November 14, 06

Near Island and Where I have been

Wow, it's been almost three months since I have updated. Unfortunately, I have been thrust into the mainstream maelstrom of having to make a living. Expressing my personal thoughts on the state of life in Kodiak on the Internet is a luxury I have had to forego.

What's prompted me to finally take the time to update is the Kodiak City Council and the ongoing debate about where to put the jail and police station.

Last week Kodiak got a view of democracy in action. I am not talking about the elections, I am talking about our own local city council who heeded the advice of an overwhelming majority of local citizens who stood up for what they believed was right. I am of course talking about the council's decision to delay voting for the location of the police and jail facility.

Prior to Thursday's meeting, it was all but a given that the council was going to vote to put the facility on Near Island - the "likely decision" was even announced in the paper. Instead, a steady stream of citizens stood before the council and overwhelmingly voiced their objections to the plan. Even several of the fishing community members who had come to the meeting on a completely different issue added an addendum to their alloted time to voice opposition to the plan.

The end result was that the council has voted to postpone voting on the issue until mid-December. Now is not the time to sit back and congratulate ourselves. What happens between now and then can change the course of events here in Kodiak. Whether or not we are handed something that we don't want, don't need and aren't happy with is in our hands.

I believe that something this important should be brought before the people of Kodiak. Near Island is an extremely valuable resource that belongs to all of us. Like any resource, it should not be squandered.

August 22, 06

Focus on the Good

On some level we all love the drama and spectacle of evil and the media that portrays it. We have reached the point that we are no longer moved or scared, we are simply morbidly fascinated on some non-thinking level that touches our lizard-conscioiusness instincts. In our thinking brains we realize there isn't really anything there. Yet still, we let it fill our precious hours and we let it poison our ability to see clearly what we need to become all that we can be as humans.

We are temporarily swayed because on one level, the folks moving the chess pieces around appear enormously important and significant to our continued existence. Their every blink and utterance is worthy of report, and hence the media hypes them all, the killers and the madmen and the hollow politicians as if they were gods among men, as if they were something more than bloody blips on the radar, as if their daily comings and goings were the most breathtaking incidents since UFOs.

The fact is they are nothing. It is a great duality of modern humanity. On one level, we have to care. It is, after all, our world, our life, the here and now, and we should pay attention to the clowns and dictators and devils, and take note and participate. But on that other, more significant level, you cannot help but scream, Oh my God please stop, I am so sick of these cretins. Who really cares about the hatemongers and thieves, and won't they please just leave me alone?

After a certain point, at a certain width of lens, they simply disappear. They fall off your personal radar, the things you let affect your soul. They pass right by our shared threshold of media interest and cultural fascination and race straight into the land of Get Over Yourself, we are all in this together so sit down and shut the hell up. Sure they can wail and scream and kick in the door, sure Bush can mumble "stay the course" as bleaker and bleaker reports keep pouring in, while John McCain backpedals AGAIN and kisses the Bush ass in the hopes that just the right combination of fear and stupidity will put him in the White House, even though no amount or combination of makeup in the world can hide his evil, beady ancient eyes. Ultimately you have to look at them and you think, Are you serious?

But still we let it steal our attention. We let our blood boil and our conscious tip towards wariness and a false sense of "safety" that is in reality fundamentally up to each of us individually. We let the spectre of civil war, world war, nuclear proliferation, terrorism slip into our vocabulary and into our culture as we ignore what is really right for ourselves.

I say bullshit. Is that it? Is that all you've got? Do you not know how insignificant and silly you seem, like a grain of sand that's sitting on a beach, threatening the ocean that it's going to drink it all up? Do you not realize how the planet brushes you off like dandruff?

Yet somehow the media and the goons they portray have managed to profit and remain as annoying specks in our field of vision while we should be concentrating on goodness, and pureness and making everyone's load a little lighter.

The people in charge are nothing. You want evil? Groupthink is evil. Mediocrity is evil. Hopelessness is evil. Decision by committee is evil. Loveless marriage is evil. McDonald's marketing is evil. Spiritual homogeny is evil. Microsoft Windows, cruise ships dumping sewage, food poisoning, cruelty - these are evil.

As for the rest, the warmongers and power sluts, theirs is merely an evil bred of ignorance and ego and impotent weeping in the night. Theirs is an evil so lukewarm and spongy it makes you recoil and shudder as if you accidentally brushed against a jellyfish on the beach. Hell, I can find better, more gut-wrenching evil in the Wal-Mart music aisle. The others, they're just the same old boring noisemakers howling into the Void because we let them.

We are especially lucky here on Kodiak Island. Things in general are good, politicians and evil and war and hate are far away, now. Focus on the good, it's always our choice.