House Haiku

House on Rogers Road
Descanso Gardens outside
Gophers troll at will

First Day

The title of this post was about to become a reference to the last day of residence at Calavo. It was going to be titled, "Last Day," and the image in my mind was the scene from the movie, "Logan's Run, " with the crowd filing obediently amid the soothing public address.

First Day suits a look to the future.

I was screwing around on the Facebook, and put Anita online. That was weird. My page had feeds from her, and mutual friends to suggest. Like Rich, and Kelley. I just wanted to get around the moderators at Huffpo. I made a comment about Michael Moore's story on Thompson, and waited two days for it to appear, but they ended up deleting it. I believe I know the reason. Huffpo moderators must adhere to a ten to one ratio of liberal comments to conservative. Or they weight reported abuse more if the allegedly abusive comments are from a conservative commenter.

Doesn't matter. It was perfect. A female Hispanic, a real latina, who could be a conservative. A poetess. She lives, but has to lay low awhile. I would die of shame and embarrasment if one of my facebook friends thought I was messing around with them personally.

It is my last day of six in a row at work. And what a doozy we have! Two huge catering orders. Get the pissa dough out right away, and start the lasagna trays at ten-thirty. Have huge pots of boiling water going all day. Check.

Speaking of the facebook, I unfriended Kelley a few days ago. I could have blocked his news feed, but the news feeds would still be out there, tempting me, low hanging fruit. I blocked Ray's news feed, but still keep him as a friend. A facebook friend. Which has now penetrated enough aspects of our daily lives to acheive the tipping point.

Serenity Defense

Feeling very good today, Sunday, Father's Day. Friday and Saturday had to defend all day. I could tell as soon as I woke up that I would have anxiety attacks those days. They started small, and were barely perceptible. By the time I was at work they completely dominated me.

It was difficult to concentrate on my tasks. I was running about three-quarters, kind of in a fog. It was very discouraging and difficult to concentrate. I'm not even sure that I was experiencing classic panic attacks. I don't know how else to describe them.

That is why I titled this post, Serenity Defense. I don't want to be trapped in a prison of words. I want to be liberated. No person would be able to live a normal life, going through what I have. So far, the correlation between playing defense against these anxiety attacks and being at work is one hundred percent.

I can't quit my job, though. There is no way that this would be covered under W.C. Stress is part of everyone's job. Some minor abuse at work is probably a fact of life for the majority of us who work for wages.

The other day I had the insight that perhaps these defenses are part of a subconcious post-traumatic stress reaction. Familiar roles are being played by the hostile, abusive waitress (mother figure) and the engaging but virtually absent boss (father figure). The father figure fails to protect his charge from hostility because he is mostly blind to it, since the mother figure is capable of projecting saccharine sweetness when necessary.

Perhaps my issue is just an irregular heartbeat. The challenge would be to figure out whether it is life-threatening or not. It is not fluttering today. Friday after work, I went to the gym and spent twenty-five minutes on the stairs. Even though I warmed up, I never got my heart rate above 140. I repeated the ritual I learned as a teenager running cross-country. Completely expel my lungs with three or four exhalations to each sip of inhalation. Usually doing this once will adjust my blood CO2, reset my heart and allow me to get into a comfortable rythym.

This ritual proved ineffective, no matter how many times I tried it. I never got into a rythym on Friday. The effort did calm me down a bit, and Friday night was a bit more serene. When I arose Saturday, my heart started fluttering right away. I hit the gym and worked out for seventy minutes. Forty-five minutes of weights followed by twenty-five minutes of cardio. Again, I never got into a rythym.

Work was kind of a nightmare. I never have the other classic symptoms, like sweating or dizzyness. Just a heart rate that seems to skip a beat, then make up for it with a second hard beat and a third beat that is harder still. Repeated thousands of times. Dozens of times I tried to exhale completely in a pulsing rythym until I felt a reset, but it never took.

When I got home, I jumped into the pool and floated on a huge innertube, staring at the bottom. The colliding surface waves refracted bright sunshine as intertwined strands and cords of pure light on the bottom of the pool. They crashed against each other violently and I closed my eyes. When I opened them a few moments later, the refracted rays were bouncing a bit more slowly against each other. I closed my eyes again and again, until the bottom was a diffuse pattern of calmly undulating rays. I could see a spider on the bottom of the pool. About two feet below the surface, a single particle of vegetation hung weightless in suspended motion.

