People that climb up to the top of tall buildings all say the same thing: that we look like ants from there.
A week ago I noticed an elderly lady in an orange vest bent over cutting weeds that were growing up through the cracked cement a couple of blocks from my house.
I wasn't sure if she was a paid city employee, or perhaps serving community service; but I'm giving her the benefit of the doubt and assuming she's an employee, not some klepto-granny.
Let me set the scene.
It's a little triangle of empty, beat-up, neglected urban blight next to a typical, charmless overlook of the LA river, no more than thirty feet across at its widest, with a similiar topography to the moon, fissures and craters everywhere. It's my wish to convince the city to plant a couple of trees there, maybe put a statue too, something to be proud of, and some benches. We should create a place where old men could gather to watch the world go by, or disaffected youth could smoke cigarettes there and talk about emo rock, I don't know, the type of little urban space they have back east in Boston, New York, and in Europe.
The thing that stuck out about the scene was the little old lady was cutting the weeds with a normal pair of scissors, and only had a small bachelor pad-sized trashcan with her that looked like it would fill up in 10 minutes, that's it. No one else was out there either and I didn't see a truck with more equipment nearby. She was woefully lacking in resources I thought.
A weed-wacker would take care of that corner in 10 minutes.
A couple of days later I saw her again, still working the same patch of cement from before, a job that a normal healthy man or woman could have finished in two hours probably.
It was sad, tragic even, but a bit humorous too.
I've said it before, there should be a word for that type of dual feeling that's so fucking prevalent these days, that common reaction to social situations and circumstances -- initially mirthful and light but transcending into sorrow and guilt, you don't know whether you should laugh or cry -- like when you see a real crazy, flailing, animated homeless dude shoutin' at shadows.
And just today I pass by and she's there again!
It looks like she is finished now as the area was free of weeds. It took a whole week, but she did it. I'm not sure if I find it sweet, and I'm glad the lady has a job, or if I am mad that our tax dollars are going to pay someone to take a week to complete a job that should be done in half a day.
So I thought about a situation, a hypothetical one.
A moral conundrum if you will.
Propose the savings from eliminating the old lady's job would save the city enough money to install some benches and some trees and give the neighborhood something to enjoy, making nothing from something. Her productivity is terrible and her employment is a form of honorable welfare. If a slacker kid worked that slow he would be fired after one week.
I'm just saying.
Bless her heart.
Now say the city would be willing to do it it too, just the old lady loses her job. And it's up to you to decide.
The benefit to the neighborhood would reach thousands of people in a small, intangible way, however their lives will be much the same with or without the benches; yet the lady will certainly be facing real hardship, perhaps extreme poverty.
But the benches will be there for years and years, for future generations, for the multitude, and it will make the neighborhood a better place, and the old lady might be able to find another job too, who knows?
But she will definitely be out of a paycheck come next week.
What would you do?
If you go for the greatest good you build the benches. Right? Spread out over time, in tiny increments that add up, more happiness is brought to more people. It's simple mathematics.
But if you go for the greatest need you let the old lady keep picking those weeds. She needs her job more than the residents need a bench they never had and probably had never even thought about. (except for me) And that's real.
What do you do?
I'm just askin'?
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I believe a work of grass
is no less than the
journey-work of the stars
- Walt Whitman
Think of good-old Walt next time you enjoy a nice glass of wine -- which is no less the journey-work of the sun breathing life to the vines that hang the grapes.
A good bottle of wine should reflect the region the grape was grown in: the amount of rain, the richness of the soil, the slant of the hillside, even if there were boulders scattered amid the vineyard.
Ponder that!
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The people are dying to know. They're protesting in the streets, clamoring for word.
Who's the baby's daddy???
Seriously, who gives a shit?
I wonder if the same people that are outraged about Don Imus care about Anna Nicole Smith? If those demographics overlap? They must: that is all that the news focused on today.
I guess, because there is so much peace in the world, we have all this time to obsess over the words and fortunes of such insignificant little fireflies caught in the jar of celebritihood.
All they are are pixels to fill up the television screen.
The only time I come across Imus is when I'm drunk and and I'm drifting in and out of sleep and I forget the TV is on and I snap to and then suddenly there he is in my bedroom in a stupid cowboy hat looking like any minute he might fall asleep too and that's right when I dig in the sheets for the remote and turn the damn thing off.
And since when did anyone take what he said seriously? And was that worse than what hundreds of fools say on the radio everyday? I think it has something to do with the fact that respectable people go on his show and it gives a baffoon like that too much ligitimacy.
That's the flip-side to the dumbing down of America: as meaningful discourse is drained from the public sphere reptilian media hacks like Imus, with enough of a sizable audience up at dawn's buttcrack, are elevated into a realm of seriousness that they certainly don't deserve.
Imus is old. He's a relic. Nothing he says matters.
Still, he should be fired. Mostly because the man can't dress.
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Watching The US vs. John Lennon I'm impressed by Lennon's simplification of the peace message and how he basically created the language we still use today at protests and such. He had a sage philosophy. True-Communication he called it. The bed-ins and such. The world is a simple place of love.
Give Peace a Chance.
War is over! If you want it.
Imagine there's no religion.
While watching the documentary I was also amazed at Yoko Ono's ability to never blink.
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One of the most difficult things for a human brain to comprehend, arguably the hardest - the question that even atheists give up on explaining - is infinity: the idea that the universe never ends.
I swear, when I think about it I get a freezing pain in my head like I just beer-bonged a slurpee.
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Some people collect time in a bottle
I collect it at ARTOFSTARVING.COM