Don’t panic!  The noise you are hearing in the background is simply the sound of our social institutions collapsing outright.  Newsflash: America is going to change and change in a big way.  Our politics, our media, our language, our culture are all slipping into a deep dark crevasse (luckily, plenty are now forming on our glaciers to accommodate).  Our money is becoming meaningless, and we have discovered the root of all suffering, besides Oprah.  Another stimulus package?  Are you kidding me?  How many times are they going to hit the economy with those shock paddles before it’s time to shut off the defibrillator?  But, that’s the bad news. As promised, here is some good news:  our politics, our media, our language, and our culture are all slipping into a deep dark crevasse.  How is that the good news, Mick?  Have you seen our politics, our media, our language, and our culture lately?  They make Keith Richards look like Jack LaLane. I say good riddance (to our culture, not to Jack LaLane).  Enough is enough.  I am sick of being lied to (by our media, not by Jack LaLane; he makes a mean juicer).  If I wanted this kind of abuse, I would stay home nights and weekends. The Clear Skies Act gutted forty years of environmental control, the Coalition of the Willing was coerced, and I need a bucket of Dramamine to make it through something called ‘the No Spin Zone’.  And don’t even get me started on the ‘Patriot Act.’ By now our forefathers must be, as the Crank puts it, whirling feverishly in their mausoleums.

What kind of fools do they take us for?  Oh, those worked?!   

Damn, we are stupid.

Well, in the immortal words of Roger Daltrey, “We won’t get fooled again!”

King Obama is only a horse of a different color.  He sucks.  There, I said it.  That was kind of liberating.  I am very proud we elected him as a people.  But Obama is going to start Bushing us from a whole different angle is all.  He hasn’t given back the One Ring.  His policies only look more constitutional.  It’s all smoke and mirrors.  Long live the Banana Republic!  How can he really be working to save the economy if he’s on TV 18 hours a day?  What is this, White House reality television?  We just need a Blue Room web cam.

In the immortal words of Roger Daltrey, “Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.”

And if I have to start agreeing with Sean Hannity on ANYTHING, it’s Carradine time.  If I’m going to go, it’s going to be with my nuts tied in a, well, it’s not going to be anything like that, actually.

But, as promised, some good news: there are things we can do to make this transition more enjoyable.  Screwing comes to mind.  Seriously, we do have more power than we think.  We are the people, after all, or at least the part of the people who can still pull ourselves away from our video games long enough to vote.  Just how long does the pause button on my X-Box last anyway?

 I predicted 9/11 would be the last time we, as a country, would be on the same page.  But that’s America’s problem.  We the People still have our towns.  I moved to one of those recently. A town that I hope might remain a town because it has been around for a couple of hundred years.  It’s survived everything from fires, to Indian attacks, to seventies Shatner horror movies.  OK, the real reason was for the three brewpubs, but, now that I’m here, I have learned a lot (other than about the brewing process). The Native Americans think this area is sacred and, perhaps more importantly, they know where to find all of the edible bugs. 

Did you know that cricket ichor can have equal amounts of protein as certain fortified yogurts?  Bug I digress.  I think a recent blog by Ana Kamentz hits things right on the head:

“The current world recession won’t lift by resuming the path of endless growth and mounting debt.  A profound global reorganization has to take place so that we put a fair value on the natural resources that underlie our unprecedented prosperity.  The leap toward a sustainable economy will be realized when each of us wakes up to the reality that you are the economy, and the economy is you.”

See?  I am not only the people, I am the economy.  I am also the walrus, koo-koo kajoob.  On weekends I’m the pinball wizard.  Hell, I’m Rick James, bitch.  But back to being the economy for a moment. As the economy, I would like to announce that all Happy Hours will be extended to 24 (void where prohibitioned). 

