In a truck stop in the Texas Panhandle, Fox News was on (shocking!). On the crawl it said something like, "Why is Sarah Palin winning over evangelicals?"
I walked by and asked the question allowed as I read it. A gentleman took the the bait and said, "'Cause she's hot!"
I asked, in all seriousness, "It's not a problem that she has a 17-year-old unwed pregnant daughter?"
Now, I was raised in a Protestant religious family who taught me that one qualification for elected office is moral character and judgment. A classic example of this is, although my parents met while campaigning for John F. Kennedy, my father said he could never vote for Ted Kennedy for elected office, because of the incident at Chappaquiddick (sp?). He felt this incident demonstrated a lack of moral character that is necessary for elected office. (The fact that JFK himself might have been as bad never came up, and since my father has been dead for almost 20 years, I'll never really know if he knew about JFK's own shortcomings or if he felt they were as bad as Teddy's).
So one window into moral character, in my opinion, is the ability to keep your teenage daughter from getting pregnant. I feel that this is one of a parent's top priority: don't let your daughter get pregnant before she is ready, even if she thinks she is.
And if a person can't accomplish this, then that doesn't make them a bad person. But it does show that that person can't juggle all of the responsibilities he/she has, now does it? And a President must be able to effectively juggle responsibilities.
I'm not saying this is an automatic disqualification for me, but it's a very, very, serious problem. Some people may think I set the bar too high, but, how and under what circumstances a girl gets pregnant can determine the course of her entire life. It's a very, very, serious matter.
So my question to the gentleman was very serious. As far as I can tell, the evangelical "morality" is all about furthering agendas but that somehow the personal morality of the candidate who makes decisions on our behalf is not an issue.
His answer: "At least she's not a Muslim."
I had finally met one. Met a person who was willing to admit he thought Barack Obama was a Muslim. At first I thought he was kidding, but he was dead serious. College educated with sources and everything. Redneck colleges, sure, but he was confident Hillary had said he was a Muslim. (He was sure I hadn't attended college because I didn't know these things.)
Hillary has never said Barack's a Muslim, of course.
It's a real shame this country has not come far enough to elect a Muslim as President. It's unclear the country could have elected a Mormon this time around as well.
And it's unclear to me that it's ready to elect anyone of dark skin, but at least it might take making everyone believe he's a Muslim to make it happen. One step at a time, I suppose.
The gentleman said that of course he wasn't going to vote for Obama anyway because, "he's the anti-Christ."
Now that's just silly. Doesn't he know the anti-Christ is supposed to be born in Europe?
Anyway, we can take this one solace: evangelical Christians are on board with electing a woman President. (well, VP, but the same qualifications to each apply because all the VP is is the person who would become President without another election).
Seriously, if you think about it, it's a big accomplishment.
Wednesday, September 10, 2008
Albuquerque
As I write this, I am sitting in a Midas in a bad section of Albuquerque (I'm quickly realizing there are no good sections) at 7:40 AM (Tuesday, September 9) , hoping that I won't be ripped off because my brakes are screeching like the Devil. They screech even when I'm not depressing the brake pedal, suggesting it's the brake pads that I just had replaced around a year ago.
They probably got dirty from Burning Man, but after a rain actually made them worse (that's right, water falling from the sky, haven't seen that happen since Missouri on August 20), I decided to take no chances and bring the truck in to the Midas.
I haven't blogged for a while because driving across the country has become exhausting. Now that I'm the only one driving, it seems to be exponentially more difficult. 7 hours straight seems much harder than 7 hours within 14 hours. So I suppose regular breaks are better, but who wants to hang out at a truck stop for 2 hours?
In Moab, we spent a day seeing Arches and Canyonlands National Parks. I now remember that I really wanted to spend an entire week in each – off-roading and hiking. Arches is a lot of hiking to see all of the arches.
There seem to be a lot of great restaurants in Moab. We ate twice at Pasta Jay's. Very good gourmet pizza. From there, we drove to Albuquerque via Four Corners.
Four Corners is actually not what you would expect because it's in the Navajo Nation. It's just as cheesy as you'd expect, but it's very low tech and “only” costs $3 per person for the privilege of saying your body was in four states at once. If this were run by the U.S. Government, I'm sure it would be about half the size of Mt. Rushmore, with a cafeteria, an admission of around $12 (that seems to be the magical value that a parent can't refuse on the basis of being too expensive), and a place where you can stand to get your picture taken for a 6x9 glossy that will cost you $25. The cafeteria would have bad food, but you wouldn't mind because you were starving when you got there.
