LEAVE IT TO PEEVER

$9500 an acre or bust.

-Bumper sticker of the week: Here comes your 19^th nervous breakdown.

-Quote of the week: “Everyone’s a pacifist between wars. It’s like being a vegetarian between meals.” Colman McCarthy

“I’d kill for a Nobel Peace Prize.” Steven Wright

-There are times in life that you just have to start over. What was is not good enough, not right enough, not true enough. There’s nothing wrong with starting over. It is a wise person who understands and learns from your mistakes. What is done is done. It cannot be undone. It can only be learned from and corrected. Wisdom doesn’t come out of the blue. It comes from doing and redoing, doing and redoing....

-I’m down in Arkansas digging crystals. Crystals fascinate me. Ancient humans looked at a crystal with awe and reverence. Here was a rock that you could see through. Light could shine through and produce a rainbow. History reveals that crystals have for millennia been used for healing and good luck. I dig crystals partly for the hunt and as a hobby, and partly, I believe, out of some genetic connection to our ancient ancestors. It is a connection that some would find odd and unlikely, but to me, feels real and alive.

-Time out:

* Meth is a profitable drug that in the short term offers the maker a good living and the user a bittersweet high. In the end, both maker and user will succumb to one of three results: prison, insanity, or death.

* How much money can the government print without any backing? This is a puzzling question that haunts economists. It all seems fascinatingly bizarre to me. If our debts exceed our assets, why not declare bankruptcy, like Chrysler or General Motors? We can pay our creditors twenty cents on the dollar and start all over again. Seeing we have the largest military in the world, who’s going to argue?

* After spending trillions of dollars on an illegal war, and giving ten’s of billions of dollars to financial institutions and auto companies who are about as financially viable as my checking account, we don’t seem to have enough money to establish guarantee health-care for every American. We are the last developed country in the world without some form of guaranteed health-care. Universal health-care was talked about as early as 1912 in the United States. The American Medical Association, Insurance companies, Managed Care companies, and American Corporations in general, along with the Republican Party, have repeatedly beaten down attempts to establish universal health-care in America. They see health-care as a privilege, a commodity, and not as a right. I think they are wrong. Unfortunately, for a lot of people, they are dead wrong.

* Galesburg keeps recycling the same used up ideas. How about let’s redo the downtown? That will save us. Maybe the third time will be a charm. What about we buy an industrial part and farm it out for half price? Maybe China will manufacture something here? Particularly if they only have to pay a dollar a day in wages. They should have held the Olympics here. That would have helped. We could all pool our money and buy the BNSF. We could tell ourselves that we don’t really need to toot our horns in town for any good reason, or maybe even put the tracks on the outskirts of town. That would save each of us about 3-4 hours of waiting time per year, which we could use for personal development. Or community development. I’m hoping maybe the new mayor will do things differently. We don’t need more of the same. Any more of the same and we’ll be sold to the cheapest bidder, probably someone from China. But we should hold out for $9500 per acre, which I hear is the going price.