Tank Update #7...The Hunt Is On...High Water And No Trout...The Food Chain Channel...

Stability at seven fish for some time now.  The two fish that look similar to, but are not Dace, are growing quickly on their farm feed.  I'll have to try to identify this species.  I think I may have seen some of their kind in Salmon River the other day.  The fish I saw looked the same, but were maybe twice the size, so I'm looking forward to seeing these fish grow bigger.  These two are now almost as big as the two biggest Dace, about four inches long. I'll call them minnows until I know better.  The smaller  of the Dace are curious.  They may be a different sub-species than the others . They have a different, sucker-like shape to their profile, making them less reminiscent of Salmonids, like I believe the other Dace resemble.  I wouldn't be surprised if they were closely related to Salmonids.  In fact, if you blew a Dace up to the size of a trout, I bet they'd be delicious.

After a very cool and wet spell this summer, we finally got some swimming weather three days ago, and we answered the call.  The river is running fairly high, still draining away the rains of the last couple of weeks.  Unfortunately there was not a lot to see as far as trout is concerned.  I don't know if this has to do with the high water, or have they been fished out, or understocked?  It was very refreshing, perfect temperature, and running very strong.   I did a "hang" several times, and it was amazing.  What I do is go to the bottom wearing a mask and snorkel, grab onto a rock and just let the current pull at me.  My feet just hang in the water as I face the unrelenting current.  It feels like I'm plugging my nervous system into the energy flow of the Planet.  In psychophysiological terms, it's my Happy Place...

Owen and I planned on trying to catch some of these minnows with a net.  They will school all around you, so we figured they would be easy to catch, but no luck.  Next step is to make a trap out of a plastic bottle and see what we get.  I'd like to get some of those minnows to compare them to the ones in the tank.  A baby Bluegill would be nice, as an experiment only, because I think it might eat the smaller Dace. Owen did manage to catch one tiny fish.  I couldn't identify it--basically an inch-long golden colored minnow.  We put it in the tank and the fish went right after it, but it got away and was darting back and forth at the surface.  I went to the other room to get my glasses and it was gone when I got back.  I think that like myself most people would forget that fish in an aquarium are still wild animals and there's no reason to think they would forget their predatory instinct just because they get easy farm food at regular intervals.  It occurred to me when splitting firewood that the Dace might enjoy a termite or a little wood worm.  Turns out they go nuts over live food.  I have fed them moths, termites, woodworms, ants,  tiny earthworms, mosquitoes, mayflies, houseflies, tiny fish, possibly pollywogs, and even newly hatched praying mantises.

Lawyers, And The Candy-Assed Douchebags Who Make Them Rich, Ruin Everything...

Dickinson's Creek flows into Salmon River I would guess about a half-mile downstream from the Lyman Viaduct.  I recently found out from the East Pediddleville Facebook group that the viaduct has undergone major changes recently, and pros and cons be damned, it really kind of hurts.

The fence was put up last year, but I figured somebody would bring a set of bolt cutters and get busy on it soon enough for the summer jumping season.  I don't normally condone vandalism, but what's right is right.  Little did I or a lot of people know that the fence was only the first phase of the changes to the site.

The deep hole full of water that used to be at the outflow of the twin culverts has been completely filled in with boulders and concrete.  A jump thirty feet off the viaduct now would mean certain death.  No more can the youth of Pediddleville claim a jump as a rite of passage.  No more can I anticipate the day when my sons would share in the thrill.  No more can I plan to explore the dark pool with my mask and snorkel--yes, I planned that for this Summer, figuring the chain link fence would prevent people from landing on my head from above.  I'll never get to see what whoppers lived down there.  For a small river like this, the pool would have been a home for the largest of its denizens.  By now they have all gone downstream into Salmon River.

