Why do I blog?

I blog because I like to write. I blog because I want to become a better writer. I blog because people stare at me strangely if I rant like this on a street corner (although the spare change does come in handy.) All of which leads to the preceding post. It is one of my first attempts at story writing. Feedback is welcome. If anything it suffers from a format change. The post starts out as a story written in a kind of oral tradition form and then abruptly changes into a exposition and then back to a more traditional story format.

posted by Y.H.N.  ¶ 2:49 PM 0 comments links to this post

  Push Wood Johnny

"Once there was a man named 'Push Wood Johnny', " I began to a group of friends. My announcement greeted by hoots and hollers and cat calls. "Oh no not another one of his stories!" called out one of my female companions. This was lovely Spanish night and we were all riding down the beach in the bed of a friend's pick up. She went on after a few bumpy yards, "You can't believe anything that guy says!"

Well I was puzzled to say the least and did not grace my companions with my bit of personal history that night. Rather I was engaged in thoughts about the nature of story telling and the truth, because you see Push Wood Johnny really did exist. His story is true, even though the improbable looms large in the telling.

The story goes like this: Once there was a man named Push Wood Johnny. Now Push Wood Johnny lived in a bush town in Alaska, a place where one has to work very hard just to get by and certainly not a place for the lazy. However whether a misplaced labor saving visionary or through a true deficit of industry he did develop a reputation for being lazy.

This is the story of his crime.

Like most of the residents of his town, Push Wood Johnny depended on a wood fire to heat his cabin. I can only suppose that one night as he was loading his stove with fuel it occurred to him that the essence of heating a cabin was a process of turning a tree into wood ash. The intermediate processes of cutting logs, cutting logs into sections and then splitting the sections into fire wood merely cluttered the Zen like essence of the larger whole.

How did it begin? Did Johnny start with cutting larger pieces of fire wood? Seeing the labor saved in that, did he begin to burn whole sections of logs, progressing even to loads of fire wood that prevented the stove door from closing? After all as the fire consumes the wood, one merely needs to tuck the remainder into to the belly of the stove. Who knows?

What we do know is that is when these practices come to the attention of his fellow citizens Johnny is shoving

WHOLE LOGS

into his stove, 6 FOOT SECTIONS of wood protrude from the fire. As they are consumed ... there stands Johnny shoving a new section into the fire.

All of this might have been forgiven and forgotten. After all Alaska is a place where the eccentric takes on shades of the sublime. Forgotten that is but for the night that Johnny fell asleep, fell asleep with a fire burning in his stove. As the night wore on and on Johnny failed to tend his fire. More and more of the log was consumed. Consumed until it burned right up to the lip of the stove door. Then WHAM ! The burning log came tumbling out on to the floor of the cabin.

Needless to say Johnny lost his cabin that night.

Push Wood Johnny, as he was now called, was held up to the local children and visitors as the archetype of laziness. His original name is completly forgotten. Now he bunks with 'Jack of Tales' and 'Coyote,' (just until he gets his own place you understand) and still not doing a lick of work. Johnny though has achieved a kind of immortality that even hard work could have earned for him. Immortality, because if I have told my tale well then you will never forget the name or story of Push Wood Johnny.  ¶ 2:22 PM 0 comments links to this post

  Get rid of the Iraqi Governing Counsel (IGC)

Somebody please explain to me how THIS helps. The decree by the IGC imposing Islamic Shari'a law on family law does not take effect until Bremmer signs off on it and then basically lapses when an interim Iraqi government is chosen. My initial reaction (Wednesday) was to really feel for the first time like we could lose Iraq, i.e. end up with a islamofacsit regime that will be as repressive as the one before it. If we were to turn Iraq over to the IGC today we will have replaced one vicious dictator with 20 vicious dictators. The inevitable shakedown would result in a slaughter house that will make Lebanon look like bloodless coup.

In fact however we must look to ourselves for this failure. The IGC has no real power (all decisions go through Paul Bremmer) and therefore there is not real consequence to tossing this kind of sop to the islamists. Look at the Russian Duma, no power, no consequences and so the body is populated by populist and rabble rousers. Intended or not this decision by the IGC is a vote of no confidence in it own existence.

Bremmer's plan to replace the IGC is to use a caucus process, much the same as will be used in Iowa in the near future, for selecting the new government. The good news is that with the exception of the Kurds, the parties represented on the ICG are so undemocratic that they have little or no influence at or below the provincial level. Nor does it seem that they have any interest in doing the work needed to gain such influence. The old middle eastern political formula is still being followed. Collect guns and steal whatever is not nailed down. When the dust settles toaddy up to whoever looks like the most dangerous and unbalanced psychopath left standing When Chief Wiggles writes about the nature of his work ( scroll down to "The nature of my work") he describes the jockeying for position and the private agendas. A divergence in goals between parties is par for the course in politics, but it is no longer clear to me that these are the people we should be dealing with.  ¶ 3:40 PM 0 comments links to this post