Ursine Logic

Embracing Your Inner Lunatic

2009-12-02T01:52:00.000-08:00

I had an interesting conversation this evening with someone I don't know very well but whose intelligence always intrigues me. He has a way of phrasing his thoughts so that others can take part in the process of their formation. Tonight he lead me down the path of creating peace by equating the direction toward it as an inward focus spreading outward.

This is not to be confused with the simplicity of saying peace begins from within. That misses the whole point of it being a participatory process that involves the idea, the desire, the sharing, and the action. For example, I can say I want peace, but what does that really mean? Does it mean I have to sit cross-legged and dream inward and hope something leaks out and basically infects others? Or does it mean that I am an activist who seeks to promote peace as a part of my activism?

That is the path my friend took me down tonight and after a few hours of reading, of thinking, of talking about other things to other people, I think I can give him somewhat of an answer. But it won't be a short answer because it's not so easily explained. I can only give examples from myself and hope it makes enough sense to others so they will join me on the same path wearing their own shoes or no shoes or maybe just dragging along behind me. The possibility even exists they could be leading me somehow.

First of all, it does begin within. But the question one has to ask is what is the within? To me it includes the ability to laugh, to mock the absurd, to challenge the mean, to disabuse the intolerant, to speak up against the ingrained.

I have the perfect venue for doing all of that. I design t-shirts and other things with my world view on them. I make fun of and challenge racists. I promote tolerance while attacking intolerance. I point out the evils of war, organized religion, hate, and just plain old fashioned stupidity that is the real cause of much of the earth's many problems.

In all this I try and be myself, to be true to what I believe and am. That's always the hard part because we are social animals, no matter how much we try and claim we are not. I am no different that way. I prefer being liked instead of disliked. I love being loved. I want to be appreciated. I want to be accepted. I want to be part of the whole I dream about and try to create.

But at the same time I can't let myself be led by those wants and desires. I lose my integrity if I apologize for the parts of me that are controversial. How can I effectively argue for a secular world that doesn't bludgeon and kill people over religion if I am not upfront and unapologetic about my Atheism?

How can I speak up for civil liberties if I don't practice them myself by advocating for people's rights to control their own bodies? If I want to have abortions, smoke pot, marry someone gay, drink vodka for breakfast, and vote for politicians who respect those rights, it is my body and my business. But I have to be all those things sincerely or I will be just a well-meaning hypocrite.

If I want a better world with resources that will last so future generations can share in them as I have shared in them, then it becomes a social and spiritual obligation to speak up against things that damage the planet whether they are small acts of refusing to use things that will end up in a landfill, all the way to pointing out that treating your vagina like a clown car is not a matter of whether you can afford to breed like Duggars but instead is a matter of selfishly using up resources that belong to future generations.

It is the same with war. I can object to Iraq and Afghanistan the same way I objected to Vietnam but unless I do more than object, there will always be war because its existence does not depend on me. It depends on those who profit from it--the arms merchants, the pentagon procurers, the politicians who pretend it's about honor and not about campaign contributions from the war profiteers. In my teens I marched in the streets, I camped out at Federal Buildings, I helped my friends write the kind of essays that would allow them to file as Conscientious Objectors, to convince draft boards they were not fit to kill another human being. Now I write those words on t-shirts and spread the message all over the world.

But does it make any difference, does it change anything? Of course, because if I've learned one thing in my years on this planet it's that we need company to effect great change. Yes we can talk about single people who have made a difference but that is denying that we are not moles living in a pile of dirt waiting to be hosed out of our warm den. I am who I am because of others in my life, because of the examples I looked up to and also those I looked down on. You never know who's going to influence you until you get old enough to look backwards in time.

So yes, it all begins from within and spreads outward, but what varies is the all. That's how the path defines itself, by the all that we are. Once I realized this on more than an intellectual level, everything else just fell into place. I understand that we are all more than the messenger, more than the doer, more than the believer. We are the whole that moves as one with all our integrity and honor intact toward a goal that benefits everyone. In fact, the best goals are those that leave us out of the equation completely and allows us to do for others without the need for a reward, or a thank you, or anything but the knowledge that even a small step forward is progress if we do it sincerely.

And in all this I am reminded of one of the most interesting people I met in my life that of course I didn't fully appreciate until years after his death. He was my uncle's friend and died shortly after playing at his memorial service when he was in his 80's and blind. I don't know why he popped back up in my memory after all these years, but I suspect it's because I saw him then and I see him now as a man who truly lived his life as the man he was. Reading about him has been an entertaining process because everyone has a story, an opinion, a memory of the man as they perceived him, so I will share the googleness that exists around his name: http://tinyurl.com/ennio-bolognini and let you choose what you will to entertain and inspire you.

Inner Lunatic from Crazy Old Lady Of Peace Store
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Letter home from the Culture Wars

2009-11-30T14:53:00.000-08:00

Dear Friends, Family, Advertisers, and Whacked out Religious Morons:

After a couple years of wallowing in the stinking mud of your propaganda-fueled culture wars, I'm writing to let you know how sick and tired I am of this stupid war. Setting aside the absurdity of the strongest and most well armed sides (Christians) and their pimps and whores in the media claiming victimhood, I want to point out the obvious that has escaped most of your puny little pea-brains--there are other people in this world besides you selfish fucks.

There are Jews who do not go around claiming a war on Hannukah even though many of them have died throughout the centuries as a result of you claiming you had God on your side as you slaughtered them in your Crusades and in your death camps. There are no Hannukah displays in public buildings, in shopping malls, in schools, and on the media. There are no days off to "celebrate" their holidays the way there are multiple ones to celebrate yours. In fact, many Jews throughout the years have kindly offered to work on your holidays so you can spend time with your families. How many Christians have returned the favor by working on Jewish holidays so they can spend time with their families?

How many of you self-righteous smug assholes have even considered that other groups celebrate something other than your holidays? How many of you know anything about Kwanzaa, much less make room for it in your public displays of forced belief? Do you even care that it is about families spending time together as you define which days off others will be forced to accept so you can spend time with your own families? Do you even care that sanctioned and heavily advertised shopping days have overshadowed the reverence of this holiday for African-Americans because you are so selfish you can't see beyond your own religious beliefs and practices?

In the most stunning and horrible example from behind the lines of the culture wars, let me remind you of how you've lumped all of Islam into one convenient terror group you can persecute and punish for the crimes of the few. Do you even know or care that the Muslim New Year occurs in the month of December this year? Would you even allow a reminder or display of this holiday in the crowded mess that you call your own celebration, or are you so brainwashed by your media masters that you don't feel they have a right to what you claim is everyone's right to celebrate their spiritual, religious and cultural beliefs. My guess is that you'd probably raise holy hell if Muslims dared to put their display next to yours.

How typically Christian of you to ignore your history of religious violence because it conveniently interferes with your need to hate. How many Muslims did you kill in your Crusades? How many Jews did you kill in your need to forcefully spread your Christian faith to those who already had a religion but unfortunately it wasn't the one you practiced? How many of your white, Christian killers have you pretended didn't exist because it interfered with your twisted biblical bigotry? How many Timothy McVeighs are hiding in your closets just waiting to bomb another Federal Building to kill more innocent people for Jesus? How many Gays and Lesbians have you persecuted in your need to spread your sick version of Christian love and bigotry all across the globe?

Do you even care in your rampant bulldozing of other's beliefs that there are many Hindus, many Buddhists, many Pantheists, many Pagans, many others whose spiritual beliefs are just as valid as your own and worthy of the same respect you demand? How many of their holidays are you even aware exist? How many of you are willing to allow them to put their displays next to yours during the month of December?

And finally, how many of you so-called tolerant asshats are willing to allow a large portion of the world to not believe in any deity? How many Atheist displays would you be willing to allow alongside your mangers and Jesus trees? How many Festivus poles do you think belong on the same public property your private religious symbols increasingly occupy now?

Until other religious and non-religious beliefs have equal status in public buildings, paid days off, and other religion-centric celebrations, you need to shut the fuck up about this stupid and non-existent war on Christmas. The only war is the war against ignorance and so far your side is heavily represented on the ignorance front so acting like victims who are in danger of losing something only makes you look even more like the hypocrites you truly are in the eyes of the world. But if History is any example, you'll just go on a killing spree in the hope of wiping out everyone who doesn't interpret a bunch of words in a book through your own hateful filters. That's just so fucking godlike, isn't it? Jesus would be so proud.

Support War on Christmas by godless_heathen
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War On Xmas Veteran by godless_heathen
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On this moronic topic of hate

2009-11-22T19:17:00.000-08:00

So Cafepress decided to take down the assassination gear after all. I suppose I should be happy they came to their senses but instead I'm left with this gnawing suspicion that they crunched numbers, talked to lawyers, measured the cost of indignation, were appalled (and not totally understanding) why they were singled out for shame on TV and Zazzle was not, and then went with the bottom line that favored them, which is the way they make all their decisions. It would fit their "profile" as they've refined it over the last year. It would solidify their standing as just another corporate crap shop that cares only about money. Yeah, thanks guys, but you already revealed who you are and doing the decent thing came too late. As they used to tell us slutty girls who actually enjoyed sex as much as the boys back then, you can't get your reputation back.

I really wish that they and others would have immediately recognized it as the hate-fueled crap it was and taken it down immediately, or at least been the leader and kept it down once they made the decision like Zazzle did. But that would imply a decency and intelligence they, and a lot of people do not possess. There's times when we seem to have become a nation of poorly educated morons goosestepping to either the almighty dollar or some barely disguised hate group.

I don't know at what point a human being can say I've had enough of this crap and I'm going to start fighting back, but that pretty much sums up where I'm at right now. I've always tried to have a live and let live approach to life. But damn it, when crazyass hating jerks who use the Bible or whatever book they choose to wave in my face to justify hate, then I'm done letting live.

I'm not a violent person and I will never, unlike these hate groups, advocate violence, but I do have ways to make my voice heard. I use my art, my words, my helping others to fight back. Those are more effective and lasting ways to effect change. If you kill someone or piss them off then you haven't really done something that will create positive change. All you've done is create more enemies, more hate, more victims.

Yesterday two of those pure little Mormon converters made the mistake of knocking on my door. All I could see were representatives of a church who used money and power to deny citizens of another state the right to marry. I still remember when African-Americans were not allowed to hold positions of power in that church. And now I see that same bigotry directed toward gays and lesbians. How dare they come to my door and push that crap on me? How would they like it if I went to their doors and lectured them on Atheism?

I sent them on their way without too much verbal damage because it's not their fault they're ignorant of what their church really is, but with enough warning that coming back would not be a pleasant experience for them. It did leave me feeling as if religion is its own worst enemy, that politicized churches have created more Atheists than believers in the last few years.

Maybe there's a downward spiral they've sucked themselves into that has to happen, and right now the pool is just starting to whirl. Maybe some day history will look back on this time the same way they looked back on the fall of the Roman Empire, the end of Hitler, the disgrace of Nazism and Facism, the cruelty of tyrannical dictators.They will be able to point to certain people who were the propagandists who stirred up the ignorant with hatred and created enemies/scapegoats for these uneducated and mostly stupid rabble to rail against. There is no easier person to control than one who hates. They are truly the tool of any master who feeds them hateful crap.

This may seem like the most idealist nonsense you've ever read but I really do believe love and tolerance can defeat all that. As I said, you can control a hater with no problem, but a person who loves is fairly hard to turn into a missile of evil. Love is a power that only works for good and immediately recognizes when not good is threatening them.

I'm not talking about the kind of love that happens in relationships. That's a whole different kind of love, a sort of willful blindness that only hurts those who choose badly. I'm talking about the kind of love that most religions conveniently forgot were the basis of those precious books they're so fond of waving around. Maybe if people were required to actually read their bibles, their religous books, and not go on just the word of some unholy intermediary with an agenda to push, we might create that better world that religion promises so deceptively to its followers.

But in the meantime, it's up to us as individuals, as artists, as human beings to take over the message of hate and replace it with love. It's up to us to take the negative crap and replace it with positive goals. It's up to us to stand up to the haters, to call them on their hate and make as much noise over love as they do over hate. It's up to us to realize we do have the power to fight back against mean, against cruel, against hateful, against bigoted and intolerant.

