I passed by the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) crowd hanging out in Government Plaza, here in Minneapolis, this morning. It was very quiet. There were a surprising number of police*, not as many as there were protesters, about half as many it seemed. As a movement, the OWS has a long way to go. There was talk on public radio this morning that protesters were planning to erect tents, in defiance of a County order. They will be arrested, apparently, if they do. It seems an overwrought response, seeing as winter is approaching; they aren't going to be camping there long. That, and a too aggressive response could swell the numbers, considerably. Or not. We are a very polite people, here in the Midwest.
I couldn't help think of Glenn Beck, watching these protesting Americans. These are the people who are going to reign terror upon the wealthy, pulling them out of their houses into the street? The people who require a military response, who will have to be "purged", in a "night of the long knives"? Oh, and that taut rack of Aryan flesh, Ann Coulter, saying this is the beginning of totalitarianism? It may be, but not in the way she is implying. If there are any more public anti-America Americans than these two reactionary wrecking balls, I'm not aware of it. Prepping their followers to be agents of the will of dominators and destroyers, these two Apostles of viciousness and violence and greed. Can you imagine the likes of these, leading a purge? A good god does not exist anywhere in any dimension, if that should ever come to pass. If there is ever totalitarianism in this country, it isn't going to have the flavor of the Left. Contrast all the people who listen to and read Beck and Coulter, with all the OWS protesters in America, and ask yourself, who has the guns?
Guns. Word is, Americans are providing Mexican drug cartels with heavy weaponry, no Americans more so than those, apparently, working for our government. I read an opinion piece in a local paper recently, extolling the virtue of the Iraq war, rationalizing that the rest of the Middle East is in turmoil and Iraq is now nominally Democratic, therefore that venture was good. One of the writer's points in support of this virtue was, that Iraqi's are now buying 10 billion in weaponry from us. No less a luminary than Bill O'Reilly has come to realize that the Iraq war was a bad idea. It was not just a bad idea, it was the epic hubris of the world's greatest Empire ever, and one more reason we are headed for collapse sooner rather than later. As for our ability to export weaponry as evidence of any kind of virtue, that is the kind of thinking that will lead to the whole world being blind. But goodness knows, it is not for an anarchist in service to the Goddess to be paraphrasing Christ.
Speaking of the Goddess, I have been wondering lately if I have offended Her. We do not have in-house, the statue of Nike that we had last year. One of the owners refused to pay any fee to rent the statue, in effect, in my mind, rejecting that goddess of victory. I've been wondering too, if money is a manifestation of some kind of daimon, and so little has flowed to me of late because I have refused to bargain with him? And last year, that this energy flowed to us in some abundance, perhaps because the goddess allowed it? I know I have not been dancing through the building naked, with my deer horns, like I did last year. One of the partners thinks the problem has been signage. I brought this argument about the goddess to him last night, as we were drinking, planning the next two weeks. It is a testament to his virtue that he could hear me without judging, actually listening, and evaluating the decisions he has made, the attitudes he has assumed. Of course, I don't know anything about any goddess or daimon, actually - though I do know I chopped the head off a dragon recently in a dream. I had a steel sword, which would not cut the dragon's flesh, but then I took my Brazilian ironwood sword into my left hand and I drove it through the dragon's skull, and then with the steel sword I chopped off his head, which was the size of a mini-cooper. I'm not sure what to think about that, seeing as I wrote a book which I titled, The Dragon: Balance, Wholeness and Healing. Some in my culture have begun to think of the dragon as a potential ally; chopping off the dragon's head, the failure of the wine I made, the failure of my potato harvest, the slack income Monster Halloween is generating, it would seem I have been rejected by life, or am somehow rejecting it. Or maybe the economy is just shit and there just aren't enough people willing or able to buy costumes of goddesses and daimons and superheros, etc; or the Twin Cities simply will not support a downtown Halloween store.
I heard another bit of magic on the radio recently, word from the Consumer Retail Association that Christmas spending would be up 3% this year. Really? Maybe, but that's not reflected here. I can tell you this, if the numbers come back from Halloween radically lower than projections, that will put a serious damper on Christmas sales. If the numbers are bad, I bet the numbers collectors and purveyors will be tempted to fudge them. Because as you may recall, this economy is 70% consumer spending, and they are now trying everything they can to bolster consumer confidence, except creating actual jobs, or increasing income for those with a job. As I replied to a reader, if the consumer stops spending at the same time the Financial class is gutting the economy, what sort of magic is going to prop up the economy? And then of course, if you are thoughtful, you have to ask yourself, if the only solution to a healthy economy is Americans spending as much as possible, how can that be sustained? Well, you don't have to ask yourself that, but you should (though if you've made it this far in this piece, you probably have.)
I started this piece off, talking about the OWS, and violence. I see increasing turmoil, at least the next year. Most of the economy at this point is a fiction that has to be believed in, or it ceases to exist. Almost all of the wealth of these idiot Financiers who are undercutting their own base, is an illusion that disappears the instant the power goes out, the power in this case being either the literal power of the grid, or the power of consciousness. Should either cease to support this system, it would collapse in an instant. In either case, with as many guns as there are, and the cities and suburbs full of lost and angry people utterly dependent on the system as it is, well, I'm sure you can or have elaborated on that particular vision. You probably don't need me to paint that picture. If there was ever a time for a Messiah that time is now. And as I pointed out in a previous post, there is no looking to any Messiah that is not an abdication of the divine in you. And whatever any Sage has ever said, there is not any salvation that is not also an immersion in the material Earth, and that has to do with skills, and a celebration of the flesh, and a caring and a concern for the Other. There are the purveyors of manipulation and separation, and there are the people of joy, beauty and abundance. Consciousness is the vehicle no one else can control but to bring me to ruin. Consciousness is the reality that I may direct as I will. The violence that floods my consciousness can be joy instead, and vision, and calm.
There is always a choice. Always, even in that darkest hour.
* Minneapolis Police Officers and Hennepin County Sheriff Deputies receive 20% off, at Monster Halloween. Because, despite the heat showered upon MPLS PD, I have yet to meet one I thought wasn't basically a good guy, I admire their service, and it is better to be on friendly terms with such men than not (when they are basically good).
Saturday, October 15, 2011
Wednesday, October 12, 2011
Saturday, October 8, 2011
Realities
It's the morning of the Zombie Pub Crawl, and I have stepped out of the building awhile, as we are staffed to the hilt, I'm on overtime hours, and would-be zombies were not waiting for us to open the doors as they were last year. They did not come last night either, in the droves I had hoped for. They will come today, and whether we sell a great deal of merchandise or not, awareness will be heightened. But we have come to a point at which, we will have to do almost as much business each day as we did last year, for the partners to break even, as we have tracked to this point at less than 50%, compared to last year.
This news, despite that two local TV news anchors called me this week to schedule interviews in the store. Yesterday I fitted two reporters dogs with costumes on camera. Monday morning another will come, to tour the store and talk about HD Masks. I feel like I flubbed the first interview, though it was my second on-camera local TV interview this year (the first being Fox News, when the city tried to condemn my house for not having natural gas hooked up in the summertime.) Maybe I did, maybe I didn't. What really can one say about dog costumes? I'm not even especially fond of dogs, at least not so much as my fellow Americans are, spending more on our pets than the Gross Domestic Product of some nations of the world. One of these dogs once had a surgery, the cost of which would have corrected my eyesight. But then, I have never given comfort to that reporter, though I have long considered him as having more substance than most of the TV people in this town*.
John Michael Greer in his most recent post talked about initiation. I have been through several formal initiations in my life, all of which were transforming for me in a way that brought me to a more powerful, clear place in my life. I have made a practice of transformation, recognizing change as inherent to the human experience, and facing that change with intention, as opposed to what most do, avoiding it or denying it. I am in the midst of one now, I suppose, though this one is far more intense than any I have ever faced, and I have faced initiations that most would assiduously avoid. I have not chosen this, per se, and there doesn't seem to be a damn thing I can do to avoid it, this new financial reality, this place in which no rule that ever seemed to apply can be applied with any confidence anymore. What appears to me to be the impending dissolution of everything we have ever come to expect as normal, this unraveling of civilization that not a one of us is prepared for.
In the midst of that, I had a dream last night, feature length, following the long, tedious, collapse into insanity of a man who was like some aspect of myself. If I had to name him, I suppose I would call him my wounded victim, the Loser, that part of me that says I have always been a loser and a failure, as a son, as a brother, as a student, as a writer, as a builder, as a businessman, as a manager, as a baseball player, as a citizen, as a homeowner, as a lover, as a human. All of which are true in part - though I could build a comfortable off-the-grid house with hand tools from salvage, I could probably survive in the woods for a year with little more than a knife if I had to, I could feed far more people than myself if I had the seed, I'm a better writer than anyone I know personally, I dance in a way that stops people, I can sing extraordinarily, I have a fairly clear sense of who and what we are as a species and where we stand in relation to the Earth, I care about people and the Earth, and I am not afraid of anyone. But the Loser wants to die, because he is tired and he can not see anything but continued failure. He wants to give up, because he is a loser and there is no destiny for a loser but to give up and waste away and die.
I woke up finally when the Loser had come to a place in which he was nearly insane and ready to die, but he stopped because there was a young child who would find out and that young child would see, and know what he had done. I laid there a long time thinking about the Loser, wondering what to do about him. I still don't know. I don't want to kill him, I want to heal him, but I can't see yet how to do that, in the midst of all this upheaval and uncertainty in my life, this upheaval and uncertainty in the culture. It is a tremendous challenge, and I am stupefied. I am facing that challenge without any clear sense of what to do about it, except that I want to get clear so I can live.
Thirty-eight years old without children or a partner, without money to pay the bills for the house I cannot sell but at a great loss, without a stock of food, facing the Minnesota winter, managing a business that appears on the verge of failing, disenfranchised from the credit system, in the world's great Empire at the edge of dissolution, among a people who are waiting for a spiritual, or technological, or political, or alien Messiah who will never come.
------
It is the Monday after the Zombie Pub Crawl, and while it was a success, there was still only 60% of the traffic through the store, compared to last year when we were in Uptown, though this year we are located on the route of the Pub Crawl. That speaks directly to the economy. Some are acting as if there is no problem with the economy, many are not. I heard on the radio this morning, a piece on Halloween spending, something to the effect, "The economy may be sluggish, but Halloween spending is not..." The voice went on to claim that Americans will spend 7 Billion this Halloween season. Maybe we will, but I thought when I heard this, that it wasn't anything but incantation, an attempt to influence, a kind of shamanic trick. Go forth and spend. Which may work when people have money, but it doesn't when they don't.
I recently watched Inside Job, the Academy Award-winning documentary on the financial crisis of 2008. Such information in the past would have infuriated me, but it's worthy of a shrug at this point. There is no undoing the path we are on. The Occupy Wall Street and the Tea Party people are basically fighting the same thing, only the one wants a government solution, and the other wants to give the country to God, which is to say, to those Americans who propose to speak for God. Somebody dropped a pamphlet in the store the other day. The cover said something about five prescriptions for Joy in service to God, but all five are prescriptions for tyranny, as in, bow down to the will of the powerful, and expect to be destroyed if you don't. As for government prescriptions, two recent Federal bills proposed, involve the spread of American drug policy world wide, and the other is a bill to prevent bullying - which are two sides of a coin called delusion. Two perspectives on the exercise of power, neither clear enough to see that the problem is the will to exercise it. Tyranny, one way or the other. If you think our drug policy is healthier for this country than drugs, then you are a tyrant or a sycophant or a fool. And if you don't know what I mean by a Federal bill to prevent bullying as an exercise in tyranny, then you have never had to deal with the myriad petty bullies working for government at every level.
