Coming Clean

Hi my name is Mike, and I’m an addict.

 

I slurp coffee the way an alcoholic swills bourbon. I began my habit shortly after the invention of dirt. I’ve never tried to stop drinking coffee, because I like a good cup of Joe in the same way I like a well-brewed Oregon porter.

 

And when it comes to a porter, I have my share, though mostly at home while sitting in front of a movie.

 

I’ve got some real nasty habits, too.

 

Sometimes while listening to a person I have bad thoughts, like wanting to poke them in the eye. Sometimes I want to slap them. To my credit, though, I never physically hurt people.

 

I ignore people who I think are stupid. I ignore a lot of people.

 

On the backroads, where I know cops don’t prowl, I try to attain warp speed in my Toyota Rav4. If I’m driving T~’s Del Sol on a backroad, I try to get airborne.

 

And there you have it: all the things which, if I ran for public office, the press would use to try and drop me to my knees. It is necessary to come clean publicly when you begin to post words of political dissent on social media, submit editorials which blatantly point fingers at people and institutions, and when you write letters and email to politicians. Everyone who holds an opposing view wants to dig in your dirt. If you toss the dirt into the hole first, you stand a better chance of not getting buried.

 

So here it is; my public confession. I’ve taken off my gloves, and I’m ready to rumble.

Activate (Final): InfoFiction

At the core of every myth is a truth. Something happened, and someone tried to explain it. Stories often get confused, blown out of proportion, or are distorted in translation. But whether because of Zeus, Indra, Taranis, or Thor, somewhere lightning struck.

—Mike McLaren

 

Beneath the donnybrook of Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Myspace, LinkedIn, Pinterest, LiveJournal, an inkling of truth should wallow within the verbiage, even if unseen by all but the most diligent interpreter. Most often I do not find even a hint of truth.

 

Every maroon like me with a social media account thinks he or she is a journalist, or if not presumes he or she is the mercurial messenger of the world’s news. I find more absurdity in the items most people consider newsworthy, and am immediately skeptical of anything tagged “news” or “update.”

 

The recent bombing in Boston sadly displayed the current state of U.S. “news reporting.” Every original report misidentified the suspects. A friend—and editor of a California newspaper—emailed an essay he found shortly after one of the bombers was killed and the other taken into custody. The essay discussed how the event was reported and handled via social media and the internet. Photographs popped up on all bandwidths of cyberspace, and all the photographs were of people unassociated with the bombing. Someone even posted a photograph of Arnold Schwarzenegger as a teenager under the heading of “Boston Bomber in Custody.” Most distressing, an unusual number of “legitimate” newspapers posted the same erroneous photos and names on their web sites.

 

When law enforcement finally released photos of Tamerian and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, every web site in the world changed its photos and revised its story. The media concealed its slipshod handiwork, but the damage was done. Two innocent people, misidentified by Twitter, Facebook posts, and sloppy mainstream media sites dove into hiding in fear of public retribution.

 

Just several months before, on two separate occasions, I caught glimpses of the television at the gym where I workout. Both times, the talking heads of the media were retracting stories they reported the night before—seems they pulled videos from Youtube, and only after airing the footage discovered the movies were faked.

 

Recently, two popular political pundits were accused of errors and unethical business dealings, and both are now unemployed.

 

Everyone wants to be first with the details of disaster. Some want to present the most spectacular spectacle ever seen on Earth. Is it because by being ahead of everyone else, the bozo with the fastest thumbs will have saved the planet? Because they have identified doom and mayhem first are they better than the next moron who got his facts wrong?

 

I’m not as worried about whodunit; that’s the job of law enforcement. I’m more interested in the why and how to stop bad things from happening, which requires research, which requires effort.

 

Effort... is that a bad word in society today... or just a cardinal sin?

 

I know that when one admits to being an activist and starts picking on government figures, big corporations, and government laws, he or she better dot their i’s and cross their t’s, or they’ll find themselves hanging by their ears from a clothesline.

