IdeaJones

Tag: Joey

Joey Jones is co-owner of IdeaJones

  • Doing Your Civic Doody

    Doing Your Civic Doody

    We will never forget this election year. Oh, we'll try, but we'll never forget.
    We will never forget this election year. Oh, we’ll try, but we’ll never forget.

    Lord, I’m looking forward to the end of this election.

    I envy people who came of age in the 60s. Who knows what kind of President JFK would have been long-term, but they at least had the chance to be idealistic.

    It was bad enough when the “bleeding heart liberals” faced off against the “heartless right-wingers.” The language has gotten harsher. This time, it sounds as if all sides believe the other side is no longer human, not just mistaken, but evil. Only one side gets heard in the end, because the winning side continues to paint the losing side as tainted, untouchable. We’re giving up the ability to become one country after the votes are tallied.

    While I’ve spoken out about the issues and the candidates in this election, I’ve tried to avoid demonizing or deifying any side. Back someone into a corner, and his only way out is to fight you. Everyone is worried, scared, tense and tired. Not the best condition in which to make decisions. We have to leave each other room to negotiate our shared future regardless of who wins the election.

    My tolerance does not extend to the candidates themselves and their handlers. One especially. I understand how someone could support Donald Trump in the beginning, and once there, with people saying you’re stupid or worse, switching requires eating a huge slice of humble pie. They didn’t leave you any way out with your pride intact.

    But if you can do it, if you can manage to choke down that much humility and admit he fooled you, know that at least one person admires you for that. It is hard to say you’re wrong. I hate admitting I’m wrong. So if you look at the way he hasn’t released his tax records when he’s the only candidate in decades not to do that, the way he says things and then says he didn’t say them when they’ve been recorded and it’s irrefutable that he did, if you can see that you thought you were getting a can-do businessman, but what he’s selling you is a hazardous, toxic man-baby who would lie to your face, use you and discard you in a  heartbeat, then I and every other reasonable, decent person in this country, possibly around the world, will owe you our respect.  Everyone gets fooled from time to time, but it takes a lot to admit it.

    It’s not you I don’t respect — it’s him. You’re not evil. You’re not stupid. You got conned. It happens to most of us. Even if you can’t quite admit it publicly, which is even harder, admit it when you vote your ballot and kick this toxic con artist where it will pain him most — in his ego. You’re in the position to give him the lesson he desperately needs.

    And once it’s over, we all need to put down our darts and knives and come together to keep our government working on the problems we need it to handle. So those who have been demonizing the opposition will have to swallow those “I told you so’s” unsaid, refrain from saying or posting that perfect insult, stop being unmitigated asshats, and work for the common good without name-calling. Mason Cooley once said, “Enjoy an insult as you deliver it, before you learn its cost.” The people you demonize will not work with you. If you want things to get better, you’re going to have to leave those witty barbs unsaid.

    We need to get back to working with each other, talking to each other, and admiring posts of each others’ lunches and pets. It won’t be easy, but it will feel good.

    If we’ve ever wanted to be superheroes, now’s our chance.

  • Back To The 60s

    This poster, just finished, celebrates some great 60s memories.
    This poster, just finished, celebrates some great 60s memories.

    This is the 50th anniversary year of a lot of 60s stuff:

    The Monkees tv show (and band) launched September of 1966;

    Star Trek (the original) debuted the same year;

    The Chevrolet Camaro, The National Historic Preservation Act (preserving sites with historic significance in the U.S.), the last official Beatles concert, the Batman tv series, and Francie, the Barbie doll’s “hipper” cousin, all made their bows in 1966.

    I was in kindergarten and Mom said that my older sister would be taking me to see The Monkees in San Francisco, CA the following January. To say I was thrilled would be an understatement.  They were playing The Cow Palace and I hadn’t been there. They were playing San Francisco and I hadn’t been there (even though we lived in Santa Cruz, which isn’t that far away). And they were The Monkees. I played their records until they were so fuzzy it sounded like static.

    Then Mom told me the concert had been canceled. Someone was sick. That was that.

    Well, that wasn’t really that — Mom lied. I think she got a look at the chaos that was the audience at a Monkees concert and decided that she didn’t want her five-year-old daughter to be trampled to death. Or my sister, who was a hippie, adamantly refused to take me. I’ll never know. Either way, it would be years before I’d hear them live. I got to see “the Threekees,” which is any three members of the band, a couple of times in the 80s. Those times it was Peter Tork, Micky Dolenz and Davy Jones. The shows were a lot of fun. I even got pranked by Davy, which is a very special memory for me.

