I won’t tell you to go shopping. They tried that before. You spent your little credit cards till the numbers wore off and then squeezed your house for money and spent, spent, spent. That worked real well. For a couple years.

Now we need to crank up the economy again. Our smart bank guys loaned you so much money that we all went broke spending it. We need a new crank to get things going so we can all be rich guys again.

Some people say the way to go is get a job and make something. But what kind of things do we make here in the old USA. We make music and movies. We make computer games. But you can only sell so many of those. We used to make loans and sell them to just about anyone. That one sure is gone. How about making something you can wear or turn on and watch or just pick up and carry around? We don’t know how to make that stuff anymore.

We do services, not stuff. We do wash-your-pooch, curl-your-hair, mow-your-grass, cook-your-Mac, rub-your-back, paint-your-nails services. Lots of doing. Lots of services. That’s OK, I guess. But we are pretty saturated with services. How much more can you do without getting illegal.

I wish we could still make great stuff like a good fast bicycle or a fancy new kiddee toy or a kitchen seven-in-one mixer or even an old fashioned broom. So I don’t have to always buy stuff from overthere. Overthere is nice, but overhere should be OK too. They say we cost too much to make stuff so we have to use robots or overthere people who work like crazy and don’t like money much. That’s what they say.

I read in the paper today that all the new money is in health! That’s what’s going to crank up the old economy.

So let’s start cranking. Everybody, get sick, right now!

Kickstart those doctors and nurses. Get that health money flowing by sharing some germs and bad habits.

I know we try. We eat fat. We drink our livers blue. We smoke our lungs black. We are not well. But not sick enough to ratchetup the economy. We need a good disease for every red-blooded American. Like a chicken in every pot we need a bunch of microbes in every belly. A virus in every cell. We need some good old fashioned low-grade sicknesses in every home.

We have some bad diseases that you could get. But they kill you quick. We want good diseases that just make you go to the hospital a lot, see a doctor every day, need a nurse, take a bunch of pills, but most of all, let you keep on working your health business job, helping those other sick people. That’s how to make the economy work. Everybody stays sick and goes to see each other for new treatments and meds, paying through the nose with good hard cash.

So where do we get these diseases we need? All the good diseases live down near the equator. Malaria and sleeping sickness keep you hanging on forever and taking pill after pill. They never get cured. They could be a goldmine.

I was going to call on our genetic engineers to fix up those down-south diseases to suit us up-north Americans, but why? We don’t need to do anything this time to be saved. Isn’t it funny how the world works?

Global warming is sending bunches of mosquitoes our way with lots of fancy new diseases in their pointy little snoots. I’m looking forward to that. You should too.

Now, everybody, roll up your sleeves, give them little bugs some blood and, hurray, catch something good for America.

It was a disaster.

I knew right away this morning, stumbling toward the kitchen, boiling water, measuring out beans. Going thru the seven steps, or was it six. Finally pouring as the steam rose up from the kettle. Then it hit me. The filter was still on the counter. Jumping back, I knocked over the filterholder and my cup and dropped boiling coffee grounds on my foot. Yep, disaster.

The coffee conundrum: how to make coffee before having coffee.

Sort of like the chicken and the egg. But I always come first, groggy, bleary and trying to carry out those seven coffee-making steps in the right order without any neurons firing. I have the steps written out and nailed on the wall but forget to read them. Nothing works.. But after two sips my daytime starts. After a big cup with its iridescent greenish bubbles floating on the dark brown thick liquid that I love, I can think and read and even do math and all those normal brain things without much trouble. I just need a jump start to get going.

I tried other ways. Exercise. It doesn’t wake up the brain. It makes it happy, but still thoughtless, after a mile or two on the track. I tried smoking but was afraid I’d die, not in fifty years, but now when I nodded off back under covers with it dangling on my lip.

So it’s coffee for me. And face the conundrum daily. And fail once or twice a week.

This got me thinking. Can’t there be another way. Maybe a caffeine patch and a smart alarm clock that slaps it on my forehead five minutes before it goes off? Maybe an automatic injection of caffeine from a syringe hidden in my pillow? Way too tricky. It would miss me and get the dog and he would go even more psycho running around after his tail for an hour or two while I tried for a final few minutes of sleep. I need something simple for my daily brain fix.

Then I remembered those genetic engineers again. They are taking genes from plants and sticking them into rats to make them smell good. They are taking genes from fireflies to make goldfish glow at night. They are taking genes and moving them all around for silly reasons. But do they face the big problems? I want them to take that caffeine gene today and stick it in people. Stick it in me. Maybe wire it to the wakeup system in the bottom of my brain. Then every morning—my eyes open and Bang! The juices flow and they smell like coffee. I am my own coffeepot. No more beans. No more failure. No more disaster. Life is good.

Then I thought why stop there. I remembered my exercise. That happy feeling I got when I ran a lot. Instead of just being awake why not be happy too? We already have the gene for it. You just have to work too hard for it.

Remember those old smart guys in England who had a calculus of happiness. Mr. Bentham said the best plans lead to the most happiness for everyone. And he made a lot of sense. And the Declaration of Independence promises us that we all get to pursue happiness all we want. But why pursue it—just make some exercise happy juice in your brain and be happy.

Yes, we do have the gene for human happy-juice but let’s hook it to something besides exercise. Something easy. A little work would be fine for getting happy but not running all the way across town. Let’s get those scientists to hook up that gene to something like scratching real hard, for instance. Get a runner’s high when you scratch your back for a minute or so. Feel low, scratch your head. Feel blue, scratch anywhere and that gene kicks in and the happy juice squirts out in your brain and joints and you are happy as a snake on a warm road at sunset.

Why stop there? There are even bigger happinesses. Mr. Bentham probably wasn’t thinking of this but how about sex. Not the messy drippy, plug-it-in, every-once-and-a-while sex, but all-the-time, happy sex. Just move the wiring. Move those sex nerves from your privates to someplace else. Leave all the complicated plumbing and baby-growing parts where they are. Just move the wires. It’s like moving the phones or rewiring the house. We need those scientists to get to work on this right now. This is one hot plan, Mr. Bentham. You should have thought of it.

Your nerves creep along from your spine and grow towards their destination. They have some kind of map or they move along little valleys in your body and finally they hit the spot they are aiming for and you can feel stuff. So the problem, Mr. Scientist, is how to give nerves a new map. So they start out just like normal but grow and reach someplace that you can use more often. Not the place where your mother told you not to touch. Then we humans would have true happiness. Or something close, like feeling real good.

Where could those nerves grow so we could be really happy? Maybe someplace where we could do something public, something social so you don’t lock yourself in a room jiggling your nerve ending all day. How about growing sex nerves all the way down to your fingers.

Then you would really enjoy shaking hands. You would go looking for friends to say howdy to and then after a few firm, all-American, tight grip minutes of the old up and down--Blam. The neurons fire and you are one happy dog. Not to mention your friends.

OK, with the nerves moved, making babies would be more like going to work. Not much fun. No pleasure. Just follow those seven steps in the instruction manual and then—Bingo--conception.

But that’s OK. One of the big problems was that it used to be too much fun making babies. Now you have to go buy the book because you are no longer hard-wired to do it. Most people would be going around giving the howdy-do so often they wouldn’t have time for making babies. Just when they really wanted one.

The church would like it. Sex without fun and fun with proper handshakes. And to top it all off, when all those churchgoers shake hands before the sermon on Sunday, going to church would be fun too.

Finally, thanks to Conrado LaRiviere, a man with lots of pretty good ideas, and the conversation with him last Tuesday that led me here.

Moving Mountains

We are in a mess. Lots of people are not working and this time they don't have jobs either. It used to be you could just sit around in front of your computer and get paid for not doing much. Now you sit in front of your computer and hope for email from Nigeria with your lottery winnings and Viagra ads.

This mess has two parts: one is people forgot how to work hard and the other is there is no work anyway. Some folks might just give up and tell everyone to sit on their hands as they mouse around the internet, but I have been checking things out. Those political scientists are calling for big, new public works projects to give everyone a nice fat paycheck and a shiny, new shovel to go with with their snazzy, new work ethic. That's the way out of this mess.

Public works projects may solve the work mess but they leave us with another big problem: what should people work on? We don't want them just raking leaves. We want them to build something that will last. Before when this happened in the 1930s they built a bunch of post offices and highway bridges. But who needs post offices these days—we have UPS and Mailboxes, Etc and they work just fine.