The unraveling of civilization is going to be an exercise in responsibility, for every one of us. We are seeing currently, all around us, people defaulting to methods of command and control, or collapsing into subservience to the powerful, grasping and clawing, or simply collapsing. The Loser in me sees it coming, and he does not want the responsibility. He is tired of thinking about it. He is tired of writing about it. He knows he will not likely live to see the Eden that is possible, in the aftermath of contraction. He has been waiting for a Messiah.
I know that I have not been practicing the art of transformation to simply give up and waste away and die. I know that we humans can create Eden, if we will only get clear about reality. I know I am here to treat this life as an artwork, to transform myself with each new reality I am faced with, to create the beauty and abundance I envision, to share and to give. I know that I am my own Messiah, and I cannot be one for any other. I know that I create my own reality, out of my experience. I know there is not a one of us who understands fully, or can.
I am alive. I am.
Oh yeah. And I did another local TV interview this morning. It went very well, I think. Better than the first two, for sure. I know this much about that - if anyone had told me last year I would be interviewed for television three times this year, I would have called them insane. None of these interviews make me want to do TV. And really, if I were William Hunter Duncan to these people, instead of Hunter Duncan, they wouldn't interview me. As far as Google is concerned, Hunter Duncan does not exist. "William Hunter Duncan" leads you here.
* I would like to say, if not for this reporter, we would not be on TV. And I still think he is one of the most solid and substantive TV anchors in this town.
This news, despite that two local TV news anchors called me this week to schedule interviews in the store. Yesterday I fitted two reporters dogs with costumes on camera. Monday morning another will come, to tour the store and talk about HD Masks. I feel like I flubbed the first interview, though it was my second on-camera local TV interview this year (the first being Fox News, when the city tried to condemn my house for not having natural gas hooked up in the summertime.) Maybe I did, maybe I didn't. What really can one say about dog costumes? I'm not even especially fond of dogs, at least not so much as my fellow Americans are, spending more on our pets than the Gross Domestic Product of some nations of the world. One of these dogs once had a surgery, the cost of which would have corrected my eyesight. But then, I have never given comfort to that reporter, though I have long considered him as having more substance than most of the TV people in this town*.
John Michael Greer in his most recent post talked about initiation. I have been through several formal initiations in my life, all of which were transforming for me in a way that brought me to a more powerful, clear place in my life. I have made a practice of transformation, recognizing change as inherent to the human experience, and facing that change with intention, as opposed to what most do, avoiding it or denying it. I am in the midst of one now, I suppose, though this one is far more intense than any I have ever faced, and I have faced initiations that most would assiduously avoid. I have not chosen this, per se, and there doesn't seem to be a damn thing I can do to avoid it, this new financial reality, this place in which no rule that ever seemed to apply can be applied with any confidence anymore. What appears to me to be the impending dissolution of everything we have ever come to expect as normal, this unraveling of civilization that not a one of us is prepared for.
In the midst of that, I had a dream last night, feature length, following the long, tedious, collapse into insanity of a man who was like some aspect of myself. If I had to name him, I suppose I would call him my wounded victim, the Loser, that part of me that says I have always been a loser and a failure, as a son, as a brother, as a student, as a writer, as a builder, as a businessman, as a manager, as a baseball player, as a citizen, as a homeowner, as a lover, as a human. All of which are true in part - though I could build a comfortable off-the-grid house with hand tools from salvage, I could probably survive in the woods for a year with little more than a knife if I had to, I could feed far more people than myself if I had the seed, I'm a better writer than anyone I know personally, I dance in a way that stops people, I can sing extraordinarily, I have a fairly clear sense of who and what we are as a species and where we stand in relation to the Earth, I care about people and the Earth, and I am not afraid of anyone. But the Loser wants to die, because he is tired and he can not see anything but continued failure. He wants to give up, because he is a loser and there is no destiny for a loser but to give up and waste away and die.
I woke up finally when the Loser had come to a place in which he was nearly insane and ready to die, but he stopped because there was a young child who would find out and that young child would see, and know what he had done. I laid there a long time thinking about the Loser, wondering what to do about him. I still don't know. I don't want to kill him, I want to heal him, but I can't see yet how to do that, in the midst of all this upheaval and uncertainty in my life, this upheaval and uncertainty in the culture. It is a tremendous challenge, and I am stupefied. I am facing that challenge without any clear sense of what to do about it, except that I want to get clear so I can live.
Thirty-eight years old without children or a partner, without money to pay the bills for the house I cannot sell but at a great loss, without a stock of food, facing the Minnesota winter, managing a business that appears on the verge of failing, disenfranchised from the credit system, in the world's great Empire at the edge of dissolution, among a people who are waiting for a spiritual, or technological, or political, or alien Messiah who will never come.
------
It is the Monday after the Zombie Pub Crawl, and while it was a success, there was still only 60% of the traffic through the store, compared to last year when we were in Uptown, though this year we are located on the route of the Pub Crawl. That speaks directly to the economy. Some are acting as if there is no problem with the economy, many are not. I heard on the radio this morning, a piece on Halloween spending, something to the effect, "The economy may be sluggish, but Halloween spending is not..." The voice went on to claim that Americans will spend 7 Billion this Halloween season. Maybe we will, but I thought when I heard this, that it wasn't anything but incantation, an attempt to influence, a kind of shamanic trick. Go forth and spend. Which may work when people have money, but it doesn't when they don't.
I recently watched Inside Job, the Academy Award-winning documentary on the financial crisis of 2008. Such information in the past would have infuriated me, but it's worthy of a shrug at this point. There is no undoing the path we are on. The Occupy Wall Street and the Tea Party people are basically fighting the same thing, only the one wants a government solution, and the other wants to give the country to God, which is to say, to those Americans who propose to speak for God. Somebody dropped a pamphlet in the store the other day. The cover said something about five prescriptions for Joy in service to God, but all five are prescriptions for tyranny, as in, bow down to the will of the powerful, and expect to be destroyed if you don't. As for government prescriptions, two recent Federal bills proposed, involve the spread of American drug policy world wide, and the other is a bill to prevent bullying - which are two sides of a coin called delusion. Two perspectives on the exercise of power, neither clear enough to see that the problem is the will to exercise it. Tyranny, one way or the other. If you think our drug policy is healthier for this country than drugs, then you are a tyrant or a sycophant or a fool. And if you don't know what I mean by a Federal bill to prevent bullying as an exercise in tyranny, then you have never had to deal with the myriad petty bullies working for government at every level.
The unraveling of civilization is going to be an exercise in responsibility, for every one of us. We are seeing currently, all around us, people defaulting to methods of command and control, or collapsing into subservience to the powerful, grasping and clawing, or simply collapsing. The Loser in me sees it coming, and he does not want the responsibility. He is tired of thinking about it. He is tired of writing about it. He knows he will not likely live to see the Eden that is possible, in the aftermath of contraction. He has been waiting for a Messiah.
I know that I have not been practicing the art of transformation to simply give up and waste away and die. I know that we humans can create Eden, if we will only get clear about reality. I know I am here to treat this life as an artwork, to transform myself with each new reality I am faced with, to create the beauty and abundance I envision, to share and to give. I know that I am my own Messiah, and I cannot be one for any other. I know that I create my own reality, out of my experience. I know there is not a one of us who understands fully, or can.
I am alive. I am.
Oh yeah. And I did another local TV interview this morning. It went very well, I think. Better than the first two, for sure. I know this much about that - if anyone had told me last year I would be interviewed for television three times this year, I would have called them insane. None of these interviews make me want to do TV. And really, if I were William Hunter Duncan to these people, instead of Hunter Duncan, they wouldn't interview me. As far as Google is concerned, Hunter Duncan does not exist. "William Hunter Duncan" leads you here.
* I would like to say, if not for this reporter, we would not be on TV. And I still think he is one of the most solid and substantive TV anchors in this town.
Wednesday, September 28, 2011
A $400,000 October
Tuesday afternoon I arrived at work to discover we had sold $40 of merchandise. Which was how much we were paying a young man to dance for three hours outside the store in a wolf costume - and $140 shy of what we payed the regular staff to be there to that point. We ended the night at $166, or about $624 shy of what we sold that same day last year. It was a low ebb. We have the staff, we have the fun store, there is plenty of awareness. But we are tracking at about 30% compared to last year. Next week is the Zombie Pub Crawl. If that week is not enormous, that will not presage well a profitable business.
Anything less than a $400,000 October will be the end, likely, of Monster Halloween (in America). $400,000 would mean a reasonable profit to the partners, on their three year investment, the staff would be entitled to a bonus, there would be talk about opening a year-round establishment, which would help vitalize the neighborhood, and I would have a near guarantee of income, for the first time in years. HD Masks would have seed money, and I could finally take this house off the grid. I want to plant hops, fruit trees and shrubs, and a vineyard. I can imagine passive solar as a partial solution to the heating problem at the Washington Ave site. Less than $400,000 by degrees, means there is less likely money to pay me for my work for HD Masks, at any rate according to market value, and I will likely descend into a long cold winters exploration of the nether reaches of consciousness, with my potatoes and my cookies and my seeds, with the house for sale.
Longer term, the Halloween industry is doomed. There are some who say there is plenty of oil, in sand flats and shale deposits, but if it comes to that kind of exploitation, so we can ship oil to China, so they can make and ship us cheap Halloween costumes, then Humanity is without hope of redemption. I sometimes don't know whether to pray for the demise of commercialism, or for the health of our store. It is an impossible paradox at times, the difference between the fossil-fuel derived merchandise we are selling, most of which is destined for landfills, and the need to sell it to support my continued existence in my house, while helping the partners achieve some kind of success.
Wednesday I spent most of the day contemplating the failure of our venture, which would mean the failure of my vision for this house. If Monster Halloween isn't a success, then my judgment for pushing this location is suspect, and I might as well give up this house and drift off into whatever. Late into the evening we were tracking at a third of what we'd done this day last year. Most of the day when I wasn't contemplating the failure of the venture, I was cutting back people's hours, none more than my own, which will be cut this week by about eighty percent. This, with two people Thursday, out of five, not showing up for work. I won't be working much at all the next four days. I suppose it's the mark of a good manager that his business run without him, except that I don't get paid if I'm not working, which means I've managed myself right out of the means to pay the bills. Genius.
In the last hour Wednesday we sold more merchandise than we did all day. A former mayor came in and bought a leg, a vial of blood and some spiders, and a kettle to carry them in. Several beautiful couples came in and purchased costumes. We didn't match last years total but we came a lot closer than we did Tuesday. It was a lot more fun that night than it has been. And then there was a request for the green man to appear at the Renaissance Festival this Saturday. It just so happens I have the day off. That should be fun.
....