We all have the means inside our hearts and it's time to start digging or the haters will win.

Hate is an STD by orsobear
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Peace Love Tolerance by orsobear
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Cafepress Approves Assassination Gear

2009-11-19T15:23:00.000-08:00

For those of you who have been following the not so thinly veiled threat from Religious Reichists to hide behind the bible while advocating Obama's assassination, please be informed that Cafepress has reversed its decision to not carry these products. Today they informed the writer of this diary on the Daily Kos that they will continue to carry merchandise advocating the assassination of President Obama.

There is only one sane response to their putting short term profits over long term decency and that is to quit supporting them. Do not buy their products. Many of us who have sold our designs through them have moved most of our businesses to their competitors such as Zazzle, Printfection, Skreened and many others due to the shabby way they treat their designers. These are not nice people and this latest move proves it. And it shows a profound ignorance and lack of caring that there are options out there for people who shop from ethical merchants. If you happen upon their site and see a design you like, be aware it will most likely be available at one of the three links listed above as many of us have moved our designs there. You have a choice these days on where to spend your money for the same products.

Many people have contacted the FBI, Secret Service, and the ISP's hosting the assassination sites. Others have contacted companies who have shops on Cafepress and asked them to reconsider offering their merchandise for sale there when there are more ethical options. And others have vowed to boycott Cafepress and anyone who does business with them.

However you choose to respond to this atrocity is up to you, but keep in mind a very simple truth: if throughout history people had the courage to speak up and say this is wrong and we won't support it, how many bad things would have not happened that did? Advocating the assassination of a President is not acceptable, no matter how much money can be made from it. In the end, it will cost them more than they gained and that will be the fair response.

Be The Change Flame by Crazy Old Lady Of Peace

Let's Kill The President For Jesus

2009-11-18T16:27:00.000-08:00

People ask me all the time what made me decide to become an Atheist and more and more lately I point to stories like this that call for the assassination of Obama, as proof of what religion does to the human brain. It is hatred and bigotry shrouded in biblical language. It is the new face of the Republican party, encouraged and abetted by their unholy mouthpieces on hate radio and propaganda disguised as news. It is what happens when you suspend rational thought and let those with an agenda based on murder, intolerance, hatred, and bigotry take over your brain. And it points out the sheer hypocrisy of those who fear putting the 9/11 terrorists on trial in the US will expose the American people to danger because what these tools of the right wing extremists demonstrate, it's people like them who are the true terrorists. Without the easily manipulated, hateful, and completely stupid rabble, no dictator, no terrorist regime ever has a chance of getting their agenda off the ground. It takes teabaggers, birthers, evangelical crazies, and fundamentalist whackos to get that done for them. Congratulations, Republicans. You've officially become the new face of terrorism.

One People by orsobear
Store For Atheists The Godless Heathen

No, I will NOT tone down my Atheism

2009-10-25T19:20:00.000-07:00

You can always tell who the rational people are; they're the ones politely and silently letting others froth at the mouth over whose imaginary friend reigns supreme. They're quietly fuming and shaking their tolerant little heads as the frothers gear up for their annual whine fest over the stupidly perceived War On Christmas. This whine fest is not rooted in anything real or reasonable, but because not every television channel is wall to wall Christian crap, and not every mall is playing Christmas music in July, and there are still a whole lot of people in the world who believe something different, or (gasp!) don't believe anything at all. And they won't stop whining until they take over the minds, bodies, schools, media, and countries of those who dare to think for themselves.

Check out how the early warm-up for the holiday whinefest begins in some parts of the country:

"Church leaders deem Good News for Modern Man, the Evidence Bible, the New International Version Bible, the Green Bible and the Message Bible, as well as at least seven other versions of the Bible as "Satan's Bibles," according to the website. Attendees will also set fire to "Satan's popular books" such as the work of "heretics" including the Pope, Mother Teresa, Billy Graham and Rick Warren." read more

It's because of them that I refuse to be polite anymore. I'm not ashamed of my Atheism and therefore I refuse to keep silent about it. I will also actively continue to point out the dangers of uni-beliefs and the demand of religious cultists to follow their absurd ideology as the expense of our civil liberties.

Hate From The Pulpit by godless_heathen

I will continue to speak out against Religious Extremism because it tramples on the equal rights of others. If marriage was truly something that took place only in a church, then I'd say fine, work it out among your members. But we all know that marriage becomes legal when you sign that piece of government paper and hand over your check. At that point all marriages become civil unions. By denying one group rights afforded to another, the government discriminates against its own citizens. And by allowing churches to enforce their specific religoius views on others, it promotes discrimination against its own citizens.

Churches are the primary funders against same-sex marriage. read more

I will continue to speak out against the violent warmakers hiding behind religion. I've been an active, non-violent Pacifist since the first time I took to the streets in my teens to protest against the Vietnam war. I have studied war as one studies the opposition and what I have found over the years are the bloody hands of churches either funding or manipulating warmaking.

"Many wars that are not religious wars often still include elements of religion, such as priests blessing battleships. Differences in religion can further inflame a war being fought for other reasons. Historically, temples have been destroyed to weaken the morale of the opponent, even when the war itself is not being waged over religious ideals." read more

Atheist Star by godless_heathen

I am proud of my Atheism. It is proof that I can reason, that I can think independently and that my mind is not owned by anyone except myself. And I will adamantly defend my right to not believe as strongly as others defend their right to believe. If we truly are no different, then why should one of us be shamed into silence? Is it because we are afraid there's not enough of us? If so, then more thought should be given into exactly what FREETHINKER really means because I don't need anyone else to reinforce what I think if it truly comes from me. Atheism is not a belief system, it is not a church, it is not a cult. You can't refuse to believe in something that does not exist. Therefore, it is not that I don't believe in your god. It's that I see nothing there to either believe in or against.

However, I make the distinction between belief and religion. Religions are cults as they meet all the definitions associated with cults. There's a list of things you must believe or suffer in some way for not believing. There is social and eternal damnation for stepping outside the belief structure. And there is an isolation from forced belief with nothing to challenge or vary that belief that turns religious cults into dangerous entities that threaten not only their own members, but anyone who dares to challenge their authority.

"Parents' involvement in cults can literally destroy a family. Individuals in cults do things willingly under the influence of mind control which they previously may have detested, for the sake of the group's "higher purposes." Reports of members of diverse cults committing illegal and reprehensible activities are widespread. Child abuse in cults is common, and children are often cults' most devastating casualties." read more

If we learned anything from 9/11 it's that religious extremism is a very bad thing. And yet we failed to notice that we live among religious extremists. We neglected to admit this to ourselves, to educate others about their presence, and to go after our own Christian Talibanists the way we go after anyone who even looks like an Arab. After all, it was a white, racist, Christian extremist who parked a fertilizer truck bomb and blew up the Alfred P. Murrah Building

"FACTNet has a duty to educate on the dangers of cults in general, mind control and religious fundamentalism wherever there is potential for harm. History has repeatedly and conclusively proven that nowhere is there greater potential for harm then when destructive cultic behavior and religious fundamentalism become part of government behavior. The information and links below are not intended to single out any particular government or political party, but are provided so you may formulate your own opinions about the real and potential dangers being discussed." read more

It is for these reasons and more that I will continue to be very vocal, very annoying, and continue to turn out designs that promote Science and rational thought.

Science Works Bitches by godless_heathen

But as much as I feel I have the right to think freely and according to my own set of ethics and education, I will not succumb to the error most religious loonies resort to--the loss of my sense of humor. Yes, I will continue to make designs that mock religious crazies, that educate others to the fact that Atheists are not evil satanists, and that can find humor in just about anything. I will not become dour and I will have enjoy life at the expense of silly beliefs. But I will continue to fight against the ones who threaten others because they believe differently. Those I do not find funny at all.

Holy Orgasm Temple by godless_heathen

To a remarkable woman

2009-10-10T16:24:00.000-07:00

A couple times a week I receive emails about a blog entry or two. But a couple years or so ago I received an email from a woman who was just diagnosed with breast cancer. She didn't know me and I didn't know her.

I still don't know why she selected me to write to. I'm not exactly approachable. I am a very private person in real life and I protect that privacy very carefully. Most of the people I know don't even know I have a blog and if they do it doesn't interest them enough to read it, therefore I feel safe using a neutral version of my name and writing whatever I want. There's a strange sort of anonymity in being out front with yourself. My words rarely make people want to bond with me other than on an intellectual level.

But in real life things are different. I am not my words. I am a fairly ordinary person who lives quietly and simply. I don't have a whole lot of friends because I don't have the kind of social skills that allow me to blatantly lie and pretend I'm someone I'm not to people who don't really care about me as a person anyway. I also have an innate sense that allows me to detect scammers, insincere people, and the terminally stupid. I don't even try with them. I just disappear from their lives and ignore them when they try to enter mine. It's no great loss on either side.

Nothing went off when I read her email except that I was moved by her situation and felt compelled to reply. There was a raw honesty to it that I appreciated, especially in a world where little white lies take the place of honest interaction. Of course, my first question was why me? Didn't she have friends or family?

Her response disturbed me until I did some research and discovered that it was fairly common for those facing death to isolate themselves from their loved ones. She was in the process of doing this but she didn't want to die alone and without, as she said, being heard about things she couldn't explain to others. She knew that no matter how hard she fought, her days were numbered and she wanted to clear some things up in herself before she died. She liked what I wrote and felt I wasn't subject to other people's opinions, that I didn't allow others to beat me down into a version of me that was socially acceptable to them. I liked that she saw all this and didn't run away or exclude me or banish me or trash me as a result, so I agreed to be her pen pal. I realized I needed her too.

This is some of what I learned from her in the time we communicated. Like me, she grew up poor. And like me this poverty was the result of circumstances inflicted on the family by one or both parents. Her mother drank and when she was drunk she would lose whatever job she had or she would drink her paycheck. My father gambled everything away the moment he got it. It was an illness with him, and when you combined it with an intense hatred of women, well..let's just say we had a lot of similar childhood traumas.

We wrote a lot to each other about the hurts we suffered growing up. I was fortunate to have good teeth most of my life but she wasn't. I remember an heartbreaking email she wrote me about the chemo destroying her teeth and how she couldn't afford to go to a dentist so she never went out anymore except to the doctor. This was on top of memories where she was teased in school because her teeth were crooked. All her friends, as did mine, wore braces as teens. They were out of reach for us financially as were new clothes, the latest fashion trend, even a pair of shoes that didn't draw smirks and taunts from our classmates.

I thought I didn't suffer over it as she did but I learned a lot about how things like being teased for crooked teeth shape your concept of self. I learned that maybe I did suffer because I wasn't pretty enough, that some didn't accept me because I didn't look like them, or made fun of me behind my back because my family spoke with accents, or we were homeless some of the time. You really don't get over that stuff easily. I was just never able to admit it to anyone but her.

We both shared a passion for peace, often to the point where we alienated those who were wrapped up in some sorry excuse for patriotism, or they simply got tired of our one note song. It didn't matter to us any more than it mattered when others excluded us from their cliques because we weren't like them. Peace was something worth fighting for, writing about, preaching about. If not us, then who? We knew silence on issues like unjust wars just created an environment that allowed unjust wars to continue. We could not remain silent and yes, we suffered over this, but some pain is worth feeling. Both of us could not have lived with ourselves if we ignored our own voices.

But we knew there were selfish people in the world, the spoiled and pampered pooches who exaggerated their own minor sufferings just to get some attention. We knew that issues such as peace and equality and trying to make a better world were threats against their own needs for attention. We exchanged stories about the most outlandishly selfish people we knew.

I shared with her the time a few years ago when Jeff was diagnosed with a brain tumor and one of our neighbors who let her livestock run around unattended and disturb the peace of everyone around her as she played hippie farmer, ignored his need for the sleep, peace and quiet he needed to heal. We begged her to do something to take care of the problem but her response was that it didn't bother her so she didn't feel any need to do anything, and then a few days later when Jeff was facing a second surgery, she went whining at the top of her lungs to her neighbor across the street about her friend having brain cancer. It was one of those WTF moments I never understood, even years later until my pen pal explained it to me. "She has an awesome need for attention, it sounds like and she'll get it wherever she can. It's why I isolated myself. People love to flock around the dying so they can get sympathy for themselves."

