please don't get insecticide in my face next time. a reasonable reaction to a gross overreaction.

well, the unpredictable weather continued today.

it rained for near about 10 minutes this morning, then the warm sun burst through the clouds and immediately began drying things out once more.

yet, as i walked to my car, a government vector control truck drove right in front of me, and sprayed copious amounts of insecticide into the approximately 1'x3' 1/4 deep puddle i was about to walk through to get to the driver door. the amount of poison they sprayed was hardly relative to the size of the puddle, but more like comparable to the size of the puddle.

seriously?

i was gone for an hour and a half, and the puddle was dry when i got back.

it makes me wonder if this happens every time it sprinkles and i just don't notice it because they were driving so slow that their engine was silent, and if they hadn't engulfed me in a mist of ddt, as they almost ran me over, i wouldn't have even known they were there. that is unless i had been previously aware that the foamy surface of the puddles in my neighborhood was caused not by some anomaly of nature, but instead by the abundance of toxic chemicals that had been blasted into them.

all down the road they went, as i was stuck behind their slow moving rig for a block and a half, spraying anything remotely damp with an overkill of pest killer.

now, this is a far cry from the time i was in guadalajara, and saw red flashing lights, and heard blaring emergency horns. as i looked out the window which contained no glass, just a rickety shutter with quite a few slats missing, i saw a huge tanker truck with the vector control markings, and haz-mat emblems spraying insecticide from two fire hoses (one on either side) all over the streets and buildings, creating a fog of noxious deadly chemicals.

why?!

why would you draw so much attention to yourselves like that?!

of course i'm going to open my window and stick my head out when i hear what sounds like a tornado warning system going through a concrete mixer, and see flashing red lights outside my window, and frankly people sticking their heads out of open windows is the last thing you want to happen when you're doing something like blanketing the entire community with deadly poison. just ask the people of yolo county.

one muggy summer day in davis, CA, the radio warned me of an airdrop ddt sweep in the county. this to kill those pesky mosquitoes, ooh, they itch somethin' fierce.

the spray is perfectly safe, coos the voice, but here comes the legal: yolo county vector control advises citizens to stay inside their houses or places of business during the spray, with doors, windows, and vents closed tight. yolo county vector control also recommends keeping anything that you eat with or off of in closed cupboards or drawers until the spray has settled. yolo county vector control would also like to remind you to thoroughly wash any and all fruits or vegetables before eating.

well, that all sounds perfectly safe to me.

look, when i'm on my deathbed, probably in a couple of years, probably with some mysterious carcinogenic disease caused by exposure to modern society's advanced techniques for preserving quality of life, i doubt i'm going to look back on those mosquito free summers and think, "wow, dead at 30, but it was all worth it to avoid a few pesky mosquito bites."

but since this lowly little ol' blog isn't going to stop the powers that be from doing idiotic things like this on a regular basis, can i just make one plea for common sense?

if you have to wear a haz-mat suit just to get anywhere near it, take a little time and do your job cautiously. please don't spray it where i walk (sometimes barefoot, sometimes in shoes that i then wear into my house), or on my car door handle, or on the grill of my car (where driving will cause the fumes to circulate through the hvac system), or into my bedroom window, or all over the front door of my residence, or all up in my ventilation system where it will then blanket my silverware, flatware, and glassware. as you zip up your tyvek jumper with vinyl gloves and strap on your gas mask nice and tight, try and remember that if you see me walking down the street, or poking my head out of my window, don't spray the pesticides in my face, or all over my body from a foot and a half away!

if the goddamn gardener on the corner can turn off his leaf blower when i ride my bike past, i'd think you could have the courtesy to not accidentally poison me from point blank range.

thanks for nothing, government employee idiots!

sincerely,

someone with half a brain.

update 2: i may never get to sleep at this rate...

BP, the company responsible (or one of them, anyway) for the oil spill has a solution very much in line with gene taylor's solution, but a little more proactive:

let the spill break up and dissolve.

BP isn't just going to let the sun and wind take care of that though.

oh, no, BP has a plan:

dispersants.

