Winters First Light

…And in that moment
when through a break,
amid the clouds
and above the lake,
upon the horizon
the last sun light,
first seen that day
since the longest night,
all the beauty of god
kissed my face
and for a fleeting instant
I was touched by grace.

Quote of the Day

"22 Frets and 6 strings is a gateway to infinity"

Butterflies, Moonbeams and Razor Blades

Ok, Ok, I know, all my most recent posts have been biting and acerbic at best. Today, I will try to write something lighter. Uhm, lets see……Puppies, er, candy canes….. Ok, good start. What else? Oh, yeah, I know….. Christmas blah blah blah. Wait, no, not quite right, sorry. Twinkling lights…stars…. clouds and sleet... wait, no veered off course there. This is harder than I thought. Must think happy thoughts! Must… er…. Ow! Flowers! OK, flowers is good, Sunshine on my shoulder…Uhm, is plagiarism OK? Think, think think….Sugar plum fairies. Hey, if they don’t tell, I won’t ask and what a consenting adult does with sugar plums is their business! Clowns, clowns are good right? Ok, not the pervy ones or the ones that live in sewers, but the kind where hundred of them come out of the little car. No? CUT ME SOME CLACK WILL YA!? I’m trying here! Warm fires ( not burning down anyone’s home )……… Money, who doesn’t like money right?........Uhm, ..........goats, there kinda cute………..More flowers, the kind that don’t cause allergies………………………….......................................................
………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….. “POOF”.

9 11

A pall of darkness is upon us
veiling this moment of morning.
The first night of many last days,
that struck at our heart without warning.
Tonight the stars themselves are still
and silence ripped from our tongues.
Everything seems so inconsequential now
as we wait for word that never comes.
It’s as if our plow shares have turned against us
and truth itself now lies
beneath a pile of steel and stone
over which only Old Glory flies.
Clouds and grey rain may gather and burst
and mighty pillars fall
but when the thunder and lightening descend
the storm breaks upon us all.

SURVIVAL OF THE BARELY ADEQUATE.

Recently, I have had the displeasure of having to deal with several local and state government agencies. Whenever I do, I walk away with the same puzzling questions on my mind as, “Who hired these people”? and “How do they remain employed”?

In these experiences, I can’t help but believe that human beings have evolved to the point of devolution, as evidenced by the people with whom I have come into contact. No longer are we bound by the rules of having to adapt or perish. Today, with our modern society and technology, all sorts of people can survive, thrive, and more freightingly, procreate; passing on their sordid DNA to their misbegotten spawn. Generation after generation of such individuals must have passed to bring us the level of low-brow intelligence which is attracted to employment at, say, the DMV or Planning and Zoning.

In a competitive market environment, embodied by such shows as “Apprentice” and “Hells Kitchen”, which are enjoyed by millions of TV viewers”, the barely adequate don’t stand a chance. However, they have adopted other survival strategies, such as the labor union, unemployment and the Family Medical Leave Act. Basically, the price to be paid for running a successful business is having to foot the bill for a bunch of people who otherwise would have no way of making a living, unless they work for the Tax Assessors Office or maybe the cable company maybe.

What kills me is that if I spoke to some of my employees the way that Donald Trump, or that Chef guy, talks to his employees, they’d run screaming to the EEOC complaining about a hostile work environment. Many of these people are the same people who watch these shows and admire the “Boss” stars for their hard-nosed business ethic.

I’m not expecting a lot, you understand, only the ability to function at a level that an unschooled child could muster. I’m talking about people who lack the social skills to say, “hello”, cant add, subtract or multiply without a calculator ( if they know how to work that ) or the ability to do more than one project at a time per day, your basic stuff. The mystery is how they get hired in the first place. Once they’re in a job however, they hold on like a tick and after 15 years they are somehow in charge by default. My father in law calls this people “glorified baggers” the people in a grocery store who start out as baggers but end up being the store manager for no other reason they were the only person still around.

Heck, I guess even the D+ student has to eat. I hear that the state may be lifting its hiring freeze again. Bon appetite!