Of course she was right. I saw it then as I saw a lot of what she pointed out to me. She helped me through the pruning of people like that from my life. "They just drain you, Kate, with their need for attention. Dump them before they eat you alive because they don't care about you at all." She told me this was the wisdom of the dying, to see the excess and reduce life down to what is essential for day to day survival.

I owe her for this. I will always owe her for this as I am much happier with the friends I kept. I don't feel as beat up or used anymore. She gave me that wholeness and it has helped me heal a lot of crap in my life.

She also helped me become less of a victim to others, because as she pointed out, those of us who are excluded and ridiculed in school, in the workplace, on mailing lists, on social networks, soon develop a victim complex. "Once you give in to this, then it's like sharks smelling blood in the water," she wrote. "They'll use you to pay back anyone who ever did anything to them. They got left out of a clique in high school, they'll make sure they exclude you from their clique in adulthood."

Yes, that happened to me I admitted, reluctantly because I felt a sense of shame over not being liked, as if it was my fault somehow. She taught me it was not my fault, that it was something defective in others when they felt a need to judge, to exclude, to treat others as personal doormats for things done to them by others. "One person is as good as another to them. Get out of their way and let them move on to someone else. We're all interchangeable to people like that."

We wrote a lot about love, about what it means to accept someone flaws and all. We agreed there are no perfect people, but that doesn't mean we had to let ourselves be abused by those who were both imperfect and mean.

About six months after we had been writing to each other she got involved in an abusive relationship. It went bad after a month and it left her terrified and drained. She asked me for help. We lived too far away from each other for me to gather up some big old dudes and go pay her boyfriend a vist, so I got some virtual help. At the time I was on a discussion list and I asked the women on there for donations to help her get out of the abusive situation she was in. They came through as only women can and the money they donated helped her get away and spend her final days without worrying about being beat up for crying.

I remember the day she emailed me from her one room studio apartment that let her feel safe for the first time in many years. I cried and cried for her that day, for all women who find the courage and the means to leave. My mother never did and we all suffered for it. My pen pal became a symbol of hope for all women the day she walked out that door. I wanted so much to hug her but had to satisfy myself with sending her a bouquet of flowers I couldn't really afford but needed to send anyway.

In the last month she wrote less and I could tell she was having a difficult time. Social services provided a caretaker for her so she wouldn't die alone on the floor trying to reach the phone, which was her greatest fear. "I want to be alone but I don't want to die alone and helpless," she wrote me in one of her final emails.

I didn't hear from her all last week and I knew then she was gone. This morning there was a bulk email from one of her relatives who didn't identify his relationship to her. It said simply that she died yesterday and her mail account would be closed in a few days. There would be no services.

And with that, it was over. I knew she had suffered a lot in the last couple months, that even the pain medicine didn't help. I knew she was ready for it to be over and in my heart I have to find a way to let her go peacefully. But today I miss her. Today I have all kinds of unfinished words to say to her, but I will leave it at two: thank you.

Breast Cancer Panda Bear by orsobear
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Crazy Old Lady Of Peace: Tattered Peace Flag: Zazzle.com Store

2009-10-09T13:36:00.001-07:00

Tattered Peace Flag by orsobear
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Obama and the Peace prize

2009-10-09T13:31:00.001-07:00

True to their reputation as moronic and poorly educated juveniles, the GOP and their goose-stepping mouthpieces are attacking Obama's winning the Peace prize. They truly don't understand how they are the tools of the weapon manufacturers and corporate warmongering Fascism admirers.

I shouldn't be surprised considering their behavior over the last few months-- things like the Teabaggers fighting for the right of insurance companies to screw them out of affordable health care, the spewing of hateful racist rhetoric that belongs under a KKK hooded sheet, the blatant sexism that attacks Speaker Pelosi with 1950's era little woman terminology, and the outright advocacy of violence against anyone who disagrees with them.

These are the actions of petty tyrants and their easily manipulated minions. It is why Obama was awarded the Peace prize. The Nobel committee understood the biggest fight Obama faces is not the Taliban, not terrorism, not two wars dumped on him by the perpetual failures of George Bush, but from the violence-fueled ignorance within his own country.

It is time to call these attacks what they are: treason. They are advocating the violent overthrow of a sitting President. There are people currently serving jail and prison terms for daring to make anti-Bush comments during his administration. Those dark age inspired eight years of Goposaur rule consisted of rhetoric associating anyone who disagreed with Bush, with the war, with corporate greed with terrorism.

And it is time to call these attacks on President Obama what they truly are: racism in all its ugliness. If the Birthers are so sure their obsession with Obama's birth certificate has any validity, then let them demand with equal fervor that of John McCain, or for that matter, produce their own.

Let the talking heads who spew their hatred back up their claims that Obama is a Socialist-Communist-Nazi by actually reading History and discovering what those words really mean and the number of people who died under those regimes.

Let the paid shills on the news prove they are not getting money from corporate funds to shove lies down the American people's throats.

And let the media prove they are not bedded down with the worst tyrants, the most ignorant and hateful band of thugs to ever try and usurp the will of the people.

Until then they should shut the fuck up and understand that those of us who voted for Obama voted against them and their hateful propaganda.

Sane people want peace and those who attack Obama for trying to bring the world together just reveal the sickness deep in their own souls.

They also need to accept that Obama was awarded the Peace prize because of them and if they want to whine about it, then maybe they should take a good look at themselves and see how they were responsible for him winning it.

The craziness of life

2009-10-08T23:32:00.001-07:00

To those seeking the meaning of life: I'm more convinced than ever that people make it up as they go along.

With a lot of help from my friends...

2009-08-30T21:56:00.001-07:00

This has been an interesting month, if one considers "interesting" to be a sort of catch-all understatement describing a sudden upheaval and reorganization of everything mundane and routine about life. It has also been a month of learning and re-learning to let go of cherished and often useful handicaps that belong to the past.

Part of letting go was learning to believe it was possible for me to actualize desires and see dreams as possibilities instead of wistful fantasies, and being reminded that part of achieving dreams, a big part of it, was the support and love of my friends. I'd still be dreaming instead of getting ready to move into the first phase of a multi-part dream that begins with me leaving Bellingham at last, if it wasn't for the cherished handful of true friends I've managed to gather together.

They remind me all this began when I became disillusioned with the larger community of people I'd known and lived with for many years. I grew up in tourist towns--Las Vegas, Lake Tahoe, Palm Springs--places that were regularily cleansed of stagnation and festering wounds by the influx of new blood and ideas. While it's true many of those agents of change were not residents and were only there for a day, a week, maybe a few weeks a year, when you multiplied them by the thousands, you had a constant infusion of novelty, of creative and entertaining amusement.

Life in a small town like Bellingham and within an even smaller community inside it was a cultural shock for me. Although I previously lived inside a smaller community in the ultimate tourist town--Las Vegas, there was always an infusion of new energy, new immigrants, new people to integrate into our already existing community. Any gathering was certain to include people of color and different cultures, many who worked in various parts of the tourist industry. Musicians were all different from each other. Chefs in the strip hotels came from all over the world. The levels of education varied and we were as likely to dine with PhD's as we were with high school drop-outs. Everyone had their story and it was our entertainment, education, and delight to hear them all.

Of course, gossip was part of it. We all talked about the new people in the community, who they were, what they did, where they came from, who helped them immigrate, what brought them to America and especially to Las Vegas. We learned about the world and each other and it kept us from becoming too isolated, too insulated, too inbred to consider any reality but our own. We knew too many realities to obsess on just one or two.

That is why it was such a cultural shock to move to Bellingham. I was used to everything being open 24 hours instead of closing up and shutting down by 10pm. I was used to going out for dinner, a show, a drink or a hike. No one in Bellingham ever seemed to leave their homes. It was as if they were afraid to venture beyond the safety of their isolated little domains. The idea of going out for a beer or a play was so foreign to most of them I might as well have suggested a drunken brawl at the local pool hall.

And they were all so white. I have never in my life seen such a collection of white people with so little to balance out their whiteness. Once a year at their homage to diversity they turn out in pale hordes with a couple black folks, the same black folks every year now, that help them prove how diverse they are. Or they'll talk about their college student trips to central and south America and show off a native they brought back as some sort of demented souvenir.

It was worse in the smaller community that became my cultural prison for the last couple decades. Not only was everyone white, but they were white and upper middle class with trust funds and the idea of work as something that was either good work or bad work, depending on whether you worked at a place like Squall-Mart (BAD!) or as an underpaid intern at an environmentally hip store or business (GOOD!) I learned that those who judged you the most for your choice of employment had a steady stream of dead and dying relatives who insured they'd never ever have to work to merely survive. It's no wonder many of them were god-awful bags of meat who leeched off of and used everyone they could to avoid actually working for a living. They're the kind of people who took off to some peasant village with Grandpa's money and stuck you with their share of the massive phone bill they ran up that forced you to live on beans for the next month. They loved to talk about the whole global village concept while they were oblivious that the working class among them were the ones stuck paying the rent on that village.

It took me a few years but I finally realized no matter how much they read or traveled, they were small selfish minds in a small selfish town. They never talked about anything but each other. And those conversations were a sight to behold. Like the old improv game of Telephone, each telling of the rumor or story became infused with personal biases, unresolved issues, mean-spirited nastiness, and by the time it was let loose as fact in a community of bored and useless people, it had so little resemblance to truth that it might as well have been the well-thumbed pages of a trashy tabloid. But they swallowed it all hungrily because there was nothing else to entertain them.

I tried to escape and bought a house out in the larger pool of the city and left the small pond dwellers to feed on each other and play who's the scapegoat this week. They were too dumb to see that once you start eating each other, there's nothing left but scraps to form the pathetic dream of community. I suspect they go hungry a lot. Their only hope is the new crop of students that come in every year and they use them up and then the cycle begins again. It's sad to watch from a distance and lethal to watch from within the pit of the communal trough.

I had some very deep wounds inflicted by people who didn't realize how much their idiot games hurt others, but the final cut for me was how they interfered in and destroyed the marriages of more than one friend. They never understood my disgust at them for interfering in other people's lives to satisfy their own boredom, or their hunger to create some terrible story out of nothing just because they had so little else to amuse them. They slept with each other with as much consciousness as a dog scratching its ass. There was no love, no desire, just a simple and superficial need to escape the tedium of their lives.

People who had no business in my friends's marriages made it their business by finding nasty things to say about mostly the men, the kinds of things people divorcing say about each other and no one who is adult enough to understand ever takes seriously. But they did. It was fodder for their own issues and they didn't care who it hurt or what it destroyed. It was selfish, mean and so totally predictable when you considered the mess of their own lives. Anything that happened was turned around until it was all about them, all about their own need for constant attention.

My friends became every man who hurt them just because they were men. And the women became victims whose strength was stripped so the community vultures could have them yet another opportunity to make it all about them and not the people actually divorcing each other. They cared nothing about the people involved other than as yet another way to make it all about them. Facts, as was usual with this group, were inconvenient messes to step gingerly around and forget as was anything that didn't fit their personal world view of things. They were oh so special and everyone else didn't matter except as a means to give them what they wanted, which always seemed like a bottomless pit others were expected to fill.

So I withdrew even more and healed and pruned my friendships down to a handful of people who grew up working for a living and whose relatives left them nothing but debts. I knew I could trust them not to stab me in the back because they were too busy earning a living to engage in such games. In spite of all my years trying to find an honest person who grew up in a privileged lifestyle, I've yet to find anyone but the children of the working class who truly understood friendship. Maybe it's because we grew up with so little that friendship came to mean everything to us. To the other kind of person it's just another commodity to use and abuse to get what they want. Money and things come first and for someone like me, that was just unacceptable and wrong. I'd have to cut out my heart to live that way.

After the divorce fiascos, I began to look for a way to cut all ties to the meanest of the mean. I was also tired of Bellingham, tired of all the white people, all the predictable battles between the two religious dogmatists in town: the fundie whackos and the politically correct. I was tired of hippies whose outfits to look appropriately counterculture cost more than my rent. I was tired of meth heads who circled my house every time I went to the store or on some other errand. I was tired of the same mean people on the street, shoving their way through the grocery stores, calling into the radio shows and writing the same letters to the editor over and over again. Bellingham became an old-fashioned vinyl record that was stuck in the same groove and couldn't get out.

