Practical Goods

When we sold produce at the Powderhorn Market year ago our next market stall was occupied by a fascinating peddler named Wendy Ward. I'm not sure what she called what she was doing then, but now-a-days it is a shop in St. Paul, Minnesota called Practical Goods What distinguished this lady's stock from others was the innate quality of it, whatever it was, and that continues until this day.

What I want to do more with this BLOG is share positive, especially alternative culture figures, businesses, causes, whatever seems to fit. We have hit the wall in our culture at present, typified by the demonstrations against "Wall Street" and the dominating 1% of the economic elite ... and their minions. What is becoming more and more evident is that we will need a higher and higher concentration and proliferation of alternatives to "business as usual."

Wendy's shop, philosophy and work are instructive of this, and I suggest you support what she does. She is at 1581 Randolph Ave. (just east of Snelling), her phone number is (651-690-1122, her hours are long and convenient (11 to 6 daily), and she is on a bus line. I'm going to quote a couple of things from her broadside: "Who should shop at Practical Goods?" " - People with lots more taste than money" & "People who like our planet and work to keep it nice" - & "People who wear clothes, use dishes, affirm the kind ship of all human cultures and might dislike living in a world that is a wholly owned subsidiary of Mc-Wal-Cola."

If you are not fortunate enough to have a Wendy Ward & her Practical Goods in your region try and support business like hers, even if you have to create something like this yourself. Thanks.

Intermittant Communications

A friend asked why blogs were not being written by me. When I answered "gremlins" her eye brows raised a bit. Having grown up in a time when this word was used fairly often, sometimes for questionable purposes (?), it comes back at times when the"hard luck and troubles" seem more evident than usual. What is it? Superstitions, perhaps. But when a string of misfortunes keep coming on it is hard not to take this personally, and even give names to it.

I would hope that this "string" is at an end, or at least occurs less often and with fewer "punishments." This is not a good time to have things which cost additional money and time prevail, would you agree? & yet they have and have continued up until this weekend. Something that I have intended to write for at least two months will be written next, and my hope is that whatever those "forces" out there that have been occurring will back off, perhaps even disappear for a time. It bring up my superstitious nature to even mention that they will not occur again.

Look up the word yourself, see what you think. I asked a fellow who works next door this morning whether his father ever used the word. "Oh yes," was his answer, and nothing else needed to have been said.

Minimum Wage

There is a lot of blather about Social Security now-a-days, including Rick Perry's remark about the "Ponzi scheme' aspect of it. Well, as someone who worked for decades and paid into the Social Security Trust Fund (?) for those decades, I consider my meagre check for $1,132 a month to be a kind of retainer for my 40 to 50 hrs a week retired "employment."

President Obama has recently suggested that we "do the math." OK, if we divide the amount which arrives electronically to my bank per month by 40 or 50 my present payment comes out in the six to seven dollar a month range, at best. In her original edition of "Nickled and Dimed" Barbara Ehrenreich (sp?) says that one must make in the range of $14, $15 dollars to live a minimal existence (?).

And that means that you must reach into what minimal amount of retirement money one just might have to even exist. Ehrenreich's calculations were based upon 1992 figures, as I recall; it would be instructive what the revisited edition gives as the amount per hour that one must "earn" in order to just exist. As you can tell, I am no economist. But I know full well that when medical considerations get on the horizon, when there is a problem with the refrigerator, a dog needs to go to the vet, when the fuel oil needs to be delivered, the brakes have to be done, and tires replaced, ETC. that small anxieties dance on a trouble horizon, ever closer. The blather includes the "news" that Congress may just not be able to pay the bills, that their squabbling may just shut the government down. "Lord have mercy."

rust buster

In the forties and fifties there were no products for sale that we knew about to "bust" the rust, corrosion, and like on bolts, nuts and other automotive/truck parts. So my mechanic Father fashioned a liquid made from Coca Cola and motor oil, which worked well, but probably not as well as those commercially available these days.

My Father was no fan of many of the so-called soft drinks, and thus made a point of broadcasting and making possible parallels between this automotive solution and the possible health ramifications for the human organs, the complexions of teenagers, etc. I was taking a physiology course in high school at the time, and decided to weigh in with his parallels and analogies with Mrs. B. and my classmates. Well, it didn't go over very well with the class, but I made a few points with our beloved teacher.

Drinking glasses full of coke with submerged pieces of rust, iron and steel enabled us to observe the disappearance of the little "specimens" into the liquid. I presented a short talk with some bonafied results at Norman's Automotive. I'm not sure how many of my fellow students changed their soft drink consuming ways. This memory came up as one of the fellows working on the next property starts the arduous process of restoring a very old Farmall tractor; rust busting will be important.

Beyond Pollyanna

As we reach the threshold of a new era the tendency is to take refuge in Pollyanna and utter denial to avoid going up against "the wall." The so-called "armed lifeboat" syndrome has brought us a new kind of literature, one which goes beyond warnings and denials to state that we must face, what Bill McKibben and many other writers have warned us about. These writings can amount to what Christian Parenti has called "romancing the end times."

Paarenti's book, "Tropic of Chaos," Slavoj Zizek's "Living in the End Times," and Naomi Kline's "The Shock Doctrine" take us to a reality that goes well beyond the fire walls put up and maintained by both apologists and critics of our dire predicaments. This is to be looking at the barrel of a gun, one which is not going to go away with rationalizations and platitudes.

It doesn't matter if your lifeboat has a cross on the bow and the old "red, white & blue" flying on the stern, nor whether you are able to lounge on your bullet and torpedo proof Chris Craft, or kick back in your deeply gated community. Everyone is involved, regardless of their armour or bank accounts. Last evening I hit the bottom of this and it was terrifying. All the best to you.

Redactive

The first hint of this word came with a trip to a library in Los Angeles with my Grandfather. This was the stereotypical Carnegie public library where you had to walk up at least a flight of stairs to enter a portal of heavy wooden doors. There was something very forbidding about the place, it had the shusshing atmosphere, very dark interior, and a no nonsense staff. We were uncomfortable in an environment that my Grandfather had hoped would be a "positive experience."

Its rules counted more than its humanness, and when my Grandfather tried to describe his uneasiness with it he found it hard to describe. Years later I discovered the redactive word, and have found myself in other circumstances which would be well described by it. The dictionary definition of the word is fascinating in that it also relates to collecting, editing and revising.

My present public library is completely the opposite; and I have had the good fortune to work in several libraries during my years of labor as a librarian to work in open, welcoming circumstances, essentially unreactionary in their services and environments. Libraries have changed over the decades and it is tragic to see many library systems being shut down due to financial difficulties and the attitudes of legislatures and institutional hierarchies. "Comes the Revolution."

Civility

To me personal memory about other people's needs is the essence of being human, a hallmark about that is civility. Not that I consider myself a "paragon of virtue," no. But to be thoughtful and courteous is part of the boilerplate of character in my book. My parents and my grandparents did not teach this, they lived it. Now I find that I miss the earlier generations' lives in this regard.

What set this off? Working with a young man this week I found that he threw his pop cans in the back of my pickup truck, and when I got in his car to take a ride to help him with something the floor was strewn with so much debris he had throw some of it over the seat. Now I like this fellow a lot, a very good worker, but I can't handle the situation which puts me at odds with his personal habits.

My Father was an automotive mechanic for many many years and couldn't stand the fact that people did not respect themselves or the cars he was to work on because of the way they brought them in. To him maintenance was critical and for people to expect him to clean up after them before he could solve their mechanical problems was a sign of disrespect. This seems to be an allegorical situation, an uncomfortable one, perhaps a sign of the times.