    This year, Mark took me to see “the Threekees” again, in Monterey. Initially it was to have been “the Twokees,” in this case Peter Tork and Micky Dolenz, but Mike Nesmith came onstage for the last part of the concert. It was in an old “golden age” movie theater, The beautiful Golden State Theatre in Monterey, and we got to meet up with friends. Thanks to our friend Janice, we even ended up center stage, second row, and we had a lot of fun. And while I didn’t get to see them in San Francisco, I will be seeing them in Paso Robles, CA with Janice — which is why Mark and I made this poster.

    Davy Jones died suddenly, leaving his daughters and a herd of horses, some of them rescues, behind. Horses are expensive to maintain (I grew up with them and it’s both labor-intensive and expensive to keep a horse), and his daughters set up a charity to keep their father’s little herd together. As my time in fandom comes to a close, it seemed like the right note to do something to support the Davy Jones Equine Memorial Fund. So Janice and I will be out in front of the theater before the show, passing out information.

    This poster of Davy Jones is also a nod to one of my favorite artists of the 60s, Peter Max. I’ve been a fan of his work since I was a little kid.  It’s colorful, flowing, and when I was a kid in Santa Cruz, psychedelic art was everywhere. Of course, I was much too young for the “tune in, turn on, drop out” 60s, but the aesthetic was in magazines, on tv, in the music, clothes, movies…  Since Max’s work and The Monkees both came out of the 60s, it seemed right to mix a bit of Peter Max into the style. I’ve also got a thing for stained glass. Most often associated with churches, there’s something about stained glass that makes the subject more of a statement.

    Stained glass is bold in its use of color and light, but fragile. It also forces the eye and brain to do one of the things they do best — find patterns. The face here is rendered minimally, but it’s clear what and who it is.

    So I’ll be standing around this weekend in Paso Robles, hoping this encourages people to approach us and get information about Davy Jones’s charity (yep, official charity, 501(c)3, I checked), and making people smile. If you’re in the area I hope you stop by!

     

     

  • We thank you, they thank you…

    (Quick note — if you haven’t gone to Rebubble.com and signed up for their emails, you really should. For example, they have a sitewide 20% sale going today. Getting great stuff from talented artists is wonderful, but getting a deal on it? Awesome!).

    If you've made a purchase from us, you've helped a refugee start a new life in America!
    If you’ve made a purchase from us, you’ve helped a refugee start a new life in America!

    If you’ve bought anything from our Redbubble store, or from our Etsy store, in the past three months, you just did something very cool.

    Four times a year, we take 25% of everything we’ve sold and buy something for a charity. Right now, we’re supporting Opening Doors, a charity that helps refugees resettling in California. These people arrive in the U.S. with next to nothing. They’re often fleeing violence and the threat of death, so they don’t get to bring much. The charity finds them housing and helps them get started with language classes, help navigating getting the kids into school, how to get around using public transportation, etc.

    So what did you do? You helped buy bus passes so that people who don’t have the money even to ride the bus can get to the doctor, or get the kids enrolled in school, or buy groceries. Often refugees arrive from places that don’t have much in the way of public transportation, and they don’t know the city. Volunteers show them how to use public transit to get where they need to go, taking them to appointments. It makes a new and intimidating place just a bit more familiar.

    Opening Doors also collects items for “welcome kits,” including pots and pans, dishes, etc. When it’s time to turn part of our sales into donations, we contact the charity and ask what they need most. This time, Opening Doors asked for bus passes, so that’s what we donated.

    We. Not just Mark and me… if you bought anything from us in the last three months, you’re part of “we.” You bought bus passes and donated them to a charity. You are part of the day someone gets a bus pass, leaving $7 in his or her budget for food, or school supplies for the kids, or medicine.

    So thank you. We thank you, and they thank you. Enjoy being a patron of the arts (buying something from a small arts business like ours makes you a patron of the arts), and a humanitarian. As a friend of ours says, “You are awesome! Own it! Own it!”

  • How To Shovel Shit

    I considered a few different titles for this post, then it came to me, a picture of my worst summer job.

    Mom was a landscaper and avid gardener. For a time, she and my dad would buy old houses, rehabilitate them and sell them (it wasn’t called “flipping” yet. And flipping sounds so effortless. This was hard work for all three of us).

    Then Dad announced he had accepted a promotion and we were moving to Reno, NV. Reno has things to recommend it (the most beautiful sunsets I’ve seen), but it’s hardly a gardener’s paradise. My parents had a house built, about 45 minutes from downtown Reno (at the time — now I understand it’s more like 30). It wasn’t near anything, surrounded by semi-desert, scrubby manzanita bushes, tumbleweeds, sand and hard-packed dirt, miles of it. There was a lake of sorts, mostly quicksand. The nearest town was Stead, an abandoned military base.