Two Thumbs Down

Way down. Film critic Roger Ebert has weighed in on the immigration debate. On Cinco de Mayo, five students from Morgan Hill were suspended for wearing clothing with American flag designs. Roger twittered that those students should be "forced to share a lunch table with students who wear the hammer-and-sickle on the Fourth of July."

This argument is flawed on so many levels, and reflects such a child-like level of reasoning, that I am stunned. The man is a film critic, not a political scientist. There is no reason he should be commenting on the 'hammer-and-sickle,' symbol of international communism. Unless he is commenting on some deleted scenes from "Red Heat," or "Red Dawn," he avoid communism. Unless there is some lunchroom scene in "Gorky Park," that I missed, the man knows very little about communism, and should keep his mouth shut.

Which would be difficult, since he has no more lower jaw. Now he has the figurative jawbone of an ass. The only way his analogy makes sense, is if those Morgan Hill students were to time-travel back to 1985, then hop a trans-continental flight to the Soviet Union. Then they could feel the shame of being an 'outsider' at a lunch table with little commie students, who would be wearing the hammer-and-sickle. Not that anyone would have any choice about what insignia they could wear, let alone the ability to complain openly about it.

Stick to movie reviews, Ebert. I'm done with you. I would have preferred to not know the level of your ignorance, and emotional immaturity. I just want to know what you think about "Iron Man 2." Not anymore. Have a great life, and enjoy sucking your dinner through a straw for the rest of your life.

Regina

I just got home from work. I am shaking with what I believe to be an anxiety attack. I hurried through my tasks and left early, just so I wouldn't have to face Regina. I don't have anything to be anxious or afraid about. My beloved father passed last year, and left me enough money to buy a house, for cash. I believe that I will have to go on medication to control this anxiety.

For several months, I have been suffering severe upset stomach. I have eliminated every food imaginable, hoping that I was suffering a food allergy. I will be seeing a doctor within the next few weeks to confirm that I don't have an ulcer or worse. I believe at this point it is stress-related.

I believe that there is a middle ground that her and I can come to, and continue to work together. I would like to understand what it is, that I have done, that has so upset her. I have never raised my voice to her in anger. There was one time three years when I used profanity in her presence, but it was not directed at her. I try and always say, "Please," when calling her orders.

What do I get in return? She has never once returned my hello greeting at work. I have greeted her hundreds of times with no reply. She may claim indifference to me in general, but that is outright hostility. I have put thousands of her orders through the window, cheerfully, without so much as a single thank you.

I believe that a hostile, abusive workplace harms everyone around. I also believe that there is a peripheral negative effect on customers. She operates on a principle of shame, not dignity. If there is a problem in a relationship involving her, then it is the other parties's fault, in no way her own. This is why I have held out hope that if I keep improving my attitude, then eventually, it will rub off on her. At the very least, I would be able to hold my head up and feel that I tried.

Unfortunately, about a week ago, I crossed a bridge with her that I cannot un-cross. It involves a story about her that another server told me. I won't repeat it in this letter, but I was deeply offended, and saw her in her true light, or lack thereof.

Perhaps my anxiety is about my fear of keeping myself in check, being afraid of saying something I can't take back. Sounds about right. Anyway, please keep in mind the possibility of a meeting of the minds, as it were. I believe it will make all the difference.

Indoctrination, Interrupted

Dennis Prager says that it is possible that a person could go their entire life without being exposed to a single conservative idea or principle. School-children are indoctrinated rather than educated. They are taught to feel compassion for animals and the environment, but not personal responsibility. Then they attend liberal institutions of higher education, to earn their B.A.'s, M.A.'s, and PhD's. The rest of their lives are filled with exposure to liberal friends, culture, and media.

I was on track to become one of these people. As a child, I was riding in my father's car, and we passed a police station. A black man was being taken out of a patrol car by an officer. Since I was taught very early on by my liberal mother that black people were victims of society and poverty, I offered to my father, "He probably just stole a loaf of bread." He was incensed, and let me know, gently, that there was no way I should assume that.

Too bad for me that I didn't have a father in the home until I was already in high school. When I was in college, Ronald Reagan was elected. The left constantly portrayed him as a trigger-happy moron, so I voted for the other guy. About a year or two into Reagan's first term, my father took us on a ski trip to Mammoth. I liked to go off on my own, pressing my skill on the black diamond runs.

On one lift, I rode with a gentleman who brought the conversation around to politics. He said he was glad that Reagan was President, because we shouldn't be giving welfare to able-bodied people. "They should be working like the rest of us, if they can." I agreed with that, inside of my heart of hearts.

