Knife Throwing: A Studio Art

That's me doing a demo. The place is behind my house, in a vacant lot. Knife throwing is a viable sport, ideal for the many vacant lots all over Pittsburgh's North Side.

Senile Musings: Accepting Your Movie Role

There is a hard numerology at work. The number of times you have seen a movie impacts, directly, the role it will take in your future. I watched Taxi Driver seven times, and began asking imaginary foes if they are talking to me. But that was a long time ago, and at midlife, my 19 viewings of the film Frankenstein is defining me.

I'm turning into the old man who played his fiddle. The Monster turned up at his shack in the Bavarian woods, and the blind hermit musician welcomed the huge, ugly crazy quilt of human parts. The kindly old cheese introduced Frankenstein's monster to the violin. "Music good." And to the grape. "Wine. Fucking good."

The hermit was an archetype of refined and marginalized individuals everywhere.

Socialized Medicine For Privacy

From the origin of employee provided health care to our current crisis in managed health care, health coverage managed through one's employer has been a gross invasion of privacy.

In its infancy it was for the most part a good thing, omitting the fact that your human resource officer knows more about you than he/she should. With a safe point of origin placed at year 1980, people were better able to obtain medical service with employee health coverage. A cultural trend followed employee health care, in which ever more wants and needs were added to those services provided. At the zenith, people got nose jobs and liposuction, free to the people, like the motto of the Carnegie Library. And at the back end of this trend, human resource personnel began using its knowlege of employee health to decide who to fire. All along there was a cultrural drift from deep, reverent privacy to frivolous coffee talk about each other's hernias and cancers. Returning to the time frame of 1980 till now, there is a more pressing reason to exit out of employer based health care, and to shift to pure socialized medicine, isolated completely from the remainder of a free market economy.

People who espouse libertarian philosophy value and evaluate the right to privacy, the right enter into business, and the right to determine one's own state of affairs. The role of government is to protect those rights, and it is supposed not to act 'in loco parentis.' Most importantly, the economy operates best when individuals are able to enter into business, earn money, and in turn create jobs. To a libertarian, anything that gums up the process is probably bad. Government intrusion into the free market is probably bad. And with the crisis in health care at the top of national crises, a mandate to take health care off the shoulders of the entrepreneur should be recognised and acted on.

The bare need of the individual to obtain heath care is in crisis now. The point of privacy is only one argument among many for socialized medicine. In the main stream, a libertarian prefers a free market solution to the need for goods and services, medical service included. My point is that there no free market solution to the high cost of health care, and that options such a single payer health care won't work. As a means to allow a free market economic recovery, socialized medicine is the one point of deviation in an otherwise free enterprise model. In this veiw point, the need to create new jobs mandates the separation of government from private business, and the separation of medical service from the relationship of employee to employer.

In libertarian thought, privacy is one of many elements in the cement that foundations are made of. Without it, any fool can make sport of your sagging. stained undergarments. In business, your right to ply your trade can be undermined by anyone whose ear is pressed to your wall. Your secrets are no longer secret. You may be forced to hire people you don't want or need. You may be forced to adapt your shop to the needs of a political interest group. Too, you may be unable to sustain a place of business under the burden of outrageously expensive health insurance. The best option to revitalize the ecomony is an efficient, unified, professional and compassionate system of national health coverage. Socialized medicine, pressed to greater than current efficiency, will extend health care to all and will remove a millstone from the neck of free enterprise.

Sculpture Proposal

With the local economy picking up like one of Clapton's electric guitars, and with Pittsburgh named as a model of a revitalized city, this would be a perfect time for some rich fat philanthropist to sponsor a public art project. A big one. In spite of all the progress, I still don't have much dough, but someone out there probably does, so I would like to propose the building of a colossal size sculpture to commemorate our forty eight hours with G20.

The G20 Circle Jerk should be constructed of marble and is asking to be built life size. Symbolic of the condition most Americans are in, it should be constructed a few blocks off the main drag of Hazelwood. Our own G20, in the flesh, was seated in a great big circle, with their networking computers in front of them like bowls of digitized pablum. The simplicity of a hard edged circle, with international VIP jerk-offs surrounding it,
all guilessly puttering with words and numbers, is a fine model of the stuff that keeps the world in the dark.
The sculpture will symbolize a happy, peaceful socialist elite, maybe a millionth of the world population the cretins supposedly represent, uselessly placed at the round table at monumental expense to the public. Of course the sculpture will take artistic license with what the big shots were doing there. They will be doing what the title suggests. Which is a metaphor to what they did.

Bats and Gov

I'm not talking about any specific city. These are generalities, and I'm
from planet Venus. The past century of bad government happened someplace
up there. We have muncipal governments that work like the one's on your cool
globe.

By contrast, we wear asbestos parkas a foot thick to keep from catching
fire because it's hot like a Burnz-o-matic. That's the principal difference
among ours and your local bodies politic. Mind I'm only complaining about
city council on my flaming hot, dirt poor planet that shares orbit with
your neighboring planet Earth. Still, similarities rim the cosmos.

Our city council reminds me of bats flying around a street light. They
don't form much of a plan. They just fly around eating mosquitos like the
executive perks given to useless relatives of the rich. We have an unusual and
disturbing pattern of sleazeballs beginning their careers on a school
board. From there they run for city council, and the hottest flying mammals rise
up to become state reps and senators. In all cases, they sustain a culture
of looming failure and crime.

We've had wireless internet for some time, and old movies like Dracula are
popular. That's how I'm able to compare certain individuals to bats and
sundry related blood suckers. Our city fathers fly around eating money out of
air, in the form of bribes and scams. We are reminded of vampires when we
watch city coucil meetings on television, all feeding off of people who do
real work for a living. Most people on Venus work in the air conditioning
business, unless they have city jobs, including the mayor and our ninety-six
dysfunctional representatives of as many blighted districts. We would do
better with fewer city council personnel, and so might you, in your travels
round the sun. Less state reps would be good, too.

dates and fates

A few years back, I was looking for a date. So I ran a personal ad on Craigslist, stunning athletic male seeks leopard spot single female, nothing freaky. I'm a plain kind of guy full of hope, and soon I got a response, then a meeting for coffee, with woman about my age of a half century.

She seemed nice, at first. Though, too, she expressed that her life at home was troubled, a husband had absconded with their life's loot, she had grown kids that didn't like her. The former boyfriend who committed suicide for no reason known to her, and they were dating at the time, made the nads shrink. There are some 'don'ts' in picking your mate. On the more normal plane, she had a job. She said she was a medical transcriptionist at a local psychiatric hospital. A well connected hospital.

We were chatting pleasantly on the phone when she told me that she had checked my psyche history on her computer at work, and she was pleased to find that I have no history of mental illness in the United States for as far back as everything private went on-line. If I went nuts before then, like in the 1980s, I'm doing a great job of hiding it.

Using only my first and last name for her inquiry, she was able to find out if I had my head examined in New Zealand, and she could even find out if a general practional had prescribed me a psychiatric med, such a Xanax. She might have had half a romance novel in front of her if I had been involuntarily committed.

My date with an apparently unstable transcriptionist caused me concern. An amazing breach of privacy is possible by way of plain folks. On a bight spot, I'm probably playing with a full deck.