    Mom couldn’t live without plants around her. She’d had no desire to move to Nevada. We were living in Scotts Valley near Santa Cruz, CA, an area so verdant that people said if you dropped a seed you’d better pick it up unless you wanted it to grow right there. Green everywhere, trees you often couldn’t see the tops of, wildflowers. Gardener’s heaven.

    But now we lived in a little patch of ranch-style houses with long dirt roads. There weren’t enough houses to make it worth anyone’s while to pave the streets at that time. The main road to highway 395 was paved, but everything else was dirt so hard it could have been concrete. There weren’t many homes when we lived there, and the ones that were there usually had tiny lawns watered frugally from wells (each house depended on its own well) and perhaps a few hardy flowers.

    Desperate for a garden, Mom undertook negotiations with the desert. She rented a big cultivator to break up the ground and began amending the soil, only it was more like reconstruction. We broke up clods with hoes and rakes and tilled in a long list of additions to add everything our soil didn’t have, which was everything.

    Then Mom found out the sewage treatment plant in Reno would let you have a truckload of composted sewage for little or nothing. We had a big pickup, used to pull a horse trailer, haul hay for our little herd of horses… now it became a sewage truck. Mom and Dad returned with a large load of black stuff that smelled, well… if you’ve ever run across a Porta-potty left in the hot sun for days, like that on steroids. It remains the worst smell I’ve ever run across (which is *not* a challenge, universe, just an observation).  Mom told me with a bright smile that I would “get” to help her put it in the garden and she’d even pay me (I had regular chores but didn’t get paid for those. I did get paid for “extra” work I did).  My going rate was 50 cents an hour, but when I turned down the job, this went to 75 cents an hour, her final offer.

    That summer, I filled wheelbarrows full of dark, stinky sludge, trundled it over to the area where the garden would be, scraped the sludge out and spread it with a rake, working it into the soil. Now, that probably isn’t allowed. It would be seen as a health hazard. But then, it was seen as a sensible way to dispose of waste material, by everyone but the ten-year-old girl with a bandanna tied over her nose and mouth, out in the sun trying to pull up enough dirt to mix with sewage to tamp down the smell.

    I’ve had other jobs I hated over the years, but none to compare with that one. Mom even kicked in a bonus for doing a good job. It wasn’t enough.

    But here’s what I learned:

    *if you leave shit lying around, it doesn’t get any better. It just becomes uglier, smellier shit.

    * Shit can’t be prettied up to smell like something else. If you put, say, peppermint extract on your bandanna, you will smell shit with a hint of mint. And the longer you leave it, the more aggressively shitlike it will smell.

    * It can be composted and used to fertilize something better, but turning it into something better will be hard, smelly work without an ounce of fun to be had. There’s no song you can sing, no game you can play with yourself, that will make dealing with shit enjoyable. But if you have shit, you have to deal with it.

    * If you don’t have to deal with it all at once, you have choices. You can elect to exhaust yourself and plow through to the end, excited about the day you no longer have to deal with this shit, or you can do a bit at a time and reward yourself for dealing with the shit, knowing it’ll take longer but be less tiring.

    This has served me well over the years. While it’s true I don’t have to rake poop (if you don’t count picking up after the dogs) now, life just contains a certain amount of shit. It’s part of the natural process. Ranting against it doesn’t change that. Grab your shovel.

    Shit you deal with becomes fertilizer. Shit you don’t deal with becomes lower-grade, more disgusting shit.

    A friend once told me that people can’t bear feeling helpless. Causes anxiety and any number of problems. But if you find something you can do about the situation, however small, it eases your tension. So when you’re standing out in the yard in your beat-up sneakers, the ones you are going to throw away as soon as you can, holding your rake, watching that truck pull up, don’t look at the truck. Don’t think about how much it holds. Move one wheelbarrow full of shit and decide if you want to move another right away when you’re done with that one. But move that one wheelbarrow full of shit.

    Because every life contains a certain amount of shit, and it isn’t going to be fertilizer unless you use it.

  • Second Amendment Gun Control

    Motivational Monday The Value of Life IdeaJonesSo many people have weighed in on the recent shootings. I’ve had to go on a “news diet.” After a while, the details, the repetition of what happened, it all becomes overwhelming. And I’m basically a busker. I sing and dance on the boardwalk for spare change, metaphorically. Who am I to add to the babble?

    But we have to speak out. We have to have a babble, and more than a babble. We can’t afford complacency.