In the Navajo version, there is no cafeteria, the bathrooms are portos (mine was very clean), and there are huts where they're selling...wait for it...jewelry.
Any retail store owner will tell you jewelry is where it's at. It takes up very little floor space and the margins are ridiculous. Jewelry, figurines and such. That's where the money is. Books...no one except Barnes & Nobles and Amazon make any money from books. Retail is really a hard business to make money at if you're not Navajo with no rent or labor costs. Your margins have to be at least 50% to have a chance. This is why Amazon does so well. Retail shops are extremely inefficient.
Anyway, we spent an entire day (Monday) in Albuquerque. Not because Albuquerque is especially interesting, but because I simply needed the break. I did, however, think that I'd find some live jazz as I heard this was a good town for that. But I couldn't find any last night. I did find a really good restaurant, The Standard Diner, on old route 66. The décor and atmosphere was elegant, and the food was really good. There were very few people there, though. They must have lost money last night. We didn't spend much more than we would have at Uno's.
As I was trying to find jazz clubs and restaurants, I encountered a LOT of “the number you have dialed has been disconnected or is no longer is service...”. I was told that Albuquerque was hurting in this economy but I had no idea. No wonder this state is rapidly moving from “swing state” status to solidly for Obama for this election, even while McCain is gaining lots of momentum elsewhere.
Today, if I get out of this Midas in a decent amount of time, we will drive to Oklahoma City, stopping at the Big Kettle National Grasslands on the way.
Why Big Kettle? Well, it's where one of the scenes from my novel takes place. How this scene came to take place there reveals a lot of my personal creative process. One day I had a vision of a hunting scene from a character's childhood. This scene would have taken place in the mid 1940's. It was a strong character-developing scene, and it took place in a grassy, swampy area. I then looked for an area that looks like that that is near where I knew the character grew up, and I found this park. Hunting was allowed there back then as it wasn't a National Grasslands. In my scene, they are hunting rabbits, and although I can change that, I recall there are rabbits in this park. I am going to take pictures there and simply take in the atmosphere so that I can more richly and accurately describe the surroundings.
Also, another scene takes place at a bank in Oklahoma City, and so I want to scope out a couple of those, also. That scene takes place in 1998, so it's more recent. The trick here is to make the scene appear to be as realistic as possible while making it still a ficticious bank. OK, so I don't have to travel to Oklahoma City to describe a bank realistically, but while I'm here, I might as well spend the extra half hour to get it as right as it can be.
My belief is that in order to help the reader suspend disbelief, the writer needs to go way beyond what seems to him/her to be enough in making it realistic. Why is that? Because there are lots of people who know more than you do about most things. Sure, for someone who hasn't been to Oklahoma City, I could make it appear to be very realistic, but for someone who lives there, you have to do more.
They probably got dirty from Burning Man, but after a rain actually made them worse (that's right, water falling from the sky, haven't seen that happen since Missouri on August 20), I decided to take no chances and bring the truck in to the Midas.
I haven't blogged for a while because driving across the country has become exhausting. Now that I'm the only one driving, it seems to be exponentially more difficult. 7 hours straight seems much harder than 7 hours within 14 hours. So I suppose regular breaks are better, but who wants to hang out at a truck stop for 2 hours?
In Moab, we spent a day seeing Arches and Canyonlands National Parks. I now remember that I really wanted to spend an entire week in each – off-roading and hiking. Arches is a lot of hiking to see all of the arches.
There seem to be a lot of great restaurants in Moab. We ate twice at Pasta Jay's. Very good gourmet pizza. From there, we drove to Albuquerque via Four Corners.
Four Corners is actually not what you would expect because it's in the Navajo Nation. It's just as cheesy as you'd expect, but it's very low tech and “only” costs $3 per person for the privilege of saying your body was in four states at once. If this were run by the U.S. Government, I'm sure it would be about half the size of Mt. Rushmore, with a cafeteria, an admission of around $12 (that seems to be the magical value that a parent can't refuse on the basis of being too expensive), and a place where you can stand to get your picture taken for a 6x9 glossy that will cost you $25. The cafeteria would have bad food, but you wouldn't mind because you were starving when you got there.
In the Navajo version, there is no cafeteria, the bathrooms are portos (mine was very clean), and there are huts where they're selling...wait for it...jewelry.
Any retail store owner will tell you jewelry is where it's at. It takes up very little floor space and the margins are ridiculous. Jewelry, figurines and such. That's where the money is. Books...no one except Barnes & Nobles and Amazon make any money from books. Retail is really a hard business to make money at if you're not Navajo with no rent or labor costs. Your margins have to be at least 50% to have a chance. This is why Amazon does so well. Retail shops are extremely inefficient.