The days off have past. I went to the Renaissance Festival this weekend, and was saddened by the overwhelming commercialism of the venture. Much of the spirit has vacated the place, or so it seemed that day of the Queen's coronation, which happened, though I was on the grounds and did not hear a word about it. In such a Renaissance-age village, one might think everyone would flock to see the Queen, on her coronation. There were no heralds, no jesters, no one calling of the ceremony, to draw people away from the vendors. Yes, the vendors have to make money, just as we do at Monster Halloween, but where has the culture strayed, when even the Queen dare not compete with consumer spending?
That, and there was very little of the heckling like I remember. when I was last there, 25 years ago. It was like some sort of corporate overloads stepped in and demanded, "tone it down!" The pickle vendors were without a voice. We Minnesotans are a touchy people, not to be made fun of. The one guy who heckled me was the dude in the fake stocks, sixty feet from the tomato launching pad. It was a good thing they gave me tomatoes that had already been thrown, because I could have taken the dude's eye out with those leather-hard industrial things, if they were whole. With two left he ripped off his bandanna and flung his long curly locks around, mocking my receding hair line. The last tomato hit the wood just below his head, gobs of tomato guts splashing upwards onto his face and up his nose. The crowd had a laugh. I didn't really want to hit him anyway.
I wore my wood swords. I made them. I saw many other swords, all steal, very nice looking, hardly a man wearing one who looked like he knew how to use it. Puke and Snot were the only ones I saw using swords, but they, the swords, were fake (Puke and Snot, the longest running act in Renaissance Festival history, were spot-on fun.) No one asked if I knew how to use mine. I met a sword maker who makes the only true swords I have ever seen. He picked up the very one I was admiring, to show me. It cost as much money as I have in the world. Which is fine, because I have no desire to cut anyone. What is the sword anyway, in this age when any idiot with a hand and fingers can pull a trigger, and any jerk can lead him?
The green man didn't make an appearance. Though had I known what the day would look like, I would have brought what I needed in with me, and crashed the staff-only after-party. (Thinking about it now, I'm a little surprised I didn't just get myself painted up and crash the party anyway - except that I was a little ill with a nasal infection, I drank too much, and I didn't have any bud.)
It's looking less and less like I'm going to have the money to maintain this house, or take it off the grid, like I've dreamed. If I have to sell it and give up that dream, I think I'll stop dreaming about achieving anything in this life altogether, and simply live. Without this house, then it's not the house, but myself I'll take off the grid - off the rez, so to speak. Who knows where that will lead? I'm thinking now of emptying the house and the garage of everything but my computers, my bikes, my canoe and some clothes. Quite honestly, homelessness doesn't sound so bad, knowing I can live outside too. The potato harvest looks like it's going to be a bust. Too wet the first half of the summer, too dry the second half and I didn't water much. I was shocked at how dry the soil was, when I began the harvest. Shocked more, at how few potatoes there were, and how small. The wine I spent two days making, is ruined. Nothing is certain in this life.
Though I did sample forty of my immature heavenly blue morning glory seeds, last night, in despair, weary of my life (as it is). I've come to a place knowing that no man or woman can do anything to pull me out of the dark place I find myself in, but me. Little happened, until I fell asleep.
If I could dream like that every night, I would be considerably stronger than I am.
Anything less than a $400,000 October will be the end, likely, of Monster Halloween (in America). $400,000 would mean a reasonable profit to the partners, on their three year investment, the staff would be entitled to a bonus, there would be talk about opening a year-round establishment, which would help vitalize the neighborhood, and I would have a near guarantee of income, for the first time in years. HD Masks would have seed money, and I could finally take this house off the grid. I want to plant hops, fruit trees and shrubs, and a vineyard. I can imagine passive solar as a partial solution to the heating problem at the Washington Ave site. Less than $400,000 by degrees, means there is less likely money to pay me for my work for HD Masks, at any rate according to market value, and I will likely descend into a long cold winters exploration of the nether reaches of consciousness, with my potatoes and my cookies and my seeds, with the house for sale.
Longer term, the Halloween industry is doomed. There are some who say there is plenty of oil, in sand flats and shale deposits, but if it comes to that kind of exploitation, so we can ship oil to China, so they can make and ship us cheap Halloween costumes, then Humanity is without hope of redemption. I sometimes don't know whether to pray for the demise of commercialism, or for the health of our store. It is an impossible paradox at times, the difference between the fossil-fuel derived merchandise we are selling, most of which is destined for landfills, and the need to sell it to support my continued existence in my house, while helping the partners achieve some kind of success.
Wednesday I spent most of the day contemplating the failure of our venture, which would mean the failure of my vision for this house. If Monster Halloween isn't a success, then my judgment for pushing this location is suspect, and I might as well give up this house and drift off into whatever. Late into the evening we were tracking at a third of what we'd done this day last year. Most of the day when I wasn't contemplating the failure of the venture, I was cutting back people's hours, none more than my own, which will be cut this week by about eighty percent. This, with two people Thursday, out of five, not showing up for work. I won't be working much at all the next four days. I suppose it's the mark of a good manager that his business run without him, except that I don't get paid if I'm not working, which means I've managed myself right out of the means to pay the bills. Genius.
In the last hour Wednesday we sold more merchandise than we did all day. A former mayor came in and bought a leg, a vial of blood and some spiders, and a kettle to carry them in. Several beautiful couples came in and purchased costumes. We didn't match last years total but we came a lot closer than we did Tuesday. It was a lot more fun that night than it has been. And then there was a request for the green man to appear at the Renaissance Festival this Saturday. It just so happens I have the day off. That should be fun.
....
The days off have past. I went to the Renaissance Festival this weekend, and was saddened by the overwhelming commercialism of the venture. Much of the spirit has vacated the place, or so it seemed that day of the Queen's coronation, which happened, though I was on the grounds and did not hear a word about it. In such a Renaissance-age village, one might think everyone would flock to see the Queen, on her coronation. There were no heralds, no jesters, no one calling of the ceremony, to draw people away from the vendors. Yes, the vendors have to make money, just as we do at Monster Halloween, but where has the culture strayed, when even the Queen dare not compete with consumer spending?
That, and there was very little of the heckling like I remember. when I was last there, 25 years ago. It was like some sort of corporate overloads stepped in and demanded, "tone it down!" The pickle vendors were without a voice. We Minnesotans are a touchy people, not to be made fun of. The one guy who heckled me was the dude in the fake stocks, sixty feet from the tomato launching pad. It was a good thing they gave me tomatoes that had already been thrown, because I could have taken the dude's eye out with those leather-hard industrial things, if they were whole. With two left he ripped off his bandanna and flung his long curly locks around, mocking my receding hair line. The last tomato hit the wood just below his head, gobs of tomato guts splashing upwards onto his face and up his nose. The crowd had a laugh. I didn't really want to hit him anyway.
I wore my wood swords. I made them. I saw many other swords, all steal, very nice looking, hardly a man wearing one who looked like he knew how to use it. Puke and Snot were the only ones I saw using swords, but they, the swords, were fake (Puke and Snot, the longest running act in Renaissance Festival history, were spot-on fun.) No one asked if I knew how to use mine. I met a sword maker who makes the only true swords I have ever seen. He picked up the very one I was admiring, to show me. It cost as much money as I have in the world. Which is fine, because I have no desire to cut anyone. What is the sword anyway, in this age when any idiot with a hand and fingers can pull a trigger, and any jerk can lead him?
The green man didn't make an appearance. Though had I known what the day would look like, I would have brought what I needed in with me, and crashed the staff-only after-party. (Thinking about it now, I'm a little surprised I didn't just get myself painted up and crash the party anyway - except that I was a little ill with a nasal infection, I drank too much, and I didn't have any bud.)
It's looking less and less like I'm going to have the money to maintain this house, or take it off the grid, like I've dreamed. If I have to sell it and give up that dream, I think I'll stop dreaming about achieving anything in this life altogether, and simply live. Without this house, then it's not the house, but myself I'll take off the grid - off the rez, so to speak. Who knows where that will lead? I'm thinking now of emptying the house and the garage of everything but my computers, my bikes, my canoe and some clothes. Quite honestly, homelessness doesn't sound so bad, knowing I can live outside too. The potato harvest looks like it's going to be a bust. Too wet the first half of the summer, too dry the second half and I didn't water much. I was shocked at how dry the soil was, when I began the harvest. Shocked more, at how few potatoes there were, and how small. The wine I spent two days making, is ruined. Nothing is certain in this life.
Though I did sample forty of my immature heavenly blue morning glory seeds, last night, in despair, weary of my life (as it is). I've come to a place knowing that no man or woman can do anything to pull me out of the dark place I find myself in, but me. Little happened, until I fell asleep.
If I could dream like that every night, I would be considerably stronger than I am.
Sunday, September 25, 2011
Bad Judgment
Here I am again, at the front desk of Monster Halloween. An employee and I just smudged the building; though I said to Dave, of Mind Wave Comics, that if there was energy in the building that was negative, in need of clearing, it was that we have filled this building that was once filled with flowers, with fossil fuel derived costumes, costumes accessories and home decor. Then again, the basement is full of wheelchairs, and the men who built the building thought nothing about the use of the sun to heat a building. And by smudging I mean only the burning of sage and the speaking to ancestors and the Goddess and the Earth that I acknowledge my place in the arrangement. Which came at the end of a long day, after a day in which I had been accused of a kind of theft by one of the partners, and today, the next-door Vikings, upon whom we have been depending, losing another game in inglorious fashion.
Sales have been tracking significantly lower than last year's. We've built what I wager to be one of, if not the coolest Halloween store in America, and few people have seen it, and far fewer still have supported us with the dollars that are required to maintain it. As to the accusation of theft, I brought this upon myself, as I used a business credit card to pay three personal bills.
That I did not have the means to pay the bills when they were due, otherwise, does not change the fact that I didn't tell the partners what I was doing. That I fully intended to pay them back with the cash that, at the time I did not have because my credit union puts a seven day hold on my pay check, does not in any way prevent the assessment of this as bad judgment - which then calls into question everything I do and every decision I have made, in the management of this Halloween store in downtown Minneapolis (including everything I said that helped lead us here.) I did this at a time when this particular partner is particularly anxious about being over-extended. He asked a multitude of his business mentors about it, and every one of them told him to fire me. He didn't, because he would have to quit his job, and he has a wife and a kid. That he could fire me, without any harm to Monster Halloween or HD Masks, is not a risk he is willing to take. That I thought I had built sufficient trust, in my service to the partners and their businesses, was plainly naive, and perhaps a sign of a greater naiveté that has lead me to that service? It is all reason again for me to question what it is I do and where I am, and why? And wonder again how it is I have come to this strange place.
I've been dancing again, on the street, though it isn't as much fun as it was in Uptown, last year. The traffic is heavier and the drivers are angrier, colder. I surmise they are all working downtown and they hate their corporate jobs, driving home from those jobs when I am trying to embody joy, there on the curb in my orange afro and wacky jacket and gold and glittering bronze shoes. It's also true that I haven't really worked out the new dance playlist; and, the aforementioned partner no longer seems eager to have me out there, representing the store. He'll have to fire me to keep me from dancing (for Monster Halloween), though.
