Almost helps you understand the libertarians

The letter arrived in the mail this morning:

April 23, 2008

Dear Arcata Dog Owner,

We have received no response to our letter dated February 25, 2008, requesting that you license your dog. If we do not receive a response by May 23, 2008, we will turn our records over to the police department. Per the Arcata Municipal Code, Title V, Chapter 2, Section 5221 - License Required. "It shall be unlawful for any person to own, keep or harbor any dog over six (6) months of age within the City for a period of time unless they first procure a license therefore."

(The threatening bolded italics are in the original letter.)

It's the kind of thing that makes one twitch and go, "Huh?"

I mean, wasn't it just six days ago that the city and county turned their collective law enforcement backs as nearly 3000 of our fellow Humboldtians, real and imagined, converged in a city park to light up the afternoon with who knows how many pounds of dope, which, unless someone can tell me different, is still an illegal substance (except for those who've paid off a mercenary physician for a constitutionally questionable note to smoke the stuff)?

I mean, we have drugs being sold in the open on the Arcata Plaza. We've got employable vagrants wanderin' the streets, peein' on walls, and beggin' working folks for cash. We've got contractors hiding environmental hazards on property they hope to turn into tenement housing. We have poachers cutting apart old growth forests to flip stolen shake bolts into cash to feed their meth addictions.

And instead, our fair city chooses to spend its time, money and resources threatening us and an 11 pound dachshund with a violation of the municipal code.

How many others received this letter? I'm gonna take a wild ass guess that the only ones who got it are those who have recently taken their dog to a local vet to have it vaccinated and cared for, and not the casual owners of free range, bastard pit bull mixes, uncollared and uncontrolled, that have never, and will never, see the inside of vet's office much less a vaccination of any kind.

Now, I'm not some right wing, gun'n'religion leaning, anti-pot zealot. But c'mon, can you ID the greater threat to the local peace and community prosperity in the line-up below?

...or...



(bottom photo shamelessly heisted from the HSU Lumberjack.)

A fool on a hill

Today I have an aerial view of the mouth of Redwood Creek that didn’t exist on my last walk here two weeks ago. I’m sitting on an sliding escarpment of sand, first built up, then sharply carved by the past two months of winter rain and shifting ocean currents. On this same point of beach, where I once walked at the same level as the waves, I’m perched on the edge of an eroding precipice 25 feet above the westward bending creek.

The creek has two mouths today: the main channel rippling its way to the right and flushing into the open ocean, and a smaller, shallower channel trickling off the corner of the main channel, a tiny backwater passage that won’t exist in a few hours when its fresh banks are overrun by the incoming tide.

I can feel imminent change foreshadowed in this morning’s cool northerly breeze. By this time next month, the rains will have all but ceased. The gray sands will have closed the creek’s access to the sea as the creek is drained of winter rains and melting snow, lacking the energy to break through the sandy barrier.

Gray whales crease the placid ocean just beyond the cresting waves, shepherding their newborns through the dangerous maze of coastal rocks and orcas to the Arctic.

Geese move south, resting in the calm and shallow water of the estuary, feeding on the grasses planted for California’s happy cows.

Four Caspian terns mingle with a smaller-than-usual crowd of gulls on the thin isthmus of sand that holds back the blunt force of the Pacific from the estuary. Yesterday, a coworker spied six pelicans hovering over the surf, a sure sign that summer is not too far beyond this horizon.

There are fewer seals here now than the 40-strong horde hauled out on the beach most of last month. One surfs by in the rapids of Redwood Creek, turning a slippery shoulder back in my direction as he passes, gawking at the comparably blubber-free fool on the hill.

“We’re having more fun down here in the waves,” I imagine him calling up to me. His dark eyes laugh at the lonely figure who sits on a broken log safe from chill and power of the ocean, separated in so many ways from the seal’s world, a world of which he enviously and distantly wishes to be a part.

The Definition of Bitter (or, Why ABC News really really sucks)

What an embarrassing night for ABC, and more importantly for a nation theoretically founded on the principal of intelligent discourse, in their conduct of tonight's phony made-for-idiot-TV campaign "debate". Nearly an hour devoted to rehashing trivial comments on sidebar People Magazine issues, issues that no one outside the joke that is the American coporate media cares a damn about. Jeremiah Wright. Lapel pins. The meaning of the word "bitter". Well, I'm bitter now dammit.

It's probably a good thing my girls shuffled me and my culturally elitist organic Petit Syrah out of the TV room. After an hour of unrestrained cursing and ball cap throwing at political flacks and coprolitic media pitchmen Charles Gibson and George Stephanopolous, the three of 'em wisely and carefully escorted me out the door, favoring the half hour of mindless American Idol commercials presaging the narrowing of the faceless karaoke pop star wannabes down to six to the sight of la casa's lone male sputtering and fuming at the silvery-screened orb inside a faux antique cabinet.

Damn. I really wonder sometimes about the future of this country. I'm pissed and frustrated. I'm grieving and, yes, bitter, but without guns or religion to soothe me. And I'm wonderin' where a middle career guy with a mortgage and a 70 mile daily commute on 4 buck a gallon gas goes to make sense of it all.

People are dying in a needless war.

Millions wander the streets homeless.

We can't, we won't, pay our teachers a decent salary for the most important jobs in the whole damn world.

We're selling semi-legal dope on the plaza to professional panhandlers on phony medical pretenses.

Our planet is rapidly melting itself into oblivion.

And ABC thinks we should give a shit about whether Obama wears a half inch composite metal American flag facsimile made in Taiwan on his friggin' suit?!? Go to hell ABC. If I actually watched any of their programming I'd boycott it, but I suppose they're not really gonna miss me since there's nothing there to watch anyway.

I'm not gonna sleep well tonight, am I? Someone pass that wine cork puller thingie over here. This bottle's empty.