MESSAGE

I am being fat tonight from a McDonald’s crispy chicken Ranch wrap and three chocolate chip cookies. So I am working it off by typing this blog entry. It is kind of cold to be walking it off outside. It is cloudy blue winter outdoors, or at least it was before it got dark. Not a day to inspire anything except sleeping which I participated fully in, at least three times.

A few days ago a guy named Stack flew a fully fueled airplane into an Internal Revenue Service building in Austin, Texas. He killed himself and somebody else and injured some folks and virtually destroyed the building. He left a long, ranting goodbye note in the Internet in which he blamed the quality of his life on:

The IRS

Big Business and it’s greed

Banks

The Government

The Catholic Church

His CPA

The state of California

And others…….

The media has quoted various personalities and talking heads who have described him as:

Cowardly

In serious distress and real despair

Never antagonistic towards his CPA

Hid his rage well

…and others

Amazingly enough, this whole thing happened last Thursday, I think, and it’s Sunday now and not a peep of the story has appeared today on any of the major Internet news sites. Except for two grieving families, one person still in a hospital, scores of almost-victims with nightmares and a lot of Austin firemen, it’s like it never happened.

People were so concerned with vilifying this guy, and with reason, that nobody paid any attention to the message he left except to describe it as a confused rant in which he blames everybody else for his problems. Much of his message was quite clear. I’m sure the morality of the wealth of the Catholic Church can be debated and I don’t want my dog in that fight. Maybe I should just quote “WWJD?” Big Business continues to get rich from the gullible and the helpless; the Government isn’t working the way it should; not much in the Noble Republic is working the way we learned in Civics class in our adolescence. Interesting that the results of a CNN poll released today show that 86% of those Americans interviewed believe that the Government is broken and that 5% of that number believe it can’t be fixed. Senator Bayh from Indiana last week has indicated he will resign from Congress at the end of his present term because it isn’t working the way it should. Are there similarities or am I loony?

I don’t believe problems should be solved by killing people except maybe in self defense. Property damage? In the case of the IRS that doesn’t seem to be too politically incorrect. And would anybody have heard Stack’s message loudly and clearly if he hadn’t done an Armageddon on a government building? Probably not. You all out there can fight back and forth over this, but I believe there’s some handwriting on the wall here.

Back in the year zero in an impoverished semi desert that was part of the far flung Roman Empire, a guy named Jesus walked back and forth between towns, socializing with low-life and high-life companions. No horse. Definitely not a carriage. Lived rough. Might have needed a shave. Stirred grave alarum among the Religious Right because they feared he was going to try to overthrow their comfortable, legalistic status quo. Got the occupying authorities up in arms because they were afraid of a coup and all they wanted to do was sleep when the sun was hot and keep their heavy armor in their lockers.

He was probably variously described as:

A rabble rouser

Possibly deluded

Got too much sun on his head, messed up his thinking

One of the Usual Suspects

They finally arrested him for something and sentenced him to capital punishment. He went through all the pain and trauma even though he had an ace up his sleeve nobody knew about. Once he was cut down the message was forgotten except by about thirteen people. If anybody else remembered him it was like the Various Descriptions listed above. But the message came to fruition over time and is very much with (and within) many of us today.

I’m not sure what I’m trying to prove here except that I’m a little pissed that Stack had a pretty definite set of complaints, many of them accurate, and nobody’s listening. Just another same-o day in the Big City. Ta!

WHO WE KNOW.

The daily news on the Internet is a laugh a minute. I start each day laughing once I get both eyes open. For instance: “Terrorism threats will decline with death or capture of Bin Laden and other top operatives.” I think that, for somebody, that’s the real world. But could it possibly be that those top honchos are very intelligent and sophisticated and that each of the most important ones has an understudy who can immediately take over in the absence of Number One? La! It must have been a Talking Head who said that.

People ask me now and then if I belong to that outfit for ex-drunks and it usually goes something like this: “You part of them Triple-A’s?” And I say “Yarp.” Being in the Triple-A’s gives me a familiarity with parts of life that most people don’t see. When I talk about it, a little, they shake their heads and start reciting that Psalm about the Valley of Death. Because they are convinced that I’m daily on the edge of danger. I do have to say that some of my best friends are:

Executives

Ex-Prostitutes (Sex Workers to put a point on it)

Jailbirds

Jail Birdies

Supervisors

Bus drivers

Working Sex Workers

Teachers

Nurses

Lawyers

Doctors

The Unemployed

The Great Unwashed (usually washed soon…)

Bikers

Bag Ladies

…all of whom are attempting to stay clean and sober one day at a time. Anything but that is nobody’s business but their own. But it makes a hell of a conversation piece the few times it comes up.

Ta!