 

Activate (Part 4): Details

Throughout graduate school, my colleagues and I signed on for a class taught by my mentor. We received credit for the class, but it was not a “real” class. It was a bull session, in which we discussed the most serious issues pertinent to our studies: writing, the teaching of writing, and communication development (CD)—the latter being a broad sense of all the ways writing is used by human beings. Most often, in discussing CD, we focused on journalism (which included television), and the use of essay as an information exchange.

 

From those discussions, two concepts entrenched themselves into my writing psyche: 1) all writing is persuasive (an argument paper), even fiction; and 2) plagiarism and and unsubstantiated public argument is a writer’s sin.

 

For an activist, writing is an imperative medium of the message. Successful activists write well. To write well, the writer (activist) must also do something else with even more craft and skill. The activist must do his or her research.

 

I am up-to-speed on nukes. I can write with accuracy the number of wars occurring on Earth at this moment, the number of U.S. military deaths, and the to-date costs of our wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. I have written legislative bills which have been presented before state assemblies, thus I know how to read and interpret legislative double-speak (used to do it for a living). I keep on file a list of every oil spill which has occurred since the Exxon Valdez (dates, GPS locations, GIS correlations, gallons, dispersement areas, ship names, responsible companies).

 

To appear as a dissident in public, on purpose, one must do their homework, must be able to correctly interpret data and information, must be acute with extrapolation of that data and information, and must be able to relate to a public with an average seventh grade reading level.

 

And one must be specifically careful of the research. I watched a documentary tonight which touted the dangers of GMOs. I will not use the documentary as a reference; though it reached the conclusion I wanted, I was not comfortable with how it arrived at its conclusions.

 

Already, in just the two weeks since reigniting my activist life, I am guilty not of incorrectness, but of sloppy presentation. My sloppiness can be attributed to laziness—didn’t read the whole report. I referred to a mucky-muck as having been bigger than he really was. He’s a really big mucky-muck now, but in the past he was just a governor who had received special privileges as payment for a little thing he had done to his home state in Iowa—wrote the bill which removed the right of local communities from regulating where genetically engineered crops could be grown. I said he was a minion of Monsanto. He was only accepting free rides in their airplanes.

 

Granted, his actions make him look like a minion, and he is, but not officially, so I deleted my Facebook post. My post tonight is spot on, even in terms of extrapolation. In fact, it is the extrapolation which four people missed when they sent me disgruntled responses. I sent them my most recent post before putting it on Facebook. I got four new responses... “You’re kidding?”

 

I’m not.

 

Accuracy is everything when you want to be taken seriously, and when you actually want to make a difference...

 

... even though you know you can’t.

Activate (Part 3): Issues

Man is always marveling at what he has blown apart, never at what the universe has put together, and this is his limitation.

—Loren Eiseley

 

I have always taken issue with more things than I could manage in my head, so for a long time I focused my activist activities on nukes and war. Realistically though, no amount of protesting, no number of anti-war songs, poems, or essays will ever stop the U.S. from killing people. Aggression is modus operandi of these United States. Indeed, war is a standard pastime of most human governments and religious organizations.

 

I continue to sing an anti-war song which I wrote in 1989, and one I wrote in 2001. Sadly, they are both pertinent today, as are the anti-war covers I perform occasionally when my gig won’t involve going head-to-head with BMI or ASCAP copyright lawyers (legislated thugs).

 

Many of my songs, however, over the past seven-or-so years, echo from an anti-corporation stance. I can’t change the world, but if I can persuade one person to shop mom-and-pops in their area, I don’t mind the risk of being pummeled at a gig.

 

The anti-corporate argument, however, encompasses many constituents: greedy Wall Street banks, corrupt and vicious politicians, ignorant and misguided governments, social gluttony, the overzealous avarice of the few who control the world’s most dangerous corporations, and on and on and on. Within those subtopics roil the myriad themes of life: welfare mothers, guns in the hands of babes, deforestation, water contamination, oil slicks on the ocean, the unceasing bombardment of advertising upon the global public... and on and on and on.

