Neanderpundit

Sleeping in. Awake late. Hanging out with musicians.

Not bad for a couple of days but i keep looking for broken stuff to fix. Once a tommyknocker i guess… Will be good to get back to work.

is not something I’ve ever personally resisted, I enjoy learning and doing new things, and my gig is always an adventure.

OTOH, I like some things to be the same, if I can get them.

The town in the frozen north where I now sit is the town that the Ogwife grew up in.

But, then again, it isn’t.

She notices it, I notice it, and we both feel a bit strangely about it. Her because her memories are gone; me, because I miss the town this once was. Here there once were the hard and the rugged, men and women who came here and carved life and living out of the granite escarpments, dealt with harsh winters and rough seas and all manner of hardship. When I first came here over twenty years ago, those people were still here, and a lot of them were still living in the same way, hunting and fishing and trapping. The Hudson’s bay company still had an outpost, where you could buy point blankets with beaver pelts. Some roads were summer roads only. And snowmobile wasn’t a means of recreation, it was winter transport.

Now the town is more like Broad Ripple than Ketchikan. The old trading post now rents plastic canoes and kayaks to vacationers, the local stores replaced by walmart and each empty storefront filled with a used bookstore, an art gallery, havens for hippies and buskers playing artifically distressed musical instruments more out of tune than their singing.

I miss the raw smell of it. The knowledge that you might see a moose or a bear in town. Now it smells like patchouli and dope, and the most dangerous thing you see is the daisy-duke shorts and full length blue support hose on Al, the septuagenerian meth addict. He himself is harmless, but his clothing is lethal both in appearance and aroma.

So for my own twisted nostalgia here’s the lyrics to one of my favorite showtunes, by Lerner sans Lowe. If you haven’t heard Lee Marvin sing this in “Paint your wagon” you have missed something special.

God made the mountains
God made the sky
God made the people
God knows why

He fixed up the planet
As best as He could
Then in come the people
And gum it up good

The first thing you know

They civilized the foothills
And everywhere He put hills
The mountains and valley below

They come along and take ’em
And civilize and make ’em
A place where no civilized
Person would go

The first thing you know
The first thing you know

They civilize what’s pretty
By puttin’ up a city
Where nothin’ that’s
Pretty can grow

They muddy up the winter
And civilize it into
A place too uncivilized
Even for snow

The first thing you know

They civilize left
They civilize right
Till nothing is left
Till nothing is right

They civilize freedom
Till no one is free
No one except
By coincidence, me

The first thing you know

The boozer’s in prison
And the criminally isn’t
And only the rascals have dough

When I see a parson
I gotta put my arse in
A wagon that follows the tail of a crow

The first thing you know
I pick up and blow!
The first thing you know

Updated to add: only in this town would you see a smooooking hot broad in yoga pants and a gadsden shirt having a smoke with a gesticulating sunburned scarecrow of a man in flipflops and mismatched socks, and hes the business owner, and shes the street bum.

Giraffe writes “I assume you support Romney”

Giraffe has a history here of serially not getting it and making assumptions. So for him, and for anyone out there who hasn’t figured it out yet, let me make it, as old Dick said, perfectly clear.

I support Freedom. I support as much freedom as possible for as many people as possible. I’m not stupid, I know that freedom, it’s a pricey thing, and we may not be able to afford it for everyone. And yet it is my goal.

To make the assumption that there ever has been or ever will be a single candidate or party or group that is capable of providing that freedom is ludicrous; to wait for the “Right person” to come along so you can vote for them is ignorant and insane, and to stay home in droves in a fit of pique is… well, it’s just not me.

Politics is a game of adults and children. A segment of the population has chosen the Government as the adults, and themselves as the children- and they are wrong to do so, of course, because Government hasn’t got the sense God gave cheese. And these people are not “them” they are, for the most part, us. Only mindset separates the sane from the insane, and nowhere is it more obvious than in Politics.

A game. A lot of people say that, but few of them know what it means. It means the politicians, far from being our masters, are our gamepieces. Tools we must use and control to gain an edge. Chesspieces on a chessboard, used to our advantage. Sometimes they are good pieces, with good moves, sometimes they are just pawns. But not to choose is to forfeit. If that’s what you want, that’s fine, but I have a few things vested in this Great Nation, and I’d like very much for it to thrive.

In the R primaries we had bad choices, because people worthwhile won’t run. Do you blame them? They get a smackdown from their opponents, they get ignored by the people who are supposed to be their base, and they are anally probed and raped by the press. Jesus Christ wouldn’t run for the R nomination in this country. So until the people who vote R are willing to get off their halfmoons, find a candidate worth voting for, and support him or her, and horsewhip all the character asassins in the press, we’re gonna get choices like Dole, McCain, Romney. That’s just a fact, like it or not.

The game is incrementalism,attrition and choice- and the choices, while for the most part, are horrible, they are clear. At each turning, you look at A or B, and say “Which one is more likely to do harm, and which is more likely to do good? Sometimes the choice isn’t that good, sometimes all you get is “which one will fuck this up the least”. Too many people look on this as some beauty contest, where the candidate has to meet their exact specifications or fuck off. I could give a shit about the candidates, and pretty much never have. I only care about whether they can ratchet back the progress the progressives have made (They are very good at playing this game, and most normal people don’t even know it IS one) or at least put a stake in the ground for a while until someone better suited comes along.

So here we are at the chessboard. Politics is just the game we play, win or lose. The stakes are freedom. And the fat lady hasnt sung yet, but it looks like this time we get to go to war with the mittens we have.