Anyway, we spent an entire day (Monday) in Albuquerque. Not because Albuquerque is especially interesting, but because I simply needed the break. I did, however, think that I'd find some live jazz as I heard this was a good town for that. But I couldn't find any last night. I did find a really good restaurant, The Standard Diner, on old route 66. The décor and atmosphere was elegant, and the food was really good. There were very few people there, though. They must have lost money last night. We didn't spend much more than we would have at Uno's.
As I was trying to find jazz clubs and restaurants, I encountered a LOT of “the number you have dialed has been disconnected or is no longer is service...”. I was told that Albuquerque was hurting in this economy but I had no idea. No wonder this state is rapidly moving from “swing state” status to solidly for Obama for this election, even while McCain is gaining lots of momentum elsewhere.
Today, if I get out of this Midas in a decent amount of time, we will drive to Oklahoma City, stopping at the Big Kettle National Grasslands on the way.
Why Big Kettle? Well, it's where one of the scenes from my novel takes place. How this scene came to take place there reveals a lot of my personal creative process. One day I had a vision of a hunting scene from a character's childhood. This scene would have taken place in the mid 1940's. It was a strong character-developing scene, and it took place in a grassy, swampy area. I then looked for an area that looks like that that is near where I knew the character grew up, and I found this park. Hunting was allowed there back then as it wasn't a National Grasslands. In my scene, they are hunting rabbits, and although I can change that, I recall there are rabbits in this park. I am going to take pictures there and simply take in the atmosphere so that I can more richly and accurately describe the surroundings.
Also, another scene takes place at a bank in Oklahoma City, and so I want to scope out a couple of those, also. That scene takes place in 1998, so it's more recent. The trick here is to make the scene appear to be as realistic as possible while making it still a ficticious bank. OK, so I don't have to travel to Oklahoma City to describe a bank realistically, but while I'm here, I might as well spend the extra half hour to get it as right as it can be.
My belief is that in order to help the reader suspend disbelief, the writer needs to go way beyond what seems to him/her to be enough in making it realistic. Why is that? Because there are lots of people who know more than you do about most things. Sure, for someone who hasn't been to Oklahoma City, I could make it appear to be very realistic, but for someone who lives there, you have to do more.
Friday, September 5, 2008
Done With Burning Man
I'm officially done with Burning Man. Until I'm not :).
It's become blase, and it burns (pun intended) way too much of my energy and vacation time to at all be worth it.
Everyone seems to work really hard for little benefit. I feel like we're all in a work camp where we are fed propaganda, trance-like alterations from watching various important symbols burn, and a variety of substances, which we ourselves are convinced to pay for, to make us work as hard as we can. OK, so the last part (at lease illegally) doesn't apply to me, but the point is valid in general.
Well, it's either a work camp or a grand experiment to see how much time, money, and hard work can be extracted from people who are otherwise in general very well off and don't work as hard at their real jobs.
Imagine if that kind of energy can be harnessed for the cause of *good*.
Burning Man "jumped the shark" for me when I heard the story (over BMIR - Burning Man Informational Radio) of how a woman had lost her camera, and another person looked through the photos, and from those photos deduced the camp that woman was in, found them and handed it back to her. This woman who got her camera back recounted this story and ended with, "Only here would such kindness happen."
First of all, I don't think it's kindness to look through someone's personal photos, and, second, I hear such stories of kindness every day in the "outer world". I'm sure for every one I hear, there's about 100,000 such acts of kindness that go on without my knowledge.
Seriously, only at Burning Man would someone think that kindness only happens at Burning Man. Since most burners are from the Bay Area, I wonder if any acts of kindness happen there at all.
No more Burning Man for me. Perhaps I'll go in 2012, with the sole purpose of working as little as possible. That'll show "The Man".
It's become blase, and it burns (pun intended) way too much of my energy and vacation time to at all be worth it.
Everyone seems to work really hard for little benefit. I feel like we're all in a work camp where we are fed propaganda, trance-like alterations from watching various important symbols burn, and a variety of substances, which we ourselves are convinced to pay for, to make us work as hard as we can. OK, so the last part (at lease illegally) doesn't apply to me, but the point is valid in general.
Well, it's either a work camp or a grand experiment to see how much time, money, and hard work can be extracted from people who are otherwise in general very well off and don't work as hard at their real jobs.
Imagine if that kind of energy can be harnessed for the cause of *good*.
