Freebo's Blog

At age 67 I can't read my own handwriting anymore, so traditional letter writing is something I do not miss.   And my clumsy, tremulous, barely legible block printing is so laborious that I get bored before I finish a single post-it note for the fridge.  I am delighted that email (and blogs too, although I can live without the snarky shorthand of texting and Twitter) came along while my generation of Mesozoans is still lumbering around the planet, brittle joints greased by chondroitin.  In the last fifteen years or so, I have written a hundred times more than I had written in my first half century.  Sure, I freely admit that most or all of it has probably been balderdash...

I hereby declare that Newt Gingrich is the perfect candidate to lead my beloved Tea Party to the Promised Land.   After flirting with so many others who only offered a single desirable attribute that made me wave my flag in patriotic fervor, I have finally found a God among men who is the answer to my prayers.  Yes, Newt’s the man to bullwhip that African Demon back to the plantation next November:

The Centennial has resurrected all sorts of stories from the past, some nostalgic, some apocryphal, some ironic, some bittersweet.  Yet there is one that may never be surpassed for its poignancy.  It is the tale of the last day of Betty and Emil.  Some historians and old-timers in the town mention it as one of the saddest ones ever told.  I respectfully disagree.  To me, although I still weep at the memory of the deed, it was one of the bravest and most noble events in a long, long time...

For the last 45 years I had not exchanged a word with him in person or through letters or calls or on the Internet.  Yet the cold, immutable news of his passing hit me hard.  And it was more than the shiver of mortality that becomes all too familiar to us all as the earth performs its graceful revolutions.

2000 Range Rover for Sale:  $5458 as is, no warranty implied

Huge and gnarly SUV for sale, deep in the Maine woods.  This 2000 Range Rover 4.6 HSE is begging for a new home.  Only 95k miles on this behemoth.  What other car offers the confluence of these three features:  Legendary unreliability, extremely costly parts and repairs, and atrocious gas mileage.  Yes, with this humongous Land Rover product you get all that and more!

• Hopelessly complex but utterly useless electronic features include a wide variety of buzzers, alarms, laser-triggered motion sensitive security shutdowns, etc.  The super lockdown mode that goes on at random times in the dead of winter keeps owner safe from exiting the vehicle until the jaws of life can be summoned.
• Known for its colossal mass and inertia, the Rover trundles down the highway like a garbage scow, while lurching side to side with the nauseating vertiginous rhythms of a conestoga on the Chisholm Trail.  But the rich, supple leather seating soothes the buns.
• Enormous V-8 burns no oil, but requires a gasoline tanker in its convoy to resupply it on the road like a B-52 over Greenland.  The gas gauge is the fastest moving needle on the instrument cluster that looks like the navigation panel on Apollo 13.
• Every conceivable audio option known to humankind as of 2000, including a sub-woofer that is capable of blowing the front passenger upwards through the retractable moonroof as if Marty McFly just twanged a righteous chord.
• Loaded with every superficial wannabe macho option such as brush bars fore and aft, alloy wheels, tinted windows, memory seats, concealed cup-holders, white gold exterior, sumptuous leather interior, hill-holding super-low range tranny for trail crashing through the boondocks as if in hot pursuit of Daisy Duke, an escape hammer in case of the aforementioned lockdown mode, and way too much redundant power crap to list.

The Range Rover rides high and handsome on and off the road with a commanding view over lesser SUV’s

The Rover with its full-time 4WD showing off its tremendous hill-climbing abilities

