Ankle Bombs in Galesville 5/09/07

Every year I like to go somewhere I've never been for a few days just to change what I'm looking at and give myself a break. There's never any money for these little ventures so usually I just throw Squarepig in the truck and pick a town and drive to it. When we get there, we park the truck somewhere, and just start walking through a neighborhood and let whatever happen. Last month I went to Galesville on a sunny tuesday morning and started walking with Squarepig. It's a funny little town. There's one street that dead-ends down at the water with side streets branching off. There's only a few little businesses and they're all on this main road, with a couple of little churches. We turned down one of the little side streets and walked for about 10 minutes before we saw Mr. Simms sitting on his front porch. He waved and shouted something about Squarepig being a handsome animal. I just laughed and shouted "You don't look blind, but you must need your eyes checked something awful". He replied that his cataracts were like lookin' through jellyfish, but he knew a handsome animal when he saw one. He invited us up on his porch and we accepted. Squarepig knows that the best way to make a new friend is to present your back to them for a good scratching and Mr. Simms did not disappoint. His hands were all wrenched into festive shapes thanks to arthritis but they still knew their job. We sat and talked for an hour or so about things like fishing worms, the way things smell when the breeze blows in off the water and how they smell when it blows from the other way and his neighbors septic field isn't workin' right.
We talked for a long time, and about lunchtime, Mr. Simms told me to help myself to whatever was in the kitchen. I went inside and looked in his refrigerator for something tasty.
There was a open can of black olives with rust around the bottom, an open beer, a saucepan full of beans and something in a back corner that looked like all furry. Not moldy, real fur. As my stomach alternated between growling and rolling I remembered I had some leftover Twizzlers from breakfast. I like Twizzlers. They have a hole in them and you can sometimes use them like a straw. I went back out and sat with Mr. Simms.
"What are your neighbors like", I asked him. "There's an old woman on the right side that I visit every now and then, and a man on the left that I've never met but I've only seen him come out of his house a couple of times. I think he's got something wrong with his leg. He wears a black thing around his ankle that must me somethin' medical."
I knew it wasn't somethin' medical. Mr. Simms had a bad guy livin' next to him and that black thing was there to tell the police where he was all the time. I didn't tell that to Mr. Simms. His blood pressure would have blown his cataracts out. What I really didn't want to tell him was that for really bad guys those things are ankle bombs. And when the police need to stop a bad guy from doing something bad that detonate it. The groovy think is that they can control the splosion and just have it be like a fire cracker, or blow his ankle out, or blow his whole leg off depending on what he's gettin' ready to do. Like if he just went out into the street and started walking they'd hit him with a firecracker. But if he grabbed somebody or started hittin' Mr. Simms or somehtin, they'd toast his ankle. Anything worse than that just turns into a mess.
Here's a big idea. Most people we vote for to be President or whatnot, senators and such turn into bad guys. That's what you call a "historically accurate statement". I think when you become President or Mayor or whatnot you should be fitted with a ankle bomb. Now here's the cool part. The bomb would be controlled by a computer thing that had all the political promises this new public servant made fed into it's software. And when he did something that was contrary to a promise, or to something he promised not to do, the computer would ankle-bomb him. Say he promised not to leave any child behind, and make sure he funded school systems and whatnot. If he signed some bill that took away money from a school, he'd get fire-crackered until he picked up his pen and signed a check. Or if he started a war when he said he wouldn't unless he had to to protect the country, the computer would probably blow his ankle out. The computer would analyze statements for lies and whatnot, and everytime the public servant told one, well...ankle-bomb time. I think it's a really BIG IDEA.
The result would be that pretty quick politicians would stop making promises which is a stupid a thing for them to do since they hardly ever can control whether or not they can keep them. Then the computer would just be programmed to figure out whether the dude (or dudette) was doing a "good job", based on what we wanted out of them. I think there'd be a huge new market for ankle replacements. That would create a whole new medical industry factories for it and the economy would boom.
I don't mean to take this BIG IDEA too far, but there'd also be a huge market for home versions. If you fitted a child with one at the age of 5 or 6 you could control things like cussin' or havin' bad thoughts and lyin' . Then maybe when he was grown up he might run for President or King or whatnot and not even need an ankle-bomb.
I didn't tell Mr. Simms all this. He just wanted to have a nice day on his porch talkin' about the weather and the squirrels and such. I stayed there until the Twizzlers wore off and I was hungry again, and Squarepig and I made our goodbyes and went on down the street to continue our vacation

