.  Nasrudin would be proud!

The lying fearmongers won again!

Well, the bastards won again.  The environment in general ,and the bears in particular, lost; poor people and minorities lost; people who believe in human rights for gay humans lost.  People who think lost.  Peace lost.  Decency lost. The truth lost. I’m not surprised.  Time and time again, the candidate who lies the fastest and the  mostest and the bestest wins.  Still, my heart is lacerated with savage indignation.  Not least because I used to be a Republican.

Yep.  When Dick Thornburgh was re-elected as governor of Pennsylvania, I was one of 2,000 close friends of his at election headquarters in Philadephia, prancing around in my Calvin Klein suit and Brooks Brothers dress shirt and Countess Mara tie, smirking and  waving around a campaign sign.  Back then, being a Republican was not synonymous with being a gay-bashing, lying, draft-dodging, tax-evading fucking sleazeball.  It is now, at least in Alaska.  We have the sleaziest, sorriest, most corrupt motherfuckers who ever held office–at least since back  in the nineteeth century, when “the Standard Oil Company did everything to the Pennsylvania State legislature except refine it,” according to one of my history profs in college. 

Today, the same thing is happening in Alaska.  The oil companies basically own the state AND  the politicians.  And they get what they pay for.  And what the oil companies don’t own, or at least lease, the cruise lines do.  They pollute the hell out of our coastal waters, and skate on paying any taxes–again and again.  Oh they pay lots of money running feel-good ads about how much employment they bring the state. And they probably get a fat tax deduction on the ads–nothing like getting paid for lying.  And I should know, I used to work for the government.  (Ask me about the Legionnaire’s Disease cover-up sometime.  I was there.)

But my goodness, time and time again I ask myself–have they NO shame?  Have they have NO sense of decency?  And time and time again, the answer is, hell no.  Outsiders don’t hear much about Alaska.  When we had over 100 wildfires burning in the Interior in the midst of our worst fire season ever, we got like 20 seconds on the evening news.  Way less than Janet Jackson’s nipple got.  But ye gods and little fishes,  the infamy!  Our governor Frank Murkowski,, a former do-nothing senator, got elected by lying and lying and lying some more.  Fearful people believed his lies and elected him,  He promptly appointed his daughter, a person with ZERO qualifications, to fill his senate seat.  She recently got re-elected by–surprise–lying and lying and lying, preying on peoples’ fears.  The head of the Republican paetty got caught doing lots of party business while working on a state job–that was mostly a sinecure anyway–and leaking confidential memos to the oil companies.  He got some bad press–and the governor–known contemptuously as Frank the bank, or Murk the jerk–supported the bastard.

One of our legislators did consulting work for an energy company that wanted to put gas wells on the lawns of the people who elected him.  A vigorous recall movement led to his resignation.  Another legislator got caught with her fingers in the cookie jar–used campaign funds to put gas in her truck and pay personal bills–got fined a token $3,000 or so.  But mostly they  get away with it.  And they keep getting re-elected!

Remember Richard “I am not a crook!” Nixon?  Yeah, the one who resigned in disgrace in the wake of Watergate.  Doonesbury reminds us that following the 1960 election (which Joe Kennedy and the Chicago mob pretty much stole), Eisenhower urged Nixon to call for a recount, and Nixon refused, saying it would tear the country apart.  Well, the country is pretty much torn apart now, from where I sit.  And now, Nixon is looking pretty good by comparison to the bottom-feeders in office now.