Never much of a daredevil, I have only jumped feet first off the thirty foot drop, but on YouTube you can see videos of people doing back flips, cartwheel dives, and even going off it on bicycles.  It may well be that some of these videos, when they were brought to the attention of certain people, have led to the crackdown.  It was always forbidden to jump there, but it wasn't generally known how crazy some thrill seekers could be in sleepy Pediddleville.  The Bummer Patrol stepped in to save that inevitable drunken ass from himself, and themselves from a lawsuit.

I remember well my first jump off the Viaduct.  I arrived, stoned, on a late hazy hot afternoon.  We had been cruising around in my friend Ted's 1963 Buick Riviera.  Ted had restored this old powerhorse of a cruisemobile in auto shop at school.  He was a character.  He was the first friend I made when I moved to East Pediddleville in fourth grade.  He often spoke in an affected, convoluted Monty Python accent, and he had painstakingly mixed paint colors and used a tiny brush to alter his driver's license so that he could buy alcohol at age seventeen. Also in the car was our friend Roy, Ted's next-door neighbor, and Doug, who was more Roy's friend, but I knew him from Boy Scouts.  Probably we had been talking about how we had been on a hiking trip in Vermont where we had seen local people in White River Junction jumping off a bridge into the Connecticut River, and several of us from our troop had jumped.  This would have prompted Roy to ask if we had ever jumped off the Viaduct.  Since I had never done it, we were now on a mission...

I had never known about this place until then.  The road that winds along Salmon River comes to a hairpin turn halfway up a hill where the old train line ran.  You could take the Airline Trail to the top of the viaduct and clamber down the steep bank to the viaduct, or you could take the lower trail in from further down the road.  Originally a large trestle bridge over the creek valley, the whole area was filled in with gravel, after installing the culverts for the water, because of the increasing weight of the trains.  It goes at about a 45 degree angle from the top to the viaduct several hundred feet down.  Over time the water had dug out a deep pit which I think was at least fifteen feet deep at the center of the pool.

                        This graffitti covers over an offensive grafitti that can be seen in videos.

When we got down to the bottom of the steep incline, our shoes filled with gravel and sharp coal slag fragments, there were several people there jumping and hanging out.  We stood there at the edge for a while watching others jump, trying to get our nerve up.  Suddenly a young girl started screaming down below in the pool.  Doug and I looked at each other with the instant acknowledgement that the quickest way for anyone to get to her was for us to jump, so off we went!  Boy Scouts!  The girl was fine without our help, but what a first time!

Industrialized "Safety" is not as beautiful as the twisty Hemlock roots that used to line the bank.  I wish I had some "before" shots of the place, not just these photos of how it is now.  It's the same sense of loss that you get when they put up a strip mall in the field you used to play in, or cut down your favorite tree, knowing it's gone forever, but it's worse because of how many people will miss it.  I did bring two nephews of mine there to jump a few years back, but I will lament not being able to see my sons jump, and for myself never to do it again.  Even the tame way I used to do it was exhilarating--truly feeling Gravity and then the splash and whoosh of bubbles all around you as you bobbed up in the pool.  The truth is, it was totally safe to jump if you did it right.  All it took was an easy little hop to put you right into the center of the pool. It was the crazies and the graffitists and the YouTube posters who caused concern over the place, and lawyers and the candy-assed douchebags who make them rich ruin everything.  I've always felt that if I drown or break my neck out in Nature, that it's MY fault, and I'm not going to sue somebody just because they didn't stop me.  But this is the world we live in, and for once, Pediddleville is superior.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=quQfg-WHDfE

Staycation Blues And Creatism...Winter Fatigue Sequestration...I Want A Bike...

It's a good feeling right now.  The winter funk has lost its firm grip on me.  Something resembling enthusiasm is bubbling up, and I need to safeguard it so that it doesn't go Missing In Action.  I started working with my lathe on a set of Swedish bagpipes I resolved to build years ago.  Somehow I overcame a mental block I was having about them effortlessly.  Now I am nearing a return from musical expatriation.  I started taking guitar lessons to clear out the cobwebs, compiled a list of obscure cover tunes I'd like to play at a local coffee house, and am near to starting up my live radio project, which will be like an artists collective series.