 

Then there’s the stuff which scares me: genetic engineering and pharmaceutical experimentation. I’ve written several essays and numerous newspaper op-ed pieces about the latter, but not a song. I have written and regularly perform several ditties about GMO and GE crops and foodstuffs. From the advent of my newspaper in 1993 to its demise in 1997, I wrote over thirty pieces against genetic manipulation for my publication and others, and then a handful more during the years I worked as an editor for the Times-Standard daily, and served as a columnist for the Arcata Eye.

 

Since returning to Oregon four years ago, I’ve lagged in my activism. I publicly perform my songs, and every three months I submit letters to U.N General Secretary Ban Ki-moon and U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton regarding the catastrophe of Burma (now called Myanmar). I wrote a letter to President Obama in Spring 2009 to protest his appointment of Tom Vilsack as head of the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA). That is all.

 

I’ve decided to get back into the swing of me, to do that thing which vitalizes me and which offers me a sense that I’m doing something right for the world. I didn’t realize that part of my life was missing until a few months ago, when Monsanto (biotech agriculture) became the main headliner in just about everything I read. I’m going to reactivate my activism.

 

I’ve got a long way to catch up. The biotech industry in the U.S. is a runaway train, and Monsanto, backed by excessive preferential treatment from my government, plows forward with a huge head-start. 

 

It is frequently the tragedy of the great artist, as it is of the great scientist, that he frightens the ordinary man.

—Loren Eiseley

Activate (Part 2): Actions & Effects

I try to avoid stereotypes and labeling, though I call myself a musician, a writer, a teacher. I do not know a word which encompasses all three labels into a single idea, thus whatever appellation I apply to myself depends upon what I do on any given day. The word activist, however, applies to me in most cases.

 

The summer of 2008, I played as a duo with C~, a fella who looked related to me, and who played his dobro, banjo, and guitar just like me. I was a fella who looked related to C~, and I played my dobro, banjo, and guitar just like him. During our gigs, we didn’t need to talk. We just knew how to play music with one another. And folks liked our music. We were the favorite among Humboldt organic farmers, and so we played one of the five weekly Farmer’s Markets in Humboldt nearly once a week.

 

I wrote songs. C~ wrote songs. We both wrote songs about political and social issues. One afternoon, as we played the Market in McKinleyville, a gentleman in his dress blues walked into the market. C~ and I were playing an anti-war tune. The fella went off like a cluster bomb, started yelling for us to stop. He got so near my face that his screaming spit got on my sunglasses.

 

I said nothing, just kept playing and singing. C~ said nothing, just kept playing and singing. I looked at C~, who looked at me, and we both knew we would not stop the rest of the afternoon. It took one of us to hit an opening lick, and we knew which song to play next.

 

The gentleman lost all composure, sadly enough in front of his six-year-old son. He even threatened to get his gun and show us “what it means to be American.” Several farmers believed his threat, packed their tables and produce, and left early.

 

C~ and I did not stop playing until long after the market.

 

“I thought he might actually come back?” I said.

 

“I wondered, but it looks like he won’t,” said C~. “It’s getting too dark.”

 

“I felt bad for his son.”

 

“That little guy felt bad about the whole thing.”

 

We packed away our instruments and left. We played the same set the following week at the Eureka Farmer’s Market, without incident.

 

Frankly, I do not think my opinions are opinions: war and killing are not good, the way corporations prey upon the have-nots to feed the affluent is detestable, and the way U.S. representatives and senators clap each other on the back after duping the “commoner” of his rights, privileges, and earnings is appalling—particularly at the rate in which dastardly deeds are increasing, and are no longer concealed behind closed doors.

 

I would not write and sing the songs I do if I thought, even for just the blink of any eye, that I was wrong. I would not write the kinds of poems and prose I do if I thought, even for just the flutter of a heartbeat, that my publicized ideas were unsound.

 

No one can convince me that war, corporate greed, and government corruption are good things. Too many people die because too many do believe in the sanctity and faith-based justification of killing, financial recklessness, and political iniquity. and so I protest.

