Fixing Us Up

I’ve been thinking about fixing up our goodbye-Bush crisis. He played patty-cake with those bankers doing old-time, laissez-faire, robber-baron, footsie-footsie thinking. Now Prez. Obama has moved on to only 70-year-old ideas by starting up Mr. Keynes’ public money shovel. It worked before—when the shovel was big enough— so I expect it will work again.

The big question for me is where do you shovel all the money—in the same old carbon-cooking, late-age capitalism pork-pots or do you aim the shovel in new green directions.

We need to make jobs and make stuff, but let’s make something that doesn’t use up many resources, doesn’t burn much coal or oil, and helps people out.

Back in the 80’s, in an earlier mess, a bunch of people thought about making new stuff. It’s a good example. Boeing laid off engineers when too many jets just sat around doing nothing (sort of like those foreclosed-on houses, these days). Ever wonder why your baby carriage looks like a 747 landing gear getting ready for touchdown? Those hot shot, laid off engineers looked at the baby buggies like I pushed my son around in, buggies that felt like a boat on a truck chassis, buggies that took the whole trunk to pack them up and weighed more than my wife. Those smart-guy engineers changed everything with new light-weight designs that twisted into a little pile of tubes and cloth and fit anywhere. That’s the way to do it.

A month or so ago, my friend Sue started writing all sorts of politicians about the chance to make buses and passenger trains again in the US. That sounds like a good green direction for the money shovel to point. Where I live, we buy buses from the Dutch and train cars from the French. And have to pay in Euros that cost a bunch. We could change that. American cars look like buses anyway so why not do stretch Hummers and Escalades and give them away to any town that promises to add them to their bus fleet. That’s a lot better than buying whacko loans from defunct banks.

But we need something big. Bigger than buses. To keep millions of people in work. I’m thinking of the great business success of our time: Acrylic Nails. There are way more nail shops than factories in the US—more nail shops than just about anything except espresso stops and porta-potties (more about them later). Nails are green—not a big oil burner, a little oil makes a bunch of nails. And you don’t just do it once. They break, they chip, and sometimes you just want new pictures and glitter to jazz them up. But best of all, nail customers are happy as puppies with their fancy personalized weapons.

OK, there is a problem that keeps the nail industry in check. Most men have pretty short ones. We could come out with macho-themed nail pix, like skulls and daggers and other nasty stuff, or we could work on completely different “looking-good” products, that, like nails, take a while to apply and wear off in a week or two, but are for men too.
If we can get more nail action and some new products going, then ten million hard working people will open shops and we will have an entrepreneur burst that will light up our money supply like hotcakes.

Here’s my idea. I have been watching those crazy fans who paint their faces for games. Why not wear face paint all the time. It’s worth a try. Everyone with face paint for their favorite team, getting it redone once a week in private fan shops on every main street and mall in America.

Or what about those fancy beard trims. Barbers used to do it but now beards are do-it-yourself, like fixing toilets and sinks. Can’t we put barbers back on the map? If Bush can tell us to go shopping, then Obama can tell us to paint our faces, do our nails and get a trim.

Everyone can sneak out for an hour or so of nails, trim and facepaint without any trouble That’s 200 million folks paying 20 bucks each. That’s billions a week. Hundreds of billions a year. About the same as they are giving banks. Instead, they should mail out coupons for all the new shops that will open. Coupons for one treatment a week for the next year or so for every red-blooded, looking great (with their facepaint and trim and nails) American over 5 years old. (Let’s not forget the kids.)

That’s lot’s of jobs, lots of small business and not much oil and waste. Wow!

P.S. Oops, I forgot about the porta-potties and espresso shops. I’ll leave that for you to add on to barber shops and nail emporiums or maybe buses. Send you ideas in right away.

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.

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.