With crisis comes opportunity.  For this next phase of human existence, depending, of course, on just how bad this whole thing gets, we should think twice about nearly half of our current job occupations.  Jobs designed to screw with our fellow man should be eradicated.  Not by a law, but by our own moral code.  Jobs in the lamprey family need to be scrutinized.  Policies that require enough paper to empty an entire deciduous forest need to be nixed.  Death to bureaucracy! If your job is a negative karma carn-evil, it’s time to start job hunting.  No longer should we put these people on pedestals.  They are vampires, sucking the life from our friends and neighbors.  Currently, we hold these people in high esteem.  We call them successful.  Successful at what?  How many old ladies can’t get their medications as their drug reps drive by in Porsches?  I’m not talking about a socialistic redistribution of wealth, that’s Obama’s gig, and hardly integral.  I’m talking about common decency actually taking hold amongst our business practices.  I know, it sounds hard to believe. Heck, it would never be possible unless the current system was collapsing outright. But did I mention that our current system is collapsing outright? Again, here’s where that opportunity comes in.  I mention it here now so that we learn from our mistakes as we restart some of these processes anew.  I use the drug rep example, because the other day four drug reps pulled up to my facility in a limo with a pile of catered food. The driver was polishing the limo in front of our clients who were despondently milling outside of their weekly “so your life sucks” group.  Yes, I ate the food, and, yes, I listened to their spiel, but I couldn’t help but think: there are some advantages to the coming collapse.

Lawyers, real estate agents, bankers, credit card peeps beware! I don’t think next time we should embrace such nonsense.  That’s not saying all people from those professions are evil, but what I am saying is that all people in those profession are evil.  OK, not really, I know some great drug reps.  How else could throw my annual ‘Bucket of Xanies Party?  Thanks Eric!

People often think that I’m pessimistic, and really, it couldn’t be farther from the truth (like Dave Atsals’ articles).  Sure America’s screwed for a while and that will, no doubt, have massive implications for all of us. But materialism is not the only perspective.  Most can’t even comprehend a perspective beyond materialism.  When does a parent ever say to their child “follow your heart, do a job that has personal meaning to you, learn for the sake of learning”?  No one.  It’s not valued (like Dave Atsals’ articles).  All parents look at the bottom line monetarily.  Yet all societal yardsticks are ultimately bullshit and those yardsticks are about to be turned on their heads.  Comfy stuff is nice, but it’s not necessarily why we are here.  This dimensional plane of existence is not designed to operate from our recliners and we may soon be forced out of those recliners if we hope to survive.  Try starting in small ways.  Lob your remote control a little farther each time across the living room rug and then retrieve it.  Rinse, lather, repeat. 

Sure the future is uncertain, but I’m not going to have a breakdown over it.  My stress levels are damn low.  Xanies baby!  Whereas I haven’t exactly prepared for the future from the canned goods/bunker perspective, I have prepared in other ways (Krispy Kremes, check).  Heck, I have enough books around to last me several decades and as long as I don’t break my glasses like Burgess Meredith at the end of the Twilight Zone episode, I’ll get by. 

Recently one of my very anxious clients (oh, wait, now as per the PC police they must be referred to as “consumers”, which, by the way, really pisses off our eating disorder “consumers”). Anyway, great kid, but he’s definitely the neurotic Illuminati-type client, oh wait, consumer.  He is scared shitless of the future.

I told him “look, there’s always been a T-Rex outside the cave, or a group of Huns over the fortress walls.  It’s part of the human condition.  How we respond is the point.  Besides, there’s always the chance the T-Rex will eat all of the Huns (gotta love creationists).”

As Joseph Campbell tells us, the monster fades in the wake of the Hero with a Thousand Faces.  Some will be quite immune to the massive upheavals ahead.  If he’s not already in jail, Pokey McDooris comes to mind.  Tai Chi, meditating, reading, writing poetry, and exploring the inner dimensions of the psyche have little to do with mainstream American culture.  Why he has to do all these activities naked is my complaint.  The Ghetto Shaman also comes to mind with his weekly Mojito Midget Reiki, oh, I can’t…  He should be in jail.  But certain people out there on the fringe are, in some ways, ahead of the rest of us.  I would also like to apply for Advisor to the Integral Warlord and will be submitting my resume.

We need to do what the Discord is doing: think globally, act jokeally. 