It wasn't until my final Economics class in senior year that I was exposed to a conservative point of view by a professor. I went to U.C. San Diego, which is to the right of Berkeley and Columbia, but left of just about everyone else. My professor was this thin, bald guy in his forties. He liked to put three or four packets of sugar in his styrofoam cup of coffee before class. The subject of executive compensation came up. Somewhere in my heart, I believed that to grub for money was kind of dirty. I knew that I was preparing myself for a career of some sort, but I still had no idea what kind of work I wanted to do. Maybe a management position, if not graduate school.

The idea that C.E.O.'s were all grossly overpaid had been drummed into all of our heads. My professor mentioned one executive who made $300,000 per year, and the classroom let out a collective 'tsk-tsk.' These individuals were responsible for earning a return of investment on the resources placed in their trust, he pointed out. That amount is commensurate with the value of those resources. This was a radical idea to the classroom, one that had never been considered. And these were all Economics majors. Had it not been for that one professor, one never knows what kind of political ideology I would gravitate toward. I like to identify with my father, so I like to think my drift toward libertarian/conservative would have been inevitable, but you never know...

The Not So Green Zone

After two weeks of release, Matt Damon's movie, "Green Zone," is out of the top five in revenues. So much for word of mouth propelling ticket sales. That was about all the movie could count on after it's dismal opening. A movie like that needs to open huge, over fifty million dollars at least, and it did a quarter of that.

All I can say, is, Matt, you had it coming. You rock your anti-Sarah Palin views all you want, just keep them to yourself. And keep the fraudulent history of Howard Zinn out of your movies. I get the message: If you read and believe Howard Zinn, then you are a genius, just like your character. Was that the whole point of the movie?

I think Hollywood should go back to the old studio system. In the old days, the stars had publicists who were their mouthpieces, and the dreck that preoccupies them was never known by the public. I think Damon will be okay. His career is on a trajectory that one bad movie cannot derail. The movie will make up some of it's losses on DVD sales. The fact is, that this movie is a huge money-loser, costing over two hundred million. Whoever green-lighted this bumper sticker against Bush 43 should lose his or her job. Or worse. This movie provides more propaganda for the radical jihadi than Abu Ghraib. Both are scandalous, and should have been prevented from happening.

Meshugas

The United States House of Representatives has passed a two-thousand, seven hundred page bill in the name of health care reform. I have imposed a total news blackout on myself. No live television or radio since getting off work yesterday. I knew the dreck was going to be passed, so there was no self-delusion. I couldn't bear the proceedings, like watching Ohio State getting mauled by Florida in the championship game, magnified by a billion. Or, in this case, several trillion.

The central argument seems to be whether health care is a right. I certainly believe access to health care is a right: nobody should be turned away from a medical provider. The leftist side of the debate skipped that reality and asserted, instead, that health care should be subsidized or free, that the government should take care of its citizens. Should brain surgery be free, or just checkups? Should my medication be free, even if I have to take twenty different kinds?

Mazel Tov! No citizen with pre-exisiting conditions can be turned down for an insurance policy. Does this mean that I can wait until the house is on fire, then purchase a homeowner's policy? That is not insurance. That will only guarantee that the insurance company will lose money. Within ten years, insurance companies will be regulated utilities or bankrupt, and the country of the United States of America will have socialized medicine.

Countless millions of human beings haven't risked life and limb to come to our shores because of the medical care. The come here because there is an opportunity for anyone to acheive their dreams if they work hard, since this nation is a meritocracy. The left doesn't like that, however. They dream of equality for all. Even if it means equally crappy crap for everyone, because they will be in their ivory tower deeming the size, shape and quantity of crap that everyone should receive.

The media blackout will lift at nine a.m., because I want Rush to break the news to me. Or Dennis. The only emotion I can identify right now is utter dejection, and desolation.

Death Knell of the Republic

I cannot shake the image of Pelosi's shit-eating grin from the gavel photo last night. She looked like the cat who swallowed the canary as she prepared to bring down the gavel on the House. I'll give her her due, a potent legislator.

Clueless as all hell, but potent. I hope and pray that HR 3962 hits the Senate floor with the same sickening thud as Waxman-Markey, and begins to languish and die. I will concede that the House is full of leftocrats and socialists, and any bill is possible there, as long as it contains a few hundred new bureacracies.

This is not about health care, this is about power. This is about the federal government wanting control over every facet of our lives, and liberty.