But it wasn't always this way...

I work outside, even during Winter, so I tend to come down with a motherfucker of a case of Winter Blues.  The ol' Seasonal Affective Disorder.  This past Winter has been particularly hard and depressing.  Pediddleville being Pediddleville, the vehicle I drove through the Winter to and from work has NO HEAT.  Also weighing in is the fact that winters seem to be getting harder and harder.  I don't care what you think about whether Global Warming (Climate Change) is real or not.  To me it is real.  To Irene, Sandy, Alfred, and that big blizzard two years ago it was real.  All that extra water vapor has to go somewhere--collapsing roofs with its weight, and seeping into your basement, ruining those forgotten boxes of stuff,  molding up your carpet and drywall.  Two years ago, you may be surprised to hear, I was thankful that I came down with Walking Pneumonia, because it meant I did not have to work outside in three feet of snow for ten days.  Winter is also the time when I'm not simply broke, as usual, but near destitute.  I really wish I could abstain from Christmas, because that's the one expense that fucks me for the whole season.  It's corporatized bullshit anyway.  What I want for Christmas is for there to be no Christmas.

 ...Or to be able to afford a new car, one that has heat, and a working gas gauge for that matter.  One cold day I was driving home from work in the pick-up with no heat.  At just about the twenty minute mark--the amount of time it takes for me to get a good chill--I ran out of gas.  I thought I had had enough to get home and I'd planned to fill up in the morning, but instead I was stuck in the parking lot of a library across from the old Nathan Hale schoolhouse.  I had already crossed the steel grate swing bridge over the Connecticut River and had already passed by the nearest gas station.  Pediddleville being Pediddleville, my gas can was also empty, so I had a predicament.  I had a feeling that pedestrian traffic across the bridge was not allowed, and the next gas station was way too far to walk to.  Just then I remembered the roadside assistance membership I had.  It was a budget motor club, not the expensive name brand one.  I called them and the guy I spoke with said that he was about forty-five minutes away, and couldn't seem to understand the directions I had to give him.  Frustrated, I thought maybe I'd call my neighbor to bring me some gas.  I told the operator I'd call back, then my cell phone battery died as if on cue.  Pediddleville.  See what I mean?

Shivering, I locked up the truck, grabbed the gas can, and started walking back toward the river.  It took just a few minutes to reach the bridge.  There was no "No Pedestrians" sign on the bridge, but it was clearly designed for auto traffic only.  There was no line demarcation of any kind of sidewalk, and the bridge is fairly narrow.  It was dark, and the lights of the oncoming cars and the overhead lights made it quite surreal as I strode as close to the side wall as I could, my feet clunking down on the metal grate.  It felt like a hard surface, but the optical illusion of the lights, and being able to see the water way down below my feet was vertiginous, but somewhat thrilling.  I just kept fearing getting hit by a car, because with the wildness of the experience and the proximity of the cars and the unexpectedness of my presence and the day I had been having, it just made perfect sense.

From the bridge it took another probably fifteen minutes to reach the gas station.  Pumping the gas came off without a hitch--no card declined, no spillage, and soon I was walking back toward the bridge.  Now the concern was being pulled over by the police.  After all, I was carrying a container of a hazardous material over a body of water, but I suppose any cop would simply give me a lift over the bridge.  Halfway across a young guy stopped and offered me a ride.  I didn't know him, and didn't think about the potential for misadventure that getting into a car with a stranger at the wheel could bring, but it was okay. He told me I really looked like I was having a hard time.  I said I wondered about walking the bridge, but he said he'd walked it several times, and that there was no rule against it.  He dropped me at my truck and wished me well.  My luck had turned, I guess, when I decided to walk in the cold over the water.

