Tuesday, November 13, 2007

Avina...

Out in the big wide open valley
Things can happen like anywhere
But the openness gives it a lonelier feel somehow
And then the thing can be so bad so evil
Sends the mind reeling at the savagery
Inhuman acts in desolately beautiful place
A young woman her name was Avina
Saw her story in the morning paper
Then happened upon a friend of hers today
Guess her life wasn't easy wasn't clear wasn't all it should be messed up in bad stuff
Knew some bad people
Got her drugs from them owed them some money
Seven hundred and fifty dollars an 8-ball of dope her friend tells me
I don't even know what that is
Others said crystal meth
That stuff that turns humans into savage animals
One more proof
They wanted their money they lured her to a faked robbery
In our town 15 blocks away
They took her tied her up with plastic ties put her in a car trunk
Out into the open country to the south
About a mile from where I pass each week
They dowsed her with kerosene
They set her on fire left her in an old boat
What was that doing out there?
Burned her beyond recognition 95 percent 3rd degree
Somehow somehow she stays alive
Somehow she walks blackened figure plastic ties melted into her
A mile a mile the wonder of the human spirit
Collapses in a yard
Farm workers come upon what they think is a Halloween decoration
Some black ghostly thing
It is a person and still living
Until 2 days later you know like those tough episodes on ER
Heard the guys who did it got caught gonna do maximum time or more
Good I let God take care of them
My thoughts go to a person
I really don't care about the messed-up life part life can get pretty messed up
Mind just reels at the evil humans can do
One more time
And rejects the bullshit about some sort of innate goodness of us all
While someone like Avina is treated so
And human life now has an official exact price hurry while supplies last
Seven hundred and fifty dollars

O God help us deliver us from evil for Thine is the Kingdom

Would I have written this if she had just been stabbed or simply shot?
You know as in normal regular desensitized lower-the-bar evil?
Probably not and that is the perversity of it

May somehow her life be given value and preciousness even so
She had a name
Avina





Friday, November 09, 2007

Back?...



They say the blogosphere is just a place where where folk can rant on and on about stuff....Who are these morons, and maybe somebody ought to boycott them, I'm sick and tired...oh, sorry!...I remember this (blog) spot, that place we used to go in a pre-Facebook world (some of us just never quite made the myspace leap, and so our pop music careers will remain the unrealized dreams that never were)...My son and I customized this template, chose the colors, and for a while I met a few folk here...I think right now there must be at least 4 people who come here anymore: Johannes, Sam, Lisa, Patrick, Claire--wait! That's five...We've all been having a real party over on Facebook, and it really is a lot of fun, the communication is lively, stimuating, I like it a lot...Especially seeing people's photos..And communication takes place in nice, crisp, precise short sentences...So that's not really the place for l-o-o-o-o-o-o-n-g editorials on Al Gore or indeed the death of hip-hop...But they better not push the commercial advertizing thing too far in Facebookville, or some of us will simply move on...We want a break from someone trying to sell us stuff or pretending life is one endless all-night party for hot singles spending weekends on Grand Cayman...Cultural snobbism...I'll settle for a jazzy evening with friends who like where and who they are just fine...Stockholm, Palo Alto, Corvallis, Lycksele, Lyon, Turlock, Santa Cruz, or wherever...Tropical islands seem over-rated, boring weather, ugly shirts...I'll take Monterey!...

Hey, some tank-ship just, and of course these things can happen, gashed itself on a pillar of the Bay Bridge and now 60,000 gallons of "heavy fuel" has spread all over beautiful San Francisco Bay, tarring up coastland, killing animals, and just 10 days before a friend of mine visits us from Sweden!...Ah, nature has quite the power from the Creator to renew-repair itself, as it/she has before in lots worse, plus human ingenuity, but still: It makes one stop and feel angry and slightly nauseous about the lifestyles and cultures and living standards that require tankship-loads of this crap (this "crap" being necessary for our lives as we have decided they must be lived) by the mondo-millions of gallons to criss-cross ecosytems, oceans, rivers, to (and I realize I'm oversimplifying) pump into our Texaco stations to fill our did-you-notice-my-pimped-out-shiny-Hummer/monster F250 pickup?...

Here in California, which I dearly love by the way, you see that, inherent in American wider culture, is an agreed-upon tolerance for showing off, that is noticeably absent in other cultures I've lived in, or at least less present...If enough people in a society agree that certain things just are over the edge and unacceptable, only the rare instance of it occurs...I'm not for conformism, but it is fascinating what level of all-out in-your-face showing off is accepted here: It's perfectly fine to cruise around the Central Valley in a monster jacked-to-the-sky Chevy crew-cab with fully room under it for use as a covered shelter for the local homeless, its bumper at the level of my Honda Civic roof, everyone knowing that it is partially responsible for those tankerloads of the aforementioned petro-crap in the Bay, that it will never leave the asphalt to get sand on the Armoralled moon-tires...Clearly, looking stupid is, collectively agreed, OK, that's seriously part of a free society, and I'm not knocking that, just makes for hilarious sights even while cormorants suffocate off Hunter's Point and coastal peoples everywhere see their lives and livelihoods irreparably altered...

But no ranting on the blog, please!...Don't even get me started on the big bad yellow Hummers...

Here's some places I haven't been to and want to go: Tokyo, Shanghai, Mexico City, Baja California, Greenland, Nordkapp Norway, Crimea, Nigeria, Rwanda, South Africa, India, Nunavut, Miami, Morocco, Tierra del Fuego...Let's do it!...If your country is not on here, don't worry, it will be...Got the World-is-so-Big-Itch, no cortisone, please!...