 

We have to stand up and speak out, because past human actions have brought the planet to the brink of irreparable damage. And right now, a handful of companies are bringing us closer to the edge, at an alarming speed—Carlyle Group, Halliburton, Walmart, Exxon, Chevron, Dow Chemical...

 

... Monsanto... .

Activate (Part 1): First Action

I try to avoid stereotypes and labeling, yet I tag myself as a musician, a writer, and a teacher. I do not know a word which encapsulates all three labels into a single idea, thus whatever appellation I apply to myself depends upon what I do on any given day. The word activist, however, applies to all my guises.

 

My mother went to college after her divorce. As a kid, from 1967 to 1970, I lived across the street from the dormitories and library of University of Northern Colorado, and just a house away from the college Student Union. I was too young for the draft, and even too young to be arrested, thus I was a handy tool for the college students who organized Viet Nam War protests on campus. No one suspected a little kid hauled around town dissident propaganda in his Peechee folder (posters and flyers which advertised the dates and times of the sit-ins).

 

I learned how to dissent early in life.

 

Fall 1976, I toured the Trojan Nuclear Facility just outside St. Helens, Oregon. I spent the next week studying fission, and instantly became anti-nuke. In my opinion, humans are not smart enough, careful enough, or compassionate enough to wield the power of the sun.

 

January 20, 1981, the advent of the Reagan era, I started writing and playing political songs and anti-corporation ditties. During the years my wife and I published a small natural health newspaper (1993 to 1997), I learned much about food, and about corporate farming, and I discovered more than I wanted to know about GMO’s and GE’s. I realized corporations were the governing body of the United States.

 

I grew my hair to my waist and stopped writing songs, and instead played instrumental, “new-age,”spiritual guitar. Still, I tagged each of my compositions with a dissident title.

 

And then little George Bush came to power. I tugged back on my Texas roots, and returned to writing and singing songs—dug deeper to reach some mean blues and lonesome country.

 

And now, thirty-three years since writing my first song, I’m still writing and playing the same stuff. Nothing has changed. One hundred sixty-two songs, and all but twenty of them ring with dissent. It is sad to know they are more pertinent today than when I first wrote them.

 

I suppose that is why I continue to sing them... with even more emotion.

If I Were...

I got this from Secret Notebooks/WildPages years ago. It’s a fun way to think about the self in relation to the world. I’ve also found that it makes a useful tool in deriving metaphors to describe characters or their actions:

 

If I were a month I’d be October

If I were a day I’d be the Day You were Born

If I were a time of day I’d be Right Now

If I were a planet I’d be In Another Galaxy

If I were a sea animal I’d be a White Shark

 

If I were a direction I’d be 10,000 Directions All At Once

If I were a piece of furniture I’d be an Automan

If I were a liquid I’d be Water

If I were a gem stone I’d be Garnet

If I were a tree I’d be a Coastal Redwood

If I were a tool I’d be a Lever

 

If I were a flower I’d be a Black Tulip

If I were an element of weather I’d be a Slow Autumn Breeze

If I were a musical instrument I’d be a Dobro

If I were a color I’d be Teal

If I were an emotion I’d be Compassion

 

 

If I were a fruit I’d be a Blueberry

If I were a sound I’d be Om

If I were an element I’d be Air

If I were a car I’d be a Datsun 1600 Roadster

If I were a food I’d be Mozzarella Cheese

 

 

If I were a place I’d be Right Here

If I were a material I’d be Corduroy

If I were a taste I’d be Salty

If I were a scent I’d be Honeysuckle

If I were a body part I’d be a Heart

If I were a song I’d be chanted in Sanskrit

 

If I were a bird I’d be a Bower Bird

If I were a gift I’d be Everything You Ever Wanted

If I were a city I’d be Venice

If I were a door I’d be Open

If I were a pair of shoes I’d be a Soft Pair of Fuzzy Slippers

If I were a poem I would be “Fall Comes In Back-country Vermont” (Robert Penn Warren)

 

Thanks, Uma.

 

Soundless

I would ask you dance, but I’ve forgotten how, so let’s sit on the back porch and watch the sun set. It’s how it will end, anyhow. The lights will go out—without a sound. The universe will never hear us. Eternity will never know.