A few weeks later I had thoroughly had it with Winter, for this and ALL years.  I am getting too tired of dealing with the cold and the poverty that comes with the season.  I had a scheduled vacation, and I had a LIST.  There were so many things I wanted to get accomplished during the vacation.  I told my wife not to get her hopes up that I would be much help around the place.  I was determined to do my things in order to preserve my sanity.  Since there was no money, a "Staycation" it would be, but that was fine with me since I'd have time to work on my list.  Of course Pediddleville being Pediddleville...

Winter depression exacerbates the 'ol Creatism disease, it appears.  Creatism is a made-up psychosomatic ailment that I have suffered from over the years.  It can best be described as a cross between Creativity and Autism.  No, I'm not really Autistic, but it seems like whenever I have a burning desire and need to accomplish things on a creative level and actually have the time to do it, that I can't do it.  I have this need, like most people need food, to do creative things.  I like to make stuff--my own stuff.  My own beer.  My own radio show.  My own musical instruments. My own music, and on and on.  Bob Dylan wrote my theme, in his song Maggie's Farm:  "I wake up in the morning, fold my hands and pray for rain.  I got a head full of ideas that are driving me insane.  It's a shame the way she makes me scrub the floor..."  I can't stand when anyone wastes my time or my energy.  I am quite capable of wasting my OWN time, thank you very much!  I have my best creative  ideas when I am imprisoned at work and can't do anything about it.  The frustration builds up more and more as I have to work more, and do more everyday responsible stuff, and not having the time, the energy, or the money to afford it makes me nuts, especially in the winter.  When I do have time I am overwhelmed with the size and time factor of THE LIST, and I get stuck.  This is what happened during my vacation.  I kept setting goals and timelines for doing things, but my list just went cold.  I did nothing all week.  Nothing.

                         High water from snowmelt, late Winter at Comstock Covered Bridge


And so it goes.  I started writing this post weeks ago.  Some champion level procrastination has taken place, and of course the everyday busy busy rigamarole of having a family, but I've also been busy with a few good things like working on the lathe and getting my bagpipes out of mothballs.  The days are much warmer now, and it is no problem driving that truck.  Getting out in the woods, though it is time consuming, is good for the soul. This year I will try to get a bike and do some rides along the Airline Trail that skirts in and out along Salmon River.  Time to blow out the cobwebs of Creatism...

Tank Update #6...State Of The Blog...Hello, Germany!...

The tank had become a weird green organism. The sheet of slime was everywhere, draping up off the rocks onto the glass surface of the tank. The fish were rarely seen.  I wasn't sure how many were still alive.  I knew I had to change the water and clean out the algae or they would all die, and that would be a monumental defeat for me, seeing as the whole purpose of keeping the fish tank was supposed to be some kind of Winter Blues Therapy I had set up for myself last year.  Now it was Winter again and the tank was nearly defunct.  I knew I had a scheduled vacation coming up, but my little fish didn't deserve to wait that long.  Urgency, these days, seems to be the only motivational process that can really grab my attention.  Yes, I am aware of the obvious metaphor...

One Sunday I started swishing the net around to draw the fish out from under the rocks, where they had been hiding in a lethargic stupor, and all seven of them appeared.  At least I wasn't scooping out dead ones.  I put some clean well water from the tap into a big stainless steel pot and placed the little Dace and "Shiners", for lack of a real name for them, into it.  What a weird thing for them, I would think, to be in an environment one minute, then suddenly scooped up and put into a very different one that resembled nothing they had ever experienced.  The water was undoubtedly cleaner than what they came out of, but it didn't move.  Visually, it was just a silver-gray featureless space.  They camped out in that pot for the next couple of hours.  Next I set up a siphon tube in the tank and ran all of the water out the window onto the lawn as snow began accumulating.  I took all of the larger rocks to the sink and scrubbed the green slime off them with an aquarium scrub pad, put all the gravel in a strainer and rinsed the shit out of it.  The rocks ended up arranged differently than they were before, less aesthetically pleasing to me, but placed to provide lots of nooks and spaces for the fish to sleep in.  I put the gravel in, then cleaned the filter and pump and filled the tank with water up to a level several inches higher than it was at its most decrepit state.