How about making bridges--we built so many bridges before that they got old and concrete is flaking and rebar is dangling down and they shake in a strong wind. We could rebuild them. But then people would just keep on driving their gas-guzzling cars. Maybe a few shaky bridges every evening on the commute will make people take the train and then we can really get out of this mess.

We need trains. Let's build them. Maybe they could be wind-powered solar trains. But then they couldn't go very fast. A train with a windmill doesn't have much umph to climb hills and mountains. Trains go best when its flat . We need more flatness in America to make trains use less fuel. It's a flatter country that will get us out of this mess.

So what I am suggesting is that we make a lot more smooth, level places in America. Move those Rockies and Ozarks and Blue Ridges out of the way. Just make a big flat pancake America from coast to coast. Then a train can go all the way across on a windy, sunny day or maybe just from your house to your new job flattening out mountains and digging out rocks and dirt. A good all-american job that has lots of work ethic to get us out of this mess.

I bet that you guys who always look at the bottom of the empty glass instead of the top are asking: what are you going to do with all the dirt when you flatten out America. Ha. This is where my idea is really great. We pile it up at the borders. You try to sneak into America over a mountain twenty thousand feet tall. Who needs fences. Who needs border guards. Just cover the roads with about three or four miles deep of dirt. No one can drive in. No one can get out. It's like living in the world's best prison. We are saved. Hurray for America. No more mess!

Even better, with all the dirt lined up east and west along the border (instead of the north and south like it is now), then all those cool pacific breezes can blow all the way across from California over into the Atlantic. Just think of those warm sunny mornings in the highlands of Nevada where everyone is going to trade in their fur jackets for flipflops and shorts. And those big pacific storms will fill up the deserts with lakes for all the waterskiers who had to move to some drybone western town and pack their waterskis in the garage or sell them on eBay. Now all Americans have the right to bear arms and to waterski all the way across America.

OK, you say: what about snow skiers. I planned for that too. Don't forget the border mountains. Go ski down from the top of North Dakota to the bottom of the hill in Chicago. Or Maybe from Maine down to Connecticut. So, we may have to cover up Maine and all those border states with a mile or two of dirt but who wants to live there anyway. Ditto for all those towns near Mexico. They can all be ski resorts instead of cactus farms.

Then to top it all off—just remember where all our cold fronts come from. Canada! And with the trans-border mountains blocking off the north then the cold just stays up there and those Canadians can tighten up their moose-skin blankets and dream about balmy Chicago and Minnesota, so close and yet a mountain range away.

So I say it one more time: Hurray for this great pancake of a country we are going to have. Hurray for getting out of this sticky mess. Hurray for America.

Choice

There are lots of types of choices. We’ve gotten used to choosing between ice cream or pie. That’s easy. Pick one today; pick another tomorrow. Or maybe both today. That’s the choice I like.

But there are really hard choices, like when you choose one thing and it eliminates the other. Marriage is like that. Pick Miss Mary today and say goodbye forever to old Suzy Q. Maybe that’s not a great example with divorce and messing around going on, but you get the idea.

The experts are telling us that we have a big choice coming up that is really, really hard. Either global warming crashes the planet or global slowdown crashes the economy. Either we quit making stuff in order to cut down on carbon or we quit worrying and watch the water rise and the polar bears attack. That’s what they say. A hard choice is just ahead.

But I want an ice cream and pie choice here. I want my globe to chill, but I need my stuff, too. I know it takes a couple trees and a barrel of oil for every 10 minutes I’m alive, but I don’t want to change. I get bored without my stuff. And you don’t want me bored because then I get nasty and make lots of noise.

So you smart-guy scientists need to figure out how to make fun stuff that doesn’t have any carbon in it, doesn’t take any carbon to make, and doen’t use any carbon to carry it to my front door. That´s what we need. Then the choice is easy. Stuff for me and polar bears for everyone, too. So get to work.

I know you scientists are already working on carbon-free stuff. Your fancy video games point the way. A new game uses up about ten days of my life and only uses two cupfuls of oil to make electricity for my computer. A windmill in a light breeze spinning for an hour could power me for a week.

My carbon footprint shrinks to mouse-sized for a month when I have a game that’s interesting. It could stay shrunk forever if great, new games came out every week and (this is important) I didn’t have to go to work and commute burning all that oil in my pickup. So I say it’s work that makes us burn up too much carbon. Because working takes me away from my games and gives me lots of money that I use to go buy useless stuff. Like lava lamps and food processers. I don’t even cook. I just eat. And how much carbon is there in a couple cheeseburgers anyway?

If everyone just stayed home and played video games and partied a lot on weekends or maybe even every other day then who needs to drive big cars. Who needs fancy houses and trucks of designer furniture that comes here in big boats from China. Who needs all that stuff. I just need my chair, my computer and my fridge.

Now, that wasn’t too hard, was it? Maybe I should start working on other things, like world peace and babies that understand bathrooms before they are born. OK, scientists you heard it. Let’s go.

Dead Pharaohs

Every once and a while you find out one little thing and it sets off a cogitating avalanche. The old brain sizzles a couple minutes and all the old ideas about how things ought to happen get fried into a mushy omelet that won’t hold together anymore. It’s a brain blowout.

That happened when I was a little kid and heard what you put where to make babies at recess. Then again when I was in the army and figured out why I was sitting locked up in a tiny trailer listening on a big radio to some other army headquarters talking Russian about their latest girlfriends: so we could drop big, fat A-bombs on them and break up their little patty-cake parties.

It happened again the other day. I was hearing about old Egypt before pharaohs married their sisters and got fancy with tall, pointy pyramids. Back then, really far back B.C., everyone dead just got covered up with a couple feet of dry, hot sand. Then, if someone happened to dig them up after a hundred years or so, they looked fine, just a little wrinkled. Sand dried out those naked hot bodies like three-year-old prunes and the dead folks looked like they might just sit up and talk about the weather or what they had for dinner last night.

But you know how rich guys are never satisfied, even back then. The pharaohs started buying fancy wooden boxes covered with gold paint and cat pictures on the sides. Then when they died, they got packed in their boxes, like a fat old sardine with their wives and servants and then locked up in a old damp cellar way down under their fancy new pyramid. Down where it’s so damp even the bugs get wet feet. So what happens there? After a month or two the dead turn into a nasty box of Pharaoh mush. As smelly and smushy as road-kill rabbits rotting on the road side.

To save the day, Egyptian hot-shot scientists came in and looked up how to make pickles and Egyptian sauerkraut and tried it out on their pharaoh.

That was the little thing I learned. Mummies are just a nostalgia craze. Wanting your body to rise up after you’re dead is just an accident of geography. All history is just a bad experiment in pickling and packing the dead to save them for a rainy day in dead-guys-walking heaven. This risen dead body thing would never have happened if Egypt were down in some jungle and all our followup Western Civ religion ideas dealt with a wet and soggy afterlife.

Anyway, how come you want an old, used dead body to come back to? I’d rather return as a hot looking 55 Chevy or a T-bird spouting flames in the wheelwells and cruise a million, million miles on an empty road-race hi-way running all over heaven.

And even if I got this body back I’m not sure which parts I'd want in it. My muscles peaked about when I was 30, but the brain was not in great shape for a long time after that. And what about those parts the doctor cut out. They can stay out. They are preserved in a jar down in the basement and that’s fine with me.

Un Día Sin Mexicanos

Mi vida es como la película, Un Día Sin Mexicanos. Viví más de veinte años en Half Moon Bay entre muchos mexicanos. Entonces, me mudé de casa a la isla de Alameda hace un año y medio. Todos los mexicanos han desaparecido de mi vida. No hay en Alameda. Cuando hablé de este fenómeno con mis amigos afroamericanos, me dijeron que el racismo en Alameda era muy fuerte hace diez años, cuándo vivían allí muchos miembros de la marina norteamericana. Los padres de mis amigos les mandaban que no manejaran allí porque la policía molestaban los negros. Me imagino que era malo también para los mexicanos. Espero que sea diferente hoy, pero no estoy seguro. Hay afroamericanos en mi barrio (más de 15 por ciento) y muchos chinos (25 por ciento) alrededor de la isla de Alameda, pero todavía no hay muchos mexicanos.