I began to look for another tourist town and found Birch Bay. Yes, it's small and inbred. Yes, it probably thrives on gossip and their version of the telephone games. Yes, it's a lot of retired folk and people like me who earn most of our income from the internet and don't have to go to a job and so can live just about anywhere. But it has tourists and as my friend Sally says, that's like a great big flush that washes away the stagnant shit. Those tourists introduce novelty, a new energy, color and accents to what would otherwise be just another white person's gated and isolated compound. I wanted to live there the moment I smelled the saltwater.

But the month I chose to do this, August, was my leanest month as far as pay. It was the month where I was genuninely poor and the recession didn't help matters any nor did Cafepress's mass screwing of its shopkeepers. It has always been the month I had to stretch a little money to go an impossibly long way. People don't buy t-shirts in August unless they get them from a street vendor in the vacation spots they're camped out in for most of the month. People don't buy presents because there's no major holidays in August that require gifts.

But dreams don't come true at convenient times. I found the house I wanted three blocks from the beach in a residential area with big trees. I couldn't afford it. I couldn't afford the deposits, the money to transfer all the utilities, the place to live until the house I wanted became open on September first. So I asked for help from my friends, the ones I kept, the ones who knew what it was like to want and not be able to afford it without help. Yes, next month I could have moved easier and the month after that easily. But the house would have been gone, the dream would have been postponed, and I'd still be living in Bellingham wishing I lived somewhere else.

And I needed to prove something to myself, the oldest child who sucks at receiving but would give away everything she owned if someone really needed it: poor people are the biggest givers. We give the largest percentage of our incomes to charity. We give our pocket change to the homeless. We feed the hungry. Without us there'd be mostly people taking from each other to satisfy their myths of entitlement. I was not disappointed. My friends came through for me in ways that far too many of the privileged class would ever understand. It's their loss to not know this side of human beings. More people like this would make a much nicer and better world.

And now it's almost time to move in. I've been packed and ready for a month. I know I'll need my friends' help in moving because I have no way to do it without them. But they will help me again because they are my friends and I'd do the same for them. We know this about each other which is why I can ask them for help. They know and I know that I will spend the next year paying them back. It will be easy to do because I'll be living in a place where paying someone back is as simple as inviting them to dinner, as simple as taking them for a walk on the beach, as simple as taking them out for a drink, as simple as giving instead of taking,and as necessary as breathing because without that return, that reciprocity, the dreams and the friendships become meaningless. I've already had enough years of those kind of friends It's time to enjoy the real human beings in my life. We've earned each other.

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Creating Homeless in Bellingham, Washington

2009-07-29T16:40:00.000-07:00

If you're a homeowner trying to rent out your home and have a property management company acting as your potential tenant screener, you need to read this--especially if your property is still sitting empty after several months. But first a little history based on my experience of living in this town for 30 years.

When I first moved here to attend Graduate school at Western Washington University, I found a place to rent with no problem. I handed them first month's rent, had the utilities changed over to my name, and we had a comfortable relationship of tenant/landlord for the next year. It was the way you rented a place to live. And I happened to hit town in a year where there were a lot of empty rentals and a bunch of anxious landlords.

Things started to change shortly after that. Bellingham is one of those boom and bust towns. If you read up on its history you will see that the speculators come in, buy up the cheap housing, sell it at a profit, leave and wait for the next bust cycle before rinsing and repeating. The ones who get screwed are the ones who bought on the way up and are left holding a drastically devalued property when the housing market starts to bottom out again. Or the ones who need a reasonably priced place to rent.

During the boom years housing is at a premium. Because most of the properties are owned by out of town speculators, or even in town speculators, the property management companies provide the services required to collect the rent, maintain the property, deal with repairs, etc. For this they tack on fees that are either picked up by the renter or the homeowner. Until recently this was a good arrangement as it allowed those who bought homes as an investment to go on with their lives and not have to deal with being a landlord. But this has all changed with the collapse of the housing market and real estate agents and brokers needing to make up lost income.

Enter the new and improved property management companies. They look just like the old ones but they are staffed with desperate real estate "professionals" who are grabbing every dime they can just to survive. In order to even look at a house you have to pay upfront fees that range from 50-75 dollars per couple just for the background check. Then there's the credit check, the processing fees, the application fees, the fees upon fees. By the time you write a check, you're over a hundred dollars and pushing two hundred dollars.

Now here's the fun part. You pay those fees and there's no guarantee you'll get the place. And on top of that, the fees are non-refundable if you're turned down. In an economy where the bankruptcy rate has increased 58 percent (read more), the odds of most people looking for a place getting turned down because of bad credit is nearly 100 percent. I'm not talking about criminals here. I'm talking about good, decent people with boring ordinary lives who have never been arrested for anything and until the last year, had perfect credit ratings. Many are downsizing and trying to start over but as they're learning, it won't happen in Whatcom county unless they want to live on the street.

Now let's look at it from the property management company's perspective. They can collect fees from 10, 15, 20 people before they find someone who fits all the criteria of no arrests and perfect credit. In a town like Bellingham, that can take a long time, months even. In the meantime, the homeowner is told it's the economy, no one is renting, maybe next month, we're only looking out for you, etc etc etc as they charge them huge advertising costs for posting free ads on Craig's List and keep pocketing those big application fees.

So the houses eventually go into foreclosure because the owners can't find a renter to help with the mortgage payments. When I was looking I talked to a woman who was trying to rent her very nice place. It was beyond my price range but not at all unreasonable for how nice her house was. She was there changing the curtains in the window because the property management company told her the reason her house wasn't renting was because the curtains made it look cheap. Seriously. That's what they told her. She's been trying to rent it for over six months. She pays the property company every month. They collect fees from dozens of applicants. You do the math.

Then there's the growing problem that results from this kind of desperate greed. In the last few months since the economy really started to tank in Bellingham, there's more property companies in charge of renting out what used to be the lower cost housing, the cheap apartments in bad neighborhoods. Face it guys, no one who moves to one of these places has the kind of credit record demanded of them. They barely have the ink dry on their release from their latest arrest. And yet, even decent people who have had a run of bad luck can't qualify for these dumps! But the property management companies still collect fees from them, and then tell them no.

Check out the parking lots of places like K-mart, Wal-mart, the abandoned big box store parking lots that went broke. Mixed in with the alcholics and drug addicts in their beater cars and campers, you'll see a new breed of "tenant," older senior citizens who lost everything, middle-class working people who are forced to live in their cars, young people who haven't established enough credit to qualify for housing on their own.

Yes, both landlords and property management companies can cite numerous examples of being ripped off by bad tenants, but many decent people can also cite numerous examples of being ripped off by these property management companies. People who work hard, deserve more than being treated like the scum of the earth just because they had to declare bankruptcy or were late on their bills or don't make enough to pass the required "rent can't be more than 40 percent of your income" rule the companies demand. How many of you reading this can pass that one, no matter what your credit is? How many of you reading this can qualify to rent a place to live in Whatcom County? Probably very few of you and of those, you can bet the companies will collect on a whole lot of people before they say yes to you.

In the meantime, homeowners who have had their houses on the rental market now need to sit down and have a serious talk with their property management companies. Make them give you the applications of everyone who applied. Send friends in to apply so you know they are being honest with you. One of my friends who spent 8 months trying to find a tenant finally fired the property management company and put a for rent sign on her lawn. She got swarms of people trying to rent her place and settled on a grateful young family who have faithfully paid the rent on time for the last five months and keep her house immaculate. She's delighted with them and they with her. And they were turned down by every property management company in town because their business went bankrupt and so they were considered not worthy of a home.

And another note for those trying to rent their home or apartment. Check out the ads on Craig's List. When you see your home listed there, keep in mind that it's free to list it. If you're being charged advertising costs, there's a good chance the places it's being advertised don't cost the company anything. But I'll bet you're paying a premium for the listing.

For those of you who have been jacked around by these companies, it's time to sit down, write your story and send it off to your congressional rep and ask them to support legislation that would create some rules to prevent these property management companies from their money grabs. Yes, the real estate market is down for everyone guys, but when you see a property management company pop up overnight that is made up of nothing but unemployed and desperate real estate agents, the odds of finding a place to live go way down while their collection of money for nothing goes way up.

property managment companies, Belliingham, Washington state, Whatcom County, bankruptcy, credit rating, renting a house, apartment rental, landmark property managment, bayview property managment, windermere realty, chuckanut property managment, real estate

The Unbearable Existence of Optimism

2009-07-23T02:19:00.000-07:00

I woke up this year with the overwhelming urge to do something different with my life, to move forward from what had become a comfortable and secure rut. I didn't know what manifestation this desire would take, but my experience is that important changes happen without too much thinking because our brain is a brake on the kind of things we need to do but don't. So I haven't thought about the important things in my life too much. I've just done them and saved the nitpicking and endless analysis for the intellectual mindfucks of my existence.

But I've been noticing this leaves many of my friends feeling unsettled as if my foundation was holding up their houses. It never was; I'm just really good at letting people use some of the blocks until they can get by on their own. It's only natural they would assume, after a long period of time living on my blocks, that they were somehow THEIR blocks.

So it's understandable that they come over to my house and see boxes piled to the ceiling, but not that many boxes considering how much stuff we had and how much we gave way, recycled, donated. It's about half of what we had...at least. Part of the change is getting rid of a whole lot of stuff. I was horrified to find we'd been hauling stuff around for twenty years that wasn't even ours. I shredded a whole folder of someone's term papers for a Psychology class. I don't remember them. I'm not even sure I knew them or how I came to have a box of their decades old discarded and forgotten crap.

But I digress over the horrors of packing and pruning. Back to my friends. The conversation goes this way: "Are you guys moving?" Yes. "Where?" Don't know yet.

It disturbs them because neither of us seem overly concerned about this uncertainty. Of course we have days when we wonder what we're doing and yeah I feel stressed out and wanting a place to land, but it's more of method rather than reason. What others don't see is the process of dealing with yourself that goes on in both mine and Jeff's lives. We get comfortable too easily so we have to sneak up on ourselves and say boo! Time to do something different. How about moving?

So, we move. It's how we ended up in Bellingham. I wanted out of Las Vegas. I hate hot weather and I was living in a place where summer meant 115 degree days of lung-searing heat for the summer months. I wanted seaons. I wanted to not sneeze and miss Spring. I wanted wildflowers that didn't die within hours of birth from the arid and harsh environment. I wanted gentleness of wind and sky and the smell of saltwater.

The easiest way was to graduate from college, send out some apps to grad school and see who bit. I was okay with any bite and didn't care which one got dragged up on the shore and into my cookpot of change.

It turned out they all bit so I got a map and picked the one farthest away from Las Vegas. I'd fallen in love with the Pacific Northwest on a month-long camping trip to Canada and Jeff was born in Seattle. I remember him coming home from class and showing him the letter of acceptance and the teaching assistantship. It was a guaranteed job for a year and it was motivation enough to move. His response was he didn't have anything else going on in his life so sure, he'd go check out his birthplace for a while.

So we moved. And moved again. And then again. And then yet again. And finally again to the present. We never left town, but we did live in every part of it. Total immersion is the only way to truly know where and what you are sometimes.

One day we found ourselves owning a house together and the restlessness started to build. I'd spent a lifetime being anti-thing, anti-ownership, anti-materialism. I wanted simplicity in living and in those I lived with and around. I'm too complex to want that complexity all around me. I prefer to keep it chained for my own amusement.

So the restlessness won. We sold the house. We decided it was time to explore the outer environs of where we live. We're still trying to decide. We've looked at a lot of places. Some days we think we want saltwater. Other days we think we want to wake up smelling the trees. We will decide this week. We have to as we know how we are and how easy it is to become comfortable, so we set a deadline of August first as the day we'd be ready to hand over the house. If we didn't, we'd still be packing and trying to decide where to live. Dates are our cattle prods.

We will leave Bellingham the same way we arrived, on impulse but with just the barest amount of money to live on and a whole lot of hope that the universe will provide more. But since we're both the oldest child with several siblings from poor working class families, we know nothing is given to us and so we're prepared to work as hard as we do now to help the universe in its providing. Sure, we fantasize about waking up one day and finding out we have some rich uncle who leaves us something instead of crazed relations who go out leaving us nothing but a pile of debts, but the reality is the only wealth we have is this never-ending source of optimism that life will turn out just fine, even if you have to struggle to get there. Struggling has never been a problem for us, but complacency has been a killer and now we recognize it when it tries to sneak up on us. This time we're going to be a step ahead of it.

