Purpose

Tonight I felt a clear purpose

after I tucked my boys in bed

all three of us are looking forward to tomorrow

because we're going to hike

to the wild canyon

and go check out a cave

a deep Local fellow,

like Masonic ring-wearing deep

geo tagged for us

there are also mortars in the stone

and a waterfall 

without a name

Tonight I was called to wood burn a portrait

of Dolly Parton

So I got started on that

While drinking sake out of a bottle

after getting hyped on Yuban

This is as real as it gets

I am in love

Not with Dolly Parton

but with the process

Saturday

I decided

It was time to fire the gun

I drove up the mountain 

with the dog and the old wooden rifle

in the winter rain

The flags at the ammo store

were hung high and pulled taught

hung square and kept clean

I brought my girlfriend's boy

because he had never fired a gun

and I was going to teach him

because we would bond

and he would never forget it

We left with 200 bullets

and a brochure about forming

the State of Jefferson, our state

the freest State in the union

Don't tell anyone 

he was only supposed to sell me 100

but the policy is not for local boys

we get to buy 200 if we want

The boy and I drove up the mountain 

up where all the towns end

we drove down a dirt road

full of pond size puddles

the kind of road that makes you love your truck

We parked next to a swollen creek

and hiked in with the gun and the dog

and followed a wide mud trail into the woods

the rain kept falling laced with the heavy

super drops that form on pine branches

The boy put some holes in his first target

and treated the gun properly

just like I taught him back at the house

the dog got so agitated at the gunfire

she jumped up and bit the barrel

after I squeezed off a round

I had the safety on, but just barely

When a boy fires a gun for the first time

his face lights up with the realization

of the initiation, the snap, the kick

the brutal power and the pin point violence

an old wooden rifle delivers

We high-fived

because firing a gun well

in the pouring rain

matters

like starting a fire

like loving a beautiful woman

and her young son

well

Your Ultra-Conservative Dad is a Democratic Socialist

Bernie Sanders is going to be the Democratic nominee, and then he'll be the President, unless the powers that be can't accept a peaceful transfer of power and something horrible happens.

Remember when Barack Obama was elected to office mostly by the virtue of his rhetoric? Do you remember what that rhetoric was like? It was populist, revolutionary, he had a transparency plan where he would use web cams to broadcast all meetings with lobbyists to us the People. He was going to bring sweeping change to Washington, take it back. His campaign was an insurgency, it broke all records. It was a grassroots movement, and I think it was just the beginning of a pendulum swing.

Remember when Barack Obama broke all previous records by having over 1 million small donors? Well he also took tons of Wall Street and Super PAC money when that became a thing. Barack Obama is a barely left-of-center centrist in policy. Now, Bernie Sanders' campaign has locked in over 2 million small donors. He has already plowed through the Obama record. He has a double digit lead over Hillary Clinton in New Hampshire, and has a growing lead in Iowa.

Bernie Sanders is an unapologetic Democratic Socialist. Socialism is a word that was used in the United States to describe authoritarian governments for a generation. The Soviets called themselves socialists, they never claimed to be democratic, but theirs was a State controlled authoritarian nightmare where the State took the place of a Czar. But Democratic Socialism is something that has been in the United States for a long time, and I'd like to point out how your Ultra-Conservative relatives are already Democratic Socialists.

Democratic means the people vote and collectively control their own destiny. That's the ideal anyway, and it has always been imperfect. Every American believes in voting, even if they don't vote. Voting for how the government behaves, or who represents us, is a primary ingredient for freedom, and the one thing that prevents us from sliding into fascism. Everybody believes in this part, unless you are a Republican operative working to disenfranchise voters. That is Treason, and should be treated as such.

Socialism is an economic concept. It is the idea that we should hold certain things in common, pool our money together, and use it to provide certain things we all need. Democratic Socialism also advocates for democracy in economic affairs. A worker-owned company is an example of Democratic Socialism. Winco is worker-owned. Farmer Coops are socialistic enterprises. So are member-owned grocery store coops. All of this is a necessary ingredient of freedom. If we had no roads, we would not be free to travel. If we had no military, we would not be free from conquest. If we had no labor laws, we would not be free from exploitation. If we had no space program, we wouldn't have had one of our people walk on the moon.

