Shannon Larratt is Zentastic

So yesterday I passed out at 3 PM and got maybe two hours of sleep. I have been unable to sleep since moving into this house a bit over a month ago — at best I'm getting four hours a night, and while I can operate on little sleep, I can't handle that little for that long. The only reason I'm functioning right now is I shot myself up with a little medication… at least that's still legal…

     If he'd been a soldier man
     Shooting gooks in Vietnam
     If he was the CIA
     Selling dope and making hay
     He'd be free, they'd let him be
     Breathing air, like you and me
          - John Lennon, John Sinclair

I mention this because a kid in Indiana that had a couple priors for drug possession just got handed twenty years in prison for getting nailed in a sting for selling two Oxycontin pills. Well, maybe he can get early release to kill in the upcoming water wars and other pending apocalypses.

Hell, this dude is facing 2-to-8 years for crowd surfing. Sign him up too.

I'm told I live in the third world… well, they got it right on the third try.

Even though violent crime is at its lowest rate since the mid-seventies, at this point the United States has approximately two and a half million of its citizens in prison, making it the most aggressive prison police state both in the modern world and human history. No country in the world — not Iraq, not China, not Russia — has a higher per-capita imprisonment rate. Deeply disturbing.

Please pay attention to these things. America is armed to the teeth, spending more money on military technology than any nation in human history, and is on a collision course with a fate that almost forces it to start using that might simply to survive, assuming it doesn't first goad any number of groups into launching preemptive nuclear strikes — America has a failing power grid and supply system (a problem that's not hard to fix), pollution that's spinning out of control, and is currently unable to supply enough fresh water for its people — a growing amount is being piped in from Canada — let alone enough food. It should go without saying how dangerous for the US to keep careening recklessly toward bankruptcy. The point-of-no-return that when we reach it all our lives change forever gets closer every day.

Low income housing going up down the block from me.
People making less than $4,000 a year own these. Own, not rent.
We can all have homes. We shouldn't have to pay the wealthy for the right to have a roof.

Now, don't get me wrong — things are pretty screwed up all over the world. The US is still better off on most accounts than most nations (and does what it can to keep it that way) — what differentiates it is that it's incredibly large (when America falls, the collateral damage will shake the planet), farthest along on the path to hell because it started first and ran the fasted into the darkness of the future, and it's the only one that's on an obvious crash course with little time left to correct it.

As much as I wish awareness and capitalist support was enough, I'm not sure that yuppies doing the right thing and heartily congratulating each other for it is going to save us… and sadly, the muddled politics in America make me fear that no one has the cahones left for revolution. It's too bad, because if you've got to choose between local revolution and world war, world war is a whole lot less pleasant.

Maybe it's best if the Earth takes a break from the wonders of humanity. Even if we leave this place a smoking radioactive storm-wrought wasteland, I strongly suspect that life will find a way.

     Years ago you sent a postcard,
     it's the one that always made me laugh
     It said "Send for reinforcements
     cause theres too much here for me to love."
          - Neil Halstead, Hi-Lo and Inbetween

Other than that, I really have to thank everyone who's written in the memories forum. My memory isn't very good, and I have trouble bringing some of this up from the depths, but those triggered so many wonderful things I thought I'd forgotten.

Yes, this was a disjointed entry.

I admit I posted it in part to clear my “you should post these” bookmarks list from the last week.