Hamster on a wheel

So you want to be a droid--- a robot in the mindless machine of making and buying produce. Luckily, you're on the right track! And we have just the education system to make sure neither you nor your children, nor your children's children will ever be on the verge of living any life other than the one that we have planned for you.

It all begins in childhood. Products designed to "give your baby a head start" that run the gambit of in the womb CDs to Baby Einstein-- a learning system that paradoxically uses television and video for educating the infant to toddler set-- are marketed to you. (I say "paradoxically" as all studies show that television for the young do more to HARM the ability for tots to think and learn)When they finally get to school, they will be given data entry (just like computers) which is often complicated and challenging giving you the illusion that your child is really learning something. Thus, you run out to buy teaching aids or send them to private tutors so that they can keep up (once again contributing to the swelling of our pocketbooks, not really helping your children in any meaningful way). What they are really getting are the system tools to regurgitate the information we want them to spit out so that one day they will be able to enter the workforce and produce the type of work we need. They will also often be completely turned off of learning and education because all they will have ever known is a drudgery that stilts and plunders one of life rather than enhancing and contributing to life (as a real intellectual life & thought will do).

This will continue throughout their young lives- even into college (although occasional trip-ups in college do lend the possibility for intellectual development-- we try to halt this wherever it happens!) We are able to do this because colleges are, after all, a business and if they are seen as too radical and oppositional to the system, money dries up. Professors don't like losing money-- for their homes or otherwise. We also quickly wrap the students up in debt. Although the school loans they are receive are low in interest, they are for many thousands of dollars and force the student to make a certain income in order to make the investment worth his or her while. In addition to this, we seize the opportunity to help these poor struggling students through their financial difficulties by offering them credit which they use for survival purposes. They are now completely reliant on the system that we offer them to pay these debts back. They will not head off for a year of exploration through Europe or spend their early adulthood seeking adventure and a meaningful existence. They will spend their energy trying to make enough money to pay their bills back and have a nice enough car to impress their family and friends.

Once they are out of college, we will continue to disguise real information and facts with pseudo-science and opinion. And we will use this method to keep you continually off balance. If you are unaware that there are actual facts out there, you will, most likely be stunned into immobility, unable to act in your own best interest simply because you do not have the ability to make the proper decision for yourself. We are helped with this endeavor by the media. They are owned by the companies that require your servitude, so they rarely give any information that might cause you to ask difficult questions that would shake up, even minutely, the status quo. We will also feed your obsession with yourself and your "needs", talking at great length about the need to be whole and happy and balanced- all the while ignoring and even cheating the real needs of the body (i.e. food and healthcare). We will perpetuate and fertilize racism, sexism, homophobia. These will ultimately divide you so that you are always at odds with the people around you who might unite with you against us. We will enable and in some cases even outright support religious institutions to convince you that are noble child of a deity with a higher purpose than the mundane realities of an earthly existence (this is all temporal-- you should be focused on your eternal destiny!). It will also, hopefully, guilt you into subordination. We encourage the nationalism and loyalty to our system that religious systems ally themselves with. As as result of your miserable existence, you will be devoured with the desire for entertainment and distraction of all sorts, never realizing how this further enslaves you to your master.

Thus, you are left, like the hamster in the cage, with a wheel to turn and nowhere to go. You will wake up, run and run and run, getting nowhere and finding nothing. You will eat the foods we give you at whatever price we mete them out at. You will consume entertainment and spend all your waking hours making a lovely little nest for yourself- all the while ignorant that there might be more meaning to life than the bars of your cage allow. You will spend your time so busy with YOU: your needs, your emotions, your eternal preparations, your status, etc.-- oh and, the bearing of offspring that you won't even try to reach for the latch on the cage door. And your offspring living what they have learned will be compelled to continue the cycle in this great Circle of Life. At least the circle we have provided for you.

And YOU should be grateful for it.

Death and Politics at the end of the world

Five miles to the best Key Lime pie!
Number One Key Lime Pie…
Favorite Key Lime Pie…
Award Winning Key Lime Pie…
Who decides?
Key Lime cookies-
Key Lime cake-
Key Lime ice cream
Key Lime soup
Chocolate-covered Key-lime-on-a-stick
Key Lime off-a-stick
Key Lime Lemonade
Key Lime Margueritas!
Key Lime edible underwear…
hmmmm

Some people claim that
there’s a ma-an to blame.