La vida aquí es diferente sin mexicanos. No hay niños jugando en todas partes con sus hermanos y su papá y su mamá y sus abuelos y sus tíos. No hay fútbol en las calles. Sólo hay gringas con un café de Starbucks y un cochecito que envuelve un bebé y que parecen como un tren de aterrizaje de los 747es. Echo de menos las conversaciones con las familias mexicanas. Los gringos no hablan con sus vecinos y los chinos no hablan con los gringos. ¡Qué ciudad!

Sin embargo, se puede encontrar mexicanos al otro lado del puente en Fruitvale. Es como en México, excepto hay chinos y vietnamitas. La vida en las calles de Fruitvale es rica, las familias están allí y las tiendas huelen con sabores de mi memoria en HMB.

A propósito del tema de la tarea, estoy seguro de que va a haber problemas económicos sin mexicanos, problemas para los ricos que buscan trabajadores para sus jardines y niños. Más importante, va a haber problemas en todas partes de la economía, porque los mexicanos trabajan en todas partes de EE.UU.

Estoy seguro también de que este problema no va a ocurrir. Los negocios no van a permitirlo. Ellos no van a pagar mucho para sueldos y por causa de sueldos bajos necesitan inmigrantes pobres para empleados. México satisface sus necesidades. Inmigración y los sueldos bajos son la historia de los EE.UU. desde la guerra civil hace unos 150 años.

No hay otros pobres tan fácilmente explotados como los mexicanos que son vecinos. Me pregunto por que los negocios esperaron muchos años antes de contratarlo. Antes usaban polacos, eslovacos y checos que vivían lejos de los EE.UU. Eran católicos como mexicanos. Pero ellos eran blancos. El racismo, otra vez.

Posiblemente, los negocios van a buscar más inmigrantes blancos, pero es difícil encontrarlos hoy, especialmente cuando el euro tiene valor mucho más grande que el dólar.

Con gracias a Sr. Zermaño por su ayuda

Smart Guy Radio

I remember hiding under the covers at 11PM, looking for rock and roll radio stations transmitting from up north to my one-transistor radio that was clogged with local, twangy country quartets and holy roller music. That radio was special to me because it let me imagine wonderful, far-away Buffalo NY where Dick Biondi played Danny and the Juniors, sending them all the way down into the highlands of North Carolina.

Radio got more interesting when I came back from the Army in Vietnam Days. I remember when the FM DJ’s played “The wicked witch is dead” all day long when J. Edgar Hoover finally died. They gave drug reports for white heart-shaped tabs and pink and blue caps every afternoon at 5. They told us where to go when when we had a rash or something was happening in the city. And there was that guy, Rumpled Foreskin, who was the night DJ and played the Fugs from NY and Quicksilver. We turned it up loud in the incense packing room where I worked making watermelon and mango flavors using Bombay charcoal sticks and Dow Chemical artificial flavors our weird boss hid in the back room.

FM then was like the internet a couple years ago. We owned it. And the money people did not. But the money people finally figured out how to make FM bland as Wonder Bread and weenies with their focus groups and teeny-bop wonders.

It got worse. Yelling old men preached waco politics and got hold of everything on the air. I turned off the radio and never listened again.

Now I´m back, almost. But I’m a geeky downloader type. I looked for interesting stuff on the web and finally found some. I listen in now as smart folks explain the world to me. They tried it once before, when I was in school listening to rock and roll, but this time a lot of it makes more sense.

Here are some of the shows I get now:
Shooting an Elephant: Why Europe Went to War in 1914
Mapping the Brain
Ezra Pound and Basil Bunting
Special Relativity
The Design of Future Things: Cautious Cars and Cantankerous Kitchens

I put them on my IPod and go for a walk about an hour everyday, listening and trying not to bump into stuff when it gets real interesting. OK, I don’t take notes and I forget a lot, but it is sure is better than Geraldo or, even worse, Regis and Kelly. Nice that there are still some smart guys left in the world--broadcasting free on my webcast radio.

A Big One for Mankind

I am a pessimist. That’s all right with me.

Optimists are wacko dreamers. I’m not. They plan for nirvana, a stateless workers’ paradise, heaven, lots of virgins, and global free markets. Everyone has their own idea of what it’s going to be like before long. I have news for them. This is it. Get used to getting up on the wrong side of the bed. News will be terrible and you’ll feel rotten and have to go do some dumb job for way too many hours. That’s it. Be happy, it could be worse.

OK, it’s not that way every day. But there are enough rotten days so you lose count.

I am a steady-state pessimist. I don’t think its going to get much worse either. Some pessimists see doom and fire and bad tattoo sores doing us in. But we get used to this life the way it is. People are about the same as they were way, way back when they climbed in trees and mostly ate bananas. We have mothers who hug us and brothers who beat on us. We grow up bad, but not that bad. Not bad enough for hell. Not good enough for heaven either. That’s for sure.

So why don’t I think things will get better? I look at what us most highly evolved Americans really think and do. We are not getting more peaceful. Almost half of us have guns in our house. Thirty thousand people a year get fatally shot, suicide included (that’s more than half the total). We make about five million guns a year. We make about four million babies in the same time. That’s one gun per baby with enough left over for every immigrant to have an automatic, even if they send a couple guns back home. How can it get better with odds like this?

But will it get much worse? Here is the good news: every year, for every killer with a gun there are 25 thousand non-killers. That’s a lot. That’s like one guy in a good-sized, sold-out baseball stadium shooting the person next to him every July 4th. All the other days of the year everybody just sits there and holds tight to their guns yelling and shouting and even winging a couple folks, but they don’t kill anyone. Only on July 4. That’s not too bad. Not great, but think how easy it is to shoot a gun. I used to do it. Pull the trigger. Bang. Some guy is dead. Western Civ really did well on this design--bullets work good! (Look at the shooting suicide success rate—92%--that was an A in my high school).

You want to hear about bad. What if every guy with a gun in the house just shot two people—not even a minutes work—then—zap—that’s it. We’re all gone. Even the babies. That’s bad. Real bad.

Optimists argue that things are different now in the post modern world. We have cheeseburgers, ipods and SUVs for everyone. Our monkey-ancestors living in the trees never had anything like that. Even those knights who bashed in heads and chopped off arms never got much past one-horsepower engines and battering rams. Now factories in China churn out enough stuff for everybody to have all new duds every July 4th and throw out their old clothes, shoes, refrigerators and, even, friends once a year. We live in a world of stuff and it’s almost free compared to a couple hundred years back when most people wore rags, ate potato skins and drank gin and opium. The optimists ask me, how can you say it’s the same when what people fought about is stuff. I want yours and you want mine kind of fights.

It’s true that we do have way too much stuff being built, but remember, we still fight over it. But now, guns make fights much messier. And A-bombs clean things out good but are very bad for us people. I watch the news and see the bodies lying around. Even the crowds at Wal-Mart Presidents’ Day sales give a punch or two. No one really has enough stuff. Who doesn’t want another hot cell phone or fancy droopy pants? Or maybe a big shiny gun to put in their new car next to their six-foot-wide speakers and wheel-lifting music amplifier machine. Even poor people want stuff--like food and maybe a doctor visit. So don’t give me the China argument that we reached our stuff capacity. We can pile it up a hundred feet high and still fight over new hi-tops and skull painted tee shirts. We are like those monkeys who had free bananas but still fought wars over their banana piles. We just exchanged bananas for hi-fashion poofy dogs and big-print hoodies.

And wars. Don’t forget those. Things get really bad when you give out a hunting license to bag a couple of your neighbors.

You optimists think things change when you got new ideas and religion. Praise the lord and pass the ammunition. God plays cheerleader too often for me to have much hope for him. And Napoleon and Hitler and Stalin and Mao and Bush twist ideas like wrestlers giving the famous pretzel death hold. Ideas don’t change people. Ideas just give us something besides stuff to fight for.

Is all hope really lost then? I hear there is one last chance that things may change. My friend, who helped invent computers, tells me that we are on the verge of something new. Those genetic engineers are messing with our brain cells, making us better. Things may be different but I am worried because this friend used to tell me about how computers would solve everything. Now I put up with spammy email, work all night from home after all day at the office, watch out for four jillion useless blogs, and run when house refinancing ads pop up in my online dictionary. My friend says gene therapy will fix us up, even if computers didn’t. Engineers are working right now on impulse control circuits in the cerebellum to slow them down with some hot-shot enzymes. It might work.