Americana Christmas

Americana is alive and well. At least in the small town of Burlington, CT where, for the last 23 years, they have celebrated Christmas in a style reminiscent of something out of a Norman Rockwell painting. With the high school band doing their best to play in the down-right cold night air, the town selectman, Theodore “Teddy” Schiedel lit the town green Christmas tree with the traditionally New England white Congregational church for a backdrop. Afterwards, native daughter Lynn Gresh-Whittaker sang and led the 200 or so assembled carolers through several verses off the well known holiday classics. The children clustered in the front to lend their voices and unique interpretations to many of the songs, while many of the parents huddled for warmth around the fire provided by the local fire department. Later, with the refrain of “Santa Clause is Coming to Town” filling the air, Santa himself arrived, not on a sleigh, but aboard a very modern, and very shiny, fire truck. Candy canes were distributed along with hot cocoa and cookies thanks to the Burlington Town Ladies Auxiliary. The historic tavern was opened for the evening and well lit, adding to the overall festive mood. All in all, except for the fire truck, this was a scene that anyone living within the past several hundred years would have recognized as a quintessentially American celebration of Christmas.

Spock is Wrong

We humans consider ourselves generally to be rationale beings and pride ourselves on the power of intellect. However from time to time we are reminded of how our logic is limited. Perhaps this has happened to you, you find yourself in a situation that does not make any sense and you wonder how you arrived there. So, you mentally retrace each of your steps and while each one seems to be logical it takes you right back to where you were, a place that you do not want to be.

Perhaps with map in hand you sat in your car, lost, and tried to figure where you are and how you got there. I would argue that our war in Iraq is another example, each decision point made sense, at the time, but now in hindsight, it doesn’t make sense at all. I consider this an example of taking logic to its illogical conclusion. I believe that if one follows the strict rules of rational thinking long enough it takes you to a weird place where those rules break down or become meaningless.

For example, answer this question, where is the end of up? We all know what up means. If you throw something in the air, it goes up and then comes back down. Simple. However, if you keep going up, you eventually transgress our relatively thin atmosphere and find yourself in space. In space there is no UP. Up is a relative point. It is wherever you want it to be. We have taken logic to its illogical conclusion where the question itself ceases to make sense. Moreover, it may be nearly impossible to define the exact point, that exact moment, when one passes into the zone of illogic!

Strict adherents to rational thought might start to panic at this point. Of course, they would have all sorts of rationalizations as to why I am wrong. But there is no reason why logic and illogic can’t live harmoniously. Chaos theory shows us that what appears to be chaos is often a larger and more complex pattern, a different type of sense, than we had previously imagined. Logic alone can’t explain the world, because it is as limited as we are. Therefore, I beseech you, question your logic! Embrace the nonsensical! “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy”.

T.S.F.T.P.O.B.G.A.T.P.F.C.A.T.

There is a problem in our society today. We do not have enough committees and task forces coming together to solve the problem of not enough committees and task forces. This is a serious threat to our social fabric and continued standard of living. What we need are more government agencies working in partnership with non-profits and invested stakeholder groups to provide education and outreach on the need for more partnerships, more education and more outreach. I propose that they be comprised of retired elderly persons with no understanding of how things actually work today and no formal education coupled with late blooming, woman who were previously stay at homes moms, who have now gotten their masters degree in social work. These groups can form a symbiotic ad hoc working group to ensure the valorization of outcome based initiatives, while maintaining measurability and culturally configured ontological schematization. I propose that they meet three nights a week for four hours a night over cheap cookies and cold coffee while discussing how they feel about things. They can be chaired by zealous, socially limited, do-gooders who are planning to vote for Hillary Clinton. Their acronym can be T.S.F.T.P.O.B.G.A.T.P.F.C.A.T. ( The Society For The Preservation of Big Government and the Partnership for Committees and Task Forces ). Each groups working agency sub group, of which there will be one in each community, will need an infusion of approximately 10 million dollars of working capital, most of which will go to creating forms and unfunded mandates. Only then will this threat to special interest groups and fiscally irresponsible management be eradicated, ensuring the continued standard of living that disabled minority women who are on FMLA and workers compensation now enjoy.

The Guillotine

How small is a moment?
This instant has
already happened,
before you
know it.
We are forever
living the past.

The blade falls.
I hear it
slice the air.
I feel it rumble
like thunder.
My heart thumps
between the tock
and tick in the space
between the hands
of the clock.
My time
counts down
in seconds split
fine as hair.
But I never feel
this second
I never know
this minute
in motion stopped,
when I am done,
eyes heavenward.

The blade holds
the still life scene
in reflection.

Life List

This is an ever growing list of things I would like to do while I still inhabit this world.