Once back in their tank, the fish were energized and active again.  The rocks were in a completely different arrangement than before, and I had moved the filter further down toward the right side of the tank.  This means that even the current made by the filter would flow differently than before, so they were really in a completely different environment than before. Yet another foreign world for them.  How odd it must have been.  Soon enough they became accustomed to it and I'm sure they appreciate the oxygenated, ammonia-free water.  It looks clean and cool.  Since moving the filter, the water that spills into the tank from it streams down onto a pile of rocks that I had placed in such a way as to create a little cave for the fish.  The top stone is about the size of a pack of cards with a flat surface and it is on about a forty-five degree angle.  There must be a nice current running up this rock from low in the front of the tank up the rock and toward the back.  The fish, sometimes three lined-up in a row, like to park their bellies on the rock facing the current and just let the water flow into their gills.  It's good to see them enjoying their environment again.

It's getting near the time to go down to the river and see if we can get some new additions to the tank.  I'm hoping for a little baby Bluegill, or a crayfish...

Before I started this blog just over a year ago, I looked at some other people's blogs.  You go to one blog, and then at the top of the page is a link that randomly sends you to the "next blog".  I saw countless blogs where the blogger would post that they were really sorry they hadn't posted in a long, long time, and that they were going to resume blogging in earnest from now on.  Almost to a one, the date of the post was more than a year old!  I hoped that I would not follow that suit with my blog, and while I have been a bit absent for a while now, I know I have a backlog of topics to cover.  I'll get to them in due time.  I am, after all, a champion procrastinator.  To be fair, though, I have had a surprising burst of enthusiasm for some other of my pursuits lately, and they have prevented me from sinking too far into an easy chair.   Coming out of Winter is a good thing.  I was almost at a point of no return.  I tend to go a bit cuckoo in the winter.  Anyway, the post you are reading now was begun several weeks ago, before my vacation, then it just languished for a while.  This evening I resolved to finish this one.  Actually, I had to split it into two different posts--the next one will deal with the vacation I finished a week ago, and this one necessarily must cover a little development I noticed when I looked at my stats...

The Blog provides you with statistics as to how many views you get, and from where in the World people are reading your writings.   Normally I get a small handful of views a week.  Nothing special.  I don't really promote it or bug people to read it.  I'm intrigued that people in many countries have read it.  I wonder if the views are the result of Google searches for the words "salmon" and/or "river".  I suspect that "salmon"  results in most of the views coming from Russia.  I get the most views from the U. S., then Russia, then Germany.  Sportsmen looking for good salmon fishing rivers, I'm sure, may be disappointed when they arrive at my blog and find these posts about Grammar Policing, Hunter Thompson, some fictional jerkwater town called Pediddleville, and my aquarium.  So it was with some surprise that I found that in the last week I have had nearly two dozen views from Germany!  What could have spurred that on?

The last post was an article called "Pondering Hollywood", which was about a trend I noticed about the way movies and TV shows get their titles--more nerdly Grammar Policing.   It sat there on the blog for several weeks, getting a small number of views as usual.  I guess the word "Hollywood" was not much of a draw, even during the time close to the Oscars.  During that time I kept editing the post because I kept coming across new titles I wanted to add into the text, then it occurred to me that I neglected to consider a ripe segment of the entertainment industry that I was not well-versed in, so I added a post script to the post that contained THE word that apparently dozens of people in Germany were looking for--PORN!  Hello, Germany, you horny wankers!  Let's see how many hits I get after this one...

Pondering Hollywood

Family Discharge, We've Gotta Stop Him, Toddler Thieves, Where In The World Is My Clownfish Son?, The Unlikely Student, He's A Recluse

Ever hear of any of these films?  No, they're not obscure Indie films or foreign films translated into English. They are well-known films that were released with much more trendy titles.  They all may have had working titles similar to these, but it's easy to imagine the execs at the movie production companies suggesting more catchy titles for greater potential returns on their investments.