I am scared. I like my impulses.

In the morning impulses get me up, not my alarm clock. Impulses make me eat chocolate and crab legs. Impulses make me do all sorts of stuff. Put on the impulse brakes and who knows where that leads. We may just sit there and smile. Why shoot anyone if you don’t get an urge is what the scientists say, but I say why do anything at all. Hurray for urges. At least for mine.

And who’s to say they won’t just replace my old fashion impulses with ones like they show on TV, telling us to eat more cheeseburgers and wear more droopy clothes. Impulse control is way too big for big corporations to pass up.

So I say leave my impulses alone. I am making a list of everything I had an urge to do last year, before those engineers got working on my enzymes. I will be sticking to my old urge list, keeping my true, original impulses, no matter what those engineers do with my cerebellum. To make sure, I am writing my Impulse Popper© computer program that jumps up on my screen (like those Viagra ads do now) and tells me to do something right now that I had an urge to do last year. Not weird new corporate-driven impulses. Real Chuck Kerns impulses that I know are my own. That’s how I fight back.

Now the real news. I am going to sell my Impulse Popper © program to Google and save us all from all those false-implanted cheeseburger, Jack LaLane Juicer and hair restorer urges that we know will get implanted in our enzymes soon. With my Impulse Popper © you can stay pure and live according to your true self. Your cerebellum may change but your impulse list won’t. You can pass it on like an heirloom to your kiddies and human nature will always be the same.

Well that’s not quite true. Don’t tell anyone but if you do have an urge to shoot someone on your impulse list, Google is going to erase that item. Their lawyers advised them about this. So maybe some things will change after all.

I Am Large, I Contain Multitudes and I Don't Like It.

Mostly TV ads just get on my nerves, but sometimes you find out something important.

Chevy showed me how to pull big, railroad cars up a mountain with my four-door SUV. Jack LaLane showed how old and saggy looks even when you work out too much. But now the probiotic, blue-state yogurt and clotted milk people are telling me secrets about who I really am—it’s like finding religion, or seeing your best friend’s mama naked when you are nine, or finding out, when you visit your Aunt Ethel in the country, that smelly, grass-eater cows squirt milk from downstairs. The world just looks different and you give up milk forever.

I used to think I was me. Now the yogurt people tell me I was all wrong-- I am more than me. In fact, more of me is not me, than is me. For every cell that says Chuck Kerns in its DNA, 1000 microbes, without papers or proper clearance, climbed the fence and live in my heartland. Well slightly lower, but you get the idea.

At first I was not sure whether to welcome them or build a fence. Now I know.

Those yogurt guys are smuggling in microbes, even charging you extra to carry them home in your car trunk. You are an accomplice and give billions sanctuary down there in your personal basement.

OK, I hear these microbe guys do work hard--dirty work--and don’t get much pay, just leftovers. It’s dangerous--if they don’t hang on tight, they get flushed. But they are taking away jobs from full Chuck Kerns DNA cells. If I could get a couple neurons or liver cells to go down and work a double shift I would, but the liver cells like to stay near their own types. And neurons think they know everything.

My problem is there are just so many microbes. A few would be fine. But they breed like rabbits in a sex club. Microbes say they don’t want to take over, but who knows. I am just one big, fat, happy colon to those guys. If things keep going this way, one day I may not be Chuck Kerns anymore. I will be a big, tall bunch of microbes named Bifidobacterium or something even longer and hyphenated too.

Now I am formally calling on those Minutemen who sit on the borders to go patrol our dairy shelves too. We need a fence in the milk case running from non-fat coffee-mate to smelly blue cheese. Microbes can’t climb high so a short wall is just fine. But those microbes slip thru damn-near invisible holes so it’s got to be tough, like us, when we can’t digest anything stronger than soggy biscuits and Wonder bread after cleaning out our system of those symbiotic alien-cell types.

We are fighting for purity in our colons today and cleaner pipes tomorrow. Remember that when you go down to Safeway and fill up your cart. Those yogurt guys will back off soon and start putting good old artificial, all-American, bacteria-free gooplets back on the shelves soon, if you act right now.

Fight On.

My Favorite Sins

Those hot-shot Catholics in Rome just approved some new, big sins a couple of weeks back. I think that’s great. We built a bunch of really neat, super-bad things in the past couple hundred years but were still playing with old sin rules. It’s like having a skinny-butt, Victorian-age pitcher tossing up softballs to 21^st century steroid guys. We have long ball, home run Sins today that the Pope never thought of until just now. He never talked about bad cell phone behavior. Or leaving cluster bombs on playgrounds. But times are changing and Hell is opening up for new age sins. I’m glad they are finally making the big time back in Rome.

But they forgot to downgrade the sin top ten, I mean the seven big guys that just are not that deadly any more. Next to atom bombers and poison-kid factories those seven deadly sins are downright tame. Let’s look at them one by one:

First, how can you say much bad about Greed here in America? We celebrate rich folk flaunting their mansions, hi-cost cupcakes and other surgical protuberances. We all want greed; some are just better at it. And to help those without money in their genes, we have greed schools everywhere: four “Growing Greedy” cable channels, a thousand Pray-and-Get-Rich Mega-Churches, web courses on grabbing houses from the dumb and poor and, for the big league greedy, MBA’s in finance. Remember, Do greed. Do it good. How can you go to hell for that?

And you’ve got to have Envy to help that top-tier greedy sons-of-guns get rich. Without envy who is going to buy anything new. The news is we have grown way beyond envy. We don’t want what our neighbors have (that’s envy) we want something better and bigger with fancy, shiny, chrome spinner wheels, too. That’s not envy that’s consumerist competition. Our President said it’s our sacred duty, like being a dead soldier. He says “Have more, more often.” That won’t get you to hell. That gets you to the mall and saves our economy.

I thought Gluttony was making a real sin comeback. I thought we had a holy war coming with Big Mac living getting clobbered by metro-sexual new cuisine. “Too much” was wronger every day. But now I see we celebrate the virtues of all eating; both big and flashy are OK. The slim and active chow down and eat arugula, too. Food technique can get you a PhD these days. If you know the regions in Tuscany and the 93 types of dim sum, and have the sharpest knife set in your neighborhood, you are hot, not evil. If you can eat 47 hot dogs in 12 minutes you are a hero. Can you really go to Hell for powering your heavenly body and even plumping it up a bit, all in the glory of hamburgers, Cinnabuns, and pate? Praise God and pass the condiments. That sounds like heaven to me.

Four more to go.

Poor Pride. How can it go against bumper stickers praising smart-ass kids, high school pride rallies, Pick your color ethnic pride, and those banner wavers who buy Chinese-made US flags. The opposite of pride is not humility; it is neurosis, self doubt and wussiness. Pride rules.

Lust, it’s an ex-sin for sure—it’s the gas that keeps our four-stroke engines going. It’s the sticky wet glue of our society. Why else would car-hound guys hang out with clothes-happy women? And vice versa. But what about unnatural lust. Some want it to move up to the next level of Sin. Unnatural is hard to find though. Monkeys and my Mom’s chihuahua do it with anyone furry they can find, monkeys even do it with their big banana trees. And humans figured out more ways than monkeys to be super-natural. This nature stuff is what sin was supposed to save us from, but now natural, green living gets you thru those pearly gates. And who knows what really goes on up there where there is no underwear beneath the white silky robes. Let’s root for more lust not less.

Next is Lazy. It’s bad, for sure. Just laying around, doing nothing, maybe sipping on a margarita. Bad. But wait, that sounds like my last vacation. Jimmy Buffet made a business singing about this to old retirees. Lazy is good if you work for it. Lazy is a just reward, not a sin. And I can see me with my wings tucked in, laying around beside the pool, upstairs with those angels. How can heaven be a sin?

Finally we get Wrath--that’s red hot anger to most people. I know I can’t take all the anger shows on TV. Fox News is surely a sin. And talk radio is worse. But then public TV is so polite you wish Cokie Roberts would slug Bill Moyers sometime in a WWR ring. So this one is a maybe on my new sin list.

One maybe out of seven. We really need an update. Please forward your new sin list to Rome. Let them come up with more top-dog new sins, like the FBI and Most Wanted TV shows do with their crooks. We need sins that deal with tight seats in airplanes, racism, genocide, droopy pants and boogie boarding, oops, I mean water-boarding. You all go right now and text that guy with the funny hat and who drives around in the Pope-mobile.