First to go will be the laughter: the gurgle of streams, the giggle of a baby with her first bowl of oatmeal, the caw of the crow with a fresh cherry.

Next it will be our motor functions, as we go weak in the knees, and get sick to our stomachs.

We will begin the end with a chorus of dirges, which will shatter into sighs, then moans, concluding with cacophonous wailing.

And just before the final moment we will go dumb, because our brains will be unable to answer how such a thing could happen.

At the last moment, we will close our eyes, to leave behind only a tear to trace the silence of all we ever were.

 

Better Fit

I walked out of a job interview last Friday, and from the smiles on their faces, the winks and nods shared between them, the comments of “oh, very good,” “why, yes,” and “well put,” I knew the job was mine.

It happened so quickly. On Tuesday, I emailed my resumé. Thursday morning I received a phone call from the HR person of the firm. She asked if I would submit a writing sample: a piece on “How to Change a Flat Tire.” I popped the thing off in less than hour, and emailed it. Two hours later I received another phone call from the HR person. We set up my interview for the following day.

I pegged it so very wrong. When I left the forty-minute interview, the HR person said she would call at the end of this week, or the beginning of next week, with whatever decision they made.

They waited only twenty-four hours, and left a message on my cell phone to say they found “a better fit.”

I was not devastated, because over the weekend, discussing the job with T~ while we sat in Trolley at a southern Oregon campground, we decided it might not be in our best interest to accept their job offer. More than likely, however, I would have accepted it, even for a salary figure far below my comfort zone.

But the voice mail said they had found “a better fit.” I called the HR person, asked what I could have done to raise myself above the person they hired, and she assured me there was nothing about me they didn’t like; my qualifications were good, my writing was excellent… they simply found a “better fit.”

So now I realize I don’t fit in. Folks don’t expect to see a tall, skinny guy my age walk in for an interview. Folks don’t expect to see a guy as scary looking as me walk into an interview. Folks don’t expect to interview a guy who knows more about steam engines than he does his smartphone. I don’t think they expected to see a guy in black dress pants, shiny black boots, a manila dress shirt, and a dazzling tie walk into the interview. I don’t think folks expect to see me walk into an interview.

I’m looking for employment. I think I’m in trouble. I don’t fit.

A Leak

T~ and I did not talk earlier this evening. We could not hear one another. Only the pounding of rain resounded through the small confines of our motorhome. Even the usually boisterous whir of the gas furnace remained inaudible beneath the din of the torrent.

 

That was four hours ago, and still the rain has not stopped. Ten thirty, in a southern Oregon forest drenched in pure darkness, T~ and I can finally hear one another, if we focus upon the conversation and listen carefully.

 

More often than not, we have weathered storms during our excursions in Trolley—usually rain and wind, and occasionally snow. Our little wreck, for the most part, handles stormy conditions well. Today, however, the old boy takes on water. Every few hours we sop a puddle from the well of the fore window. I’ve spent a year seeking to mitigate the leak, have covered the entire outside rim of the pane with water-proof goo. Still, water has a way of finding its way into whatever place it wants to go. I will continue my hunt.

 

Tonight, though, it’s all right. We are aware of the leak, and our vigilance will keep the situation from becoming a mess. A bit of water is nothing compared to navigating life when we are not cozied down inside Trolley, somewhere in an Oregon wilderness.

 

We sauntered two hundred miles to Josephine County for a rendezvous with some friends from Humboldt, who rented a yurt. They brought along some friends visiting from England. We had a smashing time last evening sharing food beside a campfire in the downpour, and then retiring inside the yurt to play Yahtzee.

 

(Of an event that happened to my friends at four o’clock in the morning, I will post a separate blog entry later. For now, T~ and I, and our new friends who live in London beside the Thames, slept well, and woke this morning in great spirits.)