Click on shirt to purchase of visit the Crazy Old Lady of Peace's shop. for many other designs like this.

change, optimism, lifestyle change, simplicity, bellingham, washington state, las vegas, seattle, zazzle

My Name Is James Tillich

2009-07-19T01:21:00.000-07:00

The world is overflowing with serious people. Most of them have reason to be serious. I even have occasional reason to be serious. But nothing singular should ever be selected as a lifestyle choice as there are options available for a reason. We were meant to take them, to use them, to make them a personal and wonderful manifestation of ourselves. We were meant to grab a moment of fun here and there to complete us as whole, functioning human beings. Without fun we are missing something vital to our being. It's like living without blood in your veins or reading only poetry that stops just before the last stanza.

Then there's the internet, this web of serious commentary mixed with blogs written by people's pets, the absurd mixed with the poignant, the propaganda dressed up as truth and raising hell at the virtual neighborhood bar every chance it gets. Never before has the potential for so much mixed with the reality that there's a whole lot of people in the world with too much time on their hands.

I'm not one of those with too much time. Most of the time I fall asleep exhausted and even dream of sleeping. The older I get the more I need some kind of help to get me through the next phase of running my business and trying to survive in a severely depressed economy. I frequently have an overwhelming desire to just blow it all off and live like I did in my 20's--in the company of my best traveling buddy and a furry companion helping me search for the most beautiful piece of nature to pitch my tent.

But that's for next year. For right now I get by with a little help from fun. I realized a long time ago that one aspect of the internet was its potential for fun. It is, when you think about it in a particular way, the world's largest ant farm. It provides a venue for just about anything one wants to do or say. It is entertainment that you let in voluntarily, content you collect for its ability to make you feel something other than the tedium of the ordinary. It is a huge collection of amusement waiting to happen.

That is why when I first heard about James Tillich, I was immediately intrigued by his potential for fun. This is from his MySpace page:

"James Tillich was born in a college philosophy class in December of 2006. A student suggested the name "James Tillich" as an incorrect option on part of a hypothetical test question. Upon hearing the name "James Tillich" the instructor burst out laughing and said, "There never has been a James Tillich." He immediately went over to the computer and Googled an exact word search for "James Tillich". Both instructor and class were amazed when "No results found" popped up. Later that night one student searched both English and German databases. Results? Zip. Nada. Nechevo. Nothing. There was no trace of such a person ever having existed. The instructor decided, "Well if he never existed, then I'll create him." read more

This to me represents the true spirit of what is one internet running alongside another one. It is the web that is woven with laughter, with fun, with the sense of play that never goes away, no matter how old we get. In fact, it is this very sense of play, this ability to turn something as mundane in its functionality as the internet into your own personal ant farm, an ant farm where all the ants wear funny party hats and dance in conga lines to Jimmy Buffet as they drink margarita after margarita, that keep you alive in a form worth living.

And in that spirit of fun I invite you, your friends, your acquaintances, even people you really don't care much for, to come play with James Tillich. I have made him a blog. Do drop by and leave him a message, a note encouraging him in his non-existence, his splendid sense of nothingness he has perfected to a precise, invisible art. James Tillich's blog

Follow him on Twitter. @jamestillich

Start your own Tillich Blog. Visit his store

Buy a t-shirt:

But most of all, use him for fun. No one will ever know as he doesn't exist. So that gives you lots and lots of room to play.

Jame Tillich, Philosophy, humor, prank, internet, zazzle

Celebrity Deaths and The Realm of Petty and Shallow Minds

2009-06-29T01:32:00.000-07:00

It's been one of those strange weeks when the dark and slimy side of human existence struggles for dominance in the world of chit chat. No where has this been more apparent than with the death of Michael Jackson. His dual existence of musician and depraved degenerate has exposed most of the world as no more evolved than some malicious nasty ladies sewing circle that meets once a week to spread lies, untruths, juicy rumors, innuendos, and vendettas disguised as truth.

I've spent some time this last week trying to figure out how we got to this low point in human existence and as far as I can tell by the most cursory of reading, society has always spoken ill of those not physically in their presence. It's always thrived on the nasty little rumor that requires whispered embellishments and embroidered lies to make it more interesting, more valid somehow. Throughout time it was never enough to merely have a lover, but to make it interesting one had to have a lover that was bad for you, or married to someone else, or simply so precious that everyone coveted him or her enough to make up nasty lies out of jealousy and spite.

No matter what the excuse, such malicious gossip is still the realm of shallow and petty minds. It was once confined to the most isolated and inbred of small towns and communities, but in the last couple decades, it has taken the place of real news, investigative journalism, and politics that feeds on the insignificant crap that appeals to the lowest common voter.

Where it went really crazy was with the Clinton presidency. There was and still is a group of small-minded power hungry thugs that just couldn't accept their candidate lost so they resorted to the last refuge of small minds everywhere: they made the bedroom a public arena. They spread semi-truths and innuendos. They wasted taxpayer dollars and precious government resources better spent doing things for the people instead of feeding a demented sewing circle of vicious little gossips.

From this peeping tom sickness grew the obsession with same-sex relationships, other people's marital affairs, petty habits, strange societal quirks that didn't directly affect those most concerned about them, financial scandals that were once the private business of the consumer and his or her banker, and a compulsive and sick desire to deify anyone who was anything near celebrity status because if there's one thing gossip does well is expose the boring lives most people live--lives so tedious they have to go outside themselves for anything remotely entertaining to talk about.

And on a societal level, the more one group trashed another group, the smaller their ability became to converse about anything more profound than who was doing whom. Characters on sitcoms became more interesting than the people in real life. At no time did this become more evident than when I spent a couple months on a temporary job. Every day my co-workers would gossip in great and delighted malicious gossip about the minute details of some people's lives that I didn't know. It amazed me that everyone knew these people, that everyone had something "juicy" to contribute to the details being discussed. I didn't realize the people they were talking about as if they were longtime friends they grew up with, married, dated, buried, and moved away from didn't exist except as characters on a TV sitcom. It was during the decade I didn't have a television. I was astonished to discover these people I heard discussed every day were not real. I knew nothing about my co-worker's families and loved ones, but I knew every detail of the television characters they so ardently discussed...without owning a TV. They cared about them more than they cared about themselves or each other. It's all they talked about day after day.

At the same time I was living in a small and very inbred community of people who had known each other for several decades. The level of conversation wasn't any different. No one talked about things or ideas. They talked about the people who weren't there. And they talked about them in bad and hurtful ways. I saw a mean side of these people that eventually made me move away from them. They became in my mind no different than the people who trashed gays, liberals, immigrants or those who didn't come from their social class. They were bigots of mind and spirit even though they considered themselves open, tolerant, and filled with peace and love for all humanity. The hypocrisy of their disconnect from what they believed and what they lived sent me running away from them as fast as I could because I felt they were a disease that would inflict itself on me if I stayed too much longer.

For those who think my reaction to petty gossip was extreme, look around you. Look what it has done to our towns, our communities, our countries and our world. Spreading the simple lie is the quickest way to control a population and anyone who spreads lies and malicious gossip about others can never call themselves truly free. They are trapped in the tedium of their own lives and unless they hack off a limb or something, they can't escape and they're doomed to just degenerate into the type of people who will never be able to enjoy someone like Mozart because of his personal flaws or refuse to see the contributions someone like Michael Jackson has made to music culture because of rumors surrounding his personal flaws and sicknesses. And these same people will mourn Farrah Fawcett, a woman they knew just as little, whose personal life was just a patchwork of gossip they gathered from tabloids and each other. Because she was pretty, they assumed she was perfect. For her they saved their praise.

But no one is perfect. Everyone has their dark side, everyone has their secrets, their evil little personality twists that stay locked up in public and sometimes goes stark raving mad in private. Where it crosses the line for me is when people who have no business, no say, no right to interfere in someone's private life, make it take the place of truth, honor, integrity, and the right to live as mutual consenting adults in a world of our own choice. To them I say it's time to get a life of your own. You're way overdue.

As for Michael Jackson, I spent many happy years dancing to his music when I still had functioning knees. I'm sorry for his private life, but seriously, it's not about me. It's between him, any potential victims, the families of those victims, the authorities, the deals they made or didn't make. For me it was and still is all about the music. That's the only part of it that is any of my damn business, and so for all those delightful dance parties that defined the 80's and early 90's for me, I say rest in peace and thank you.

Magnet and other items with this design and others available at Crazy Old Lady Of Peace

Michael Jackson, King of Pop, Jacko, MJ, cult of celebrity, gossip, music

Murdering for Jesus

2009-06-02T01:46:00.000-07:00

I'm descended from a long line of survivors, people who lived through horrors most of the people I call my friends can't even imagine. In too many of them the scars never healed properly. They lost something vital to life, some integral part of self that left them incomplete human beings. The other ones, the ones who did manage to put the pieces of themselves back together again came out stronger and more alive than when they went in. It almost made up for the ones that came out severely damaged for life. Almost.

I've spent a lifetime dwelling on this as I lived with the war wounded who couldn't deal with the pain so they passed it on and raised children with anger, with bitterness, and sometimes an outright hatred of human beings. Considering what some of them went through, I can't judge them for this. In fact, because of it I became a person who is reluctant to judge, who tries to understand the depth of wounds, the reasons for the missing pieces of humanity. I've always wanted to make up for what they didn't get a chance to experience: tolerance, acceptance, equality. I felt it was my obligation, the reason I was born. I was one of the balancing stones of the next generation. I never questioned this role. I just knew it as mine.

And yes, I've spent a lifetime balancing out the selfishness around me by being unselfish, especially when it was difficult. It's so much easier to want than to not want. We have to train ourselves to not want, to let someone else have, to stay out of the way of someone else's happiness needs. I'm kind to people others are cruel to because I know how it feels to have others be cruel to me based on things that exist only in their own fears. I've always figured people's lives were their own to live and as long as you didn't hurt the other animals, no one had a right to tell you how to live. And hurting someone was not an excuse and killing was always wrong, no matter who did it.

I learned these valuable lessons from some of the most fucked up people on the planet. But the strange thing is, because of what was done to them they developed a sort of reverence for tolerance, a kind of wistful optimisim. It was their version of religion and they worshipped daily on their dreams of a world that wouldn't do to their children what was done to them.

An important lesson I learned was that in spite of the horrors they went through, in spite of the mean cruel side of humanity they had to endure, not one of them killed another human being over some mythical god. In fact, if war taught them anything, it was that religion was the biggest obstacle to peace and harmony in the world.

That doesn't mean everyone in my family were pacifists who embraced all humanity as their brothers and sisters. Hate is an evil disease and it gets passed on to the nicest people and turns them into not so nice people. Often I would look at some members of my family and wonder what they would have been like without war, what would they have been like without having to survive hate and others trying to kill them just because they believed differently or didn't believe at all. And I often wondered what they did believe because for the most part, they kept these things to themselves as they had learned it was not something safe to talk about openly. Power was too unpredictable and it had a way of turning on you when you least expected it to.

There's a lot of Atheists in my family, especially the ones who almost died from someone else's religious hatred, and especially their children, of which I am one. No god would stand by and let what happen to them happen so I never believed in one. Believers like to say there are no Atheists in foxholes and to them I say it takes war to make people stop believing. It takes hunger, and fear, and the loss of most everyone you know and love to convince you god is a figment of a special privileged class who have never had their beliefs tested by too much reality. It takes reading history and paying close attention to how the unholy churches and their evil minions killed millions over many generations simply because they believed differently. It takes seeing the pattern of hate emerge over and over again to finally understand it is not some god who is preaching hatred from the pulpit, from the radio, from the television screen. It is not god, but it is some mean fucked up excuse for a human being who is spreading that hatred.

And yesterday, that hatred caused the death of a doctor, a man who had dedicated his life to helping other human beings, a man who was gunned down in church, of all places, in the house of the god these hatemongering fanatics believe is so loving and kind and honorable.