My heavenly blue morning glories are still doing well, flowering every morning and making seed. I've been listening to Terence Mckenna again, dissatisfied with the vast majority of discourse I encounter, and I'm struck by my desire to explore the internal landscape, of dreams, and altered consciousness. I mean to map that landscape, as much as I am able. Part of me wants to take my potatoes and morning glory seed and float down the Mississippi. But I would rather be here, taking my house off the grid, planting fruit trees, tripping periodically and having the time and stability to contemplate it while reporting faithfully.
Because as much as I get down on this fossil fuel derived endeavor we call civilization, I wonder too if we are not somehow the Earth becoming conscious of itself, or attaining some form of higher consciousness through this increasingly connected, boundary dissolving species, Homo sapien sapien? I am curiously drawn to this notion of Mckenna's that we as a species are being drawn toward some singular point by some strange attractor, and that point will mean a change unlike anything the human mind is capable of imagining.
But then, I am human, and I make mistakes, and I am prone to errors in judgment, and I and my ideas about anything are ever to be questioned. I don't claim to be right. I only claim to report faithfully.
And now that I think about it further, I used that card a fourth time, to buy wine making supplies - wine which is now spewing out of carboys and their air locks, all over my sister's kitchen floor.
Sales have been tracking significantly lower than last year's. We've built what I wager to be one of, if not the coolest Halloween store in America, and few people have seen it, and far fewer still have supported us with the dollars that are required to maintain it. As to the accusation of theft, I brought this upon myself, as I used a business credit card to pay three personal bills.
That I did not have the means to pay the bills when they were due, otherwise, does not change the fact that I didn't tell the partners what I was doing. That I fully intended to pay them back with the cash that, at the time I did not have because my credit union puts a seven day hold on my pay check, does not in any way prevent the assessment of this as bad judgment - which then calls into question everything I do and every decision I have made, in the management of this Halloween store in downtown Minneapolis (including everything I said that helped lead us here.) I did this at a time when this particular partner is particularly anxious about being over-extended. He asked a multitude of his business mentors about it, and every one of them told him to fire me. He didn't, because he would have to quit his job, and he has a wife and a kid. That he could fire me, without any harm to Monster Halloween or HD Masks, is not a risk he is willing to take. That I thought I had built sufficient trust, in my service to the partners and their businesses, was plainly naive, and perhaps a sign of a greater naiveté that has lead me to that service? It is all reason again for me to question what it is I do and where I am, and why? And wonder again how it is I have come to this strange place.
I've been dancing again, on the street, though it isn't as much fun as it was in Uptown, last year. The traffic is heavier and the drivers are angrier, colder. I surmise they are all working downtown and they hate their corporate jobs, driving home from those jobs when I am trying to embody joy, there on the curb in my orange afro and wacky jacket and gold and glittering bronze shoes. It's also true that I haven't really worked out the new dance playlist; and, the aforementioned partner no longer seems eager to have me out there, representing the store. He'll have to fire me to keep me from dancing (for Monster Halloween), though.
My heavenly blue morning glories are still doing well, flowering every morning and making seed. I've been listening to Terence Mckenna again, dissatisfied with the vast majority of discourse I encounter, and I'm struck by my desire to explore the internal landscape, of dreams, and altered consciousness. I mean to map that landscape, as much as I am able. Part of me wants to take my potatoes and morning glory seed and float down the Mississippi. But I would rather be here, taking my house off the grid, planting fruit trees, tripping periodically and having the time and stability to contemplate it while reporting faithfully.
Because as much as I get down on this fossil fuel derived endeavor we call civilization, I wonder too if we are not somehow the Earth becoming conscious of itself, or attaining some form of higher consciousness through this increasingly connected, boundary dissolving species, Homo sapien sapien? I am curiously drawn to this notion of Mckenna's that we as a species are being drawn toward some singular point by some strange attractor, and that point will mean a change unlike anything the human mind is capable of imagining.
But then, I am human, and I make mistakes, and I am prone to errors in judgment, and I and my ideas about anything are ever to be questioned. I don't claim to be right. I only claim to report faithfully.
And now that I think about it further, I used that card a fourth time, to buy wine making supplies - wine which is now spewing out of carboys and their air locks, all over my sister's kitchen floor.
Sunday, September 18, 2011
Toy Guns, deux.
The store is in place, making quite an impression, many people walking through the store, overheard saying, "this place is so cool!" I have assembled an excellent staff, who are mostly responsible, as I have been mostly chained to this desk pouring myself into orders and packing slips and interviews and emails et al, on less than six hours sleep any night except last night (6.5), the last three weeks, or something like that. I don't really recall, there is so much to remember, and I have stretched myself to some sort of limit.
I'm sitting at the front desk writing, knowing I can return to my house tonight after two nights here, and sleep in. And yet I'm in no hurry to return, as the business we've built is much more comfortable than my house. The only thing I have to return to is my plants, who I miss. I'm hoping Tuesday morning to make wine, with the grapes at my sister's. I might even take the next three mornings off. Though it's a critical time, the partners are leveraged to the hilt, and traffic and sales have been anemic. We thought the Vikings football opener, five blocks away might help. The Vikings were up 17-0 at the half, though the radio announcers made note of how quite the crowd was. Rosie, the General Manager of next door's Maxwell's, stopped by to ask how sales were. He said Maxwell's was slow too. The Vikings seemed to be infected by the mood, losing 24-20.
We've grown increasingly pessimistic about the location we've chosen, and it seems we may have ordered too much merchandise. That, and a critical vendor, Rubies, is considerably late with a delivery of makeup and fake blood, which is critical to our making some kind of profit from this venture. Without that, for the Zombie Pub Crawl, we aren't necessarily sunk, but the hull will have been breached, of this peace pirate ship called Monster Halloween. It's preposterous for me to even care, knowing as I do how bad all of it is for the Earth, except that I'm aware of the financial risk the partners have taken, and there are at least twenty people who are depending upon the income generated, including myself.
So it is, for all of us, as we trend toward that precipice called the changing of everything, or the like, for those in the know. I overheard two elders on the light rail; one, of the so-called greatest generation, the other a clear boomer, the one sounding like a local radio celeb, the other like a politician or a member of the Metropolitan Commission, talking about all the light rail that would be built. I thought, how much light rail there had been in Minneapolis, and how much there could have been, and now the hour is very late.
I checked in an order of fake guns last night. I ordered them, replicas from a Tennessee company called Parris MFG. They take their replica's very seriously, at Parris. They sent us a pair of boxes of matching Confederate and Union hats which we didn't order. I'm not sure what to make of that, or the warning, or advocation, that these toys are, "appropriate for ages 5 and up." As I was entering these items into the system, a song was heard on The Current, with the refrain, "All the other kids better run, run, run, faster than my bullets," a very catchy tune. Last year at this time I was building a monster out of toy AK-47's, M-16's and Uzi's. This year, I'm contemplating Americans using these guns against each other.
I don't want to be. I think instead I'll close up shop and head next door to see if Rosie is working. Or maybe I'll just go home and sleep.
I'm sitting at the front desk writing, knowing I can return to my house tonight after two nights here, and sleep in. And yet I'm in no hurry to return, as the business we've built is much more comfortable than my house. The only thing I have to return to is my plants, who I miss. I'm hoping Tuesday morning to make wine, with the grapes at my sister's. I might even take the next three mornings off. Though it's a critical time, the partners are leveraged to the hilt, and traffic and sales have been anemic. We thought the Vikings football opener, five blocks away might help. The Vikings were up 17-0 at the half, though the radio announcers made note of how quite the crowd was. Rosie, the General Manager of next door's Maxwell's, stopped by to ask how sales were. He said Maxwell's was slow too. The Vikings seemed to be infected by the mood, losing 24-20.
We've grown increasingly pessimistic about the location we've chosen, and it seems we may have ordered too much merchandise. That, and a critical vendor, Rubies, is considerably late with a delivery of makeup and fake blood, which is critical to our making some kind of profit from this venture. Without that, for the Zombie Pub Crawl, we aren't necessarily sunk, but the hull will have been breached, of this peace pirate ship called Monster Halloween. It's preposterous for me to even care, knowing as I do how bad all of it is for the Earth, except that I'm aware of the financial risk the partners have taken, and there are at least twenty people who are depending upon the income generated, including myself.
So it is, for all of us, as we trend toward that precipice called the changing of everything, or the like, for those in the know. I overheard two elders on the light rail; one, of the so-called greatest generation, the other a clear boomer, the one sounding like a local radio celeb, the other like a politician or a member of the Metropolitan Commission, talking about all the light rail that would be built. I thought, how much light rail there had been in Minneapolis, and how much there could have been, and now the hour is very late.
I checked in an order of fake guns last night. I ordered them, replicas from a Tennessee company called Parris MFG. They take their replica's very seriously, at Parris. They sent us a pair of boxes of matching Confederate and Union hats which we didn't order. I'm not sure what to make of that, or the warning, or advocation, that these toys are, "appropriate for ages 5 and up." As I was entering these items into the system, a song was heard on The Current, with the refrain, "All the other kids better run, run, run, faster than my bullets," a very catchy tune. Last year at this time I was building a monster out of toy AK-47's, M-16's and Uzi's. This year, I'm contemplating Americans using these guns against each other.
I don't want to be. I think instead I'll close up shop and head next door to see if Rosie is working. Or maybe I'll just go home and sleep.
Sunday, September 11, 2011
Solitude Interrupted
Well, it's been some time since I last posted. What a time it has been. I've been investing 12-16 hours every day, the last two weeks, in Monster Halloween. Along with the staff, I'm transforming this 92 year old building that had been filled with flowers for 50 years prior to the last five, into the coolest Halloween shop in the Midwest, and maybe America. The transformation has been astounding, and I'm the only one privileged to see most of that progress. The staff is shaping up; I have a core of strong people from last year's store, and some who've worked the last two years, exceeding my participation. The most recent hires, three impressive young women: one, a clothing designer inspired by David Bowie, to replace last years clothing designer, who rumor has it, had some sort of hand in the design of Kim Kardashian's wedding dress; another woman, from a military family, with an abundance of steel in her face (literally) and a radically elaborate neo-gothic style, who trains horses; another young woman of extraordinary beauty, who Twittered as she worked, with impressive presence, who has fans on her blog and Twitter account more than I, by a factor of 100.
The absurdity of my life is profound in a way that I can only describe. I am currently smoking pot and drinking beer at 2:52 AM, listening to my Sing playlist, the only time I've dedicated to writing, in ten days or more, and I can hardly spell - thanks be, to my new Linux Ubuntu Lemur thingamagiggi. I'm sitting under a lamp, at the front desk, my back to the widows open to the sidewalk on Washington Ave, downtown Minneapolis. I've slept an average 6 hours a night, these two weeks, and there is much left to do, before we open, this coming Thursday the 15th. Today's management started at 9 AM, ending at 1:30 this morning, after a conversation with a conservative hire, who was rock-solid for us last year, in which I tried to awaken him to the idea that it is not just the poor who have brought this country to the precipice of ruin - this tenth anniversary of the terror attacks of 9/11. I missed the last train at 1:22.
