ATARI
Hey,
Have not felt like writing this year. Nothing is happening here at the top of
the world. We are gaining like 5 hours of daylight a day. The nip is out of
the air and the temperatures are in the teens below. The school year is passing
without remark. I have a docile group this year. They remind me of ferns. Make
sure they are rooted, give'em some water once in a while and put'em in the sun
when it comes back. All in all, a boring group. I went all winter without a
major emotional meltdown. Some might think that is good. I just think it is
cause I don't care about anything enough about anything to get riled up. We
have had two administrators leave this year for major health reasons. I hope
they are going to be ok, but I really have not needed their help or support
this year in the greenhouse with my ferns.
My obsession this winter has been planning a couple
of trips over the next two summers. A group of us are traveling the Yukon River
from Whitehorse, Yukon to the Bering Sea and then north along the coast to Barrow.
Even this seems mundane. If spending $30,000 on gear and traveling 3,500 miles
in a boat can't get me excited I think I will move up north and try to find
some excitement.
Sixteen months of self taught guitar lessons have
ceiling out with Amazing Grace and Ode to Joy. Not the romantic and cool repertoire
I had once envisioned. Would take up the spoons but would have to dishes to
find two clean ones. Even then I think all we have left are those stupid corn
and pea spoons with the little holes in the bottom to allow the water to drain
off. I am not sure they would sound the same. They do tend to add some excitement
to eating the morning Cheerios though. Keeps me slouched over the bowl in the
morning. Only major accomplishment to date is removing the last stubborn portion
of a mole on my bald head with a razor during the morning head shaving ritual
in he shower. The teacher that used to tell me before classes started that I
had two streaks of crusty blood running down to my collar line has moved on.
Kerty still gets the joy of not mentioning the streaks to me in the morning,
but it is not the same.
Local politics are as ugly as ever. The oil money
is starting to peter out here and the spoiled locals are forced to face cutbacks.
The oil cutbacks seem to coincide with talk of opening ANWR and dipping into
the permanent fund. Drilling in ANWR would have a negative effect on the caribou
herds. They are getting fewer up here and harder to catch. It is getting tougher
and tougher find them and to run them down on snowmachines after a three hour
chase. The new method is using trucks to run them down on the tundra. Plus the
cab of the truck is a little warmer than the traditional hunting method with
the 1000cc snowmachine. We are still killing those troublesome whales around
here. With all of the global warming talk it may be a good idea to kill a few
more and get them out of the sea to keep the ocean's water level from rising
too much from melting polar caps. Either that or we are going to have to start
harvesting more sponges from the ocean's floor. I am all for either proactive
approach. Our Alaska Congressman was sitting in a polished presentation by a
group of east coast environmentalist last year in a committee meeting. The college
grad environmentalists had huge 5 color cardboard charts showing what would
be the negative impact on the caribou, the cost for proper cleanup response
teams, pictures of lush flora and fauna, pictures on newborn caribou calves,
the small economic impact that drilling would have, pictures of solar energy
options, and color pictures of caribou walking tens of miles out of their way
to cross under the pipeline. The Senator sat quietly through the laser pen presentation.
When it was his floor he walked up to one of the five color charts on a tripod,
picked it up, surveyed it thoughtfully, walked it toward a C-SPAN camera, turned
the cardboard chart over revealing the blank back side, and announced,"
See this...this is what ANWR looks like for 10 months of the year". Why
are the opinions of the extreme occupying so much of our attention? Most folks
will not align themselves with either view. Why do we spend so much time and
effort to identify the extremes only to compromise on the median? Should middle
not be the represented to begin with?
The four-term borough mayor decided not to seek reelection here. Congratulations
need to be extended to his wife...our new mayor. We are starting a new alternative
education school here. We hope to attract the kids whose parents get them up
to come to school 8-12 days per quarter. Alternative education? That is odd
that we are just getting on the wagon when these dreg parents and kids have
been finding an alternative to education for years.
Alternative education, a school within a school,
at risk youth, latchkey kids, correspondence education, and the like. We are
so inflexible with our college prep curricula and benchmarks that we would rather
create new titles, schools, and deliveries instead of evolving to meet needs.
Education must rank right up there with NASA, the military, and ENRON when it
comes to efficiency and ethics. Shit sticks to the barn wall no matter how many
coats of whitewash are on it.
What the hell is going on with all of this subsidizing?
The builders of a proposed natural gas pipeline from the Slope are being told
that the interest on their loan will be reduced if the price of natural gas
falls. The tourism industry is getting relief money and subsidizes for the decrease
in travel following 9/11. How many consecutive disasters to the Bristol Bay
fishery must occur before it is not categorized an emergency? It has been five
years in a row now. I am not a betting man but I figure year six will not make
up for the previous five. That is not an emergency, it is something else. It
is similar to the fate that befell the folks that cut river ice, buried it in
the ground covered it in sawdust, and sell it in the summer months. The demand
for astrolabe production has fallen in the last 400 years and with it, their
union's power. Now we are going to give money to Alaska trinket tourist shops
owned by Californian retired folks because their Californian neighbors are less
inclined to travel during a year that saw us attacked and at war? Please build
a gas line. We will give you low interest loans and land rights...in fact...you're
going to like this Mr. CEO...if the price of natural gas falls...well guess
what...so do your interest rates on the loan. Are you in? I will build the damn
thing.. Oh, and lets set aside 12 million for next years Bristol Bay emergency.
If we dump a bunch of money in it before hand then we can thwart the emergency...well
then it will not be an emergency...we will call it...um.... er...hey, we will
not call it an emergency, we'll call it an agency.
I had a kid ask me what we did before there was
TV. I told him we played a lot of Pong on ATARI. Age does not bother me. There
is no truth though in wisdom coming with age. The only real wisdom in the aging
process is the realization that you knew what you needed for life the first
time you lied to your parents, or you were beaten up by the resident bully,
or had an over opinionated oaf tell you that you were underachieving. In most
cases the occurrence of each of the three can be traced back to one incident.
In the third grade a paste eating kid named Joe punched me in the gut, followed
by a visit to the school nurse and then the office where the principal told
me I should have walked away and sought the help of a teacher instead of writhing
on the floor in a trail of my own drool, and then to my parents where I told
them that Joe beat me up cause my sneakers were stupid. Age has shown that bully
is a father of nine, in a dead end job, and sire of a self-repeating legacy
with Jr. The principal was getting heat from the board about suspending too
many kids and I could get just about anything from my parents using a selective
memory, crusty blood streaks, and feeding their belief that I was being oppressed.
I am saving this one to my hard drive.
It could be used in a court of law someday to determine my sanity. He was found
wandering in ANWR, playing a loose interpretation of Ode to Joy on his guitar,
pulling a new outboard, a couple nasty crusty blood streaks running over the
edges of his square Norwegian head, an old C average report card with suggestions
of underachievement, new sneakers, pong, one serving spoon, and one corn and
pea spoon.
Bruce
PS. Barbara Lavallee was here in Barrow today. She is a non-Native Alaskan painter
from Juneau. She had some new paintings and prints for the Natives to see. This
should help them see how they are supposed to look and act. Interesting though,
she was putting on her exhibit in the local store. She was very close to an
igloo though. It was a nice 40 quart one. Red, hinged lid, drain plug, and handles.
Art and sanity are in the eyes of the beholder, crummy as they may be.
"The trouble ain't that there is too many fools, but that the lightning
ain't distributed right."
-Mark Twain-