I understand who these people are. I grew up with some of them. They are people who are lacking in basic human compassion, who believe their hell on earth is punishment for being human. They are pitiful and weak excuses for human beings. They are easily led, easily controlled by those who have ungodly agendas. They hang on every word the hatemongers spew as if it were the word of their own god. They don't see themselves as the manipulated fools they are, the tools they are to further an invisible agenda by those far more rich and powerful than they will ever be. They listen and hear them say go and kill for me, go take out this symbol so we can exploit it for political gain. Their puppetmasters don't care about the families, the loved ones, the communities that suffer. It's all about politics and getting someone to murder to further an agenda.

This is who killed this doctor and the other ones. This is who blows up buildings and clinics. This is who kills indiscriminately in war and turf battles. This is who kills over an imaginary god only they can see and yet want to inflict on everyone else. This is who the real terrorists are and it's way past time we started paying attention to what they are doing, what they are trying to destroy. It's time to make them accountable for their actions. Put them on trial for the accessories to murder they are, for the treasonous bastards they are, for the hatemongering bigotrys they perpetuate in the name of a political agenda designed to enrich and empower them further.

It is time to put the blame where it truly belongs, on those that led yet another poor stupid manipulated idiot to kill--the O'Reilly's, the Limbaughs, the Gingriches of the world. It is their agenda that drove this man to kill another human being. Not god, not the easter bunny, not the tooth fairy, but soul-less, empty hearted men who care nothing about humanity and want only to enrich themselves further, steal even more money and power, spread even more hatred and intolerance bnecause in the end they know the one truth they can't hide from: as human beings they are complete and utter failures and history and the generations within their own families will forever remember them for this failure. They will serve as cautionary lessons to wiser and more educated generations to come, just our generation learned from the horrors of our parent's generation that some people are just plain evil.

Butterfly in lavender, purple, pink, blue is the center of a
pale blue heart with a sunburst lavender sun behind it and is encircled
by "Compassion, peace, love, tolerance" in darker purple. Purchase stamps here along with other items with this design.

pro-choice, Dr. Tiller, abortion, anti-religion, hate radio, Bill O'Reilly, Rush Limbaugh, Newt Gingrich, politics of hate

That Prop 8 vote...

2009-05-27T02:42:00.000-07:00

I don't understand most hate. I'm just not the kind of person who wastes what I feel on such a non-productive emotion. I'm always slightly embarrassed for the person who goes off on some tirade that turns them red and livid and bordering on the edge of stroking out from it all. It seems so futile, so low on the list of ways to accomplish something or change an event or manifest what it is that eludes you so completely you must hate all those who keep it from you, justified or not.

I admit to a feeling of bewilderment, of not understanding what it is that people who object to same-sex marriage are objecting to. It seems simple to me. Two people discover they love each other and want to have a party where everyone comes and joins in the celebration of their love. It happens every day all over the world. Why does their being gay make a difference?

And yes, I've heard all the religion arguments and it's probably because of such self-serving interpretation of words written many years after the fact by those with their own agendas to push, that I am an Atheist. Religion has always fed on hate to perpetuate itself, especially in times when it felt threatened. And the last eight years of religious manipulation for political gain has probably created more Atheists than believers so the beast is threatened. And it strikes back to perpetuate itself.

But this time it has stepped on its own tail. Not only has the validity of the initiative process been validated, but so has the legality of voting in a specific agenda based on the small-minded and cruel beliefs of religious cults. This has opened a very wide door that will be shoved open with great force, exploited and trashed for points and counterpoints, and will eventually force a definition of who gets to decide how someone else lives--and why they should have that right over someone other group or individual.

Therefore to help speed up that process so we don't have to endure anymore religious crap wrapped around bundles of bigotry and hate and obscenely paraded as the word of god, I propose the following initiatives for the people of California to consider gathering signatures for and getting on the ballot and then turning out in huge numbers to vote for them:

1. Make all marriages performed in churches illegal. If churches can decide which civil marriages are valid or invalid, then the people should have the same right to decide if church weddings are legal or illegal.

2. Make divorce illegal. Force those who bleat about the sanctity of marriage to stay married to each other. No escape. For eternity. That means you, Mel Gibson and Newt and Rudy all the other hypocrites. No new bimbos. Marriage is, after all, sacred and we say so, therefore you must obey whether you agree or not. You must now go back to your original wives...forever. And ladies, you have to take them back because chances are you don't differ that much from them politically so you deserve them.

3. Any church that preaches politics, hatred, and intolerance immediately loses its tax-exempt status and must register as a PAC.

4. Before anyone can get married, a percentage of people based on the number that voted in the last election, get to vote on whether they can get married or not.

5. Make it mandatory that anyone who brings up the Bible as an excuse to justify their bigotry has to sit down and actually read it for themselves, every damn word, every damn page. No unholy intermediaries putting their political spin and manipulation on it. And if they can't read? Well, then they'll just have to put off using the Bible as an excuse until they learn how.

A lavender alien asks "What's your religion doing in my bedroom?" Funny thong with an important message for the bible-thumping morons who
need to quit peeping in bedroom windows. More with this design

Tired of biblethumpers knocking on your door? Greet them with this
poster of a bug spray can spewing out crosses and words "Bible Thumpers
infesting your porch? Hit 'em with parasite B-Gone!" More with this design

proposition 8, same-sex marriage, equality, gay, lesbian

Swine Flu and the Federalist Society

2009-05-03T18:52:00.000-07:00

While exploring who those responsible for THIS were, a few familiar names popped up, especially sleazy lawyers associated with the company who have ties to the Federalist Society.

First of all, let's define who the Federalist Society is:

"The Federalists were (and remain) "originalist" in their approach to the Constitution--meaning that they favored strict textual readings that tended to shear back constitutional principles developed during the more liberal Warren Court era. In terms of substantive law, they promoted the conservative mantra of states¹ rights to leach power away from "big government" in Washington. At a deeper intellectual level they tended to be either libertarians (meaning that they opposed government regulation as an intrusion on individual liberty) or devotees of the free-market cult of law and economics (meaning that they opposed government regulation for interfering with "market efficiencies")."

Want an example, other than the impeachment of Clinton, of what their policies are?

"Perhaps the network¹s most far-reaching victory in recent years was a 1999 decision by a Federal appellate panel of DC Circuit judges in a case called American Trucking v. EPA , which stunned clean-air advocates by rolling back EPA standards covering smog and soot. The decision was based on the principle of "non-delegation," a rigid and archaic reading of the Constitution, which holds that Congress retains all legislative authority, but not the power to delegate regulatory power to executive agencies. C. Boyden Gray, a member of the Federalist Society¹s Board of Trustees, filed a friend-of-the-court brief in American Trucking. Gray was also good enough to share his insights on non-delegation with the Federalist convention in November when he moderated a panel discussion entitled: "The Non-Delegation Doctrine Lives!"

Laughingly and criminally as they claim tax exempt status, one of their tenets claims they do not get involved in politics.

"They have weakened or rolled back statutes on civil rights and affirmative action; voting rights; women¹s rights and abortion rights; workers¹ rights; prisoners¹ rights; and the rights of consumers, the handicapped, and the elderly. Add to that the consequences of non-delegation if further extended. Regulatory oversight by federal agencies would then be kicked back to Congress and the states--like the power to preserve open pipelines in telecommunications, to regulate transportation, the drugs we take, the food we eat. Would we really want elected officials directly responsible for regulating industries that are also major sources of their campaign funds? That is very much a political question--one to which the Federalist Society¹s answer is unfortunately all too clear." read more

And of course, letting no "opportunity" go unanswered in the quest to profit from the misery they inflict on human beings, Tamiflu once again rears up and says take me and I'll heal that nasty flu. So, who owns the rights on Tamiflu? read here for some familiar sleazebags

Letter to Chairman of Smithfield in 2005 drawing attention to how his company was poisoning people that was ignored.

Check out their leadership roster here

And check out their relationship to the Federalist Society starting with one of their senior advisors to the society, Judge Carol T. Crawford.

This is all just the result of googling a few names and doing a bit of reading, but the question remains that once Smithfield and its history of disdain for consumer protection laws that led them to set up business in places like Mexico away from any restrictions, realized people were dying as a result of their criminal acts, who and how did its Federalist Friendly "consultants" squash the truth and instead create a fake terror alert called Swine Flu?

swine flu, tamiflu, Donald Rumsfeld, Federalist Society, Smithfield Foods, Gilead

Anita Hill for Supreme Court Justice

2009-05-01T18:04:00.000-07:00

We rarely get the opportunity to right a wrong in this life, but when one falls into your lap then it's time to consider it seriously. And for those of us who lived through the public humiliation forced upon Anita Hill for daring to speak up when she was subjected to sexual harassment by Clarence Thomas, justice is long past due. She has the qualifications. She will make a damn fine Justice. And it will make Clarence Thomas' head explode. I consider all those excellent reasons to nominate Anita Hill for the Supreme Court Justice position being vacated by Justice Souter. Now THAT'S what I consider moving forward.

Shirt and other items at Zazzle with this design available at Crazy Old Lady Of Peace store

Click here to purchase this dog shirt or the design on other Cafepress items.

Anita Hill, Supreme Court, Justice Souter retires, Anita Hill for Supreme Court Justice, Obama, Cafepress, Zazzle

The Company We Keep

2009-04-25T17:04:00.000-07:00

I've always believed that we are known by how we treat others on our way through the maze of life. There's nothing more revealing of character defects than how those above the crowd treat those below them in status, wealth, power, and dignity. It's why we elected a President who represented the paradigm shift many of us already felt and wanted to make the norm instead of a quaint idea embraced by an idealistic few.

We knew that treating others with dignity and respect were the keys to creating a better, kinder and more gentle world. We knew that a planet that was lacking in humanity would soon cease to hold anything resembling the enlightened and wise human being. It would deteriorate into an us vs. them, me first, take it all before someone else does jungle of savage and cruel excuses for human beings.

I've tried most of my life to only be around those who are kind, who care about others more than they care about themselves, who are supportive of endeavors without being enablers of bad habits and ideas, who say good things about those who are not in their presence rather than spread mean and self-serving untruths.

I haven't always been successful as I'm one of those people who prefer to believe the best of someone before I accept the worse. And of course, love is the great blindspot that filters all truths, as is the need for survival, the ache for friendship that won't betray you, and the idea that won't turn out to be something other than it claimed to be.

But I'm a fast learner and definitely can say that no one has ever fooled me twice. And along with that learning came the shaping that made me who I am today--someone who will not compromise on her ethics and expects others to live the same way.

For several years I've had many Cafepress shops. I was okay with some of their merchandise as I didn't believe college students who were looking for a beer drinking party shirt cared much if some poor Guatemalan villager made 10 cents for the shirt they just paid 30 dollars for. It didn't seem important that a shirt be 100 percent organic and sweatshop free if it was just going to be used as a limited message against a political candidate I detested. It seemed fitting in a way to use it for that purpose. I always figured people voted with their wallets anyway so if the origin and distribution of the merchandise was offensive to them, they'd simply walk away and buy it elsewhere.

But when I opened a shop that reflected the passion I felt over our need to save the environment, to fight against the corporate takeover of our limited and precious resources, and to promote a healthy lifestyle through the choice of organic food, vegetarianism and other issues that affected me directly, then it began to matter.

I justified my shop at Cafepress even though I was not completely happy with their reluctance to come right out and say these products are not made by people we exploited for a large profit margin in a third world country. I felt they allowed individual artists the opportunity to promote their message in a supportive and like environment. The people who are and were shopkeepers at Cafepress were individual small business owners, the kind of people I support in my everyday life when I choose where to spend my money. I don't shop at Wal-mart, don't eat at McDonalds, and I buy my lattes from my neighbor who is feeding her family with the profits from her personally owned stand instead of Starbucks.

That has all changed. Cafepress is no longer the small shopkeeper many of us prefer to support. Their front page now sports Coca-Cola designs and other corporate contracts. The small shopkeeper is being squeezed out and replaced with those who will work for far less and stay within the corporate lines. Artists are no longer allowed to set the price for their personally created works. Cafepress will do it for them and will also only pay the individual artist 10 percent and no more. This means that the average artist will make about a dollar on every shirt they sell and pennies on buttons and stickers. And worst of all, that doesn't mean lower prices for the consumer. It means that Cafepress is giving themselves the profit we once made.