Hog’s Breath—God’s Breath—hamburger yummers!… with everything… fries, Bartender’s special drink--- P-Thingy.


Bone Island: Boner…
Boner Island?
Key-
Boner Key—Bonkey…
Don key Otee.

For God’s sake, move- need to go!
“Land of the Free because of the brave”- figures, moron.



Left turn, right?
Right… Right?
No! left… right.


Southernmost Point
Southernmost Real Estate
Southernmost Hotel
Southernmost Café
Southernmost Bank
Southernmost Key Lime Pie
Southernmost oxygen.

Most Southernmost


turn…


Busy!

People everywhere.




It’s a zoo…

Death and Politics at the end of the world

Bells over my right shoulder. I glance over, startled to spy a stout, charcoal-skinned grandma in full gypsy garb, hobbling off the curb just as the Conch Tour Train rattles up to the light. She leaps nimbly backwards, the fluid motion in surprising contrast. She lifts her fist and shouts, face contorting as though uttering a curse. The train rambles around the corner. A tall broad-shouldered… woman? adorned in a floral, foo-foo tutu and flowing hot pink boa hung out the door of the train, shouting back to a thick-chested man leaning against the back window sporting a leather bustier, one thigh-high booted leg draped casually down the side of the car. The passenger-laden train is practically bursting with men outfitted in a rainbow of feminine fashions from antebellum to Harlem harlot. A rowdy rooster struts down the sidewalk, ostensibly unaware that dawn is long past, his squawks punctuating the human cacophony. A swimsuit clad couple, sporting matching full-body tattoos, brattles by on bicycles, weaving in and out of idling traffic.

“… more like a carnival.” I ease my vice grip on the wheel, clicking the red ruby slippers of memory. “There’s no place like home. There’s no place like home.”

Involuntarily, yet necessarily drawn to the water, I drive. Past the turn in to an abandoned bar where, once upon a time . . ; past palm and pond; past bougainvillea and banyan; and finally, past the fort . . . past the past.
Bread crumb colored shoreline nearly deserted.

The gulf breeze tousles my hair


I come to myself, agape…

Stimu-- what?

Political discourse in this country is in crisis. We do not have two distinct parties- we have one party with two different branches, one extremely pro-corporation while the other gives lip service to being for the people. But the democrats still fundamentally believe that if the corporations fail, then the people will suffer. This means that they have to continue to prop up corporations in order to support "the people". It's just a convenient excuse to be pro-corporation. And we let them do it! Obama's plan was never meant to be anything different than what we already had, it was just a stab at "a correction". The economic philosophy we are currently being driven by, thanks to Milton Friedman, calls for less and less government regulation- except when the system crashes. Then we pour money into the system to try and prop it up so that we can "free it" again. The Clintons and the democratic party bought into the chicago school of economics whole heartedly in the 90s and the dems have never looked back. Obama is the same! Saying "change" over and over again does not make it different!

Corporations drive mom and pop shops out of business. Small businesses are no longer able to compete because corporations can do things cheaper & faster. How many independently run shops can any of us think of? Perhaps a handful. I would not mind owning my own bookstore... but how can I compete with Barnes and Noble or Amazon when they can set the price for the publisher? How is supporting big business in any way for "the people"??? Do we really think that the kind of job creation most commonly talked about (i.e. giving a company more money to hire more factory workers) is really going to move us forward? No, it simply allows the CEOs and the share holders to give themselves big salaries and nice fat bonuses while workers make less and less. Tax breaks for the wealthy and for the corporations will bankrupt this country! We have to quit buying into two lies the republicans have spread: 1. government is bad (thanks to Reagan for that one: "Government is not the solution to our problems; government is the problem.") 2. the private sector is the way to get things done. While most might not agree with these statements overtly , the attitudes are still omni-present in many liberal discussion and in their support of the "compromises" within the stimulus. It's time for the people to stand up for themselves and stop allowing the corporations to run our government. It truly should be a government OF, FOR and BY the PEOPLE.