Who needs Obama to preach mutual respect and mutual goals when we can practice this in our own towns?  We should go grassroots all the way.  Simplify.  A nationwide Xanax taper wouldn’t hurt either.  Who knows, maybe we’ll even bring back the family dinner.  Who could forget Grandma’s Soylent Green Stuffing?  Less Xanies and more community interconnectedness!  We can work together and develop systems that work on a smaller scale (like Dave’s brain).  Now, if you will excuse me, I have some work to do.  The going rate is 487 crickets for a pint of lager around here.

When my fourth grade teacher, Mr. Healy, asked for potential solutions to our country’s refuse problem I thought, in my typical ‘hey, I’m only in the fourth grade but have the balls to raise my hand today’ kind of way, maybe we should send all of the garbage into space, or shoot it into the sun or something.  That was the general idea, and, no, I still haven’t gotten over his reply.  Now, he could have discussed the cost of such a venture, or the logistics of flying daily to the sun with a shuttle full of empty milk cartons, but instead my astute teacher, who always liked Kimmy Grenawitz best, said, and this part I remember quite vividly, “Space is the last place we want to pollute!”

Space; infinite, empty space; our sun, the giant yellow incinerator, thingie.  Whaaaa?

Not only did he say this with the exclamation point, and the italics, but he added the derogatory inflection as well (try as I might, I could not find the derogatory inflection button on my keyboard). Why do I think this statement reflects a generation of teaching?  Well, I don’t, but it was a damn stupid response to make to a fairly reasonable fourth grader.  Overall I had a very good experience in school, minus Kimmy Grenawitz!  But I did think, even way back then, that we have some serious educational gaps to fill in this country, besides Mr. Healy.

Let’s shift to my daughter’s experience, my little microcosm of America, a girl born in central PA, who until recently attended the best public elementary school in the district.  She’s only in third grade and she was already threatened with rather elaborate violence and pushed from the monkey bars, twice.  One incident resulted in a fractured wrist and for the second incident she was lucky enough to land on her head.  No one saw anything either time and both third grade perpetrators are still at large.  Recently she was studying for her PSSAs, which I believe stands for (Pennsylvania Sucks Serious Ass).  She was worried about these regional tests because as she puts it, “If I fail my teacher could get fired.”  She also told me during her math homework, the same day, “I can’t work ahead, daddy, or I’ll get yelled at.” 

No child left, period.

Forget my daughter; what does she know?  Certainly not math.  Let’s take my own undergraduate “work.”  I was talking with my old philosophy professor over dinner recently.  I mentioned how his class was so enjoyable that I even attended now and again.  Perhaps, it wasn’t my fault my attendance was so bad, maybe, just maybe, it is the professor’s job to make the coursework remotely interesting (after all, wasn’t I the customer?).  He laughed at the comment and then told me “space is the last place we want to pollute!” 

Dr. Dan can be a bastard.  

I changed majors from biology to psychology my sophomore year mainly because of the suckiness of the course work (although, admittedly, the decision may have been influenced by my tendency to spend my spare time chasing women toward the nearest keg).  Years later, I asked the professor’s assistant, my friend Tim, why invertebrate zoology sucked so bad.  I remember saying, I watch jellyfish on TV all the time and they seem interesting enough (the last Democratic Convention comes to mind). 

“It was a ‘weed out’ course,” he explained, “you know, to see if you are reeeaaallly interested in jellyfish.”

Why don’t we try to inspire our youth instead of weed them out? 

Tim said, “space is the last place….” (you get the idea.)

Onward to my graduate work. My MS in psychology was completed totally on-line.  Doing class work and homework entirely from a coffee shop is, perhaps, the apex of human accomplishments (next to striped toothpaste).  Now, if we could only figure out what to do with all this garbage.  Hmmm.

I only lost points in e-college when I used non-recovery model language.  Knowing things is not horribly important anymore in our society, but cultural sensitive issues are paramount.  A hundred-thousand dollars later and our children can learn how not to offend the socio-economically challenged, opiate dependent person they are over medicating (I say pocket the hundred grand and arrest that damned hobo junkie).