 

We shared breakfast, then hiked around Selmac Lake in the rain. N~ (my new friend) and I took many photographs, and talked extensively of life in general, and of the differences between living in England and the U.S. He and his wife took early retirement (redundancy). They’d had enough of working and living in the “stressure” of the fast lane. They just finished a five-month sojourn in New Zealand, and loved it. They are also enjoying their travels through America.

 

This evening, my new English friends and my familiar Humboldt friends piled into a spacious mini-van for the two-hour trip back to California.

 

T~ and I remained behind, and moved Trolley to a new campsite. We treated ourselves—anchored our rig beneath the towering pines of a full-service site. Usually, we pride ourselves on the self-sufficiency which Trolley offers, but tonight I connected our water, sewer, and electrical to the pole of space thirty-two. We do not worry this evening about keeping lighting to a minimum, water consumption, or what’s going down the loo. At home, we do.

 

What this trip boils down to, however, is what I will say to the folks who, I predict, will offer me a technical writing job at the end of this week. Teaching music lessons in Corvallis is not even a fifth as lucrative as it was in Humboldt County, and this past Friday I interviewed for a job in Eugene (fifty minutes south of where I now live).

 

It came faster than expected. I emailed my resumé last Monday morning, received a call Thursday with a request to provide them a sample of technical writing on the topic, “How to Change a Flat Tire.” I conjured a thorough, well-written exposé in less than an hour, emailed it, and received another phone call just an hour after that.

 

“Can you come down for an interview at three tomorrow.”

 

“Yes I can.”

 

Why wouldn’t I say yes? Even while tending the piffle of the music store, I sought real employment. Corvallis literally offers no jobs, and will most likely never present any opportunities in my realms of expertise, mainly because those kinds of businesses do not exist where I now reside.

 

For the first time in over thirteen years, I performed as an interviewee. Much to my surprise, I performed well. The panel of five who performed the interview were all smiles, and occasionally winked at one another. They want a technical writer, and I left their firm with a strong presumption that I am the writer they seek.

 

The moment I arrived home, I wrote and mailed a letter which reiterated my thanks for the interview, and which restated my qualifications, and reviewed the reasons why I am a good fit for the position.

 

Today, I have second thoughts. And as much as T~ would like for me to have gainful employment, she, too, harbors second thoughts—probably more so than me.

 

“I haven’t really thought about Eugene,” she said this evening. “And I know you don’t want to commute two hours a day for very long. I’m not sure Eugene is where I want to go.”

 

“But it is a job, and who knows, maybe we’ll like it.”

 

“And maybe we won’t. It is, after all, very similar to Corvallis—college town, transient population, and from the look of the north and east sides of town, a good chunk of redneck mentality mixed into the progressive stream.”

 

“But it’s a job.”

 

“We haven’t looked at Bend, or any parts of Central Oregon where it’s drier. And it puts us an hour farther away from Portland. You know very well that I could transfer my job to Portland. If we’re going to be in rain…   “

 

“… we’d rather be rained on in Portland.”

 

“What do you want for the last haul? I don’t want to move again after this next time.”

 

Cozied in a motorhome which we have arduously reconstructed from literal ash and rusted metal, T~ and I think more clearly, with more resolution, and with eyes better focused upon the pertinent and necessary aspects of life: what we want to get out of it. It’s what happens when you step out of the race to focus on what you’ve been passing.

 

I wouldn’t be able to commute for very long. My back won’t take it day-in-and-day-out. Traveling in Trolley, I make frequent stops to stretch, and I tolerate the pain because I know where I’m headed (nowhere, really), and that I will have an extended time in which I do not have to sit behind the wheel. Once home, I will have an even longer time to recuperate, because I do not drive much during any given week, if at all.

 

And now, in the slow pace of Trolley living, with the rhythmic regularity of Oregon weather pummeling the roof of our motorhome, I realize that this job offer will come at the same speed which T~ and I vowed to avoid when we left Sacramento, California, in 1997.

 

It doesn’t make sense to step back into the lifestyle we fled thirteen years ago. The first real opportunity I’ve had since moving to Oregon three years ago, and I might say no. I will keep hunting. One of these days, I’ll find a way to mitigate the leaks.