Hike to Everest base camp
Swim with Dolphins
Stay at a primitive hut on a secluded island
Write a book
Fly in a sail plane
Fly a hang glider
Parachute jump
Learn to speak Spanish
Learn to play the guitar well
Build my own home
Have a mini-farm with Llamas and horses
Visit a Buddhist country
Kayak with icebergs
Walk on a glacier
See a total solar eclipse
Stay in a rustic cabin for Xmas
Learn to sail
Have snowmobiles/ATV
Learn to play the bass guitar
Have a boat
Go to a retreat at a monastery
See a volcano erupt
Stay at that cool hotel in Glacier National Park ( The Windsor, the Prince, something like that )
Learn to ski/snowboard
Try golf
Visit: Hawaii, Patagonia, Bermuda ( cruise ) Nepal, Israel ( as soon as peace occurs ),
Japan, Alaska
Go to the Olympics
See the Space Shuttle launch.............

Locus of Control

The age old conundrum, do we have free will or are we completely bound by fate, arose recently for me in some poignant and pointed conversations. When discussing with one friend the recent ill begotten series of events that befell another, that friend said to me, “well that person obviously made some bad choices”. Me, personally, I have never subscribed to the complete internal locus of control theory nor the complete external locus of control theory. One of my axioms is, “Life is 50% what you make of it and 50% what comes your way”, or put another way sometimes shit happens to you.

Where you are born and to whom plays a big role. It is one thing to be born in a white upper class family in the US and another thing entirely to be born to a poor family in New Delhi. Now, unless you subscribe to some sort of esoteric spiritual explanation, which I am willing to discuss but not endorse, a child has no control over these factors. To me, this alone disproves that we have complete control over our lives. I sometimes think about all the violin virtuosos out there who we will never know about because they have never had the opportunity to play a violin, where is personal choice there? On the other hand, to say that we are at all times and in all ways fated to an outcome beyond our control makes no sense to me either. For example, I can decide to quit my job at this second and there is nothing any external force can do about it. Again, one may argue that on some unseen cosmic level, it was already written that I would do so, but in the absence of some proof, hint or even a clue that such things are the case, it seems a more realistic and pragmatic thing to believe that I do at least have some form of control. If I don’t think in this way then suicide makes sense, because if I kill myself I was destined to do so, so why not?

Now, the question becomes, to what degree do we have control or are controlled? How much does nature play a role vs. nurture, as scientists are fond of asking? I don’t know and if I did know, I certainly wouldn’t have the space to write about it here. Suffice it to say, that I disagree and agree with my friend at the same time (who by the way was born, in my estimation with a silver spoon in her mouth and has, like Siddartha been kept away from many of the ills of this world). I will accede that my other friends’ woes are partly his fault, but at the same time, sometimes shit happens and sometimes it just happens to you.

Everything I Ever Learned About Management I learned from My Dog

• Everything I Ever Needed To Know About Management I Learned From My Dog.
  Copyright Scott Whittaker
  · Dogs need training. A dog who does not know basic obedience is often a nuisance, and perhaps a danger to themselves or others. People need training too.
  · Dogs need attention/time from their people. Spend time with your people!
  · Dogs need socialization with other dogs to be happy and well adjusted. Even if it is an “only dog”, a dog that has spent time with other dogs is better adjusted.
  · Dogs work better in a group. My dog is happier as part of a pack.
  · Leaders settle disputes. The “alpha” will jump in to settle a “fight”.
  · Leaders go first. The alpha dog will go out the door before any other dog.
  · Leaders share, they can let other dogs play with toys. The alpha will not necessarily take all the toys for themselves, but will let other dogs take toys. They are confident in their ability to take it back if they have to.
  · Dogs keep their nose to the ground and their eyes on the road ahead
  · There is one leader – no big hierarchy
  · As the leader you must always be having to prove yourself ( other dogs will continually test you to be the next leader ) .
  · Dogs need something meaningful to do. Dogs who have it in their nature to hunt, heard or guard are happiest when doing these things. If there is no outlet for this sort of behavior, then dogs may have behavioral problems.
  · Dogs need direction, they want to be told what to do. Watch a well trained dog, they are keeping eye contact with the handler and waiting for the next command.
  · Dogs fight but usually no one gets seriously hurt
  · Sometimes you have to show somebody who is boss – hump their leg! Alpha female dogs will “hump” male dogs to show dominance.
  · Dogs don’t care what color(s) you are.
  · Leaders watch the other dogs. The alpha tends to keep to itself, but is always watching what the other dogs are doing.
  · Make time to sleep and play everyday.
  · Meet new people at the door. My dogs cant wait for strangers to come to the house, they get so excited. Is your organization welcoming of newcomers? Are you excited because they are there?
  · Dogs have clear boundaries and “mark” their territory. Does your organization have clear boundaries and clear roles?
  * Stretch before doing any strenuous work. Dogs always stretch when they get up. If you stretch before working, you can minimize ergonomic related injuries.
  * Avoid biting when a growl will do. Dogs usually give warning signs before escalating a conflict. Watch for warning signs between people as a sign of potential conflict.
  