The spending estimates of this bill were a joke. No mainstream journalist mentioned that the fees begin immediately, while the services don't even begin for five years. That is the only way the ten year estimate came in sounding so reasonable. To them.

This president campaigned on a promise of bipartisanship. Will that be loudly proclaimed since one 'Republican' voted for the bill? Would not be surprised. More likely though, is the inevitable crowing by the other side. They are not good winners. They did not want bi-partisanship, they just wanted to win, and pat themselves on the back. And continue to marginalize anyone who believes in the Constitution, limited government, and liberty.

So today, I am a poor loser. I have that angry, cheated feeling from losing a fight that I know was a good fight, a moral fight. I don't care about any abortion amendments. If and when the bill becomes law, any anti-abortion language will be struck down by our activist judiciary.

The day when it becomes illegal to not have health insurance, as you sit in your own home as a private citizen, is fast approaching.....

Too Soon?

The Michael Jackson Memorial Circus hit the Staples Center today. I caught part of the telecast while I worked the stairmaster at the gym. Even Fox News got into the act. Today, there are United States soldiers fighting and dying in Afganistan. Iran is about to obtain a nuclear weapon. North Korea warns of our annihilation. Unemployment is nearing ten percent. And Fox News considers this spectacle "newsworthy." Guess they can't afford to get scooped on the freak show by CNN or MSNBC.

The broadcast showed aerial shots of Los Angeles, as the vehicle bearing the casket plied downtown streets. Then there were several images of people milling around outside the arena. One, in particular, a young woman wearing a wife-beater, sporting colorful tatoos all over her shoulders and arms.

I wonder why they feel the need to drag the gilt-encased carcass all over the place. The memorial service is for the living, not the deceased. Perhaps the people involved believe there are special powers intrinsic within the coffin. There has been some hyperbole surrounding this person's passing. While the image of him dangling his baby out of a hotel room window is burned into my mind, there are clearly some people who have elevated him to Christ-like levels.

Thus, they shouldn't bury him. They should tote him around like some modern day ark. He could smite the enemies of any who bore him. Who would dare oppose them? Perhaps he would start to get a little gamey, no matter. Natural decomposition would actually be an improvement for his gruesome appearance.

Johnny Depp is an Ass

Saw the movie, "Public Enemies," on the fourth. It had all the weapons, the cars, the clothes, and all the nineteen-thirties atmosphere. There was one scene where the bad guys were breaking out of a bank, and the lookout unloads his BAR into a police cruiser, just shredding it. What a terrifying weapon. And the shootout at Little Bohemia was a study in popping and flying lead and splinters.

I'll see a movie with Johnny Depp in it. He's a good actor. He hasn't earned a permanent spot on my shit list, yet, like so many Hollywood types. The types that feel that they need to let us all know what their political identity is all about. Invariably it's a little to the left of center. Like Kevin Spacey, who slobbers all over Hugo Chavez. Susan Sarandon. I won't watch them for free, and will never knowingly pay to see them.

Even Matt Damon, who so jealously guards his family's privacy, can get a little squirrely now and then. He is afraid of anyone who has any spiritual faith, apparently. He felt the need to mock Sarah Palin, saying, "I hope she doesn't believe dinosaurs were roaming the earth four thousand years ago."

Johnny Depp is just plain wrong. He was wrong in 2003 when he said, "America is dumb, it's like a dumb puppy that has big teeth that can bite and hurt you, aggressive." He continued, "My daughter is four, my boy is one. I'd like them to see America as a toy, a broken toy. Investigate it a little, check it out, get this feeling and then get out."

Why do I need to know anything about Johnny Depp other than what his next movie will be? Is he a master of political science and history? Does being a rich actor qualify him in some way to pass judgement on the nation that gave him his start?

I saw him being interviewed last week, on the eve of the release of his new movie. He was asked what he thought about playing the role of John Dillinger. He responed that he believed that, "John Dillinger was one of us. This was when things were a lot like they are today, when banks were the enemies."

Excuse me, but I don't think the title, "Public Enemies," refers to banks. Banks loan money to people to start businesses and buy homes. Those people agree to forfeit something if they are unable to repay. Nothing personal, it's just business. And personally, I am nothing like Dillinger, and none of my friends or family are, either. Nobody I know has ever gunned down anyone. Those policemen he murdered were human beings, guarding us against the barbarians. When a policeman goes off to work, he has a natural right to return safely to his loved ones. Same as anyone, including Johnny Depp.