BP is using chemicals that can dissolve and disperse oil spills when used in high volume.

sounds great right?

wrong. not only has BP already bought up fully one third of the entire world's supply of dispersants, and yet there is no end to the leak in sight (meaning we will run out of them well before the leak stops, apparently on its own, i guess is BP's mode of thought. remember how the nazis wanted to dam off the straight of gibraltar, and drown the mediterranean, but there actually isn't enough concrete in the world to do that? yeah, it's kind of like that. herman sörgel would be so proud), but the dispersants are known, known as in we already know them to be more toxic and hazardous than raw oil.

oh good...

for a second there i thought we were going to experience some long term effects from this whole thing. turns out the real long term effects will be from the solution.

now i can rest easy...

update: this is what they thought was going to happen...

you know, sometimes i say/write shit, just because i'm in the heat of things, and want to represent an extreme emotional response, simply to get an extreme emotional response.

then i read something like this and it blows my mind...

i was 100% right.

rep gene taylor said, "people shouldn't be so scared" about the spill in the gulf, "it's not as bad as i thought" and that the spill looked like "rainbows and chocolate milk".

oh.

OH!

how stupid of me!

if it looks like rainbows and chocolate milk, it can't be bad. in fact i bet it's a magical miracle from the lord jesus himself!

we drilled so deep we killed satan, and the earth is rewarding us by erupting in rainbows and chocolate milk!

zipitty fucking doo dah!

hurrah! huzzah!

tell you what taylor. you can have the first glass of chocolate milk, and let me know how it tastes.

this fucking a-hole took a 3 hour tour from 1,000 feet above the spill, and he thinks it will "break up" on its own very quickly.

er...

uhhhhhhh...

break up?

how so, fuck face?

and even if the spill did "break up" where would the pieces go?

they'd still be floating around in the ocean somewhere. or washing up on some shore.

or shall we just assume that the feathered and furry aminals will coat themselves in rainbows and chocolate milk and fly away with it to a magic land called extinction junction, and we can resume cranking out 8mpg behemoths over at the nummi plant (just kidding, toyota closed the nummi plant months ago, displacing thousands of jobs. jokes on... those thousands of recently unemployed people who can't collect unemployment because the state thought it more productive to sit around measuring their cocks than pass a budget, and the fed thought it better to play legislative chicken with people's lives. go congress, go prius!)

even more good news from rep taylor. the plan is to let nature take its course and allow the spill to evaporate on its own time(?).

oh, good. for a second there, i thought we were going to have to do something... to help alleviate the catastrophic effects of our ignorant and selfish actions.

that was a close one.

errrr... what exactly did you think was going to happen?

so i know i don't post here as often as i should. but the fact is, i write a ton of stuff either when i've been drinking, or post-ultra realistic dream... that kind of thing, and i just don't have the confidence in the piece to put it out there until i've proof read it while clear headed, and it's not that i don't like it when i'm thinking straight, it's just that i never go back to it.

but you know, i think it's time i just didn't queue it up for post. time that i just let it spill out, to gush forth like black, iridescent fossil fuels from beneath the gulf of mexico.

so here it is...

i'm a guy. just a guy. just a guy who knows a girl. just a girl who was born to a guy. just a guy who is responsible for placing haliburton in the persian gulf.

and you know what?

this girl is one of the most stand up, selfless girls in the whole world.

and i doubt her father is a bad person.

how could he be?

he made a pretty amazing child.

so when i hear that haliburton is on deck to take this whole gulf of mexico spill on the chin, what's a guy to think?

i know haliburton is a fucked up, amoral corporate whore-fest that only wants to make a buck, and if they happen to ruin a large portion of the planet, well, most of them make enough money to move somewhere that they didn't destroy.

and certainly i don't plan on defending them simply because i personally know someone who might be hurt if i went for the throat.

but this is my life.

i think and act often in cold rational detachment, mostly because i have to, mostly because i find myself in these conundrums in which personal experience, and logical thought come to a baffling and contradictory intersection right on my goddamn face.

and ultimately people get hurt, because we are people, and we don't deal in cold rational detachment, even if it gets the conundrum off your face.

but i don't really feel like going for the throat here... why? you ask.

because we were drilling holes, miles deep in the earth, with the intention of dredging up billions of gallons of toxic sludge.

and we fucked up.

no goddamn shit.

what the fuck did we think was going to happen?

that we were going to drill so deep that we would never run out of oil?

or that we would drill so precise that we could never in a million years make a mistake?

mistake or no, this was bound to happen eventually.

ever heard of an earthquake?

a volcanic eruption?

i should fucking hope you've at least heard of a volcanic eruption.

remember last week when you couldn't get a flight back from your wine tour of the parisian countryside because iceland spewed all over eurasia? yeah, that's a volcanic eruption, and shit like that happens, without warning, all the time. especially in places where large, odd, and extremely deep punctures in the earth's crust happen to be.

so ladi fucking dah. here we are with the left hand punching in the launch codes to blast innocent brown people into keeping our gas prices under 4 bucks, and the right hand holding a sign proclaiming "drill, baby, drill!".

and new orleans gets a giant metaphorical cock up the ass, once again.