God and Free Will 5/08/07

I was sittin' on my front porch this evening talking to my dog Squarepig and I realized that I could be inside watchin' Howie Mandel or Dancing With the Stars or any of a number of other network television shows. I don't have cable and my antenna consists of a wire attached to the back of my 1984 RCA set. Anyway, I realized that I had chosen instead to spend my evening sipping a beer and talking to a dog. There wasn't another soul out, so I could talk as loud as I wanted. Squarepig likes to hear me talk. Sometimes I talk about politics a little , or music. She doesn't care what the subject is. Tonight I talked about American culture. Now you might look at me and think, "that throwback doesn't know anything about American culture." But you'd be wrong. I'm a observer. I watch how people live and how what we do changes everything else around us. Everything we do is like a ripple in a pond. Just me sittin' out here talkin' to Squarepig change how somethin' else might have happened. The guy across the street may have seen me sittin' here and decided he didn't want to go out and walk his dog for fear he might have to converse with me. Not an unfounded fear, as I might holler at him just to get a reaction. But his stayin' inside might have had any number of effects that I can't begin to imagine and each one of those effects caused somthing else to happen. Anyway, what I'm gettin' at is that I watch the way the things we do affect our culture. And like I was tellin' Squarepig, American culture ain't nothin' but broke. It mostly just consists of TV and internet now. I saw an article in the newspaper today that said 2 out of 5 three year olds have a TV in their rooms. What the heck for? Because it's part of our culture now to let the cable system educate and inform our kids. I don't have any kids myself, but I think I could teach a kid how to think a whole lot better than HBO can. Anytime I talk about to people about TV most of them say parents need to use the off button, and be in control of what their kids watch and that it's just a personal responsibility issue. But what that talkin' overlooks is that the parents who need to exercise that personal responsibility of raisin' their kids are mostly irresponsible idiots.
All in all, I think God kinda' screwed up when he gave folks free will. That's like givin' a gun to a maniac. Folks'll screw up free will in the end no matter what. When he gave us free will he should have given us access to some kind of inner guidance system. Like a Help button or something. I know, my Christian friends will say that's the Bible and the promise of salvation. But for most of us that's not a built-in thing. Somebody has to sit you down and talk you into lookin' at that. But the free will thing's there from the gitgo. Maybe he should have given us a little more of the guidance system with the free will. That might have saved a lot of bloodbaths and carnage since the beginning of time. Maybe not, I don't know. Squarepig has free will. He does stuff all the time that he just chooses to do, some of it stuff that he knows better than to do because it goes against what I've taught him. But he makes his own mind up about it. I think some dogs have more of an off the shelf guidance system than people.
Now don't get me wrong. I talk to God all the time. He and I have a very close deal goin'. But it took a lotta' years of nudgin' and proddin' to get me to see what the guidance system was. And it didn't come from my friends tellin' me I had to be saved and washed in the blood and whatnot. It come from me stubbin' my metaphorical toe a thousand times against what he was tryin' to show me to try and kick it out of the way and do what my free will wanted. After a while I began to think instead of tryin' to kick it out of the way, I might be better off pickin' it up and holdin' on to it.
Now how did I ramble off into this. I was suppose to kick you a BIG IDEA. Second day of the blog and I let the world down.

The First Big Idea 5/7/07

Hey, thanks for droppin' in on Harmless Jones!
This is what I'm talkin' about! BIG IDEAS. You'll find a bit o' news here now and then, but mostly you'll witness some deep thinkin' That's what I do. I'm a one man think tank. There's nothin' I like better than to push everything aside, kick back and have a big think. I'm king of the daydreamers. The lost art. Most of us have forgotten how to daydream and parents don't know how to teach it. If you take TV, the internet and the iPod away from most people they freeze. For a while anyway. I think most, unless they've been damaged by the thinkin' the machines have been doin' for them, will learn how to think again. Unfortunately, schools don't teach people how to think either. There oughta' be a class on thinkin'. Not just reasoning or critical thinkin', but navigatin' the pathways, rainbows and cesspools in our imaginations. But that's not a big idea, it's just an observation. Here's a BIG IDEA. Any BIG IDEA I put forth on this page is free for the taking. This is my gift to the world. If you see a BIG IDEA you like and you want to run with it and make it happen, go for it.
Now here's my first BIG IDEA. America needs a national food. We need a whole bunch of national things. But I think it's a good idea to start with food. Our culture has has gotten so blended and scattered that the only way to define American culture is to say "it's diverse". That's crap! That just means we don't have any focus and we're starting to dissolve into an indefinable moosh. That's not desirable. Once you start swirling all this diversity together all the sharp edges start gettin' rubbed off of it, and it's gettin' hard to see what made stuff seem so diverse in the first place. So I say it's time we started defining ourselves again and the best place to start is with what we put in our bellies. Personally, I think a great candidate for national food is the donut (or doughnut). Listen to my song "Song About a Donut" and I think you'll agree. Baby, this is pure American food. Don't give me any of that crap about the donut evolving from a beignet. We bore a hole in it baby. It's ours! Wassup!! you don't like the donut, how about oatmeal? Let's do Cheezits, or any of a variety of cheese-flavored snack foods. The pop tart might work if it weren't so manufactured. Or maybe that's what makes it American. We build food. We don't grow it anymore. Help me out here. I think this is one for Congress to tackle. They shouldn't be dealing with resolutions to end the Iraq war. They supported the resolutions and actions that took us there. They only move toward a decision when they face overwhelming pressure to do so. They supported the war because the pressure was on them to agree or look spineless and unpatriotic. Now they're all saying it was a mistake because to continue to support it makes them look as stupid and misguided as the President . Yeah, yeah, I know it's such a wonderfully designed system we have. Then why is it so frikkin' reactive. Let's do something proactive and designate a national food. I nominate the donut . That's what I'M talkin' about!