My tomatoes would be rotting on the vine but for a neighbor. The wine grapes at my sister's are ready for harvest. I'm trying to imagine a way to harvest and ferment the juice, between now and the opening of the store. The store is progressing nicely. As manager, and generally, I am on task and clear and relaxed as I've ever been - women have begun to notice; and yet I have neither a toilet or any functioning drain in my house but for the basement washing machine rigged with pvc to the floor drain - oh and what the fuck, raging around my house Friday morning at two AM, ripping apart the plugged tub and shower drain, wondering how in the fuck it is I came to this weird place, trying to save the world, off-the-grid or something or other, what the...? in my house that has descended into what has all the appearance of a homeless man's abode.
In deference to at least one government program, how thankful I have been for the Hiawatha Light Rail, that I have awakened every morning at my house, since the Halloween store began in earnest, since my Heavenly Morning Glories began to bloom. It looks like I'm sleeping here tonight @ Monster Halloween. Oh right, and I maintain a blog.
Taking another sip of beer at 3:28, wondering about another puff. A starling flew in the back door today, and didn't want to, or have the sense to leave, or it was sent. Several crickets have taken residence. There was a grasshopper on my computer screen today, as I was entering Cinema Secrets products into our point of sale system, liquid latex, face paint, latex zombie prosthetics and the like. Our system is designed and run by Canadians, and it is maddening. Somehow, we chose a Canadian web-design firm to handle the HD Mask website, as well. As Creative Director, I've given these Canadians as clear and concise direction as I am capable of, and they have consistently returned, asking me to resend documents, and complaining that they haven't received adequate direction, even as they betray that they haven't actually read the slim trail of emails, or the content on the website they are designing. They've done a decent job otherwise, from an engineering aspect, except for the spacing thing between words and punctuation, on certain pages, and the squashing of certain product images. I met the designers of our Monster Halloween point of sale system, this past January, in Houston at the Halloween Expo. They talked of vast changes to the website, but it was clear today as I was entering merchandise manually, which I shouldn't have to do, that they haven't done a damn thing with the site but make it more inefficient, which would be an impossibility if not for the changes that were made last year, at our oft-repeated and almost as often ignored request. I have an employee who is brother-in-law to one of the store owners, who is a nice guy and who I like, but he doesn't always listen well, he's too often looking for a short-cut, and he doesn't always bother to measure or plumb or think things through, who I am relying upon for certain construction projects, because I'm manager and I built the stairs and the desk and the back door but I can't build the store myself.
Pack another, at 4am. Crack another. Staff showing up at 10. What was my point? Oh yes, I manage a Halloween store, full of fossil-fuel derived replicas of archetypes, time periods and fantasies. I'm looking now past a collection of beer bottles at a plastic valkyrie, perched upon blue plastic crystals, winged with a sword like a gun and a shield that isn't as big as either of her breasts, with a diameter equal to her waist, thigh-high white tights with a golden fringe, with a golden waist-clasp with a piece of purple fabric hanging in the front and the back, retrieved from the ample remains of last years pile of Miami merchandise, apropos and absurd but meaningful nonetheless. She watches over the desk.
Even the crickets have gone to sleep. Oh wait, there's one, further afield than before. Now he's letting go. I found a harmonica in the building. What a gift that has been, a world of sound I've never heard. I've been thinking about a band, and a Halloween party. That would be fun. But all I do is sing and dance. I drum and play this mouth harp, but like just about everything else I do, I do alone. What do I know about music? And yet here I find myself, managing a Halloween store at the heart of this metropolitan region, in the twilight of this great Empire. And now there are two crickets out there in the field, a call and response. Hmm, what a trip, this life. I think I'll crack another, and puff, just because. At five, going on six.
The absurdity of my life is profound in a way that I can only describe. I am currently smoking pot and drinking beer at 2:52 AM, listening to my Sing playlist, the only time I've dedicated to writing, in ten days or more, and I can hardly spell - thanks be, to my new Linux Ubuntu Lemur thingamagiggi. I'm sitting under a lamp, at the front desk, my back to the widows open to the sidewalk on Washington Ave, downtown Minneapolis. I've slept an average 6 hours a night, these two weeks, and there is much left to do, before we open, this coming Thursday the 15th. Today's management started at 9 AM, ending at 1:30 this morning, after a conversation with a conservative hire, who was rock-solid for us last year, in which I tried to awaken him to the idea that it is not just the poor who have brought this country to the precipice of ruin - this tenth anniversary of the terror attacks of 9/11. I missed the last train at 1:22.
My tomatoes would be rotting on the vine but for a neighbor. The wine grapes at my sister's are ready for harvest. I'm trying to imagine a way to harvest and ferment the juice, between now and the opening of the store. The store is progressing nicely. As manager, and generally, I am on task and clear and relaxed as I've ever been - women have begun to notice; and yet I have neither a toilet or any functioning drain in my house but for the basement washing machine rigged with pvc to the floor drain - oh and what the fuck, raging around my house Friday morning at two AM, ripping apart the plugged tub and shower drain, wondering how in the fuck it is I came to this weird place, trying to save the world, off-the-grid or something or other, what the...? in my house that has descended into what has all the appearance of a homeless man's abode.
In deference to at least one government program, how thankful I have been for the Hiawatha Light Rail, that I have awakened every morning at my house, since the Halloween store began in earnest, since my Heavenly Morning Glories began to bloom. It looks like I'm sleeping here tonight @ Monster Halloween. Oh right, and I maintain a blog.
Taking another sip of beer at 3:28, wondering about another puff. A starling flew in the back door today, and didn't want to, or have the sense to leave, or it was sent. Several crickets have taken residence. There was a grasshopper on my computer screen today, as I was entering Cinema Secrets products into our point of sale system, liquid latex, face paint, latex zombie prosthetics and the like. Our system is designed and run by Canadians, and it is maddening. Somehow, we chose a Canadian web-design firm to handle the HD Mask website, as well. As Creative Director, I've given these Canadians as clear and concise direction as I am capable of, and they have consistently returned, asking me to resend documents, and complaining that they haven't received adequate direction, even as they betray that they haven't actually read the slim trail of emails, or the content on the website they are designing. They've done a decent job otherwise, from an engineering aspect, except for the spacing thing between words and punctuation, on certain pages, and the squashing of certain product images. I met the designers of our Monster Halloween point of sale system, this past January, in Houston at the Halloween Expo. They talked of vast changes to the website, but it was clear today as I was entering merchandise manually, which I shouldn't have to do, that they haven't done a damn thing with the site but make it more inefficient, which would be an impossibility if not for the changes that were made last year, at our oft-repeated and almost as often ignored request. I have an employee who is brother-in-law to one of the store owners, who is a nice guy and who I like, but he doesn't always listen well, he's too often looking for a short-cut, and he doesn't always bother to measure or plumb or think things through, who I am relying upon for certain construction projects, because I'm manager and I built the stairs and the desk and the back door but I can't build the store myself.
Pack another, at 4am. Crack another. Staff showing up at 10. What was my point? Oh yes, I manage a Halloween store, full of fossil-fuel derived replicas of archetypes, time periods and fantasies. I'm looking now past a collection of beer bottles at a plastic valkyrie, perched upon blue plastic crystals, winged with a sword like a gun and a shield that isn't as big as either of her breasts, with a diameter equal to her waist, thigh-high white tights with a golden fringe, with a golden waist-clasp with a piece of purple fabric hanging in the front and the back, retrieved from the ample remains of last years pile of Miami merchandise, apropos and absurd but meaningful nonetheless. She watches over the desk.
Even the crickets have gone to sleep. Oh wait, there's one, further afield than before. Now he's letting go. I found a harmonica in the building. What a gift that has been, a world of sound I've never heard. I've been thinking about a band, and a Halloween party. That would be fun. But all I do is sing and dance. I drum and play this mouth harp, but like just about everything else I do, I do alone. What do I know about music? And yet here I find myself, managing a Halloween store at the heart of this metropolitan region, in the twilight of this great Empire. And now there are two crickets out there in the field, a call and response. Hmm, what a trip, this life. I think I'll crack another, and puff, just because. At five, going on six.
Monday, August 29, 2011
Keystone XL
When I first heard about Bill McKibben's zeal to be arrested, on behalf of the effort to prevent the Keystone XL pipeline, scheduled to run from the Alberta, Canada tar sands, to gulf coast oil refineries, I was dubious. I tend to look at Mckibben as a boomer environmentalist, the kind with pie-eyed, top-down notions of an eco-technic America for 300 million Americans, with readily available fossil fuels, as if more than a bare handful of Americans actually care about the particular source of the energy we burn. I imagined him and a few hundred others arrested, America yawning in the face of more immediate concerns, namely, the economy, Obama signing off on the permit because not to would be played like a treason against America and the death of jobs, adding another nail in the proverbial coffin of his presidency, cum 2012. And everyone would go home resigned to the next Environmental battle, ever more weary in the awareness that America is likely to burn every last fossil fuel it can, unto the very destruction of the biosphere, so as not to address what the end of fossil fuels actually means for our civilization.
The Alberta tar sands are a vast reserve, equivalent in volume at least to Saudi Arabia in it's prime. They are equally more vast a dirty business to extract, making generationally unrecoverable moonscapes potentially horizon to horizon, upriver of Lake Athabaska, the Great Slave, the Mackenzie River and the fragile arctic. The tar, turned into transportable oil by toxifying thousands of gallons of water for every barrel of oil, would then be transported across America's heartland, to the gulf coast, where it would be turned into gasoline, diesel, airline fuel et al, to be sold in the global marketplace, landing wherever it will fetch the highest price. Hardly contributing to a job anywhere in America, but certainly maintaining jobs on the gulf (and maybe a kind of army to protect the pipeline - plenty of warriors looking for jobs), and enriching a few who will then invest their ill-gotten gains globally, in the way of an American elite who are sacrificing America in the name of global market share.
Carl Pope, Chairman of the Sierra Club, had a nice assessment of this, in a recent blog post. He's another I tend to view through the lens of my assessment of the big time Environmental Organizations as better at paying staff than framing the argument. But his words clarified my notion of McKibben's zeal, and while I don't think the sacrifice will have much affect on Obama'a decision, I certainly admire it, even if it was only a few days in jail, though that few days being a clear sign from above, about where this is headed. The fact is, the work for the kind of eco-technic future people like to paint doesn't begin tomorrow as much as it did begin about 40 years ago, and then was effectively and widely abandoned in the advent of our zeal toward Empire and the Presidency of that man who is now a god, Ronald Reagan.
The idea that Obama will deny the permit is almost laughable. On what grounds? Saving the Earth? Yeah, good luck with that. Not only has he shown no willingness to take any stand on anything but quintessentially Liberal and increasingly, ideologically Conservative ideas, he has to face a loud and exceptionally influential segment for whom nothing about the Earth is as sacred as the right to transform it into garbage, which is what the bulk of the current economic model amounts to in the end. And even if he takes a stand, what does he have to give? Fourteen trillion dollars in debt; he'd have to tax the arrogance out of corporations, and everyone making more than a million dollars, to pay for that eco-technic future, and pay off the debt - which I'm all for by the way. But there isn't an idiot in Congress talking that kind of Americanism, and most Americans are too chicken-shit to make it happen (remember, it's in the cattle feed.)