The cost of education has risen 440 percent in the last decade and treating EVERYTHING like a business in this country is starting to backfire worse than the Ghetto Shaman after a burrito eating contest.

Which career pays 440 percent more in the last decade?   How long is this stupidity sustainable?  I feel like telling my kids to study for their future positions the way God intended, in public libraries.

This generation seems immune to the Flynn Effect.  There is an Intelligence Quotient cliff that Americans just did a Thelma and Louise off of. Eventually the peer-reviewed research is going to start reflecting this fact (then again, when the peers are sitting in the driver’s seat of said convertible…).  These are all reasons taken quite arbitrarily and, by themselves, I don’t really think they say much (except about that brown-noser Kimmy Grenawitz!). What it does do for me, however, is start to draw a picture, oh wait, arts have been cut too. 

Nevermind.

Since moving to the great American southwest, I have grown increasingly troubled by some of the local customs, color, and culinary transgressions associated with the high-desert peoples.  Normally, the thought of stopping at a jerky stand would never even enter my consciousness, but here, in the land of dirt, dust, and more dirt, I can not help but notice any and every business I pass in my travels, mainly because I’ve only seen four of them.  Somewhat disturbing was the moment I realized that the scant few ‘establishments’ found outside of civilization’s kindly influence involve a suspiciously high amount of jerky.  Two jerky related incidents struck me with considerable angst in recent weeks.  The first occurred north of Phoenix in a town called North of Phoenix where a fat man with a straw hat sat in the blazing heat selling jerky products to passersby.   It was over one hundred degrees at this particular moment in time and this man had no cold beverages to peddle, as if man can subsist on jerky alone.  I’m not just saying that…that’s what his homemade sign read: Man Can Subsist On Jerky Alone.  Granted, this is a free country, but that guy’s life insurance rates should be higher than mine, just on principle. 

Even more disturbing, he kind of reminded me of that guy from Motel Hell. You know, the movie that brought us the timeless passage: It takes all types of critters, to make Farmer Vincent’s fritters. What kind of critteresque roadkill was jerkied-up for my enjoyment on this hot Phoenix afternoon?  What would compel someone to stop at this remote desert jerky stand in the first place?  Is every fifteenth customer thrown into Farmer Vincent’s vat?  Or was the customer-to-vat-count much higher? 

Do you feel jerky, well…do ya?

What point of desperation and depravity could lead a man to eat some unknown jerkied meat-product from a Motel Hell-looking guy?  But then it hit me.  There is nothing, absolutely nothing, between Phoenix and my destination.  This was the proverbial it, as far as choices were concerned.  He had a veritable jerkyopoly.  To complicate matters, my stomach and my curiosity were peaking like Janet Jackson’s tit at a halftime show.  So, I pulled over and I stared at the straw hat wearing Farmer Vincent looking dude through my clip on sunglasses.  He stared back at me warily and somewhere nearby the theme music to Fistful of Jerky whistled through the dunes.  Thankfully, I remembered the granola bar in my glove compartment.  So I waved at the impressive stranger and turned my Explorer back onto the Carefree Highway.  One would pretty much have to be on a road called the Carefree Highway to chance the dietary unknowns associated with private jerky stand in the middle of Nowhere, AZ (Actually, in retrospect, Nowhere, AZ, was about fifty miles northwest).

My second, and arguably worst, desert jerky encounter (DJE) came complete with much fear and loathing amidst a Vegas trip to see fellow Discordian, the Great Bald One himself.  A typical road trip for me back east involved stopping enroute at every coffee shop and brew pub, where I would often write witty articles blissfully devoid of any and all jerky products.  It once took Pokey McDooris and I three days to make it the hundred miles from State College, PA to Harrisburg, PA.  We were actually shooting for Philadelphia, but never made it further than a brewpub called Bube’s Brewery (best of both worlds).  But here, in the Valley of the Sun, well, just north of the Valley of the Sun, my road trips tended to involve (gulp) driving to my destination. 