meanwhile, the government owns a car company that the taxpayers are bailing out, and congress is calling them out for lying to the public, and not even about the things the public knows that that company is lying about, which it is, but we seem to be ok with those things, because we've been lied to about them long enough that it's almost weird if we're not being lied to about them. and one of the things that that company is lying about, yet nobody seems to give a shit about, is their gas mileage, but you know what? nobody cares that that company is lying about it because nobody gives a shit where gas comes from.

as long as it comes from that little nozzle at the ARCO, what difference does it make?

well, when it stops coming from that little nozzle at the ARCO, and starts coming bursting out of the ocean floor at about a thousand gallons a minute, it actually makes a big difference.

we just went from slowly strangling the environment, to instantly drowning it.

fuck fuck fuck, fuckitty fuck fuck, fuck fuckin fuck.

are we this stupid?

i submit that the answer is so above and beyond, far and away, some concept so yes-like, that there is actually no possible way for human brains to understand how much the answer is yes.

not a bunch of human brains that created the situation that we are now in.

you FUCKing idIOTS!

we have absolutely, and for a very long period of time, demolished the nature of a very large portion of the planet.

uhhhhhhhhh...

do you think it might be time to stop now?

you know, i do. but as for a majority of the world, let me take a wild guess...

i submit that their answer is so above and beyond, far and away, some concept so no-like, that there is actually no possible way for my brain to understand how much the answer is no.

do our children literally need to drown in spilled petroleum before we cut this shit out?

you know what? why do i even ask silly questions like that?

we get cancer, birth defects, and record SIDS numbers from carcinogens we put into the atmosphere. we blame someone else.

we get diabetes, and heart disease from foods we choose to consume. and we blame someone else.

we create new continents made entirely of garbage in 5 separate places on the aquatic map. we blame someone else.

we live miserable, pathetic, sheltered, unhappy lives for a staggeringly long time. we blame someone else.

the list goes on. the punchline stays the same... we blame someone else.

some people may wonder why i hate the world.

ha.

that list is long and depressing.

but if we break it down to just one topic...

chernobyl, three mile island, exxon valdez, the gulf coast spill, the persian gulf wars, the explosion of cancers, hiroshima, nagasaki, agent orange (brought to you by the producers of valero gas, think again before you fill up at that trendy new petrol station. think about vietnamese children with fabric patterns melted into their skin...) the pacific garbage gyre, styrofoam (packing peanuts), asbestos, CFLs (danger: product contains a toxic amount of mercury. but they last so much longer, so long as you don't follow up on that claim...) silicone surgical implants, animal testing, animal cruelty, the amount of petroleum and other deadly pollutants necessary to make just one single cel of film (seriously, one film is the equivalent of a tire fire like the size of the empire state building, and i won't even tell you what it takes to make those lithium ion batteries that your prius runs on...), and why we waste that on shit like hot tub time machine... seriously, do i need to go on?

i swear to god, every morning that someone doesn't find me hanging by a belt from the rafters, must be some kind of miracle, because that depressing list is just a portion of one, one single topic for which i find myself completely and utterly depressed, disgusted, and disappointed with this life that i've heard so much about.

we cannot undo the things we have done, and now we will raise many generations of children who won't know that the mississippi delta shouldn't be black and greasy.

does life suck this much when people are stupid enough to create this kind of a world?

i submit that yada yada yada... yes.

congratulations. i'm almost certain that 99.9999999999% of the population will have learned nothing from this.

the circus suspects man invented god, simply so we could play god. why not? that's why we invented the framptone, and look how good that worked out.

for milenia, man has been creating games and passtimes for the purpose of mimicking life on a smaller scale.

games like go, chess, and risk teach us the strategies of war. monopoly teaches us how to ruin the lives and well being of others by being a morally bankrupt real estate mogul. life helps us deal with the surrender of all meaning and ambition in our lives to the the empty, cookie-cutter minutiae of suburban living. jenga teaches us how to build precariously tall, structurally unsound towers, and grand theft auto teaches us how to punch a hooker in the teeth, rape her in the back seat of a stolen "toyolla corota", then steal her purse and leave her for dead. and, apparently, rubik's cube teaches me how to be some kind of queer who thinks he's better than you (that's what that guy at the bar told me, anyhow).

imagine what a bleak world we would live in if we didn't grow up subliminally learning these life skills, by making them into fun, family time games.

oh, it's raining out, what should we do? i know! let's bilk mom out of her rental properties on baltic avenue, then crush dad's railroad empire while he's in jail, shooting craps for his freedom.