This finest piece of British engineering since the Titanic and the freakish hat at Will and Kate’s wedding can be all yours for only $5458.  Get with it, Anglophiles, add some excitement and refined British elegance to your travels.  How boring it is to leave on a trip, actually get there, and then have to return home uneventfully.  Gag me with pink rollers, a Weight Watchers chicken pesto dinner and a TV Guide!  With the Range Rover you add an edge of spine-tingling adrenalin-pumping primal fear-inspiring terror to your life with the haunting feeling at all times that an error message will announce some imminent calamity with a cacophony of  beeps and whistles and flashing icons on the dash or claxon horns, or a 20 mph self-limiting speed governor, or just a total incineration of the car’s absurd wiring harness that makes a DNA molecule look like a game of Parcheesi and you are abandoned in a three-ton hefty hunk of steaming, smoldering, lifeless ferrous junk and arcing copper wiring that will never make it back from beyond Thunderdome.  The AAA guy will be clueless to help if the beast shuts down.  The nearest grease monkey with the requisite IQ to fathom this needlessly abstruse piece of technological overkill may be in Perth or Edinburgh.  Any otherwise routine trip will now hold the potential of becoming an adventure, an odyssey, a ride on some flatbed with a soundtrack right out of Deliverance...a voyage into the most forbidding recesses of the unknown for perhaps the last time in your lifetime.

Your jealous neighbors, watching you return yet again with your Rover being towed or trailered back home, will wonder what posh locations you were attempting to reach when the oxygen sensors blew or the plastic tie rod collapsed and left you careening to the edge of a precipice, looking oh so stylish while the blood drained from your face and the coolant drained from the $1700 radiator.

For even more stories about the pride of owning a Range Rover and the mechanics you will get to know as your saviors, please contact Roy at 207-293-2451.  But don’t delay!  This car won’t last long.

As is true of Father Time, Mother Nature does have a habit of reminding us at unpredictable intervals of our ultimate powerlessness before the elemental forces of the unknowing universe.

To dear friends and family and a few selected acquaintances of Bee Van Til:

I thought this would be fun for you all to read as we count down the days until the Centennial Celebration at her beloved Lake Lure home...where Bee herself will be surrounded by the bounty of a lifetime of love, devotion to family, and service to humanity.  Actually, it might be enjoyable for you readers of my blog and Freebo’s blog to read it too.

Let's go back a century...

This time Michael extols the virtues of his beloved NBA and two of its most colorful characters. Also, “A letter from Home".

Picture yourself in a generic social science course held in a typical college classroom...way too much beige, sticky laminated chair-desks haphazardly angled towards the plywood lectern, an obsolete overhead projector hulking in the corner, and a friendly old teacher at the helm...perhaps also growing more obsolescent by the semester.  It looks and feels like another routine day in Whatever 101.  But the instructor asks the students to close their iPads, put away any vestigial books that may remain in their possession, and shut down the incessant texting for fifty minutes, assuming western civilization can tolerate such an absence of real-time communication, and pay some serious attention to his lesson plan.

We are drowning in a sea of numbers in this digital world.  In this piece, Roy Van Til asserts that zero and one are the cornerstones that truly define the human experience.  And for him, it is clearly a Life of One.

The author hopes you enjoy the reading and that you place the unique numbers of your own life into a context that makes perfectly good sense to you.

My first conversation with Miss Pia occurred via email. It went like this: Dear miss Pia, I found your name in a group of healers taught in the Cayo by a Rosita Arvigo, i have some...Issues, and i was wondering if maybe i could get together with you for a consultation to see whether or not you could help me? Best, Michael A couple of day's later i received my response from Pia which said, "i am sorry i didn't get back to you sooner, but i was with patients for the last couple of days and i never interrupt treatment to pick up my messages. Please call me at such and such tomorrow morning"......

The Old Perfesser would have known what the magnificent US Women's Soccer Team was feeling last night.  For it was Casey Stengel who wisely said that "there are some games you can't win, and some games you can't lose."  In this essay, RVT wonders if the soccer gods took charge and somehow affected the outcome.  It has happened before...and it will happen again.  Maybe that is one reason why we love sports.  Sometimes there are upsets that live on forever, for better or worse.  I hope you enjoy the reading and I look forward to your feedback.

Gadaffi: “I love a girl in uniform”…

Greetings to friends unknown:  This piece is about placing our petty complaints into proper perspective.  With a little humility and sensitivity we might all make the world a more pleasant place to live.  All we need to do is simply relinquish our bitchin' rights.  I hope you enjoy the reading.    ...RVT

Hi Everybody,

I now have all blogging technicalities in place and I'm ready to begin blogging, complete with your ability to respond to any blog, as well as to each other, creating an online community. My friends ROY VAN TIL and MICHAEL JOCHUM will also be blogging, both interesting people with different styles of writing and hopefully compelling, provocative, and stimulating. We're looking for agreement, disagreement, other points of view. I look forward to your reading my blogs as well as Roy's and Michael's....and to your comments.