Here in northern Arizona piss breaks usually involve cactuses (if I’m alone), or the electric window (if I’m not).  For my first trip to Vegas I wanted to stop somewhere along the two hundred and fifty mile trip and get something iced or brewed or maybe even some non-jerky-related sustenance.  The only thing between Kingman, AZ and Las Vegas, NV, a two hour haul, was a stand on the west side of the highway called Rosie’s Jerky Mart, or some such place for all of your jerky needs.   I’m not just saying that, that’s what the sign said: A Place for All of Your Jerky Needs.  OK, I’m making that part up (won’t be the last time). 

This was the only place on the way to Vegas? This?  It looked downright dangerous, and I have been known to blunder, nah frequent, some rather unsavory establishments in my time.  Besides, if I needed a jerky it was going to involve a Vegas hooker and some Manishevitz.  Right now, I wanted a friggin beer. 

What is the southwestern fascination with this shit?  Is jerky used for some other purpose in this region?  Do all of the pickup trucks out here have a jerky indicator that blinks on if jerky levels are low?   I felt like a stranger in a strange land. 

The words Rosie’s Jerky Mart, or some such, were, if memory serves, spray-painted onto a large crude sign in the same style, though admittedly more grandiose, as the Motel Hell guy’s truck of business.  There was a small sign that said coffee, but I decided, hell, it’s only another sixteen thousand miles to the next jerky stand. 

I don’t know what I was expecting.  My last trip out this way, involving a man known only as Shag, was no different.  People have said to me, Mick, why did you expect lots of stuff in the middle of the desert?  And to these hypothetical intruders I would reply, it’s not the hundreds of miles between things that are concerning me, it’s what people are choosing to open hundreds of miles between things.  You know, without the kindly influence of civilization, business sense, or even rational thought.  If I stay in this region will I become one of the jerky boys?  I already have a healthy fear of jerky, but each lonely drive through this groovy jumping wasteland brings me closer to that jerking fear (little too Lovecraft?).

Do you feel jerky, well…do ya?

There are many reasons for the decline of science fiction. OK, in all fairness, my version of science fiction. As an avid sci-fi fan who almost never watches the Sci-Fi channel, I’ve started to reflect on where it all went so horribly wrong. There are many culprits. First, the movie Outlander comes to mind.  Outlander, not the Scottish decapitating swordsman dude, but the Sean Connery as an aging space-cop dude, was a sci-fi crossroads of sorts. This movie was simply a cops-and-robbers story set on one of Jupiter’s moons. For the first time, the setting, the actual reason we are watching a science fiction movie in the first place, took a backseat to a space-marshal human drama. Support your local Cylon?

A second crossroads came as Gene Rodenberry passed the torch to Rick Berman, who immediately set to work flying the starship Enterprise into a black hole. He made some god-awful TV shows, on TV show budgets, and called them “movies.”.

Somehow he thought, “Hey these really intelligent, detail-oriented Star Trek freaks won’t notice recycled footage, dumbed-down FX, and poor storylines, right?”

Great thinking there, Rick. This, coming from the same man who brought us Deep Six Space [Deep Space Nine], or, as I like to call it, “Melrose Space,” as it sadly competed for the Melrose Place audience. For those not familiar with Beverly Hills 90210 or Melrose Place, you might know their viewing audience as the cheerleaders who would never date you. This human-drama soap opera always danced around the possibility of a true science fiction storyline, although that rarely happened. Berman decided it’s much easier to have the same actors, the same makeup people, and deal with the same alien races each week.  It’s much too expensive to beam down to a new planet each week, see something novel, blast it out of existence, and then beam home. So, instead, we get the same few Ferengi who are in love with the same few Bajoran. This was beginning of the end for the franchise. Even Enterprise, which tried to go back to the old themes, failed because of its multi-episode, cliffhanging, only-really-interesting-at-the-end-of-the-season, recycled plot gimmicks. AHHHhhhh, AHhhhhhhh! Sorry, I just had a Sam Kinison moment. Was there even one episode of Enterprise where they beamed down to the planet, met the creature creeping around the alien landscape, then had the captain bang something green, rip his shirt, and blast the bad alien into space dust? Even once? My guess is never. So what worked in the first series was never actually tried in the last. 