Of course, this is all within their right to do so. It is their marketplace, their business, and their problem. But for me and other shoppers who take into consideration where the merchandise comes from, how the employees are treated, and how exploitive and corporate-owned the business is, shopping there is no longer an option. In my mind they are no different now than Wal-Mart or their new BFF, Coca-Cola.

Therefore, I and many others are moving many of our designs away from them. And in the way life has of making lemonade, I found the perfect venue for my Environment designs. Skreened.com represents everything I believe a company can represent and still make money. Take a look at their statement of purpose:

Here's what excites me about offering these products through Skreened:
"Everything SKREENED offers is made in the United States byAmerican Apparel.

Since we take a strong stance against any kind of exploitive labor practices, we have chosen to print on American Apparel. Their employees are paid fair wages and have an excellent work environment.

After it's all said and done, wouldn't you rather pay just a little bit more for the peace-of-mind that comes with knowing that no one was exploited to put a cheap shirt on your back? read more

I am looking forward to helping them grow their business with my many designs devoted to saving the earth and each other. I encourage you to shop there and support them because we all need to put our money where our personal beliefs and ethics are or why have them? Here are a couple offerings to get you started, and note that you can take the design that is on this product and put it on one of their other offerings if you wish. You can also add your own text to it. Have fun folks. I am.

This shirt is available at Ursine Logic's Environment Store.

This shirt is available at Ursine Logic's Environment Store.

Later I'll tell you what I really enjoy and appreciate about Zazzle. They are embracing Cafepress shopkeepers with open arms, lots of support, and a cool range of products. They're a great place for those special gifts.

Cafepress, Skreened, Organic, American Apparel, Sweatshop Free, Environment, anti-corporation

Cafepress Further Screws Hands That Feed It

2009-04-23T02:43:00.000-07:00

I had a conversation with a fellow Cafepress shopkeeper back in November. It got a bit heated. It was just after I returned from the Seattle Meet 'N Greet and found an email from her asking me how it went, and did I get to see how wonderful and loving and nice everyone was and what a happy family we all were now that I went.

Let me preface my response by saying I grew up in the era of psychobabble. I endured those horrible bonding sessions that HR weenies in corporate officedom inflict on the rabble and I learned all the right buzz words to fling back, much as monkeys fling shit at those standing outside their cages to indicate the insulting indignity of being reduced to a mere exhibit in someone's demented play.

I dated enough losers to know that when someone wants a meaningless fuck that will only benefit them, they will swear undying love and respect and always always always claim they need you so much.

I've been around enough politicians and preachers to know that when someone is talking about doing me good, then I'd better keep my hands firmly wrapped around my wallet.

I've heard enough it's for my own good stories to stuff a million Christmas turkeys and still have enough left over to donate to multiple political campaigns and gardens in need of some deep fertilizing.

So it's perfectly understandable to me, at least, that my response to my fellow shopkeeper was to say that no, for me it was still business and I was not dumb enough to think these people were my friends or had my best interests at heart. They were just nice young folks, the same kind of nice young folks that gorged themselves on venture capital in the 90's and got high on their own arrogance...just before their companies crashed and burned and took all the true believers with them.

After meeting them in person I was even more convinced that it was time to diversify, that keeping all my design eggs in the Cafepress basket was not a good thing. My fellow shopkeeper got all pouty and said that I was too jaded to see the good in them and that they weren't like Corporate Pigs who abused everyone who worked for them and didn't care about them as people. In her words: "They're not Wal-Mart. They care about us because without us they'd be nothing."

I called Bullshit loudly and very clearly as her evangelizing came on the heels of being told we would no longer get a bonus for sales originating from the marketplace. The excuse for this was they needed the money for advertising and we'd all make so much more as result. Yeah, right. Only the dumbest true believers failed to see that they were setting themselves up as our direct competition as their budget was a lot heftier than the average shopkeeper.

I tried to tell her this but she just didn't get it. I gave up then and when I next heard from her it was when she wrote me to complain over the election portal Cafepress had set up with a very nice Obama shirt. It was priced below the base price we had to pay so we couldn't compete with our own designs. I immediately transferred many of my better selling Obama designs to Zazzle and had a great election season there and a pitiful one at Cafepress. This was more than the writing on the wall. It was the path to the future and it was littered with Cafepress shopkeeper bodies.

My fellow shopkeeper didn't join me at Zazzle until St. Patrick's Day when they did the same thing with the featured shirt that was priced below the base price so we couldn't compete. Same with Earth Day. And I'm sure it will be the same with every niche they think might do well.

When her sales at Cafepress tanked so badly that she couldn't even pay her rent for March, she apologized for all the names she called me in November. And today when Cafepress announced that any designs they sold for us in the marketplace would only get a 10 percent commission starting in June, neither of us were surprised nor left wondering what the hell we were going to do and how were going to survive. Her store at Zazzle caught on nicely as she has a lovely and unique niche that will do well there. Considering she made almost 50 grand at Cafepress last year and this year will be closing all but one of her stores at Cafepress, I'd say that was in the top ten of stupid moves on Cafepress's part to lose her. I made half that, but supplemented it nicely with the eggs in my other baskets. So between the two of us they just threw close to 80 thousand dollars away. Idiots.

But once again, I have to say that those who believe Cafepress, Zazzle, Printfection or any other business cares about them other than as a means to increase their bottom line, needs to get into another line of work. We are content providers, nothing more and I predict all the designs at Cafepress, if it's still here in a year, will be cheap knock-off's from China, and a few corporate shops like Snoopy and others that probably have permanent lip marks on their high earning behinds.

Cafepress has been acting like a company that's either on the verge of bankruptcy, going public, or more likely, selling itself to some place that will outsource everything and fixate totally on the bottom line. It will become the Wal-Mart of the POD world. Considering how they've trashed the shopkeepers who contributed to their success, it would be a fitting end.

The people who started the company obviously quit caring a long time ago when they got their money and it became a job rather than fun. That's when Cafepress started its downward slide to corporate sleazebagness and that's where it will remain. Zazzle to me right now is the company that will nip their ass into total and complete mediocrity because for now they are hip, cool, and more than ready to welcome with open arms those who are wiping the shit off themselves and looking for somewhere else to sell their designs. I also like Printfection. They do nice work and I manage to sell an occasional shirt there without trying very hard. I'll probabably put more of the energy I once put into Cafepress there and see how it goes.

The thing is, what Cafepress seems to be unable to comprehend is that those of us who design for PODs, we "POD People" as many of us call ourselves, we do mostly know each other. We talk. We share industry gossip. We go here. We go there. But in the end, we are business people and we go where the income is, where we can make money. We usually go together, in a herd, and we bring our marketing skills, our nice google and other search links with us. We blog about each others designs. We promote the hell out of wherever we're working at the time. Love has nothing to do with it. It's business and nothing else. Anyone who thinks differently is going to get their heart broken and their bills left unpaid.

So those of you who are mourning over being fucked by the players at Cafepress, there's some nice honeys waiting for you at other places and they'd love to help make you feel better and get over those nasty abusers who really don't and will never appreciate who you are and what you do for them.

cafepress, print on demand, pod, zazzle, printfection, cafepress, commission change, shopkeeper, pod people, ursinelogic

My Life Through Music

2009-03-18T03:15:00.000-07:00

In our path through life we sometimes comes upon one of those things we like to call "defining moments," and I had mine this evening while listening to Bob Dylan. One of my friends lost his envelope of car cd's and I was making him another one as a gift.

When you do something like this for a friend or for yourself in preparation for a driving vacation, or just filling up your Ipod, it involves not just going through your music collection, but also doing a bit of time traveling in the process.

Music has always been part of my life. My earliest memories were of what we called PWCS, or people who could sing. This meant astonishing voices filling my early years of emerging consciousness. I grew up with Mario Lanza, Bing Crosby, Patsy Cline, Nat King Cole, and Perry Como. This was added to and filled out when my aunt and uncle immigrated and brought with them entire symphonies that entered my spirit one piano note at a time, and sometimes came out as Jazz when they got together with friends and played for fun.

There were a lot of things about growing up in Las Vegas that sucked, but music wasn't one of them. I developed a passionate love of Jazz and Blues that stays with me to this day. It's what made me think the Beatles were kind of sissy boys and instead made me hand over my pennies for The Stones, The Doors, Cream, and most everything that came out of Motown, except maybe the Supremes. I preferred Aretha and Etta James.

The patterns of my life always come with musical accompaniment. Interwoven among the memories of a very serious activist who spent her days working against the Vietnam war and choosing Dylan as my visionary spokesman over other more pretty voices. It was an interesting paradigm shift for me to choose the message now instead of the music or simply the best PWCS.

This moment of wanting music to be more than sounds on a plate, was a moment of waking up that has continued to this day. I will always believe it was not politicans who brought down the wall, but rock and roll. I will always believe without the protest songs of the 60's, the anti-war movement would not have taken root so effectively. I could go on with examples, but you get the picture. For me, music makes up a large part of the tapestry I am and will become. It comes with faces of have loved, tears I have shed, places I have lived, and dreams I saw myself taking part in. Music, unlike anything else, has the power to change the world.

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music, 1960's, activism, Rolling Stones, Motown, Bob Dylan, Jazz, peace, antiwar, zazzle, cafepress, t-shirts

Personal Economic Bailouts

2009-02-28T03:18:00.000-08:00

I've had several interesting discussions lately with acquaintances who lost their jobs in the last few months. Let me preface by saying all of them had good jobs, excellent credit ratings, and worked mostly for their homes. As more than one of them said to me, having their own home was all that mattered and they expected to work and spend most of their income for one.

As do most Americans, they also had several credit cards because without one they couldn't buy an airline ticket without triggering a terrorist alert, couldn't rent a car, and couldn't afford to take a vacation once a year. They also had gas cards, department store charge cards, and various other pieces of plastic that allowed them to buy now and make payments.

Again, I feel it's necessary to say these were not irresponsible people. They paid their bills on time. They didn't overspend. They used credit to buy things just a bit beyond their ability to pay, such as cars, furniture, electronics, and they always paid them off. Many of them paid off their balances each month. And because they were responsible, the mail bought new offers every day, offers they turned down because they already had most of what they needed.

It was a nice, calm, and predictable life. Then the first one lost their job when the company went bankrupt. Then another. And finally, most of this group of people who all knew each other either from working in the same field of through online communities, found that more of them were unemployed than employed. It happened quickly, in a matter of weeks. But they thought it was temporary and the unemployment benefits would carry them through for a few weeks until they found another job.

But another job didn't come along. Then the unemployment benefits ran out. Many of them cashed in retirement accounts to survive and took heavy penalties in taxes and other deductions. And then the retirement accounts, which were often only enough to live on for six months, also ran out.

That left the credit cards. They began to use them to buy groceries, to pay utilities, to pay for doctor and dentist emergency visits. They began to use their gas cards for minor repairs, for cartons of milk for the kids from the gas station mini-grocery. And unlike in the past, they no longer could afford to pay off the balance every month. For several of them, it was the first time in their credit lives that they had to run an unpaid balance. They began to lose sleep worrying about their debts.

But they were still getting by, they were still surviving, but the mortgage was not getting paid. The first missed payment was easy to rationalize, to say they would catch up next month when they got a new job, they would make it up and it would all be a bad dream. But they didn't and soon they were two and then three months behind. The threat of foreclosure became real. Suddenly they stood to lose everything they worked so hard for, everything that meant they were responsible adults.

These were people, as many of us are, who understand that a decent credit rating means a decent way of life. At least a few of them sacrificed buying more than minimal groceries so they would be able to make that credit card payment, even as their homes were going into foreclosure, even as their credit limits were being reached, even as the job prospects grew dimmer and dimmer.

And then one day they found themselves either in a house they no longer owned, or living in an apartment they couldn't afford anymore either. Their cards were maxed out. They missed a payment and the rates skyrocketed, the late charges grew larger, and soon even the possibility of making a payment was beyond their ability to do so. Their stomachs churned, their lives suffered, their relationships began to develop stress cracks, their children stopped applying to colleges and tried to get jobs instead.

