Category: Uncategorized

I just finished reading Woody Guthrie’s biography, Bound for Glory. Highly recommend it. It started kinda slow, with a lot of detail about young Woody’s trials and tribulations in Oklahoma. He weathered a lot of sorrow early on. It’s surprising he didn’t become bitter. And giving his street-fighting ethic as a kid, it’s also surprising what a peaceful, tolerant adult he grew into. I particularly like a scene where he’s playing in a bar on the West Coast at the outbreak of World War II. Patriotic fervor is running high among everyone, Woody included. But when a mob starts attacking a Japanese-American’s bar, Woody and a bunch of military folks rally to their defense. There are countless scenes like that. And he has a real gift for language (not to mention songwriting.: Another great scene is when he drifts from West Texas to California on the hope of a better life with relatives. He gets to the house, looks inside at the stifling, stable existence within and walks away, even though he’s famished and his clothes are hanging off him. Better to follow his muse than succumb to the routine of middle class life.

“When I stood there on top of the hill and listened to that iron gate snap locked behind me, and looked all down across the roofs and church steeples and chimneys and steep houses of Sonora, I smelled the drift of the pine rosin in the air and watched a cloud whiff past me over my head, and I was alive again.”

OK, here are my theories on the death of Dr. Atkins, creator of the all-meat, all-the-time Atkins Diet. He died from head injuries suffered when he slipped on an icy sidewalk last week in front of his home in New York. The physician had been ridiculed by the medical establishment for 20 years until just recently, when the docs went “Doh! (forehead smack) Bob (Atkins) was right and we look like idiots! Eat all the meat you can choke down!”

1. He became light-headed from lack of carbohydrates.

2. Vengeful members of the AMA hired a hitman to hose down the sidewalk of front of the Atkins house just before a hard freeze.

3. Nitrite poisoning impaired his balance.

4. Angry cows spiked Atkins’ morning omelet with a growth hormone that took effect just as he reached the icy sidewalk.

The check I mailed to the Feds on Tuesday was enought to buy 1/518 of a Patriot missile. As I dropped my return into the mail slot, I imagined the stacks of Iraqi bodies I helped create, the financial opportunities for Dick Cheney and Haliburton I’d made possible, the oil company property safeguarded by my money. (Strains of Lee Greenwood’s “I’m Proud to Be An American” swell, then fade.)