From Wikipedia, here they are: “. . . luxuria (extravagance, later lust), gula (gluttony), avaritia (greed), acedia (sloth), ira (wrath), invidia (envy), and superbia (pride). Each of the seven deadly sins has an opposite among the corresponding seven holy virtues . . . chastity, temperance, charity, diligence, patience, kindness, and humility.”

Free Gas

Someone has to do something. Gas costs more than bottled water. No more cheap rides in Big-O-Mobiles. Even worse, maybe no rides at all.

Americans don’t ride in hi-mile, put-put-cycles or tin-can cars. They need elbow room. They need butt room. On a big steel chassis. That’s what America is about. Freedom to ride away from any problem, no matter how big.

I am afraid I see 200 million cars sitting dead in the driveway. Is this the America that our heroes, Chevy, Ford and General Motors, built? We need big thinkers to get past this mess-up. We need oil. So let’s do something and get some oil--NOW.

We tried the friendly route. How many kisses did Bush smack on Mr. Saudi’s cheeks last month anyway. It was a bunch and he didn’t even get a gas burp back.

We tried the bad-ass route and invaded a place with oil for 100 billion summer vacations to the Ozarks. But that got screwed up and now, besides not having any oil, we are spending enough on the war to fill up the Prez’s 747 for a long flight to Mars.

Everyone said just borrow, borrow. I got a credit card in the mail every day. And Uncle Sam had the biggest credit card of all. Everyone rich wanted a piece of him. Big-Bank here and Rich-Guy there. They all fed his habit. And Uncle taught us to live like him. So now we have to pay. Pay bunches of bucks for oil. And then try to sell our SUV’s as storage sheds and cheap homes for the broke.

England had this problem. They spent it all and couldn’t afford even a used tank back in ‘41. But that was fighting Mr. Hitler. Then, after the war, with all their borrowed bucks those Brits tried to repossess the world. Owing everything to everyone and just hoping they could bluff their way saying “Mission Accomplished.” That’s what they tried and now they are just a piddly-wet island. We don’t want that.

We got into hock buying TV sets, snappy shoes and oil. We are maxed out. We need to call one of those credit counselors I see on TV. I know what they will say: Hey, why are you so in debt when you got so much in the bank, the land bank that is! You got more square miles than you need and you are borrowing bucks. Just sell off some of that dirt and you can be free of debt and buy all the gas you want. Maybe even get a new four-wheeler.

There is one thing you can’t buy more of right now and that is land. And we got a bunch. The world is filled up and you can’t get any new half-full countries anymore. We should score enough money to buy us a gajillion oil wells and save the Hummer and Escalade from extinction. Or maybe we just do a trade. 50000 square miles of God’s own earth in trade for 100 years of oil. Free. What a deal.

O.K., the problem is--what goes?

It’s like GM selling their big skyscraper in Detroit. They didn’t need it. They needed factories in China. We need to think like GM. Sell something big.

I say--sell Florida. It has lots of water around it and what do those guys with oil need: water. Nice wet, jungly beaches. A nice place to take a break from hot dry sand dunes in the desert. And for the Floridians, what does Florida have that you can’t get in Belize or Thailand or Cancun anyway, where it’s a lot cheaper.

Florida goes.

OK, I am holding back on you. Here’s the secret. Who cares if we sell Florida to keep our SUV’s alive. Florida will be underwater soon anyway if we use enough oil. Just don’t tell anyone or it may break the deal.

True Love

Something is happening.

Dogs are everywhere. Yap dogs lie in fat driver laps, big labs lick children like ice cream cones, fat-headed bull-toad terriers strut beside their fat-jowled owners and, worst of all, Chihuahuas in pink dog coats and, sometimes, little tutus tip-tip-tip across the living room of otherwise reasonable people.

The days of the free-range, doofus dog are over. Pluto doesn’t stumble into Mickey’s room and tangle in the electric cord any more. Goofy doesn’t yee-haw like an off-the-farm yokel. Dogs are the new fluffy handbag, the complement to strappy heels, the companion to a big guy’s bad-ass belt buckle. Accessories are everywhere and they breath and bark, or at least yip-yip-yip.

What happened? We are urbans. We don’t range the woods with shotguns and covered wagons any more. We don’t need a dog to fight off coyotes and rattlesnakes. We don’t need a ratty, burr-covered, mangy outdoors assistant. But we do need to look good as we walk down the hot city streets and, most important, bright-lit mall hangouts for teens and other layabouts. What could be better than a sharp-looking dog to highlight your new pink hair or that nasty tattoo!

But why dogs? They need care. They are messy. They chew expensive shoes and sofas. They plop droppings everywhere that we dutifully bag as we never would for humans. Dogs are kind of stupid—OK, they are stupid. And you are stuck with the same dog-look for a long time. You can’t get a new model each season without dealing with big disposal problems. The business opportunity looks like Rent-a-Dog, but people don’t change dogs. They love their dogs forever and I know why. Their dogs love them. Pure sloppy, undeserved, unconditional, lip-kissing love. You know your dog would die for you. Your dog lives for you to come home. Your dog wants to be part of you. True love.

We want an accessory that loves. That’s it. Love-doggies are what's happening.

This makes me wonder. Why can’t everything love me, not just my clothing accessories. I want my car to at least like me, to be happy when I sit in it, to feel the glee when I go fast around those hairpin turns. To hug me hard when I have to leave her in a parking lot and fly away for the week.

Or why not my house? It just sits there now and doesn’t say a word. It isn’t happy when I come home. I don’t want house slobber on me, but a smile would be nice.

The good news is love-stuff is just around the corner. I am calling on those genetic engineers to work hard on this one. A couple million neurons is all it takes. And there is lots of room in the attic or glove compartment for lots of love in all my stuff.

Some people say we don’t care about people anymore because we get our love from our pets. That’s hogwash. I love people. They just don’t love me as much as my new TV that knows my channels and plays them for me whenever I want. Or my new bed that has my number. Love stuff is the future. Get ready.

Going Fast, Staying Close

(I’m not talking about the latest dance or even harpooning big semi-trucks on long stretches of the interstate where only one or two off ramps fly by every hour or so. Come to think of it, why not grab on to those double semis for a ride—just aim the harpoon at their rear bumperlock and—wham—you reel yourself in and then take a snooze as those miles tick away. They already carry so many tons they won’t notice you, even in your monster SUV.

But that’s different idea about Putting Fun Back into Driving. Today’s idea is about getting to work, buying groceries and picking up your kids on Saturday driving on crowded freeways.)

Freeways have a problem. You know that. Most say there are too many cars.

But, saying too many cars is just thinking backwards. The best way to figure what’s going on is to think about speed. Now, cars go fast when there’s lots of room but when cars get close together they slow way down. That’s the problem.

Remember: not too many cars; just too many slow cars.

So, what to do. Think about the weather. It knows how to handle this problem. When winds get crowded by mountains they just blow harder over the top. You want to fly a really big kite-don’t go where it’s flat and open; go up on top of a mountain where the clouds bunch up. You can have a kite as big as your car.

We need cars to do what the winds do. When you are in a jam just go like crazy.

People do the opposite, though. When it gets crowded they slow down and even stop. At first, going slow sounds reasonable—if you get close, then you can bump and bumps are better going slow and worse going fast. But you don’t want to bump at all, not even going slow. So the slow-go is over if we can have a no-bump car.

The real question is how to do the no-bump. Think about driving even closer together. How can I hit you if you are holding me, like clenches in boxing. Or like the harpoons for semis. Every car is hooked tight together and dragged along really fast.

No wrecks. No slowdowns. No worries about reaction times from those bad drivers, dilly-dallying along, talking on their cell phones, having a cup of coffee, and God knows what else, as the car in front jams on its brakes and then after a few seconds it starts slugging along again.

OK you say, but this sounds like a train. Who cares. You have your own car. You go fast and won’t be late for the kids.

It does mean that freeway entrances will be tricky. Instead of going one at a time with those weird red lights that make us wait to enter the hiway, we will just queue up really close together and hook bumperlocks. Then a big puller comes and whisks off twenty or thirty cars at a time. Then you can dilly-dally all you want. Or talk on the phone. Who cares.

Leaders

It’s time for picking our new leader. We hear speeches and name-calling. Just to see who gets to the big leader-decider for the next four years.