Thanks you so much for being a part of my world, my music, and being a difference in making this a better place for us ALL.

Peace,

FREEBO

Hi Everybody,

So BP has "plugged the hole", capped the well, and everything will be OK......I WISH!!! If this whole thing isn't a huge wakeup call to all of us, to speak out, to get involved, to cry out for change, and to continue to be the change that we wish to see......I don't know what is or what will be. We are truly at a crossroads, at a point of destiny, and the choices we make now as a society and a country will effect all those who come after us. We need a new direction, and we must demand it. I know it won't be easy, I know its frustrating for each of us "little guys", I know there are powers that be who will stop at nothing to make greater and greater profits at the expense of The People. But together, we really can make a difference, by speaking out individually and in great numbers. We can be MAD AS HELL AND NOT TAKE T ANY MORE if we really want to. We can choose NOT to be lulled to sleep by those forces who wish us to be unconscious. Because if we don't, this will not be the last disaster, or the biggest. If we cannot see the madness of the direction in which we're heading, then we're no different than the Captain of The Titanic.....full speed ahead on an unsinkable ship, intent on breaking the trans-oceanic speed record in a sea known to have deadly icebergs, unable to stop or change direction once an iceberg is sited....THE TIPPING POINT. And I firmly believe we are indeed very close to that tipping point, and if we don't slow down and/or change direction, the ship will hit the fan! DRILL BABY DRILL.......NOT!

Peace,

FREEBO

My father said to me many times while I was growing up in a small Pennsylvania coal town, "Change comes slowly". And my own personal experience over the years suggests that this wise man was so right. As human beings, we seem to have an innate chip that inspires fear of anything different from what we know, a natural protection, I suppose, from the many dangers that could threaten us in the wild of our caveman days. One would hope, of course, that our experience, our intellect, and our knowledge of history would overcome that inherent fear in situations where the facts suggest otherwise. But The Status Quo is a powerful drug, and if you have something that seems to work for you, it's only natural to not want to give it up for an unknown. Thus the dynamic of the Power Brokers, The Haves, the upper tiers of society.....any society! For the rich who can afford the best healthcare, the Staus Quo works. For the powerful insurance companies, healthcare companies, and those politicians who are in their pocket, The Status Quo works. But for so middle class, poor, and disenfranchised Americans, it is not and has not been working.

So this dynamic makes it all the more interesting that The Good Old USA has finally embarked on a different path when it comes to the healthcare system in this country. No matter that every other "developed" country in The West has Universal Healthcare, "Socialized Medicine"...whatever you want to call it....a system where everyone pitches in to help everyone else, and a system that most folks in these countries will tell you works quite well, thank you, that very few if any would give up for a system like ours. But we have finally made a move toward CHANGE with this healthcare bill. In the scope of things, we made a "LEFT TURN"......yes, LEFT.....because LEFT suggests change....RIGHT suggests Status Quo, "conservative...to conserve, to hold on to, to be wary of change". The only real constant is CHANGE. And to resist any change simply out of fear is to be stuck in that caveman mentality, to be in fear of one's own life...or in the case of many, fear of losing one's identity.
The forces that have been against Healthcare Reform seem to be those who have had the most to lose.....(1) Healthcare Companies whose obscene profits would become less and (2) Republicans who see their party as losing to The Democrats, Republicans whose prediction of "Obama's Waterloo" not coming true, of Obama winning the battle of healthcare and by definition, Republicans losing the battle. Quite simply, this greed dynamic has been framing this thing for the past year....for the past 50 really.
So we are at a new juncture, one of change. Yes, as my father said, change does come slowly. This healthcare bill is far from perfect, has much to be desired as far as covering all Americans with insurance, is a very long way from Single Payer/Universal Healthcare, and a very long way from getting the unnecessarily huge profits of a few giant healthcare corporations over the needs of The People. But it is A START. This is not about a victory for The Democrats or Obama...it's a victory for The People and their needs. It's a moment where The Little Guy triumphed briefly over The Bully. It's a moment of Change, and in that respect, it's a good thing!