I had one of those burgers today, with a friend who tolerates my oddities, and my relentlessness on certain things. I advised him to skill himself, as much as possible, with an appreciation for mastery. He and I share a dream of land and water flowing out of the ground and big gardens and grape and hops vines and fields and big woods, and guitar lessons and deer gutting, and other such pursuits. He's a kind of wizard, actually, and gets paid like one, about as useful as anyone I know, with a beautiful family. Just what a good community needs. He sees the way people are losing jobs that took them 25 years to earn, that won't be filled domestically, shipped permanently to foreign countries, until such time as Americans are willing to do the job for the same pay a Filipino is willing to accept. Filipinos, perhaps someday, burning a share of the Athabaskan tar sands, quickening the global decline toward economic and ecological ruin, or at the very least, more of this weird rule of quasi-global overlords, American mostly in name.
Right. Maybe I'm not such a great beer drinking companion, but I don't have many illusions left about where this whole operation is headed, this epic collapse that very likely awaits America, and the species Homo sapien sapien. But who can say what will come of it? I keep saying too, this universe is vastly more mysterious than we have been led to believe, and there's no saying we won't evolve - as if we aren't in this very moment, evolving.
Every morning in my back yard for a week now, the monarchs have been gathering. There is a five year old Liatris, a rough blazing star as tall as I am, that from morning till evening, has up to twenty or more monarchs feeding from it. There are Liatris, rough and otherwise, elsewhere in the yard and on the boulevard, but this one is visited by all the forty or more monarchs that are in my yard at any given time, because it has the advantage of being the healthiest, in the quietest spot. It puts into stark contrast Inspector Harold, who showed up again, shouting something at me with his first words, telling me to clean up my boulevard and clear the sidewalk, which is more like a walk through a woods and woodland edge, on a well traveled path. The first image in my head after he shouted at me before I even had a chance to acknowledge him, was my Brazilian ironwood sword; but I'm a civilized man, and I tried to have a conversation with him instead, but he walked away from me, to file another letter. That will be about a dozen, or twenty letters this year, from my friendly Inspections Department. There are people who want to come to my yard to film these butterflies, but that and the abundance my yard represents is lost to a few of my disaffected neighbors, who channel their ignorance into the inspections department who then take the opportunity to generate revenue, forcing poor Harold to have to deal with me.
Harold nor his employers can dim for long my joy about the butterfly, or the first heavenly blue morning glory to bloom this year, five of them, with many more to come soon. It's been a long wait, as the more aggressive uncle ott's with their smaller purple, red and pink flowers, have been gradually taking over much of the yard for most of the last half of the summer, as they always do; once I see them blooming, I lose me zeal for pulling them out. There are asters and golden rod blooming in the yard and on the boulevard. In short, many of the vegetables have peaked and are drying up, at the same time my yard is about to burst with color, on-going until the frost. It's wild, and I love it. Because the more crazy the world gets, the more clear I become about what I love.
As for that god-damned pipeline, any act toward it that isn't about preventing it, is an act of tyranny, and a threat to America.
The Alberta tar sands are a vast reserve, equivalent in volume at least to Saudi Arabia in it's prime. They are equally more vast a dirty business to extract, making generationally unrecoverable moonscapes potentially horizon to horizon, upriver of Lake Athabaska, the Great Slave, the Mackenzie River and the fragile arctic. The tar, turned into transportable oil by toxifying thousands of gallons of water for every barrel of oil, would then be transported across America's heartland, to the gulf coast, where it would be turned into gasoline, diesel, airline fuel et al, to be sold in the global marketplace, landing wherever it will fetch the highest price. Hardly contributing to a job anywhere in America, but certainly maintaining jobs on the gulf (and maybe a kind of army to protect the pipeline - plenty of warriors looking for jobs), and enriching a few who will then invest their ill-gotten gains globally, in the way of an American elite who are sacrificing America in the name of global market share.
Carl Pope, Chairman of the Sierra Club, had a nice assessment of this, in a recent blog post. He's another I tend to view through the lens of my assessment of the big time Environmental Organizations as better at paying staff than framing the argument. But his words clarified my notion of McKibben's zeal, and while I don't think the sacrifice will have much affect on Obama'a decision, I certainly admire it, even if it was only a few days in jail, though that few days being a clear sign from above, about where this is headed. The fact is, the work for the kind of eco-technic future people like to paint doesn't begin tomorrow as much as it did begin about 40 years ago, and then was effectively and widely abandoned in the advent of our zeal toward Empire and the Presidency of that man who is now a god, Ronald Reagan.
The idea that Obama will deny the permit is almost laughable. On what grounds? Saving the Earth? Yeah, good luck with that. Not only has he shown no willingness to take any stand on anything but quintessentially Liberal and increasingly, ideologically Conservative ideas, he has to face a loud and exceptionally influential segment for whom nothing about the Earth is as sacred as the right to transform it into garbage, which is what the bulk of the current economic model amounts to in the end. And even if he takes a stand, what does he have to give? Fourteen trillion dollars in debt; he'd have to tax the arrogance out of corporations, and everyone making more than a million dollars, to pay for that eco-technic future, and pay off the debt - which I'm all for by the way. But there isn't an idiot in Congress talking that kind of Americanism, and most Americans are too chicken-shit to make it happen (remember, it's in the cattle feed.)
I had one of those burgers today, with a friend who tolerates my oddities, and my relentlessness on certain things. I advised him to skill himself, as much as possible, with an appreciation for mastery. He and I share a dream of land and water flowing out of the ground and big gardens and grape and hops vines and fields and big woods, and guitar lessons and deer gutting, and other such pursuits. He's a kind of wizard, actually, and gets paid like one, about as useful as anyone I know, with a beautiful family. Just what a good community needs. He sees the way people are losing jobs that took them 25 years to earn, that won't be filled domestically, shipped permanently to foreign countries, until such time as Americans are willing to do the job for the same pay a Filipino is willing to accept. Filipinos, perhaps someday, burning a share of the Athabaskan tar sands, quickening the global decline toward economic and ecological ruin, or at the very least, more of this weird rule of quasi-global overlords, American mostly in name.
Right. Maybe I'm not such a great beer drinking companion, but I don't have many illusions left about where this whole operation is headed, this epic collapse that very likely awaits America, and the species Homo sapien sapien. But who can say what will come of it? I keep saying too, this universe is vastly more mysterious than we have been led to believe, and there's no saying we won't evolve - as if we aren't in this very moment, evolving.
Every morning in my back yard for a week now, the monarchs have been gathering. There is a five year old Liatris, a rough blazing star as tall as I am, that from morning till evening, has up to twenty or more monarchs feeding from it. There are Liatris, rough and otherwise, elsewhere in the yard and on the boulevard, but this one is visited by all the forty or more monarchs that are in my yard at any given time, because it has the advantage of being the healthiest, in the quietest spot. It puts into stark contrast Inspector Harold, who showed up again, shouting something at me with his first words, telling me to clean up my boulevard and clear the sidewalk, which is more like a walk through a woods and woodland edge, on a well traveled path. The first image in my head after he shouted at me before I even had a chance to acknowledge him, was my Brazilian ironwood sword; but I'm a civilized man, and I tried to have a conversation with him instead, but he walked away from me, to file another letter. That will be about a dozen, or twenty letters this year, from my friendly Inspections Department. There are people who want to come to my yard to film these butterflies, but that and the abundance my yard represents is lost to a few of my disaffected neighbors, who channel their ignorance into the inspections department who then take the opportunity to generate revenue, forcing poor Harold to have to deal with me.
Harold nor his employers can dim for long my joy about the butterfly, or the first heavenly blue morning glory to bloom this year, five of them, with many more to come soon. It's been a long wait, as the more aggressive uncle ott's with their smaller purple, red and pink flowers, have been gradually taking over much of the yard for most of the last half of the summer, as they always do; once I see them blooming, I lose me zeal for pulling them out. There are asters and golden rod blooming in the yard and on the boulevard. In short, many of the vegetables have peaked and are drying up, at the same time my yard is about to burst with color, on-going until the frost. It's wild, and I love it. Because the more crazy the world gets, the more clear I become about what I love.
As for that god-damned pipeline, any act toward it that isn't about preventing it, is an act of tyranny, and a threat to America.
Friday, August 26, 2011
The Mask
What really is anxiety, but the beginning of a deeper ability to feel?
I thought this a few days ago, as I was biking to work, suddenly uncertain, shaking slightly. It was a Saturday late-morning, beautifully summer-like; the path to work passing through Minnehaha Falls Park, people everywhere, and I just puffed. When I puff I tend to focus on feeling, in the landscape of the immediate, or I wander into the vast and unlimited landscape of ideas. Biking, I tend to do both. That day, there being so many people around, on the bike path walking and biking, people crossing the path, the path crossing the street, that suburban-looking woman in that giant automobile clearly not accustomed to looking for bicycles, parents with their kiddie-carts, with their inevitably joyfully swerving kids, that old couple who bike every so often, but rarely, and not really aware of anyone else, the driven-to-get-there getting there as fast and efficient as possible, the ladies chattering, walking side by side, each in a lane. On a snake-like strip of asphalt eight feet wide - weekend August traffic on the road on one side, park patron traffic enjoying-the-day on the other.
It was strange, the uncertainty, the shivering. I haven't felt like that in some time. I tend to wander through life saying and doing what I feel called to do - there being a time when I was incapable of feeling. I've let go of a lot since then, the last four years. These days, I look joyward to dancing in the street. Plants make me smile. On that same Minnehaha Falls path this morning, I sang most of the way to work, pulling forty pounds of tools in my $3 garage sale score, kid-carriage trailer, to begin the assembly of Monster Halloween-Minnesota. Women are much less defensive toward me when I pull a kid-carriage, I've noticed.
I'm also Creative Director for HD Masks. Check us out. I wrote most of the copy on the website. It's a work in progress, so don't be too critical. It came on-line just in time for the birth of HD Masks, our first foray into event marketing, for the St Paul Saints, at Midway Stadium in St Paul. The Saints are owned in part by Bill Murray. Their President is Mike Veeck, the son of the Hall of Famer Bill Veeck, renowned in the baseball world for his marketing antics, once releasing a piglet on a major league field, for fans to chase down. Saints Management conceived of Gary Busey night, Aug 23, just because and maybe as an attempt to lure Gary Busey to the stadium. Keith, one of the Managing Directors of HD Masks, being the entrepreneurialist he is, happened to find out about three weeks ago. We found a suitable image. We made an arrangement with the Saints. We made 1700 Gary Busey masks, fifteen hundred of which were handed out at the gate. We had a table outside where we displayed our custom masks. Then we handed out 200 masks in one section and took pictures. You can see the pics on our Facebook page. More to come.
At first, outside the stadium at the gate, I wore the Alien mask. After a beer I wore the chimpanzee. That one made me dance, and chase the kids around. That was fun. Most people wouldn't look at me, dancing there by our table; those that did often couldn't tell that I was looking at them. I danced to acknowledge that I was, helped by an impromptu folky bluegrass band. The courageous ones smiled. When it was time to hand out the 200 masks to the one section, I put on the orange afro.
In the Latin, mask is persona. So, to say that we are persons, is like saying we wear a mask. To wear a mask is to explore the multitudiousness of the self. It can be, to let go, if one is willing. To wear a mask is like a shape-sifting, opening to feeling.