Guess what, your super conservative dad is a big fan of a number of publicly funded programs. The United States military is the biggest. All conservatives like that. They like it so much that often they won't even consider the idea that it should probably be audited for waste and fraud every once in a while. The US Military is big government at its biggest, but conservatives are generally totally fine with that.

On the local front, your local conservative elected official will almost always advocate for budget increases for police and fire departments. In many towns, the police and fire budgets account for the vast majority of the public spending. The higher ranking cops are making six figures and retiring to life long salaries and benefits. Police departments are, by definition, a socialist program.

The truth is, the American economy is only as stable as it is because of the delicate dance that happens between the private sector and government. Everybody knows that when you need the safest investment possible, you buy government bonds. The banking system only seems stable to the individual depositor because of the FDIC insurance that will give you your money if the bank fails. Remember in 2008 when the Ayn Rand-iest institutions in the land on Wall Street almost destroyed themselves? Even they, who claim to symbolize the virtues of capitalism and the free market, crawled sniveling to the People to bail them out.

The American economy is a mix of capitalism and socialism. Since the reforms after the Great Depression, this mix of public and private enterprise is what has kept the whole show stitched together. Typically, the economic battles of right and left have to do with how to distribute that public money, and which public programs have virtue.

A Democratic Socialist in America, believes that health care is a right. Why? Because we are all going to get sick. Just like we are all going to need potable water. Capitalism should have a limited role in the delivery of health care because we don't have a choice in getting sick. We should hold that in common because we already have the condition in common. This is why Medicare and Social Security are bipartisan favorites. We all get old and don't want to work anymore, and we all get sick.  

Public higher education should be provided to everyone who wants it because the benefit to all of us is so huge. More smart, small businesses providing jobs, a more capable workforce, a more nimble populace, less people feeling stuck doing things they liked in their twenties but hate in their forties, we all benefit from it.

But the biggest bone of contention, the real source of populist rage and the rising up of working people, is the unimaginable wealth disparity in our country. We live in the wealth disparity of feudal England. There's the working class and the investment class. And the investment class has bought the government and given themselves all of the socialism they can. Corporations get tax breaks, kick backs, deregulation, they make billions colluding with government to rebuild the countries we've bombed, they are writing the bills that get passed in Congress. The government works for them in a very literal way.

The only rugged individualists left are the working poor or the working well-to-do who feel wealthy but only in relationship to the poor. They're being debt farmed and making the banks plenty of money just like the rest of us.

Socialism is alive and well in America, which is necessary for economic stability. The problem is that the public money is being used in ways that benefit the economic elite. I'm not talking about the local restaurateur who after 20 years of hard work managed to make himself worth a few million bucks, he's under the thumb too, through oppressive rules and taxation. He doesn't have his congressman on speed dial either.

The economic elite who are milking everybody are billionaires who live on their own islands, and whose lobbyists make our laws in the dark. America is a plutocracy in function, but not in spirit, and thank God we still have the vote. The pendulum that started with Barack Obama is only gaining momentum, and more and more working Americans don't want to vote against their own interests anymore.

The candidates on the right, who have never been more doomed in an election cycle, are trying to convince your ultra-conservative friends that America is under attack by liberals and immigrants and a host of other, Others.

The enemy is domestic. And I believe that if your Ultra-Conservative dad—who worked his ass off at his auto shop business for years—if he met the little Ivy League investment capitalists making billions off the backs of working people like him, he'd want to kick their asses too. He's just looking in the wrong direction.

We can all agree on this: All Power to the People.  

               


 

Listening to Ambient Music and Writing Quatrains

I like Quatrains
they're similar to haiku in that
they make use of bracketing and limits
it makes for an artful artifact on the page

Preparing a perfectly cooked omelette

is a lot harder than it looks

to get that dandelion yellow lifted custard

takes years and burns and insults thrown like hot pans

There is hair all over the place
the hairs keep getting longer over here
it has something to do with the psyche
when the feelings really learn to reach out

I've long been fascinated by the use of technology to make art

how the computers make the making of most things possible

even for the little guy without a studio or a global economy

But then there are those years you just want a pencil

There's another universe out there

where the grand canyon is a just a tiny hole

and the Earth is just a tiny little bubble in a tiny marble

in a tiny school in a tiny town in a rural county of the greatest state

The Writing Life? Is This Happening?