Burning Man "jumped the shark" for me when I heard the story (over BMIR - Burning Man Informational Radio) of how a woman had lost her camera, and another person looked through the photos, and from those photos deduced the camp that woman was in, found them and handed it back to her. This woman who got her camera back recounted this story and ended with, "Only here would such kindness happen."
First of all, I don't think it's kindness to look through someone's personal photos, and, second, I hear such stories of kindness every day in the "outer world". I'm sure for every one I hear, there's about 100,000 such acts of kindness that go on without my knowledge.
Seriously, only at Burning Man would someone think that kindness only happens at Burning Man. Since most burners are from the Bay Area, I wonder if any acts of kindness happen there at all.
No more Burning Man for me. Perhaps I'll go in 2012, with the sole purpose of working as little as possible. That'll show "The Man".
Bryce Canyon (September 4, 2008)
Woo-hoo! I got an image to upload!
Well, two full days now and my mother and I are getting along. Someone must have hypnotized my mother, because I haven't changed one bit for the trip. Does that make me a bad son? No, but a less good one.
Today we drove through the painted desert and took in Bryce Canyon before sunset. As you can see from that photo, it was beautiful, but it gets better.
On to Moab and the most beautiful stretch of interstate highway in America.
Thursday, September 4, 2008
Vegas, Grand Canyon, Route 66 and Sedona (September 3, 2008)
Yesterday my mother arrived in Vegas, and today I said goodbye to Heidi and my sister.
Vegas is simply a cluster-fuck. Perhaps literally. Everything is fake. I mean, I saw lots of fake things. Obviously fake.
I just don't understand gambling with games of chance at all. My idea of gambling on a game of chance is a one-shot deal. I bet $1,000 with the 1 in 2,000 chance of winning $1,000,000. I know if I did this 1,000 times, the odds of coming out ahead are small, and the odds of losing a million dollars is much higher than that. But if I did this only one time, sure I'd most likely lose $1,000, but, hey, I still have a decent chance of becoming a millionaire.
Of course, going to a casino is like doing this 1,000 times. There's really no way to win, unless you stop as soon as you've won significantly. But instead, you won't stop when you're ahead, instead you'll stop when you have a plane to catch.
Also, why is sitting in front of a slot machine so much fun?
Now Poker...Poker I understand because it's a game of skill, but, only if you're good at it. Most people aren't, yet they play anyway. I guess, though, it has to be this way. *Some people* have to lose, and so I guess they will always be considered the ones who are not good at it.
I didn't gamble one cent while I was in Vegas. I didn't see a show. And I didn't do anything that is supposed to be "left in Vegas."
I really don't like Vegas.
...
My mother and I went to Grand Canyon West where we went on the sky bridge. It was pretty cool, but it's really not ready for prime-time. Still, the views were very good. I'd never seen the Grand Canyon before, except one time when it was fogged in, so that doesn't really count. We drove on old route 66 in Arizona and ended up in Sedona.
...
Seriously, I'm having real trouble uploading images and gps tracks. Sigh.
Vegas is simply a cluster-fuck. Perhaps literally. Everything is fake. I mean, I saw lots of fake things. Obviously fake.
I just don't understand gambling with games of chance at all. My idea of gambling on a game of chance is a one-shot deal. I bet $1,000 with the 1 in 2,000 chance of winning $1,000,000. I know if I did this 1,000 times, the odds of coming out ahead are small, and the odds of losing a million dollars is much higher than that. But if I did this only one time, sure I'd most likely lose $1,000, but, hey, I still have a decent chance of becoming a millionaire.
Of course, going to a casino is like doing this 1,000 times. There's really no way to win, unless you stop as soon as you've won significantly. But instead, you won't stop when you're ahead, instead you'll stop when you have a plane to catch.
Also, why is sitting in front of a slot machine so much fun?
Now Poker...Poker I understand because it's a game of skill, but, only if you're good at it. Most people aren't, yet they play anyway. I guess, though, it has to be this way. *Some people* have to lose, and so I guess they will always be considered the ones who are not good at it.
I didn't gamble one cent while I was in Vegas. I didn't see a show. And I didn't do anything that is supposed to be "left in Vegas."
I really don't like Vegas.
...
My mother and I went to Grand Canyon West where we went on the sky bridge. It was pretty cool, but it's really not ready for prime-time. Still, the views were very good. I'd never seen the Grand Canyon before, except one time when it was fogged in, so that doesn't really count. We drove on old route 66 in Arizona and ended up in Sedona.
...
Seriously, I'm having real trouble uploading images and gps tracks. Sigh.
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