While I have many concerns with the latest incarnations of the Star Trek, I have to say that The X-Files was the single most destructive force in sci-fi. There were about eight episodes of the TV series that I absolutely loved, which hooked me onto countless, conspiracy-entangled empty hours, none of which can I ever get back. I held out for those wrapped-up-in-one episode gems, where they’d meet the ancient killer bug or hunt the strange alien creatures in the woods. Sadly, nine out of ten episodes were cheaply done cliffhanger rip-offs designed for one purpose: tune in next week to find out another meaningless piece of the meaningless puzzle, kids! And don’t forget to drink Coke. One day, while watching Mulder muddle through yet another dead-end lead, the clouds parted and I remember a voice from the heavens saying, “My god, they don’t know where this is going either!” And I didn’t even care, because I kept waiting for the monster episode, which grew rarer as the series wore on.  

The most recent affront to sci-fi, Battlestar Galactica, borrowed from a lot of these cheats. I’ll grudgingly give the show some credit, as it started with great writing and great special effects, but the space/action soon gave way to human drama, just like all the rest. Human drama, which has nothing to do with space, but is much cheaper to deal with, always creeps in like a Triffid on Amp. It’s the law of diminishing returns: it becomes less about Cylons and more about human-looking Cylons, and then ultimately who is banging the human-looking Cylons.  As a sci-fi traditionalist, I want the women to literally suck the chrome off the bumper, so to speak.  If you’re going to show me robot sex, then let’s get down with something that can suck the chrome off the Millennium Falcon.

Today’s sci-fi shows use trickery to draw you in; then, before you know it, the only worthwhile episodes are the season premiere and the season finale. Luckily, I have a wife who tells me when the first and last episodes air each season. During the commercials, she’ll fill me in on all of the plot gimmicks, sub-themes, and who is inter-galactically banging who. Yes, she has watched every episode of Battlestar Galactica, yet she still calls the bad guys “Zylons”. Women,. I think they are part of the problem. Remember Species? My wife knows every elf in friggin’ Rivendell, including the correct elvish pronunciation, but four years later and the bad guys are still the “Zylons”. She’s lucky she’s cute, and not in any way an android.

While independent movies can be wonderful, these folks need to stay away from sci-fi. I have bad news for you independent film buffs, a.k.a. morons: formula movies work in sci-fi. Endless variations on the same theme trigger wonderful things in our collective psyches. Such formula movies include Night of the Living Dead, Night of the Lepus, Night of the Comet, Night of the Jackal, Day of the Dead, Day of the Triffids, and The Day the Earth Stood Still. Frankly, anything with “day” or “night” in it will work. I will even accept “morning” or “evening,” if you insist on change. The Morning the Robot Badgers Struck; or how about The Evening the Radioactively Enlarged Ice Weasels Ate Yuma. Basically, they come, whoever “they” are, from outer space, but they must land via meteorite, spacecraft, or via solar wind, radiation, or melting ice floes. Atom bombs will work in a pinch. Anyone in the opening scene must die no exceptions.  Bonuses awarded if they are cute scantily clad women.  Some mysterious entity picks off the protagonists, one by one, until the survivors are huddled in some structure or other, be it church, house, bunker, Starbucks, whatever. Oh, and boarding the windows during the end sequence is a must. 

Screw the rest of you trying to pull sci-fi into something other. Refresher course: “other” is typically Melrose Space. Be imaginative, but stick with the theme. Show me something. We are in the outskirts of space. I don’t give a radioactively enlarged rat’s ass who is banging who. If everything must evolve, how about setting that end sequence in a Starbucks? Starbucks even sounds space-appropriate (it worked in Battlestar Galactica). You can have the survivors using cordless screwdrivers to board themselves in, or for super-futuristic, how about laser drills digitally enhanced by Lucas Film?

Bottom line, don’t change what works.  Change what doesn’t work, you know, like Pokey McDooris.