I still find it hard to believe: How the delicate strings that held my life together just snapped and everything changed. This blog space has been sitting here for three years untouched. I've been writing that whole time, but in journals or word docs, reading at poetry readings or submitting little bits and pieces to the local weekly or literary journals.

But, in November 2014, my life was turned upside down after it was engulfed in flames and thrown over a cliff. There was no escaping the fact that I would lose everything: two businesses, a house, an unbroken family. How that all went down is too deep of a tale to tell now, but my wife left me and it was a painful enough experience to reset all my thoughts and feelings on life, love, and success. I could liken it to shutting down a computer that's running too many apps at once, when everything starts to freeze so you just turn it off. And after fifteen seconds you turn it back on again, reset. They call it a hard reset right? My mind, psyche, and emotional body did that.

I had a year of living with virtually no income. Maybe $600 every month. That was the year I handed off my cafe and the income it provided to my ex wife. I stopped eating out, I stopped paying the mortgage, I cancelled stuff, turned out the lights, I routinely spent $50 for a week's groceries for my boys and I. My mother taught me how to do this by example in her hard years of selling her handwoven rugs at craft shows. She helped me a lot too. Mom would slip me some money here and there or bring me ten persimmons she gleaned. She doesn't need to but she still gleans, because free people like her glean. My maternal family's Hard Wintering Great Depression Mennonite FDR Democratic Socialist hardiness is in my DNA, thank God. 

Winco, Grocery Outlet and Heartseed Farms saved my life last year. Winco is a worker-owned coop, and Grocery Outlet is a locally owned franchise. Heartseed Farms was an intentional community of organic farmers that traded me coffee for a weekly CSA box of the finest fruits and vegetables. With this team as my life support system I remembered that most people are in poverty and don't own two businesses. Turns out visiting poverty is no big deal for me. It was like seeing that great uncle who brings humble treats like dum-dum pops and hands them out to all the kids with his huge battered hand holding them all, the hand missing fingers from the harvest accident involving a combine. That's what poverty is to me, familiar, genetically familiar. Many people are scared of poverty because he's big and strong and scarred up, but he carries a lot of warmth, is always honest, always looks you in the eye, and has no tolerance for bull shit or phony smiles. In a lot of ways I missed poverty.

So the point of this post is that in my poverty, in the losing everything, I was given the opportunity to think freely about what I want to do now. This is an amazing opportunity. I also learned how little I need to be really happy and healthy. Since I was a wee boy I've wanted to make a writing life. I've wanted to sell books, books of poems, manuals, letters, scripts, ebooks, all of it. If I had executed half of the writing ideas I've had over the last ten years, well scratch that, I wasn't ready to do any of it then. Not well anyway. That's the truth. I was too busy playing too many roles, but it was good practice.

So then, a miraculous thing happened: I admitted to myself that I don't want to work hard not writing, I only want to work hard at writing. I like to work, love working even, anyone who knows me knows that I like work. Making food or coffee, or anything with my hands, is a necessary ingredient to my happiness. There is so much peace in using my trade, just not for 40 hours every week. That's too much time taken away from writing projects. The businesses I lost were my means to an end anyway. A wise man once told me, "Just go do the end you're looking for, skip the means."

So now I get it, and I'm doing that. I had to lose everything I was afraid of losing to have enough courage to do that, but now I'm doing that. Plus, being in love with Sadie Rose, a writer, has given me a valuable peek behind the curtain. I've been so inspired by how she makes it all work for herself, how she keeps herself writing for pay. Watching her has been a big eye opener and very inspiring.   

And then freaky things happened, some writing jobs came: A manual, a business consult, a biography that needs to be written. It's stacking up, unfolding just like that. I see a pathway to where I need to go. I'm not trippin on money, because I have such a smaller use for money than I used to and I'll always work my trade when I need it. I'll never get paid writing poems of course, unless I make books and sell them myself out of a backpack. But that's really fun! So I'm good. I'll make books and sell them out of a backpack.

I'll write for whoever needs me to write. 

I started up this blog again as a journal space primarily, and as a spot to try out a poem or two (I usually test run them at The Bookstore poetry readings), and as a place to rant and opine and advocate about things you may or may not care about. Really, this is all a big experiment to see how long I can make a living just being me and creating. Whatever happens, I'm pretty sure I won't get bored.  

If you need a writer, for business or pleasure, get a hold of me. Otherwise, I'll let you know when I'm selling those books of poems out of my backpack.