i've forgotten how to grow vegetables; i used to do it in iowa but up there the soil was so good you'd plant seeds and have to get out of the way before the plants would come up and hit you. down here you have to hang around your garden and fight off the bugs; if you walk away for a couple of days, the weeds take over and you can't even find your bug-eaten vegetable. also there are the deer; they're overpopulated, and bad drivers aren't taking care of the situation, because of the high gas prices. so they go all over, especially eating the tomatoes, but also the roses, and just about anything else you could put in a salad.

the reason i mention this is that the financial markets are crashing, so it makes us all wonder if we'll be hanging around figuring out how to shoot squirrels, and i never did know how to do that. about the only depression-type thing i can do is play a song, and that might have to do, since i'm in a fix over this vegetable deal. fortunately we don't have any money in the stock market. on the contrary, if credit is short, we're better off, 'cause we don't have to go get more of it just to keep the system running. we have a huge cavernous addition on the house, but it's not finished, so we can just go up there and run around in the open room for the whole depression, maybe, until we figure out how to finish it without money, or, maybe we don't.

i mention this because really, our whole picture depends on the world financial outlook, at least mine does, maybe they still need sociologists in a deep depression. but i, an esl teacher, could conceivably lose my job if, for example, money dries up in asia, or saudi, or, say bush invades taiwan. this is why i don't watch the debates too carefully. i hate evidence that any candidate is not up to the job, and i've had a little too much of that for the last eight years.

got this report while buzzing around my favorite places, and it scared me a little, so i'll probably go stick my head back in the sand and do my haiku, or maybe pop art in the upcoming mini-break. these are ostrichish pursuits, i admit, but they are working for me in that 1) life is pretty crazy around here, with my wife writing a book, the boys growing quickly, and an overload at work; also, they're giving me writing classes again, lots of papers to grade, maybe i'll figure out how to put the whole class on chat, so as to improve their grammar, or at least watch it carefully, without having to always keep grading and correcting it. i'll light up the blogs again and make sure there's lots of good commentary on american life...maybe we need it. i'm beginning to think partly in terms of woody guthrie...well, they kilt the soil back where i'm from, so i picked up & headed out to see the big old world & this is what i wrote. or ralph stanley, who never could sing all that well, but dredged up all the cool appalachian songs, sang right from the mountains, got all the women with good singing voices to accompany him, and now he's endorsed obama, which shows he's basically sensible on top of it all.

the thing is, after studying andy warhol for a while, i decided that though i also had a longstanding bout with boredom & with what one critic called, deliberate moral blankness, that i didn't really want to go down that road, didn't want to just take advantage of, or even make pop-art calendars out of, other folks' work. as part of a class where we studied freud and dreams a bit, i encountered freud's nephew, who brought freud's ideas to the usa, then decided, why help people discern their subconscious, when one can simply help business take advantage of their subconscious, and make big bucks in the process? he started out convincing america that it needed bacon for breakfast; then, he convinced women that they should all start smoking. finally he moved on to united fruit where he convinced america that it needed to invade guatemala; this was the year i was born. aha, i thought, i'd been looking for the root of that for years, and there it was. "the father of spin," he's called as he got people like rove inspired to be truly slimy & manipulative, and change the course of history. we are truly living in a freudian age (just do it) though most people wouldn't even want to admit it...but then, how do i fit into this picture? i make quaker pop-art (scroll down) but i cover it up sometimes with plays for youth- this one is about our building...and, who knows. what i'm saying is it's hard knowing how one fits into the world, but, i don't want to look back at a life and say, father of spin, overthrown governments & dead smokers in my wake. or, t-shirt factory in new york city, lots of drugs, millions-a-bucks, i'm a deeply superficial person with purple hair, but dead. i like pop art, i think it's the actualist poetry of the computer-visuals world, but, i'm a' make my own, not gonna make a career out of poor m. monroe, and to that end, i've started dragging a digital camera around, taking photos of stuff i love, like faner, sculptures, signs, japanese garden, etc. which i'll soon show. this can only get deeper, as i'm in for more writing classes, and can't write for beans, anything except haiku, in this kind of mode. stay tuned. chou!