Then Mr. New-Leader decides to spend all our money on things we don’t need, fight people we don’t know, give big guns to big thugs, and, most of all, pay rich guys for being rich. Would any of us decide these things?

We need to elect a NOT-Leader who doesn’t decide anything. He just does important stuff like the national trash collection and garden cleanup. And teaching our kids and keeping guns away from whacko’s and robbers and teenagers. Things we tell him to do. Yes, we want a Do-As-You’re-Told kind of guy. We don’t want this guy making up stuff to do just to keep busy like the guy we have now. The new guy can sleep all day--I don’t care, as long as he doesn’t do anything too terrible.

How come we need a leader anyway? I know. Deep in our deepest hearts we still want a king to tell us what to do. You’d think we would be over that by now. But we want a King, walking around with his fancy red coat and crown and a bunch of princesses. Why do we want him? It’s brainwashing! Do kids’ stories have a congress? No, but kings show up everywhere. The biggest things are king-sized. The baddest fish are King Salmon. Mr. King Kong always got the prettiest girls. Burger King gives you paper crowns if you’re good. The King of the jungle runs things, not the shift-manager lion down at the oasis. Boy, are we brainwashed.

And we do have a king right now. Maybe not for life but it feels that way while he does what he wants with my money and country. Let’s be honest and apply the duck test to our president: If he walks like a duck and talks like a duck then guess what he is. Let’s call his home the White Castle and bow to Queens Laura and Condi.

What’s the alternative to kings? I know Congress is messy. Kings chop off your head with a big, pretty swing, but senators argue until you drop dead of old age. It’s like those business meetings that go on and on until you schedule another meeting. But you don’t do bad things at those meetings. You just don’t do much. And not doing much is a pretty good idea when you have lots of bombs and blank checks waiting in your desk.

The kings-to-be ask us who will answer the red phone at 3AM., who gets to decide something terrible before breakfast. I know the truth--they don’t decide at 3AM. They already know what they want to do; they just wait for some a reason to do it. And they think those things they do are best done in the dark.

Since we are stuck with these leader guys, how can we keep them under control? Congress is supposed to cut off king-money to keep them in line. And they cannot attack until Congress declares war. But the decider-king just keeps spending and fighting. No matter what.

I have a plan. We need a king-sized global trading system to swap leaders every six months. Twice a year, the UN has a big party and all the leaders come and eat too much at a very fancy dinner. Then after a couple deserts, everyone pops open a fortune cookie with their new assignment: “You were made for Poland, start packing.” “Hah, you got Burma, good luck,” “Woo, woo, woo, you got the U.S. –don’t forget to cash in all your Euros.” Like musical chairs, but this time with enough seats for all, everyone moves and takes their staff. OK, we will get some good leaders and some bad. Just like now, but they change quicker and they don't get too attached to one place.

But best of all, if you were a big-shot leader, would you start pounding on another country if you might be its leader in two days? Leaders watch out for themselves, not us. We can trust them on that, and on stealing a little. Luckily it takes a while to figure out how to do something real bad in a new place and by then they will be off somewhere else.

OK it’s not a great plan, but we need to do something to spread out their power. That’s what Adams and Madison and the gang tried to do when they made the constitution here the USA. Spread out the power, so nobody has too much. Give a little to Congress, the judges, governors, city councils, a little to the steel and power companies, a little to the Girl Scouts and a bunch to the Red Cross; give a little power to everyone.

Let everybody be a leader.

Green Thoughts

I cut down on stuff coming into my house. I save electricity—curly lights in every room. I save water—the lawn dies happily each summer. I buy less—don’t have the money anyway these days.

And I pay attention to what goes out. I recycle—I sort stuff into big green and blue bins and instruct my wife (with moderate effect) on the intricacies of plastic reuse classifications. I compost—my banana peels and coffee grounds will soon be born-again dirt. I dutifully trek back to Safeway with my plastic bag offerings (suspecting that they just chuck them in the dumpster when no one is looking).

I am one green guy.

But I have been thinking about something we send out everyday and spend God knows how much money, time, effort and energy in transporting to a big industrial-style, centralized processing plant. You know, the family sewage.

In this time of decentralization, how come we have a big, superhighway of poop under every street? Right next to the fresh water pipes and cable TV.

I know that in the good old days everyone just dumped their poop out the window and men just took a walk in the newly invented garden behind every upscale urban house. Sewers were a big (but little considered) advance for civilization. With sewers, poop flowed downstream and the rich moved up on the hills. Then when the scientists learned how to cook it and clean it up in their processors for dumping in the rivers—Wow! Cities didn’t smell the same. Except for the horses and then later for the cars.

I left out the part about cholera and dysentery, (formerly known as the bloody flux, thanks Wikipedia) going away. With these guys flushed from polite society, stomach growling and cramps were a thing of the past. Hurray for Sewers!

But now in post-industrial America, when we have closed down shoe factories, plants for making steel and iron and even lots of our airplanes get built in France, do we need the biggest factory in town to turn out processed poop, just to remind us that the US was once the industrial giant of the world. I suspect no.

It's just no one has had the foresight to see what is hidden. Sort of like before vacuum cleaners, or food processors, or even back when the best place to sit and read was just over a big hole in the floor. This was before Mr. Crapper (now of great fame--his name made immortal thru daily use) did his great work and invented the toilet with its water valve that lets poop go out, but keeps smells from coming in.

Now is time to move beyond centralized, industrial-sized solutions. We have cell phones, not central switchboards; we have laptops, not IBM 360’s; we have ipods, not radio stations; we have skateboards, not steam trains. Life in the US is small and spread out, like the suburbs, and poop needs to keep up.

We need a new way to deal with it. No pipes coming out of the house. Just pull the handle and BAM: everything gets processed, clean water flows out to the tomatoes and a pile of clean, sweet-smelling, org-dirt comes out ready for the garden.

We have a prize to send someone up to outer space. That encourages rocket development. I say lets develop the poopster. Offer a new prize, a million bucks, to you, Mr. or Ms. hot-shot inventor, to think about poop for a few minutes and design us a poopster. that's what I call the invention now, but remember, it will be named after you when you succeed.

Mr. Crapper’s big days are over. When you win, you will be remembered once or twice a day by everyone on earth (if we have good marketing).

Wetdog Chews the Fat

(ok-this is a story but it is full of ideas)

Wetdog Chews the Fat

I was chewing fat, way back in old, old days, before the first calamity.

All people chewed the fat back then, chewed fat four-leggers, fatty birds, and fat, fat plants.

We all grew round and fat and soft back then. Farms plumped up pigs and ducks and you could squeeze the wet-fat out of corn and other oily plants, all for us to eat.

Then calamity came. Gene engineers melted all our fat with their creeping virus genes. The twisting virus strangled and rebuilt our genes to stop the fat from growing in us living things. All because the engineers sold gene treatments to the rich to make them slim and sleek and to the starlets to let them eat and eat. Their virus genes escaped and stopped all internal living fat-making machines. No more fat in all us living things.

Gene engineers lost control. The virus crossed the planet. Then people, cats, dogs, mice, all creatures, plants, and even labs not specially contained, could never create the fat we loved. No more precious calories bulging under well-sized arms or in bouncing, happy thighs or in our belly rolls. That was the big calamity. All people were doomed evermore to eat and eat and eat.

“Oh rue the day of calamity the angels say.”

Now all must nibble constantly or drain their fuel—like humming birds have always done. These little birds fell down hard when their inner food ran low. Now people do that everyday. Just drop when calories are gone and internal carb accounts are drained.

“Oh, sweet, sweet fatty angels help us through the hour when no sugarbars or chiplets come. “ We pray that prayer ten times a day. “Oh, fatty angels guide us on.“

Now, the calamity has long past. Nothing ever bulges fat. All people are just molded tissues under tight-stretched skin. Lean and mean they used to say when I was young, but that was wrong. Now all are lean—the mean and good ones, too.

Some still want the fat, fat look. They bulge themselves with insert bags surgically slipped underneath their skin. These are the RoundOnes. They look like fatty angels, all round in their bellies and their puffy cheeks. But RoundOnes are not the angels of the earth, as they often claim. They are only stringy lizard folk like me. Eating stringy meals, but singing fat-filled eating songs together every night. Songs about the round way people ought to look. They act like there are no stringy selves inside their puffed out skin.