I don't know at one point the change happened, the change that took everything they believed and turned it upside down. As one of them said to me: I worked all my life to maintain my credit rating. I worked my ass off for my house. I paid my bills every month. And in a matter of months it was all gone. But, as he said with a laugh, he no longer worried about his credit rating because he no longer had one.

This is something that happened to the rest of them too, and I'm guessing a whole lot of people in this country right now. The holy god of credit suddenly became meaningless. At that point, the realization dawned on them that what little money they could scrape together was going to go to feed their families and not the credit card companies.

Many of them saw the banks and mortgage companies, the auto makers, the big corporate entities who were squeezing them for money suddenly get handouts for their business failures. But no one cared about them, no one was offering them any kind of help.

What I saw happen next may very well be a tidal wave that will sweep the country and which probably drives fear into the heart of credit card companies, banks, oil companies, and any corporation that extended credit for the purchase of their products. These people simply quit paying anything. They gave up. They walked away from their debts.

Many had no choice as I know of three people personally who tried to work out something with their creditors. One wrote several letters to her credit card companies asking them to please work with her, to let her make smaller payments for a few months without huge late fees tacked on or crazy increases in her rates. Their response was to turn her over to collection agencies. She said the most peaceful day of her life was the one when her phone was shut off for non-payment.

Another thing that bears mentioning because it's an important consideration. I'm not talking about young people here. I'm talking about people in their 50's and 60's, people who will draw small social security checks or have taken early retirement at 62 and a cut in benefits, just to survive. These are people who will not buy another home, another new car, or anything more lavish than what they need to survive. And it won't matter to them if they get another job. As one couple said to me: we're done owning anything. We don't ever want to go through this again.

What this small group of people I've written about mean for this country is that they may very well be representative of aging boomers who are simply walking away from their debts because credit no longer matters to them. They have nothing. They will own nothing. The future holds a small social security check, health care provided by emergency rooms or medicare. As the old song goes "Freedom means you have nothing left to lose."

If this becomes an ever widening trend, then the credit card companies are doomed, the housing market won't recover for years, and the consumer-driven society of pretty things and fancy toys is over. It will be interesting to see what happens because I suspect this is the just the tip of a very large ice berg.

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economy, recession, depression, walking away from credit card debt, bankruptcy, foreclose, unemployment

When the past comes bearing flowers

2009-02-25T03:12:00.000-08:00

My odd mail tends to run in cycles. There's always the crackpot crazies who crawl from the ooze to tell me all the different ways I'm going to burn in hell. They always show up after I write about my lack of belief in their imaginary playmates, and they fail to see the humor in threatening me with a place that exists only in their tiny little minds.

Then there's the real hateful fucks, the ones who are out on a day pass from reality and decide they're going to do a search for their fave buzzwords such as Gay, Lesbian, tolerance, equality, and then send me and I assume others, hate mail filled with sick and twisted proof that in their world jesus is definitely not love.

There HAS been a decrease in the post and run talking points morons who think if they go to enough blogs they perceive as liberal, commie, and *gasp* anti everything the GOP stands for, and post their drivel then they will win some prize or other. Maybe the grand prize is a brain. Most of their reps sure could use one. And for a really good deal, I'll throw in a couple hearts because it's obvious many of them are lacking one.

Usually they don't send me emails as they prefer their "message" to be visible to all the misguided heathens who wander into my little corner of hell. It's the real crackpots who take the time to click on the proper link, expose their email to my evil eyes, and ramble on for several screens trying to come to a point that doesn't exist.

So, I'm understandably suspicious when someone writes to me and says, hey I read your blog and I just want to let you know....or words to that effect. I usually prepare myself for the kind of hate I can only imagine, the type of bigotry that I don't even want to consider as anything but insanity, and ramblings that make so little sense I often wonder if they let their dog or cat type it for them.

I usually delete the hate posts and let the political differences stand to generate some (hopefully) productive discussion. I rarely respond to emails as I don't want to encourage people who are just one beer short of official stalker status. My blog has always been for me, a sort of place to try out thoughts, share designs, ideas I'm working on. I don't feel obligated to be part of the public consciousness unless it has something different to offer me.

The letters I do respond to are the ones that are personal reactions to something that made me feel something when I wrote it. I have a lot of respect for people who can relate to the stew of my emotional life and I always try to say at least thank you for being as crazy as I am.

But today I received a letter that kind of threw me for a few hours. It was from someone who claimed to be my first love in 10th grade. I tried and tried to remember him but there was nothing there. I couldn't summon forth the face, the name, the love he claimed we shared. I began to suspect a case of mistaken identity, someone who forgets some people don't use the same name their entire lives and that neither my first or last name are ones I went by in High School.

But he knew so much about people I knew. He described a party we went to together and while I remembered the party, I couldn't remember him. He knew I only had three or four friends in High School and kept my distance from just about everyone. He even knew which High School, which is important when you consider that I was a senior before I went to any school for a full year.

But I couldn't remember him and I felt bad because obviously I played some part in his early formative years. I asked him to send me a picture and as I waited for it I fully expected it to all be an amusing mistake, that I would look at it and it wouldn't be anyone I ever knew.

Except when I opened the email and looked at the picture I remembered him. He was the nerdy little kid who shared his lunch with me in 6th grade when I had even less friends. We used to walk all the way to the far end of the playground, sit under a tree and share our lunches in silence. We did this for half a year until I was once more taken out of school because we had to move again. I never got a chance to say goodbye.

But it was the second picture that threw me. It was his yearbook picture and then I remembered him. I remembered the strange kid who used to stare at me from across the classroom, the tall and skinny stick figure with too short pants and glasses that made his eyes seems like cockroach eyes. He never said a word to me, never once reminded me or tried to remind me that he was the same kid I shared my lunch with for those few brief months. And to be fair, he looked so different I doubt his own mother would recognize him. The kid I shared lunch with was very blond with a light dusting of freckles and piercing blue eyes. The young man at the party was dark and pale with those strange glasses.

I also remembered the party, but I know we didn't go there together. I went there with a date, a young man who was truly my first love, my first crush, only I had no idea then what was happening to me or that he was the cause.

It slowly began to sink in that what he was remembering was the story as it had played out and evolved in his own mind. I began to feel very uncomfortable and to regret answering his email.

But life works in strange and happy ways. It turns out that he got curious about his long lost love and read deep into my blog and oh wow...he was deeply, let me say DEEPLY offended by my anti-christian ways. He was a devout something or other and he felt he had to not write me any more because it would make him compromise his beliefs to do so.

I sent him a nice thank you for being honest and I wish you the best. I refrained from telling him that Cthulhu loves him...in a sandwich.

high school, first loves, crazy people, anti-christian

Ramblings from an aging madwoman

2009-02-24T03:38:00.000-08:00

For many years on my birthday I'd rework a poem to add in the perspective that another year of living sometimes brings. I say "sometimes" because I've learned many times over there are those who go through their entire lives without learning anything new.

My poetry would be a waste for them. They'd look at it, say hey it has this many words, this many lines, this many pieces of punctuated mysteries, but they'd never be able to add a damn thing to it.

It is those people I want to wean completely from my life. That's my birthday resolution, to finish the pruning of the suck monsters, the me-me-me birdies that eat from my hand and take a finger along as a souvenir.

I want to keep all my fingers this year. I want to go back and rework poetry and plans and dreams. I want my dreams to support me, to join up with my fantasies and give me one hell of a ride for the money.

Of course, I've always wanted. It's what motivates me and most of the people I know. We want. It's literally the tie that binds because wants are like that kite string. It holds you to the ground and makes you believe you really are flying.

There are days when I want to run with scissors and cut every one of those strings. I want to make the smug, the selfish, the prim and proper, the perpetually indulged fall flat on their ass, get up and ask what the fuck was that? And the ones who then say cool, let's do that again!...well, those would be people I'd be interested in keeping around and getting to know better.

But this year my wants are mostly undefined, which is something different for me. I usually know what I want as not knowing has always seemed inefficient to me. How can you manifest without knowing what you want to pop out of that hat? What kind of magician doesn't know what's in there and when and how it's coming out? Surely, I'm at least as proficient at manifesting as a trickmaster.

But yeah, I do have a short list of things I want for my birthday year and I've made the list based on events and other unexpected visitors to my life. I don't exactly have an open door to my life, but like termites, carpenter ants, roof rats, and flies, there are those who find a way in.

The first on my list is to start that poetry thing again. I've spent the last few years writing everything but poetry. Through the weird wonders of Facebook, I've friended and been friended by all these crazed writers I knew back in some misbegotten time of my life. I remember how much I liked their poetry, how much I liked my own poetry, how I enjoyed being around people who wrote and lived in short profound and meaningful phrases. I miss that now that I'm older and writing is mostly something I associate with work and not fun.

I know I'd be a much better poet now because I have more to write about. Back then I speculated about life a lot. In spite of some of the bad things that happened to me growing up, I led a fairly sheltered life. There was a lot I simply did not know about people. There was a lot I had to learn. And I'm still learning. That's the good thing. That's what always proves I'm still alive. I can learn.

So that takes care of one thing. The second is to clear out some stuff in my head and heart. I've had a couple things come into my life this year that belong to the past and need to go whimpering back there.

There's a reason I left Las Vegas and I have to remind myself of that when I get this half-assed longing for people who are actually related to me in some way and who knew my family and so understand me in a way no one else ever will.

You can't explain to someone who wasn't there what it was like. Sometimes I'll show them a scar or two, or I'll get vehement about domestic violence and war and what it does to people who started out life somewhat sane, and they'll understand a little of it. But they'll never understand like the ones who had to bandage me up, who hid me in their houses, who helped me get through the worst of the bad stuff. I want all that to go to the little safe in the soul that says "do not open until xmas...or ever again."

Thirdly, I want a better world and that means better people. We've gone through an incredibly selfish phase of human existence. There are people who've known nothing but self-indulgence, who have no examples of what it means to step outside your own skin. The last couple decades have created an entire set of deficient human beings who have lived in the most opulent and fakely prosperous of times. They truly do not know what it means to suffer, to not have, to scrimp on desires and deny wants. No, I do not weep for the Trustafarians. I say to them welcome to the grown-up world and may you survive it without too much whining.

For the fourth thing, I want to get rid of everything I own and live out of an eco-friendly rv or motorhome or 5th wheel that has things like solar panels and can disappear into the desert or forest or beach for weeks. I've started the research and the first thing I made sure I can have is high speed internet access because that's how I make my living. Everything else gets in line behind that. But that seems like the easy part. There's always free wi-fi somewhere, but I want to be able to disappear and still work so those are the kinds of details I'll be working out in the next year. Jeff is easy. He retired early and gets a small social security check. The cat doesn't really care as long as she's with us. She's well traveled as would be any creature that makes its life with us.

The fifth thing is the most important. I want only people in my life who can give as easily as they receive. I'm really good at giving but I suck at receiving. Far too many people I know excel at taking. I'm tired of "special" people. It's time they grew up and realized that category has long ago quit being something special and is now quite ordinary and pathetic.

I've been incredibily fortunate in love and in friendship, but in both of those it took a lot of finding out what I didn't want before it became clear what I did want. I pruned a lot of people from my life in the last two years. It was a deliberate process and I chose carefully and with full awareness. I feel that most of the selfish users either moved on or got some encouragement from me to do so. I'm sure some of them are bewildered and just can't figure out why I don't want to be around them anymore. To them I say it's a lot like broccoli. There are times in your life when it tastes good and you need it to grow strong and there are other times when it makes you gag and puke up your life in small doses to keep them from being hungry. A lot of people I used to know are feeding themselves these days and all I can say to that is it's about damn time.

But that does leave the little flecks of gold at the bottom of the pan. Since I've started being careful in my selection process, I've noticed the occasional hunger to go back to "family" has decreased. In many ways I wanted to run back to them the same way I ran to them when I was in High School and they cleaned up my bruises, wiped away the blood, and told me it wasn't my fault and the pain would eventually go away.

Getting older means being able to do that for yourself and that's what this new year will bring for me--a life built on healing the pain of trusting the wrong people, mistakingly befriending the users and abusers, and stupidly loving the selfish assholes.

Not that I'd trade any of those lessons for something else. Hell no. I am who I am because of the bad things done to me, not the good things. Once I figured that out, the rest was easy.

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birthday, introspection, selfishness, trustafarians, love, friendship