The 12 Drugs of Christmas

With Christmas in full swing, we are hearing Christmas carols all over the place ( why are they carols and not alice's or mary's?) and of course you are bound to hear the 12 days of Christmas at some point (probably one of the most obnoxious carols ever ). Whenever I do, I think back to a little diddy that my friends wrote back in high school, the 12 DRUGS of Christmas ( Mike W, do you remember this?). We even recorded it to send to WHCN ( they were cool then ), but we never did. I forgot about half of it and so have since re-written it. So here it is in all its touched up glory, ( though I abbreviated all the repetitive lines in the interest of saving space, memory, bandwith and just plain ol' interest ) sing along... ( imagine the music in your head and sing out loud )


On the First day of Christmas my Truelove gave to me a pound of marijuana
On the second day of Christmas my Truelove gave to me 2 coke spoons
On the third day of Christmas my Truelove gave to me 3 hits of acid
On the fourth day of Christmas my Truelove gave to me four chrome bongs
On the fifth day of Christmas my Truelove gave to me five Quaaludes ( sing “5 years in jail” when you do the very last verse )
On the sixth day of Christmas my Truelove gave to me six tubes of glue
On the seventh day of Christmas my Truelove gave to me seven clean needles
On the eighth day of Christmas my Truelove gave to me eight tabs of morphine
On the ninth day of Christmas my Truelove gave to me nine grams of crank
On the tenth day of Christmas my Truelove gave to me ten junkies shooting
On the eleventh day of Christmas my Truelove gave to me eleven crack whores
On the twelfth day of Christmas my Truelove gave to me twelve 5ths of liquor

Hugo Chavez

Hugo Chavez. No, hes not a fashion designer. He's an asshole. A Castro lovin, proclaimed communist, totally anti-American, dickhead. If you dont believe me, Google him and see what he has done. I wont bore you with the details here. The bottom line is DONT BUY GAS AT CITGO. Citgo is owned by Venezuela, the country of which Chavez is an elected dicktater ( spelling intentional ), thus owned by Chavez! Dont fill our enemies coffers by buying there F*n gas! Viva America!

Jihad To Go and Say That

Warning. The following blog is rated R and for mature audiences only.

It may not seem it from some of my rants, but I love this country. Not only is it beautiful, but I believe it was founded on wonderful ideals; a grand experiment, unlike other countries that were based on some divine right to rule or just cobbled together from random historical antecedents. Our freedom to speak our mind and worship ( or not ) as we chose, sets us apart from many other countries. In North Korea the police come to your home to make sure you are not listening to or reading material critical of the government. A teacher in Sudan was recently found guilty of violating Islamic law because she allowed her school children to name a stuffed bear “Muhammad”. She may go to jail or get whipped or both. Some people in that country are calling for her execution! In Saudi Arabia they have “decency police” and a woman can be arrested for being in public without a male relative chaperone.

Thank god (pun intended) that I live in a country where there is ( at least nominally ) separation from church and state, because I gotta tell ya, this Islamic Law stuff is a big steaming pile of bull #@$%^. It’s gotta be some of the craziest @#$% I have ever heard. These radical islamists believe that we in the west are out to attack Islam, well with their basing their civil laws on islamic religious theories, we should be. Their way of thinking is a throw back to the 10th century and ideas like theirs have no place in an enlightened world. People have had death threats aimed at them for speaking out against radical islam. I myself, for simply writing this, if they were somehow aware of this blog, might be such a target. F* them!

So in honor of free speech and under the heading of insulting three of the worlds major religions at the same time, I declare that I’d like to see Jesus bend Muhammad over Buddhas big ol’ fat belly ( the Chinese version of Buddha ) and give him a Dirty Sanchez while Buddha delivers a serious donkey punch! Take that Muhammad. Ow!