Everyone knows this noisy, cultish group because most RoundOnes with the insert bags choose Transparency. Their bones and liver, heart and spleen all show through their color-missing skin, show through their insert bags hidden deep in belly spaces. Their organs and a map of arteries and veins are bared. Transparent RoundOnes are not the fatty angels that they try to be. No fatty angel would expose her gassy bubbles, squirting tubes and organs pumping slimy juices.

Some Transparents slip bright glitter chips in the round insert bags that paunch out their shining belly rolls. Some keep swimming fishes in round-the-waist bags dodging intestines and other squirmy body things. I never care to see the golden fish beneath their see-through belly skin.

The true fatty angels float above us, full-covered with their robes and feathered wings. We should do as they would have us do.

“Be round but be covered,” I always say when I see transparancy. “See it and be it,” the Transparents yell back to me. I tell them, “cover up and keep your organs to yourself.”

True fatty angels never would display their inner stuff. We should all be like the angels in their covered state. I follow fat angels’ one true way. I cover all with all the fur I grow myself, thanks to the Furry Way

Fur priests say that our Furry sex is no better than the others. “The Furry sex is not above the Feathers, Scalebacks, and the Crawlers. Furs are not above Transparents and the minor sexes, too. No better in the fatty angels’ eyes. But all Furs know, “Outside is what does matter.” The Fury Oath I took back on my sexing day says so.

The Furry Way called me at my sexing time. That day I took the fur-virus dose. Then during my Adulting Year Away, I grew hair out soft and smooth. I came back brown furred and took my place in my new sexed role.

I am Wetdog. I am fur. I sing each day before I pray:

Fur fends off rays,

wraps bodys warm,

and keeps the nose glare free

and skin from harm.

fur forever and brush my face.

(clap clap clap)

But this story is not about the Furs or insert bags. This story is of LaDu, one of the true fatty angels and how she grew and sprouted wings and flew away.

Yes, I was chewing fat that day back then when we conceived LaDu. That day, my family feasted in the center of the grassy, rolling townyard green on long communal tables fitted out for family days. We feasted on this conception day for the One-Who-Is-to-Be, and that would be my sister, the soon-to-be-conceived, LaDu. She would be conceived as soon as the lambduck leg was carved down to the bone. Townspeople watched from the edges of the yard, remembering their family conception days when they sat and prayed to the angels for their One-to-be.

The calamity would come within the year (of course we did not know it then). That was the last time my family had communal fat to chew. In love and happiness we chomped down to the bone that day. The angels smiled, blessed us all, and wiped their rounded, greasy chins.

I sat on the far side, on the children’s side, with child Lulu and Lulene. We children sang conception songs as parents reached for the center cooking pot for meaty, dripping chunks:

Angels, angels come today

And bring our new baby, baby

We make our baby with this song

Baby, baby come along

Suck the sauce and chew the bone

Feast today for baby comes

Dance the dance and carry on

Make the baby, sing the song

MamaLa and MamaTrogh were furs like me. They sat to my side. These two mamas were my favorite mamapair. MamaLentroline and MamaJenelate sat across from them. They were of the feather sex and had their plumage spread and covered the full tableside. MamaMako was the ScaleBack of the family. She sat with MamaLen from the minor sex of Crawlers. MamaPapa, our Transparent, sat on the far side from me. She wore a feather robe that day and covered well. She had the place of honor. She handed out the meat and did the carving work. The lambduck meat was sliced away. The family laughed as they held the greasy food and let it slide down inside as they swallowed whole their greasy bites.

Time finally came when all were all filled and food was done. The Conception Song had all twenty verses sung, so MamaLa, who led the party day, pulled up the BabyView upon the table. All watched as the projected image of the One-to-Be danced undefined, ghostlike, in the center of the yard. The BabyView had been used for years to conceive by all town families. The engineers built them way back when the sexes were more constrained. Some said the innies and outies existed then and those two sexes were all there were.

MamaLa took the GeneSpin from the BabyView to architect new baby genes for our One-to-Be. The first gene choice went to our MamaPapa. All beamed wide, wide happy smiles. She had the carry for nine months now with the big insertion bag inside that plugged into her bloodtap to carry new baby LaDu. MamaPapa should be first to choose, because she had the babycarry chore. Of course, the family helped and plugged in when they could, but the bag was hers. MamaPapa smiled and picked the eyegene: Orangy-Red. We cheered and clapped and yelled for her.

MamaLu spun again and we called out genes as the choice turn went round the table. Each Mama chose new genes for the One-to-Be. The genes filled in and the projected image ghost grew to fully colored flesh dancing in the townyard air. Of course, the baby was not sexed, not until adulting day, so the baby had that boring look that children have—that’s what the Mama’s said to us—boring red-black-brown-foam-and even blue, but always with that undercoat of red. Not like adults with their fur, scales, and feather rainbow looks.

After an hour of spins, the One-to-Be was fully formed. The genemap blazed in lights above the townyard glen. Then all the Mamas came to MamaPapa’s chair and picked her up. They chanted as they carried the family bagholder over the field to the baby cleanroom for Mamapapa to receive the new one in the angel-blessed bag. The children carried baby presents on their heads and danced around the babycarry’s chair. Fatty angels danced above the townyard square.

The townsfolk who had watched the family party with only sly side looks now dropped their feigned distance to parade across the yard, to sing and to pop bags with loud bangs, as we always do on conception days. The children ran through the line, but the Mamas walked straight to the babyroom. Mamapapa smiled and all children knew it would be their job to wait on her until the day was due when the bag was broken and the One-to-Be would join us and get her baby name. That was the start of our LaDu.

We conceived LaDu the month before calamity. It came like fever through the town and all were changed. Sex did not matter--all sexes: furs, feathers, tranparents, even the antennae folks, too, whom noone ever sees. All caught the virus, young, mid, and old-withered too. Even those conceived but not yet burst to life, like LaDu.

All seemed wrong when the virus came. We were all hungry all the time. We started melting like old lardcakes frying in the pan. In only weeks we looked so lean and many of us danced like rich starlets after their fancy no-fat creams. We would all be fit and lean and become starlets on townyard screens, that’s what the children thought.

MamaPapa stayed big, round in the middle, the bag held her very tight. She slimmed down everwhere but there, in her arms and legs and even in her neck.

In the next months, other babies burst out skin and bone. Lizard babies we called them then. No fat was showing anywhere. Families cried when a bag was popped. Only lizard babies were carried out of for family children to view.

So everyone was crying when Baby LaDu’s day came. MamaPapa flipped the flap and pulled the bag. She popped the plugs and other tube things from the side. The bag was opened and baby given the twelve volt jump from the start machine. We sang the baby welcome song:

Unzip the bag and pull her plug

Let the baby breath in air

Give her room to stretch and move

Then hold her snug with Mama care

But we sang with little heart, for fear of what LaDu would be. A lizard baby scared us all.

But all inside the bursting room were laughing like before Calamity. Then I saw LaDu, fat as any baby ever was. I was down to boney legs and arms but LaDu had fat rings round her arms and legs, and a chin that puckered seven times. She smiled at me and I smiled back and gave her a furry Wetdog cry.

We sang to Baby LaDu that night. Everyone in town put her down to sleep. The next town heard the songs and then the next town too. All knew we slept happy in our family.

Soon engineers came to see Ladu. In white coats they scoped her belly cells. We told them, “see, calamity is done; the virus is not strong. LaDu can beat it. Engineers like you could fix us all. We will plump out again.”

LaDu was hope. LaDu was joy. We sang to her each day and squeezed her tight each night as we lay her in her nesting room.

The engineers came back again. They shook their heads and said we were wrong, “wait, LaDu will be a lizard baby too.” For three months they came but our LaDu got rounder everyday. She bounced her head up and down and we squeezed and squeezed the soft baby fat legs and toes.

Finally the engineers took LaDu away and told us that she was a fatty angel, not of the Wetdog family. She was not a baby but belonged above. They took her to fly above the town, dropping sugarballs and chiplets down.

The family cried but could not save LaDu from her angel fate to save us all and drop us daily sugarballs. MamaPapa, we could not console. She dripped tears like fatty droplets used to fall. She had watched the baby grow inside her see-through bag. Now she watched LaDu dance in the sky each night. She cried for her angel child.

MamaPapa knew what to do. She reinserted the bag from her LaDu and filled it full of chiplets and other LaDu sugar things floating around to remind us all. The RoundOne cult started on that day. Now they bulge around us all.