In the Seventies you may recall movies and maybe a few TV shows with titles meant to inspire Intrigue, let's say.  The Eiger Sanction. The Andromeda Strain.  The Amityville Horror.  The Rockford Files. There was a play called The Thudpucker Proxy.  The grammatical structure of the title is the word "The" plus a proper noun, often some character's last name, then another noun, but a concept noun rather than an object noun. There are some more recent examples of this:  The Shawshank Redemption, and the entire Bourne series, but that formula is not as common anymore.  It has, in fact, morphed into a newer formula.

I first noticed this new apparent trend in 2001, when checking the movie listings, I saw that there were two movies in theaters concurrently called Kissing Jessica Stein and Saving Silverman, that began with a verbal noun, or gerund,  then a proper noun, usually a character's  name.  Saving Silverman  even had the added cutesy saleability of alliteration, and I remembered the year before a film called Finding Forrester.  This got me thinking, and I started to remember several films like this.  As far as I can reckon, this trend in film titling began in 1983 with a movie called Educating Rita.  In 1987 there was Raising Arizona, and Driving Miss Daisy in 1989.  In 1992 we had Raising Cain and Educating Peter.  1993 saw the release of Killing Zoe and Boxing Helena.  Leaving Las Vegas came out in 1995, Chasing Amy in 1997, and 1998 saw the release of Waking Ned Devine and Saving Private Ryan.  1999 was the year that saw probably the most extreme (possibly parody) use of "the formula": Being John Malkovich.  It is almost as if the formula had gained such influence on the collective consciousness that a title such as this was inevitable--rather than an action taken toward a character,  actually BEING the character!  In the 21st Century we had the three films already mentioned, then Finding Nemo in 2003.  This trend in movies started to trail off at this point. Perhaps the movie moghuls sensed a coming glut and eased out of it, though 2008 had Forgetting Sarah Marshall and 2009 had Facing Ali.  The trend by now was migrating into other media.   

After Seinfeld, Julia Louis-Dreyfuss had a short-lived sitcom called Watching Ellie.  Other shows are Raising Hope, Saving Hope, Finding Bigfoot, Flipping Vegas, Flipping Boston, and Breaking Amish. Breaking Bad qualifies on a technicality because although the word "bad" is an adjective, in this context it is being presented as a concept, which is proper noun-ish.  It has infected band names--Flogging Molly, Breaking Benjamin, and Walking Elliot.  Books--Renting Lacy, Catching Fire, and Killing Lincoln, which was recently adapted to a TV docudrama.  A Blog--Kissing Suzy Kolber--and you can bet there are myriad blogs on the internets that use "the Formula". 

Trends like this are interesting.  A film called The Rita Education, though awkward sounding, might have prevented this trend!   The Taking Of Pelham 1-2-3 has been re-made twice years later as a TV movie and then in 2009 as a big-screen release, and the urge to call it Taking Pelham was resisted.  The popular comedy There's Something About Mary could have possibly been called Stalking Mary, but the urge was most probably quashed by its inappropriateness.  Was Spielberg encouraged to call his film Saving Private Ryan rather than The Last Son or Family Discharge?  It's interesting that as the formula moved into TV from movies, it seems that the formula lends itself even better to reality series and blogs than to films because of the ongoing nature of those formats.  Then again, it could be that it's just familiarity and saturation.

Naturally the formula can now become something to ignore or forget about since it is so ingrained in our consciousness.  It took me a long time to get around to finally saying something about it.  Right now the more annoying Hollywood trend deals with subject matter rather than title structure formulas--the fact that nearly every other film or TV show these days is about Vampires, Werewolves, and/or Zombies!  Breaking Dawn, anyone?  In the name of all that is Holy, come up with something original!