I didn't say much with the orange afro on. I just sort of bounced, with a kind of joyful swagger, dancing slightly to music no one else could hear. I planned to say plenty: "Are there any Saints Fans in this House! What? I thought Saints fans were super fans? Is that all you got? Are there any Saints fans in this house!? Hey, how many of you are growing tomatoes? Yeah? Nice. I've got about one hundred tomato plants. I thought, I'd plant that many and I wouldn't have to worry about them. I thought I'd be canning three hours a day. I've got about as many tomatoes as I had last year with ten plants. Where was I? Oh yeah. HD Masks. We do event planning, like tonight's Gary Busey night. We have custom masks - animals, icons, colors. You can even upload your own image! Yeah! Show up at the reunion, looking like you did when you graduated. Show up to work looking like the boss? Uh-huh. I'm sure you sure you've got some ideas. One last question: Are there any Gary Busey's in this house?"
But the Saints were down 9-1, in the bottom of the third inning. The air was heavy and hot. It was a pain-in-the-ass getting there; three miles out of my way because urban planner is an oxymoron when you're on a bike, and Google Maps has the stadium on the wrong side of Snelling Ave, which is a damn big deal when you're on a bike, and a pedal even fell off. Someone else was supposed to address the crowd. No one gave me permission. All I ended up saying was, "Thanks, Saints Fans!" And they let go into applause, eager for anything to applause to. I spent the rest of the night, berating myself for not speaking up, pretty certain I wasn't worth the title Creative Director, pretty sure I'd lost the second coolest job I ever had, next to manager of Monster Halloween. But then, the owners of Monster Halloween-MN and HD Masks are the same, and it has been made fairly clear that I am of value. What value? Who can really say?
It is such a strange place I have come to, never more sure of where I am, at the same time...
For the more intrepid of my readers I offer this. It's an extraordinary example of stringing words together well, sloppy in a few sentences but show-stopping, so to speak. It stuck with me for days, and I can't quite see where I stand in relation to it. I've been so busy with Monster Halloween the last few days I haven't had time to reconcile it. I'm not sure how I could. Thrown for a loop, is the phrase that fits. I find myself suspicious, at the same time I can't really find myself disagreeing with any of his important points. Anyway, it certainly is a strange time in which we are living. Wide open. An excellent time to be doing a bit of shape-shifting, testing the boundaries of the self.
I thought this a few days ago, as I was biking to work, suddenly uncertain, shaking slightly. It was a Saturday late-morning, beautifully summer-like; the path to work passing through Minnehaha Falls Park, people everywhere, and I just puffed. When I puff I tend to focus on feeling, in the landscape of the immediate, or I wander into the vast and unlimited landscape of ideas. Biking, I tend to do both. That day, there being so many people around, on the bike path walking and biking, people crossing the path, the path crossing the street, that suburban-looking woman in that giant automobile clearly not accustomed to looking for bicycles, parents with their kiddie-carts, with their inevitably joyfully swerving kids, that old couple who bike every so often, but rarely, and not really aware of anyone else, the driven-to-get-there getting there as fast and efficient as possible, the ladies chattering, walking side by side, each in a lane. On a snake-like strip of asphalt eight feet wide - weekend August traffic on the road on one side, park patron traffic enjoying-the-day on the other.
It was strange, the uncertainty, the shivering. I haven't felt like that in some time. I tend to wander through life saying and doing what I feel called to do - there being a time when I was incapable of feeling. I've let go of a lot since then, the last four years. These days, I look joyward to dancing in the street. Plants make me smile. On that same Minnehaha Falls path this morning, I sang most of the way to work, pulling forty pounds of tools in my $3 garage sale score, kid-carriage trailer, to begin the assembly of Monster Halloween-Minnesota. Women are much less defensive toward me when I pull a kid-carriage, I've noticed.
I'm also Creative Director for HD Masks. Check us out. I wrote most of the copy on the website. It's a work in progress, so don't be too critical. It came on-line just in time for the birth of HD Masks, our first foray into event marketing, for the St Paul Saints, at Midway Stadium in St Paul. The Saints are owned in part by Bill Murray. Their President is Mike Veeck, the son of the Hall of Famer Bill Veeck, renowned in the baseball world for his marketing antics, once releasing a piglet on a major league field, for fans to chase down. Saints Management conceived of Gary Busey night, Aug 23, just because and maybe as an attempt to lure Gary Busey to the stadium. Keith, one of the Managing Directors of HD Masks, being the entrepreneurialist he is, happened to find out about three weeks ago. We found a suitable image. We made an arrangement with the Saints. We made 1700 Gary Busey masks, fifteen hundred of which were handed out at the gate. We had a table outside where we displayed our custom masks. Then we handed out 200 masks in one section and took pictures. You can see the pics on our Facebook page. More to come.
At first, outside the stadium at the gate, I wore the Alien mask. After a beer I wore the chimpanzee. That one made me dance, and chase the kids around. That was fun. Most people wouldn't look at me, dancing there by our table; those that did often couldn't tell that I was looking at them. I danced to acknowledge that I was, helped by an impromptu folky bluegrass band. The courageous ones smiled. When it was time to hand out the 200 masks to the one section, I put on the orange afro.
In the Latin, mask is persona. So, to say that we are persons, is like saying we wear a mask. To wear a mask is to explore the multitudiousness of the self. It can be, to let go, if one is willing. To wear a mask is like a shape-sifting, opening to feeling.
I didn't say much with the orange afro on. I just sort of bounced, with a kind of joyful swagger, dancing slightly to music no one else could hear. I planned to say plenty: "Are there any Saints Fans in this House! What? I thought Saints fans were super fans? Is that all you got? Are there any Saints fans in this house!? Hey, how many of you are growing tomatoes? Yeah? Nice. I've got about one hundred tomato plants. I thought, I'd plant that many and I wouldn't have to worry about them. I thought I'd be canning three hours a day. I've got about as many tomatoes as I had last year with ten plants. Where was I? Oh yeah. HD Masks. We do event planning, like tonight's Gary Busey night. We have custom masks - animals, icons, colors. You can even upload your own image! Yeah! Show up at the reunion, looking like you did when you graduated. Show up to work looking like the boss? Uh-huh. I'm sure you sure you've got some ideas. One last question: Are there any Gary Busey's in this house?"
But the Saints were down 9-1, in the bottom of the third inning. The air was heavy and hot. It was a pain-in-the-ass getting there; three miles out of my way because urban planner is an oxymoron when you're on a bike, and Google Maps has the stadium on the wrong side of Snelling Ave, which is a damn big deal when you're on a bike, and a pedal even fell off. Someone else was supposed to address the crowd. No one gave me permission. All I ended up saying was, "Thanks, Saints Fans!" And they let go into applause, eager for anything to applause to. I spent the rest of the night, berating myself for not speaking up, pretty certain I wasn't worth the title Creative Director, pretty sure I'd lost the second coolest job I ever had, next to manager of Monster Halloween. But then, the owners of Monster Halloween-MN and HD Masks are the same, and it has been made fairly clear that I am of value. What value? Who can really say?
It is such a strange place I have come to, never more sure of where I am, at the same time...
For the more intrepid of my readers I offer this. It's an extraordinary example of stringing words together well, sloppy in a few sentences but show-stopping, so to speak. It stuck with me for days, and I can't quite see where I stand in relation to it. I've been so busy with Monster Halloween the last few days I haven't had time to reconcile it. I'm not sure how I could. Thrown for a loop, is the phrase that fits. I find myself suspicious, at the same time I can't really find myself disagreeing with any of his important points. Anyway, it certainly is a strange time in which we are living. Wide open. An excellent time to be doing a bit of shape-shifting, testing the boundaries of the self.
Friday, August 19, 2011
Haunted House
I was incredulous, this past Monday, with the Dow up and the financial pundits and media claiming it was a good sign, the news of increased economic activity in the form of mergers of major corporations. If any merger has ever resulted in more jobs, feel free to let me know. As if this isn't going to mean the elimination of "redundancies", and the throwing off and shutting down of otherwise profitable subsidiaries, which is otherwise called "people losing their jobs." Oh, and that Texan, last weekend in the announcement of his decision to run for the Presidency, saying that the debt was the theft of our children's future, as if widespread hydro-fracturing across Texas and elsewhere in America, to export natural gas, is not taking away the freedom of children like my niece and nephew to stay warm in future winters. And then Warren Buffet and that guy from Starbucks, remembering history and the course of Empires, reminding the rich that money insulates no one in the event of widespread social breakdown. And then the clips from Fox News I just saw, in excerpts of an episode of The John Stewart Show, the viciousness and the violent justification, the loud declarations of "class warfare" "parasites" and "the moocher class".
The same week of my first major harvest this year. I put away about eight pints of cherry juice from my wild cherry tree; you can see the cherries in the background of the pictures I published of me in my helmet, a couple of posts ago. I froze the juice. I'm hoping it will be a nice treat and healing too, this coming winter when I'm feeling down. It joins, in the freezer, the black and red raspberries, the wild and cultivar strawberries, about half a freezer full, meager as a winter supply, but I won't think so in the depth of February when it's -22. I gathered bags full of three different kinds of carrots, a colander full of Kohl rabi, and enough tomatoes, cukes and jalapeños to make a few days worth of a raw, simply tasty summer soup. Everything is late this year, after the sunless spring and that hideously hot early summer. The weather has settled into a kind of comfortable warmth, with occasional heavy rains - both curiosities in August. Good for the veggies though. The rattlesnake snap beans are on their second abundant crop this summer, two or three meals a day, about five weeks worth this summer so far. I've decided, they're my favorite bean. Which is important to know, because beans cross-pollinate, and that's a problem if you don't have access to a hundred and one different seed varieties in stores and on the Internet.
I wanted to show you pictures, but my new, fancy Canon camera, the updated version of the one that had the lens problem I wrote about earlier this year, has a lens problem. The first camera's lens wouldn't extend and quit taking pictures, this one extended but the lens won't go back in, and it won't take pictures. I'm pretty sure I took less pictures with this updated more expensive version, in less time. Best Buy gave it to me in return for the first broken one and twenty dollars. I pondered for a moment - will they try to blame me? But I'm pretty sure they'll just want to exchange it for another.
My sister's brand new T-Mobile smart-phone has a blank screen. More signs of capitalism feeding on itself, in this age of increasingly scarce resources and increasingly high executive and shareholder expectations. I wonder what the people at my old place of employment think about their vendors making trash? What's that going to do to the bottom line? But then, increasingly fewer people have the resources to purchase the shit anyway.
Also this week, the Halloween store started in earnest. I can actually peddle the Minnehaha and West River bike paths, from within a few blocks of my house, seven miles, to within three blocks of my new place of employment, at the old Minneapolis Florist Supply. Two stories with a big basement, it's not ideal by industry standards, but I think it's perfect. It used to be full of flowers! It hasn't had a tenant in a long time, except a band that just got kicked out of what has to be one of the coolest band practice spaces in Minneapolis. The ownership of the business next-door owns the building. They bought it in 2006 for $1.8 million - way too much - with the intention of tearing it down (it is an inconspicuous, uninsulated rectangle, built in 1919, with most of the windows blocked up), to add a parking lot to their otherwise cramped locale. The city stepped in (after the purchase) and said if they do tear it down, it has to be turned into green-space. Not, a parking lot with a rain garden. Green-space. Minneapolis has miles and miles of green space that serves little other purpose than employing union lawn mowers. I'd prefer sheep, cattle and chicken herders, and garden tenders; the city government won't even allow community gardens on public land. These neighbors, our landlords, pay about $220,000 a year in property taxes. No one has been willing to fill the space without a million dollar build-out. That is a hard pill to swallow.