My cross country drive/tour in my mom's '97 Taurus continues with an added house concert his Tuesday night in Nashville put on by my friends Meg Hilly and Samantha Newark. It wil be a 7 PM show, over by 10:00 at the latest for those of you who have work or school the next day (I'm a musician, no such choice....that's why I decided to become a professional musician over 40 years ago!). Besides Samantha doing a song or two, I hope to have several of my other very talented Nashville friends join me as well. If you're anywhere near Nashville or know someone who is, please let them know. You can get the info of my Myspace.

..The Atlanta show was unfortunately snowed out...several inches making Atlanta drivers unable to cope with the highways! I have compassion for those of you in the North East with record snows still digging out.

Which brings me to make an observation and a statement about GLOBAL WARMING....or CLIMATE CHANGE!! I find it fascinating...and frustrating...to hear the Conservative Pundants point to record snowfall as proof that there's no global warming. "How could there possibly be global waming with all this snowfall and cold....rediculous!" Of course they make it a point to specifically call it GLOBAL WARMING..... never using the phrase CLIMATE CHANGE. An overwhelming percentage of scientists agree and reliable statistics confirm that the earth is indeed becoming warmer, that the icecaps are melting, and that this warming trend is in fact causing bizarre weather patterns. So it's certainly not a stretch for any half-intelligent human being to come to the conclusion that there is a connection between the two.......UNLESS YOU SIMPLY REFUSE TO MAKE THAT CONNECTION.
Listening to so much local radio as I make this drive across The Good Ol' USA (for the umpteenth time!), I find myself innundated with Right Wing Talking Heads...Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Glenn Beck, and many more....as they continue to push their radical agenda...yes, RADICAL. I believe for these folks, it's deeply personal, not in a way to make the world better for human kind, but to make it better for themselves and their immediate friends. For them, it's really all about money and power, both the same really. To make themselves right, they constantly strive to make others wrong. The facts are bent to fit the agenda, and the agenda becomes exactly the opposite of what their "enemies" believe. Because SEPARATION is key....."divide and conquer", an age old strategy. It is a war to them, a big game, where there are only winners and losers. To be wrong is to be a loser, and losing is intolerable, devasting, and annlhilating. Their fragile egos cannot take it...they'd feel personally destroyed. So to avoid this awful feeling of being less than, they constantly strive to be better than. And what better way to do that than to put somebody else down, to make the other person wrong, to attack constantly, pre-emptively...it is war, after all. If you once spouted and loudly shouted to the world that global warming doesn't exist, you can't go back on that.....you'd be admitting that you were wrong, and being wrong is losing, and losing is intolerable. So they continue to insist they're right, even if the facts don't support that. But facts can be cheery picked, so cherry picked they are. "Look at all this snow (show snowman in TV news picture)....no global warming here! Al Gore is wrong, see, his whole movie is a Left Wing piece of propaganda...I told you so.....I WAS RIGHT ALL ALONG!"
That's the beast that has emerged in the past 20 years, it's self serving, it's everywhere, and it's destroying the country. The truth has become a casualty of personal greed. The ego has triumphed. The other side, unfortunately, in its attempt to counter the falsehoods, engages in a similar energetic, and the escalation continues.
To me it's very sad, to watch our beautiful planet cry out for help, and to have the powerful few ignore our Mother's pleas, because to do so might take something from them....money, power, everything they've been able to accumulate. But mostly it's a sense of self that they never really had, a sense of self that had to be created on the "outside" with material gain, all feeding the ego. "INNER WORK....what's that? Hey, I'm fine....just look at me, I'm really successful!"
Yes you are, Rush. Yes you are, Glenn. Yes you are, Sean.You're all really successful on the outside. But in my book, you are all losers. Because you're not team players, you're selfish, you're greedy, and when it comes to Global Warming, or shall I say Climate Change........YOU'RE WRONG!     Peace,
FREEBO