Post script:  After posting this entry I have edited it several times, usually to add in a new title I have found or remembered.  Now, though, I have to add a whole new segment, spurred on by the announcement that Vice President Joe Biden has begun a new "audio series" called Being Biden.  Yes, this bandwagon has even been jumped onto by the Vice President.  I failed to mention earlier that I see the gerund-proper noun-titles in numerous segments on news shows.   Another thought I had was that there is another segment of the film/video industry that I did not touch on in the original post: Porn.  I won't take the time to research it now, and clearly you can see that it's not an area I am in the habit of viewing, but I'm certain there must be many Pornos that make use of the formula.  I can only guess--Doing Denise?  Teasing Tiffany?  Fellating Fellini?--I can only guess.  I have a relatively clean hard drive.  I've tried the Internets a small handful of times, but I just don't have the interest in it to get past the creepy feeling that a digital record of that viewing is being stored somewhere, identifying me as a consumer of Porn, and I don't think I have ever watched an internet porno to its "completion".  It just creeps me out too much.  I do not have a voyeuristic "need", shall we say.  I have more important and interesting things to occupy my time with than to watch internet pornos.

Post post script:  Another movie title popped into my head recently, and it predates Educating Rita from 1983 as my claimed start of the trend.  Eating Raoul came out in 1982.

Vintage Violence

Since the trouncing the Republican party received in the 2012 election, all these TV political pundits keep doing is saying the party needs to do this or that to regain their diminishing support.  They have to embrace minorities (um, ick!), they have to learn to compromise, they have to be responsive to women's concerns, et cetera.  I say to these pundits, stop!  Let them commit their political suicide!  But then again, the more you suggest they need to change, the less they will change.  That's just their nature, so maybe I'm wrong.  Keep it up, pundits.

This debate over gun control is a prime example.  They will not budge, and the more they are asked to budge, the more loony they get.  Wayne LaPierre is Asshole of the Year, as far as I'm concerned.  This jerk had barely any respect for the pain the people of Sandy Hook in Newtown, Connecticut have experienced, living through the most horrifying damage a community can face, when La Pierre appeared on Meet the Press with David Gregory.  Gregory is not even the most left-leaning of the press he could have talked with, but on this day Gregory was grilling LaPierre pretty good, trying to get him to admit that if Lanza had been unable to obtain large capacity magazines, he might not have been able to butcher as many people.  He would not concede it.  In fact, I don't know if anybody else caught it, but he even, in a subtle way, threatened Gregory's life.  He started saying that the solution was to have armed guards at the schools, which is ridiculous but predictable, and in a quick aside mentioned that he noticed that they don't have armed guards at the NBC studios.  Do you think that agitated gun owners, afraid that the Black President is going to take away their firearms, might become unhinged seeing their gun mentor being treated in this way by the "evil, liberal media", and now knowing that there are no guards at 30 Rock, might possibly decide to start shooting up "the problem"?  This is the caliber (pun intended) of person we have to deal with all across the board in this country now, and all of those Republicans are in lock-step.

They've done it to themselves, though they try to blame "the Liberal Media", which is anything but.  The Media, in case there is any doubt, is owned by people and corporations with lots of money.  Unfortunately it is not in the best interest of their profit margin to be all that "Liberal".  Yes, Republicans have done it to themselves by screeching the "Liberal Media" myth for so many years through Fox News and all that talk radio.  Case in point: Glenn Beck.  It is well-known to people in Conneticut that in his earlier days in local Connecticut radio that Beck was a notorious coke-head.  An addict.  Addicts are known to do or say anything to get what they want.  Is it a stretch to believe he is the way he is because he is beholden to be by some rich entity who may have helped him out of the mess he made of his life?  Or Limbaugh.  It has always mystified me how intelligent people on TV could knowingly say wrong things.  What's their motivation?  Who are they protecting?  Themselves in some sick way, I suppose.

So the way it has gone is that through the screeching of these Right-Wingers in the Media and their willing cheerleaders in the Republican Party, all other Media has been forced, to try to avoid being labelled biased, to always offer the most crazy, unpalatable viewpoints as balance, no matter how wrong they may be, even often leaving it as the last word on many segments on the news.  What this has done is make the debate so UNBALANCED that as many Democrats get more conservative, the Republicans have to oppose things that they may have supported years ago.  If a Democrat supports it, they MUST oppose it, to the ridiculous extent that we see Mitch McConnell filibustering his own bill!