done with your homework, hoytt? good boy. you've earned some xBox time. now run along and practice gunning down the cops. remember, old people make great human shields.

but as funny (and scary) as it is to think that our possible futures had been shaped by innocent games for ages 3-99 (the hundred+ crowd play much more dangerous versions. instead of operation, they play high risk invasive surgery. instead of risk, they play a game called dubbya dubbya 2: post traumatic stress. the point of that game is to avoid snapping into a dementia driven, fight-or-flight, homicidal rampage when everyone jumps out and yells "surprise!" at your birthday party, because they didn't know you haven't been taking your meds since your insurance filed your PTS as a pre-existing condition last month...) it's even scarier to think that a large part of the problems we face as adults, not just in our personal lives, but as a society, and a species, in general are probably caused by forced adherence to religion since before we are old enough understand what is going on in the world around us.

think about how many wars, invasions, revolutions, colonizations, coups, and crusades have been driven by religion. think about the fact that the founding fathers included not one instance of religion in the original constitution, declaration, pledge of allegiance, monetary imagery, or any political oath, aside from the protection of freedom of religion, which interestingly enough, comes secondarily to the statement "congress shall make no law respecting the establishment of religion...", yet, by now, god has found his way into every one of those things. think about the moral, and even simple life choices we make with religion on our minds. how many people care whether or not they have sex before they get married? how many people care that they are supposed to care? hell, the fact that anyone would even think of marriage as a part of life is a testament to how deeply ingrained religion is in our psyches.

but we've come to a funny little crook in the road of god-fearing human existence. we've come to a place where we now have the capacity to play god, and not just in the sense of games like the sims, or warcraft where we get to control every tiny little detail of an entire microverse, or a game like second life where we get to create an entirely new life for ourselves, and reimagine it the way we would prefer, if we were in charge of "godly" decisions like what color our skin is, how big our sexually desirables are, how much we get paid, and whether or not our garage alt-rock bands made it big after highschool. no, in the real world we have taken ourselves down a road to a place where we have no choice but to play god.

case in point, we have created (yes we have created them, however incidentally) intersex fish. not the kind that throw trash at you from the back of their pimp's scooter on a backstreet in bangkok, either. the kind that have both sets of reproductive organs and swim around in the potomac river.

the glorious potomac, once a babbling beacon of america, is now a sludge filed cesspool of liquid toxic crap (the title of babbling beacon of america is now held by gaffin' joe biden, and the title of sludge filed cesspool of liquid toxic crap is being hotly disputed by rush limbaugh) full of deformed, hermaphroditic fish swimming around in circles, impregnating themselves. herein lies the rub: we did this to nature, but nature is simply responding and evolving to a change in the environment that was put in place outside of natural control (does it seem funny to anyone else, that we can discuss human actions as though they are not natural actions, yet we refuse to believe that human behavior is unnatural?). so do we accept that humans are, in essence, the next ice age, the catastrophic element that will significantly alter the nature of life on earth forever after us? or do we try to change it back?

the fact is, we can't change it back now. sure, we might fix the river before the entire population of fish goes both ways. but what about the plastics we use? they can't be taken back, and will eventually have to be digested by some new animal, or some newly evolved animal that has the capacity to do so. if we don't allow this adaptation, then we risk living as humans for a far greater period of time, but in a pile of our own trash with no other living things to keep us company. what about the oil we pump out of the ground? we leave gaping caverns in the earth that will, once pressure is released, and pumping stops, collapse in on themselves, creating canyons and craters of gritty petroleum sludge, where nothing we know of today could live, and it's too late now, the corks have been popped and the tops of the oil reserves have been pumped. if we don't go all the way on this, we don't stand a chance of avoiding it, we only doom ourselves to rocky petroleum lakes, rather than goopy petroleum valleys.

the fact is, we've already shat all over the planet. we can't take it back now. the best we can do is stop. just, for the love of god, if you believe in one, stop for a moment and think about all the things we don't need in our lives, all the ways in which we play god, all the reasons for which we feel we are the gods of earth, all the reasons we care what god thinks of how we live our lives, and when we start our lives up again, leave out those things we don't need, stop living as though we are the most important thing in the natural world; the last line of defense. stop living as though we have a higher purpose that justifies the depletion and destruction of the natural world for our own devices. stop living as though an invisible geriatric in the sky will give us a good grade when we shuffle off this mortal coil (my highschool english teacher was right, i would use that later...)

stop and take a moment to come to terms with the fact that, if there is a god out there, we are nothing more to that god than a bunch of mutant fish swimming around in a diseased river. or perhaps, if there is a god, we are nothing more to that god than a silly game to pass the time.