For us though, the building is perfect. Grungy, but great. A stream of Vikings fans flows by every game day, and streams of zombies will stumble by on the night of the Zombie Pub Crawl, taking place right across the Washington Ave bridge on 35W, right next to the 35W bridge that collapsed in 2007. They just dedicated that monument. Someone came that very night and stole the metal letters for salvage.
It's going to be a wild ride. We are quad-rangulated, so to speak, between Uptown, downtown, the Seward neighborhood and the University of Minnesota. I think it will be about twice as crazy as it was last fall, in Uptown, on Hennepin Ave. You can see the building from the light-rail. I'm looking Joyward to putting on the orange afro, the wacky jacket and the golden shoes Stephan gave me. It's going to be so much fun. I have the two coolest jobs ever (more on the other job, in the next post). I'm hoping to hire the staff to make it the coolest Halloween store in the Midwest. I'm not technically the job creator, but I'm the one who picks the staff. Look for the add on Craigslist. Or drop in. You just have to know how to have fun - and you have to like people.
I'm an unlikely retail Halloween manager, insofar as I don't buy much but craft booze, bud, coffee and good food. The whole notion of consumer stuff seems to me a kind of insanity, thoroughly disconnected from the consequences to biological systems; but then, if we stop buying stuff, what then? I had a vision tonight of our antique basement. It's perfect for a haunted house. I would put a 1970's TV at the bottom of the stairs, playing excerpts on a reel, of Jimmy Carters "Crisis of Confidence" speech that helped cost him the election, warning us that if we didn't take the reality of fossil fuels seriously America would be doomed. There's an old furnace behind the stairs that looks like it was once fed whole sections of trees, which I'd put a guy in a suit feeding a guy in coveralls into. In the first stall I'd put Reagan, parroting the word "freedom, freedom, freedom" with a cadre of stern faced suits standing behind the oval office desk he is perched on, holding strings attached to his back. Stalls each for GHWB and Clinton, both smugly assuring us that credit is money, that an endless exchange of 1's and 0's can replace the real economy, as if it wasn't really a practice of de-skilling and a continued weakening of America to grow a global hegemony of supra-national elite. Then PGWB doing a little diddy about a crusade and tax cuts paying for wars, on a house which people are being dragged out of by Sheriff deputies. And then Obama, Bernanke and Geithner, looking cock-sure, sitting on stumps around a bonfire in the woods, all of them in suits, the be-sooted ghosts of Henry Paulson, Alan Greenspan, Robert Rubin and Larry Summers hovering behind them. Then a stall with Michele Bachmann and Rick Perry hovering together, smiling hand-in-hand, leaning over a manger cradling the four horseman of the apocalypse and the whore of Babylon, on a burning pile of bibles, and tea partiers and brown and gay people. And then, into the very back of the basement, where I'd make a long dark winding hallway, with a row on each wall of young men and women in wheelchairs, missing various body parts, and otherwise scarred and disfigured. The wheel chairs are actually there, a hundred or more of them. (Free storage for a hospice.) I'd invite real vets to sit there, if they wanted to.
At the end, an exit, a stair that's really like a ladder for an old farmhouse cellar, built for one at a time, leading to a little hole in the floor behind where our front desk will be. The most disturbing haunted house in Minneapolis.
We wouldn't sell a thing.
And then what kind of manager would I be? How then could I provide jobs for 35 good people? How then could I help my friends who gave me this job when no one else was offering and I didn't have any money, finally make a return on their three year investment, a nice auspicious financial burst leading into the birth of their mask company? How then could I put myself in a position to start paying the mortgage on this house I am living in, this land I am living on, the mortgage my father has been paying since the collapse of 2008?
No, I will not make such a statement in this place of business. This will instead be a place where people can come and enjoy themselves, in this twilight of the only Empire any of us have ever known. Where people can come and maybe explore the multitudinous nature of the self, if they want to. Or just buy a monkey suit - which may be more healing than you know.
The same week of my first major harvest this year. I put away about eight pints of cherry juice from my wild cherry tree; you can see the cherries in the background of the pictures I published of me in my helmet, a couple of posts ago. I froze the juice. I'm hoping it will be a nice treat and healing too, this coming winter when I'm feeling down. It joins, in the freezer, the black and red raspberries, the wild and cultivar strawberries, about half a freezer full, meager as a winter supply, but I won't think so in the depth of February when it's -22. I gathered bags full of three different kinds of carrots, a colander full of Kohl rabi, and enough tomatoes, cukes and jalapeños to make a few days worth of a raw, simply tasty summer soup. Everything is late this year, after the sunless spring and that hideously hot early summer. The weather has settled into a kind of comfortable warmth, with occasional heavy rains - both curiosities in August. Good for the veggies though. The rattlesnake snap beans are on their second abundant crop this summer, two or three meals a day, about five weeks worth this summer so far. I've decided, they're my favorite bean. Which is important to know, because beans cross-pollinate, and that's a problem if you don't have access to a hundred and one different seed varieties in stores and on the Internet.
I wanted to show you pictures, but my new, fancy Canon camera, the updated version of the one that had the lens problem I wrote about earlier this year, has a lens problem. The first camera's lens wouldn't extend and quit taking pictures, this one extended but the lens won't go back in, and it won't take pictures. I'm pretty sure I took less pictures with this updated more expensive version, in less time. Best Buy gave it to me in return for the first broken one and twenty dollars. I pondered for a moment - will they try to blame me? But I'm pretty sure they'll just want to exchange it for another.
My sister's brand new T-Mobile smart-phone has a blank screen. More signs of capitalism feeding on itself, in this age of increasingly scarce resources and increasingly high executive and shareholder expectations. I wonder what the people at my old place of employment think about their vendors making trash? What's that going to do to the bottom line? But then, increasingly fewer people have the resources to purchase the shit anyway.
Also this week, the Halloween store started in earnest. I can actually peddle the Minnehaha and West River bike paths, from within a few blocks of my house, seven miles, to within three blocks of my new place of employment, at the old Minneapolis Florist Supply. Two stories with a big basement, it's not ideal by industry standards, but I think it's perfect. It used to be full of flowers! It hasn't had a tenant in a long time, except a band that just got kicked out of what has to be one of the coolest band practice spaces in Minneapolis. The ownership of the business next-door owns the building. They bought it in 2006 for $1.8 million - way too much - with the intention of tearing it down (it is an inconspicuous, uninsulated rectangle, built in 1919, with most of the windows blocked up), to add a parking lot to their otherwise cramped locale. The city stepped in (after the purchase) and said if they do tear it down, it has to be turned into green-space. Not, a parking lot with a rain garden. Green-space. Minneapolis has miles and miles of green space that serves little other purpose than employing union lawn mowers. I'd prefer sheep, cattle and chicken herders, and garden tenders; the city government won't even allow community gardens on public land. These neighbors, our landlords, pay about $220,000 a year in property taxes. No one has been willing to fill the space without a million dollar build-out. That is a hard pill to swallow.
For us though, the building is perfect. Grungy, but great. A stream of Vikings fans flows by every game day, and streams of zombies will stumble by on the night of the Zombie Pub Crawl, taking place right across the Washington Ave bridge on 35W, right next to the 35W bridge that collapsed in 2007. They just dedicated that monument. Someone came that very night and stole the metal letters for salvage.
It's going to be a wild ride. We are quad-rangulated, so to speak, between Uptown, downtown, the Seward neighborhood and the University of Minnesota. I think it will be about twice as crazy as it was last fall, in Uptown, on Hennepin Ave. You can see the building from the light-rail. I'm looking Joyward to putting on the orange afro, the wacky jacket and the golden shoes Stephan gave me. It's going to be so much fun. I have the two coolest jobs ever (more on the other job, in the next post). I'm hoping to hire the staff to make it the coolest Halloween store in the Midwest. I'm not technically the job creator, but I'm the one who picks the staff. Look for the add on Craigslist. Or drop in. You just have to know how to have fun - and you have to like people.
I'm an unlikely retail Halloween manager, insofar as I don't buy much but craft booze, bud, coffee and good food. The whole notion of consumer stuff seems to me a kind of insanity, thoroughly disconnected from the consequences to biological systems; but then, if we stop buying stuff, what then? I had a vision tonight of our antique basement. It's perfect for a haunted house. I would put a 1970's TV at the bottom of the stairs, playing excerpts on a reel, of Jimmy Carters "Crisis of Confidence" speech that helped cost him the election, warning us that if we didn't take the reality of fossil fuels seriously America would be doomed. There's an old furnace behind the stairs that looks like it was once fed whole sections of trees, which I'd put a guy in a suit feeding a guy in coveralls into. In the first stall I'd put Reagan, parroting the word "freedom, freedom, freedom" with a cadre of stern faced suits standing behind the oval office desk he is perched on, holding strings attached to his back. Stalls each for GHWB and Clinton, both smugly assuring us that credit is money, that an endless exchange of 1's and 0's can replace the real economy, as if it wasn't really a practice of de-skilling and a continued weakening of America to grow a global hegemony of supra-national elite. Then PGWB doing a little diddy about a crusade and tax cuts paying for wars, on a house which people are being dragged out of by Sheriff deputies. And then Obama, Bernanke and Geithner, looking cock-sure, sitting on stumps around a bonfire in the woods, all of them in suits, the be-sooted ghosts of Henry Paulson, Alan Greenspan, Robert Rubin and Larry Summers hovering behind them. Then a stall with Michele Bachmann and Rick Perry hovering together, smiling hand-in-hand, leaning over a manger cradling the four horseman of the apocalypse and the whore of Babylon, on a burning pile of bibles, and tea partiers and brown and gay people. And then, into the very back of the basement, where I'd make a long dark winding hallway, with a row on each wall of young men and women in wheelchairs, missing various body parts, and otherwise scarred and disfigured. The wheel chairs are actually there, a hundred or more of them. (Free storage for a hospice.) I'd invite real vets to sit there, if they wanted to.
At the end, an exit, a stair that's really like a ladder for an old farmhouse cellar, built for one at a time, leading to a little hole in the floor behind where our front desk will be. The most disturbing haunted house in Minneapolis.
We wouldn't sell a thing.
And then what kind of manager would I be? How then could I provide jobs for 35 good people? How then could I help my friends who gave me this job when no one else was offering and I didn't have any money, finally make a return on their three year investment, a nice auspicious financial burst leading into the birth of their mask company? How then could I put myself in a position to start paying the mortgage on this house I am living in, this land I am living on, the mortgage my father has been paying since the collapse of 2008?
No, I will not make such a statement in this place of business. This will instead be a place where people can come and enjoy themselves, in this twilight of the only Empire any of us have ever known. Where people can come and maybe explore the multitudinous nature of the self, if they want to. Or just buy a monkey suit - which may be more healing than you know.
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