That's right, Republicans, keep on digging in.  That pile of detritus so conveniently placed right next to the hole you're in is looking awfully inviting...

It's The End Of The World As We Know It, And We're Still Here...

New Year's Day, in the Year of Our Lord, Two Thousand and Thirteen, A. D.

It seemed to me that Terrence McKenna really had something there with his Temporal Resonance Theory, at least from my own perspective.  Indeed, things really seemed to be accelerating toward some kind of Cosmic Collision at least in terms of my own life.  All things would be hyper-interconnected at the Zero point of the Time-Wave Continuum, December 21st, 2012, and passing that point would be a transformation so profound, it would mean "the end of History" according to McKenna.  He didn't say "End Of The World", which made it more believable to me.  So there was no massive Earthquake/Tsunami causing "The Earth Changes".  No collapse of the US Economy (not yet, anyway).   No Rogue Nation setting off a nuclear device and World War Three. No revelation that Aliens have been engineering our Evolution and our Society for Millennia. No implosion of The Milky Way.  No Zombie Apocalypse.  No Apocalypse...

From my standpoint, I almost wished for one or more of these things to happen--to shake things up.  I was locked in a lot of waiting, a lot of "riding it out" as the day approached, and some kind of massive change might have been a welcome thing in my book.  Let's see, I was nineteen in seniority away from being laid off from my job.  This scenario caused extreme anxiety as I grappled with the prospect of a very uncertain 2013, and the choice of taking a severance package that might have led to a nice winter off from working outside in the elements, followed by the very real uncertainty of finding a new job.  When I considered leaving this Hell-Hole, I was filled with inner Peace and optimism of finding a real career that I would (Heaven forbid) actually enjoy, but it always came back to the fact that it was very risky and I have a family to support.  It felt like being denied parole.

Pediddleville is not far from Newtown, Connecticut, where one of the most awful things in History just recently occurred.  That one certainly played into the sinking feeling, as if the psycho killer was trying to accelerate his own twisted version of End-Times.  It certainly doesn't at this point seem like it will enact positive change, just more debate and obfuscation leading to an impasse...

Let's not forget the extremely weird Presidential race we endured this year.  This shameful spectacle we had to witness only reinforced the notion that we were heading toward Doom, especially if Romney was going to be elected.  I've said before that a CEO is no more trustworthy than your garden-variety junkie street hustler, and with the machinations at hand--Fox News Propaganda Machine, Super-PAC money, The Koch Brothers and other sinister tycoons, Gerrymandering and Karl Rove, and knowing of past voting machine shenanigans--I was convinced that Romney was going to win.  Even though the campaign the Republicans ran on was offensive to the extreme for most people regardless of Race or economics, I was convinced he was going to win.  It was very discouraging, because Greed and Racism, in my book, are always, ultimately, supposed to be defeated.

Even Obama's win has not been uplifting, as the Nation now battles this "fiscal cliff" debate.  It's the same old cluster-fuck that plagued the Election cycle.   A good old Tabula Rasa might have been better.

On other fronts, I have been plagued by car problems, money problems, motivational problems, Time-management problems, to the point that I have felt debilitated by it. Christmas didn't and doesn't ever, help.  I have the same old New Year's resolutions, left over from last year to try to tackle, and right about now, I'm just not feeling it.  What I feel now, after the Zero date, is not so much inspiration or a sense of something new beginning, but a very flat, stagnant feeling.  Fuck it.  Just move on.  Yeah, that's the ticket.  That great new career will just drop into your lap.  Or the bastards will have a change of heart and suddenly start being nice to you.   Oh Yes...

So, far from the 2012 thing being a new start, it feels like the most nothing of nothings has actually happened.  Salmon River flowing nicely now as my fish enjoy another easy winter.  Pediddleville 2013.