GUILTY!
Guilt is a damaging emotion. Nevertheless, I'm prone to such feelings, especially when I grumble about gas prices while other people are dying or otherwise suffering in some public way. Some expire surprisingly -- Johnnie Cochran; some slowly and inevitably, and probably blessedly -- Terri Schiavo. While long ago I decided to be guiltless as much as I could manage, it's a stealthy and subtle, sticklily creeping emotion that oozes into your psychoemotional system by stifling degrees -- like a morphine drip without the blissful, cottony aenesthesia to deaden all pain. My real guilt lies in my conflicted past, but it arises now and then, causing bitten fingernails and overconsumption of coffee, sweets, or wine -- some days, all three consumed in what I assume are carefully spaced interludes. Hell, I'm not 20 anymore, so then I'll face an evening of heartburn and a night of ragged sleep. Which makes the following morning fairly miserable, and leads to drinking more coffee. The toxic combination -- lack of sleep, bad nutrition, anxiety -- releases some gel-like substance in my brain and loosens the remaining logic connections. Which then makes me fantasize answers and outcomes that somewhere deep inside my consciousness comfort me with how they beautifully coincide with my own conception of cause and effect. Such as: Johnnie Cochran's brain tumor was a karmic result of having blithely and successfully defended a bad-ass killer. Now that's a nasty thought; I can see that even in my bleary-eyed, guilty frame of psyche. No one deserves a cause-and-effect, lethal pounding like that, poisonous spider marching in the head, a macabre, painful death that saps an exceptional brain . . . even if he was a lawyer.

It's Good Friday and I had a pleasant day, and the weather was exquisite. At the moment I am ruining my good mood by still grumbling about . . . guess what . . .

FUELISH WORDS
In my more airheaded era I used to say, offhandedly, that I'd stay on this planet just long enough to see the demise of the internal combustion engine. This was when I lived closer to the urban centers of Los Angeles, and barely ever made even brief escapes during the summers when the smog got so smotheringly disgusting I made foolish comments based on 1) faith that soon we'd all be driving all-electric or some other "clean" machines; and 2) death simply meant moving to another locale with lighter luggage. HA! I now see that I've probably signed on for a long life around here, Earth, and for some reason the smog doesn't bother me that much anymore. Just another indication of how marvelously adaptive humans can be. Also an indication of how sweet those clear, smogless days are.

Now gas prices have, pardon the hackneyed word, skyrocketed. My hikes with Buckwheat up the hills near our home have become all the more precious. The fact that I have two good legs that carry me up those hills . . . sweet! Life is good.

But dependence on fossil fuels sucks.

ROCKER WATCHDOG

Call it frivolous, but I am plenty upset about how many once respected rock'n'roll bands have sold out to corporate America in the form of granting permission to use some of their most memorable music on TV commercials. This annoyance probably has something to do with my generation -- brought up as we were by our peers to covet our rock'n'roll as generational anthems unsullied by the venalities of our parents and their loyalty to the marketplace. Never mind that the music industry itself has always been entirely corrupted by Mammon to the point of baldfaced infiltration of mobsters . . . somehow that never hampered our pristine counterculture ethic.

Anyway, I've been keeping a list. I cannot find the list at the moment, so for the time being I have to rely on my memory. Therefore the list right now is very brief:

KFC: Lynyrd Skynyrd
Office Depot: Bachman Turner Overdrive

Never fear. More when I find that damn list! Er, never mind. Cuz I just found a writer who tells the tale far better than I could. So, go right here.