    Over 370 shootings in America last year that had four or more victims each. More than one a day. Most of the answers will doubtless be hard to come by, and someone won’t like whatever it is. But there are a few things we should do right off.

    Ban assault weapons. Understand that I grew up the child of a military vet who collected guns. I learned target shooting when I was so little I had to lean against something so the kickback wouldn’t land me on my butt. Half of my childhood was spent in NRA country. And I’ll tell you a truth — guns are fun. They’re often even pretty. You want a rifle to hunt or a handgun for target practice? Go for it!

    But. An assault weapon is not a hunting weapon. It has one purpose — to kill human beings, many of them, quickly and efficiently. And nobody who isn’t active military or police needs one. Nobody. The Founding Fathers could not have envisioned such weapons when the Second Amendment was written.

    And while we’re at it, the Second Amendment reads, “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms shall not be infringed.” If you’re a strict Constitutionalist, you can’t escape the fact that it starts out with the words “A well regulated Militia…”  Not just “regulated” but “well regulated.” In other words, there was no thought of just anyone being able to just own anything. If you wanted to have a gun, you were going to be regulated.  We didn’t have a standing army as such, so the idea was that you would own a gun and be part of a state militia. Not a private one. Not one you concocted with your friends. Not an independent, private army. A “well regulated Militia.”

    If the Founding Fathers had seen assault weapons, would the Constitution read otherwise? Probably. But it doesn’t. It reads the way it does and the Bill of Rights includes rights, but also responsibilities. So let’s throw away that tired saw that the Second Amendment guarantees the right of anyone to own any old gun. It doesn’t, clearly.

    Which leads to the next thing we need to do. Whether you think Remington, Smith & Wesson are right up there with God, or you think guns are scary and make you a bit nauseous, you can get on board with one easy fix for our gun problem. Right now, the feds can put a person on a watch list or a no-fly list because he’s going to meetings where they talk about how to kill people, but they can’t stop him from legally buying a gun.

    Let’s review. Someone who is judged violently insane, who makes radical proclamations that people he doesn’t like should die, who’s looking up bomb making guides, that person can be kept from flying from Portland to Los Angeles… but he can buy as many guns as he wants and drive there.

    So how about that, for a starter? How about we get that national database going and require that anyone selling a gun, be it gun shop or gun show, refrain from selling to people on the terrorism watch list? Are there people on that list who will never hurt anyone? Without a doubt. Do those people need guns? Nobody outside of a police officer or military member needs guns. He might want a gun, and if there’s no reasonable reason why not, he should be able to buy it, but nobody needs a gun.

    Lastly, registration. Before you rip my head off demanding why you should have to register as a gun owner, explain to me why you shouldn’t? No mentioning the Second Amendment — it calls for you to be well regulated. So. You have to take a test, get a license and register your car (as well as provide proof of insurance) to drive a car legally. If you’re caught driving illegally, you will be fined (if your butt doesn’t land in jail). And a car has many non-fatal uses.

    A gun is designed to shoot stuff. It makes a poor shovel. It’s not much use as a screwdriver. It has one use, and that use is dangerous, especially in the wrong hands. So why shouldn’t you have to demonstrate that you know how to clean, load, shoot and store it safely? Why shouldn’t you have to register it? If nothing else, the money from the license fees could be put toward victim assistance.

    I could argue that “concealed carry” and “stand your ground” laws are making us less safe, not safer. Everyone would like to believe he’d be Clint Eastwood when it all goes pear-shaped but really, think about the people you know. Are there more Clint Eastwoods, or more Barney Fifes? I know people who have concealed carry permits who I wouldn’t want to have a sharp stick, let alone a gun, especially in stressful situations.  Put them in a shootout and wait for the casualty count to rise as stray bullets take people out. But that’s an argument for another day. Let’s start with the easy stuff that any rational, reasonable person can embrace. The low-hanging fruit.

    Because gun regulation is coming, neighbors. It just is. Too many mass shootings. We’ll reach a tipping point where even politicians who are sucking from the NRA like piglets will be put in the position of doing something. If you’ve ever seen what the government does when it panics, you can understand why it would be better if those of us on either side of the issue come up with some legislation we can live with and tell our states and DC what to do.

    So, in this year when “Hamilton” is all the rage and we’re experiencing a renewed interest in our Founding Fathers (and Mothers), let’s really honor our Constitution and Bill of Rights. Let’s put that basic regulation into place. Reasonable, rational gun legislation.

    Before another Sandy Hook. Before another Aurora. Before another Orlando or any of the other places where our people are gunned down.

     

     

     

     

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