That was the end of baby LaDu. She was not a baby child at all. She was an angel called to fly, by engineers who knew her fate. She hovers nightly in each townfield sky, projected over clouds and stars. She sings praises to the engineers who found her grounded on the earth. We Wetdogs pray to our LaDu to save us every, every day.

Kicking Butt

My basketball team lost last night. I was so bummed.

But I am thinking, why are they my team. I don’t play on it. I don’t even go see them. I just watch them on TV. But they play twenty miles from my house. That makes them mine? Hey, these guys don’t even live here. One guy is from Texas and the two with the long names, from Europe. But I get excited for them. And bummed when they lose.

That happens at work too. We have a project-team. I don’t like two of the guys but we eat pizza when we hit a milestone. And we kick butt over the other teams.

Teams seem like a trick to make us work hard or cheer or buy more beer. But it sure works. It’s wired in, like loving your mom and punching your brother. Your brain loves teams.

Teams must have started a long, long time ago, back when we kicked butt everywhere. We must have because our ancestors made it and the kickees didn’t. We had one big mama who had a big, big papa. We were brothers. We had lots of relations who walked like us, talked like us and took other peoples’ stuff. That’s really living. Sort of like high school.

Team stuff is everywhere. Waving flags and cheering. I did it on July Fourth. For my big team—the U S of A. It’s my nation-team. I pledge allegiance to one nation and we kick butt.

Nations do more than play games, they tell team stories. They try hard to remember their big mama. The Germans had a great story for Mr. Hitler and still sing it every year; the English have their Normans; the Slavs their Boleslaw; the French their Marianne Liberty leading the revolution with her droopy dress-top. Every bunch of folks with a special nose twist or chin size or hair color called themselves a nation. And get this--every nation had its own race only one hundred years ago. Now there are only a couple races and scientists know everything is just a mish-mash, anyway.

We don’t all look alike here in the U S of A. We are not a race, even an old-time race like the Russians and Swedes think they are. Nope, we are a mish-mash. But we are a nation because those French revolutionaries changed what nation meant. They kicked out relations who were goof-off aristocrats and did not include those guys in their Nation. O.K. they never invited else in (except that Corsican guy), but got the idea going that Nations are not blood; they are not race; they are just folks who think alike and kick butt of people who think different.

I am thinking that this kicking butt stuff is not really that good. Now we try not to kick butt and we just can’t help it. I think it is because of our built-in team spirit. I know the principal made you go to team spirit day in the 9^th grade, but it’s time to cool it. Especially, now because every nation-team has bombs and big planes and the big league guys have A-bombs too. They roast butt.

Stopping butt-kicking is hard because it’s wired in. We need to snip some wires.

I have a plan, but first I want to tell you a story. I used to live in Baltimore and listened to the Colts on my new three-transistor radio. (It was a while back.) Then I left Baltimore and left Alan the Horse Amechi and Lenny Sputnik Moore. I left my team. I went to San Francisco and became a hippie and even made money off my new team, the 49ers, when I rented out my driveway for parking during games. But I never felt like it was my team. And Baltimore wasn’t either, anymore. I didn’t care who kicked butt.

We need to be like I was and move away from our team every once and a while.

I have a plan to make that happen: Every year there is a lottery. The winners get $50K and a free pass to a randomly chosen country. Just they can’t come back. Not ever. Or at least for ten years. And there are lots of winners. Five percent of the country wins every year. And in a decade or two, they have a name for the losers: Homebodies—and it’s not such a nice name either. So homebodies try to figure out how to stack the odds and be a winner too.

The winners can take their family. They get a job that’s now empty in their new nation because someone there won too and had to leave. Everywhere people win and move. Maybe we give them a year off to learn the language, try the food and go to the beach.

But everybody gets confused. Which team are they on? Who knows? Which butt to kick? It’s hard to figure out.

But that’s OK with me.

Big Families

Raising kids is hard. Like having a couple extra full time jobs—if you do it right.

In the old days, parents had help. I remember that a couple doors down in either direction lived my grandma, three aunts, two uncles, someone called Tio Frank who drank a bit and no one knew for sure how he was related but he came to dinner a lot and taught me fishing, and a bunch of cousins of assorted ages with their various dogs and cats. We kids ran back and forth like wild monkeys and went to the wrong house to eat when they had spaghetti. But high-tailed it home when Mom yelled or we got feeling sick

Now, does any kid have enough cousins and uncles? No. That’s because it takes brothers and sisters to make cousins and there are not many of them any more. One spoiled child is all most people get. And a lot of work.

O.K. kids are a joy, too. It’s true. I’ve got to remind you of that because I have a plan for everyone to have lots of kids.

It’s those genetic engineers who can help again. They learned how to chop up DNA and replace lots of chunks. I heard the other day that they put DNA from a firefly into a pig and now he lights up when he grunts. If they can to that, then they can make more uncles and aunts.

The secret is to have more than two bio-parents. I suspect we still want primary parents—those who give more than 50% of the DNA, but why not get 5% here, 10% there, and have a whole collection of people making a baby. I don’t mean the sex in bed babymaking. I mean test-tube sex, and maybe a baby shower party or two.

Low percenters can’t really be called parents, just the 50%ers-plus get that name. I call the others are pair-aunts and pair-uncles. Because they give to that pair of DNA strands.

I hope this helps. Adults just don’t seem to care much about kids unless they have lots of similar DNA chunks (we used to call them blood relations or maybe just people-like-us). But kids need a bunch of love and work from lots of people.

Finally, when they say you have your pair-uncle’s eyes, you know they’re right, because he put in chromosome IV which makes your eyes brown and smiley, just like his.

Getting Synched

The world is out of sync. I mean it. When I call India they are a half day off. It’s that way everywhere.

I can’t fly for more than an hour without getting offered supper when I want lunch. And long-distance conference calls. I am lucky if half the people show up. They call in an hour early. They call in an hour late. They call the next morning. Let’s get synched up, world.

Some people want primitive synching--they tell me to use GMT. First of all, I have to explain to everyone what GMT is and half the people still cant figure out what I mean. And then they have to do math—most people can’t subtract 11 or 9 or whatever number from their time to get GMT time. And then I have to explain that, yes, England did try to rule the world and made themselves the center and that’s why the G means Greenwich. And I know they are just a little dib-dab these days, but . . .

What a pain.

If you think about it, this mess is all because our eyes are small and piggy and not so good in the dark. We used to hunt during the day and hide out at night. Who hides out at night anymore! We have full-spectrum lighting. It’s time to break free from the sun ruling our lives.

A lot of people say, well, just make everybody have my time. Russia did this. If it was 8AM in Moscow then it was 8 AM in Vladivostok where the sun had just gone down. Doing it this way just means whoever is in charge keeps their suntime and takes some sun away from everyone else. Sort of like England tried with their GMT. We need a better way.

The key is dropping sun-centeredness. We don’t have chlorophyll like plants. We are warm blooded. We have evolved way beyond our early sun-needs. And why do we want the sun to come up just before we wake up, anyway? Put a timer on your lights. We (most of us, that is) quit worshiping the sun a couple thousand years ago. So let go!

Now the solution--if every day has 25 hours (hours that are just the same length as they are now), then the sun would come up one hour earlier every day. Everyone gets the same about of sun-days as they do night-days and the big mix of in-between-days. We can look forward to night-days and watch the sun rise when we get off work at 6PM. Everyday would be different.

But when it is 8AM in Blatsville, Indiana, it is 8AM everywhere. And people are just getting up everywhere at 8AM and you can call up someone in China and start talking about breakfast and they can tell you about their cornflakes and you can tell them about yours. Life will be peachy—and all synched up. Just, in some places it’s sunny at 8AM and in others it’s dark—but it’s 8AM in the morning everywhere.

A couple of changes need to be made. First of all, everybody gets an extra hour off every day. That makes this an easy sell. You can use it for your rotten commute or catch up on sleep or whatever. Then there is a 13 o’clock PM-the new midnight. Some people might be superstitious but that just makes the night more adventurous. And there are only 350 25-hour days a year. That’s OK with me. I lose count about May anyway. And, finally, there are fewer days in the month, but that means payday comes around quicker.

OK, there are some down sides—we will all need new curtains. Big thick ones. To sleep thru the night when the sun is shining overhead.

And maybe a big, bright light over the garage so the kids can play outside during the dark, dark days.