IdeaJones

Tag: jones

  • 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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  • An Open Letter To My Species

    Dear Human:

    We are the only species in history that gets to decide whether or not to evolve. For everyone else, environment forces the issue. Adapt or die. If you can’t deal with warmer temperatures, or colder, or migrate to a place that suits you better, or develop a taste for something you weren’t eating before, that’s it, you lose your place on the planet.

    Owing to our opposable thumbs, humans have been more successful at forcing the environment to adapt to us. It’s given us a deceptive feeling of invincibility.

    But every species has to pay its bill in the end, and if you can’t foot that bill, you either fade out or the challenge you’re facing eats you, burps and that’s it.

    One of the universe’s waiters who’s been standing around holding out a check is our tendency toward tribalism. It’s natural. You could argue that it’s the main thing that got us this far, after those thumbs and a willingness to eat almost anything. Knowing who is “yours” and who is other kept your ancestors safe enough to reproduce up until you. Tribalism has two main components:

    1. Identity – figuring out who is your tribe;
    2. Outsiders – figuring out what to do about anyone who isn’t.

    Identity used to be easy. Your tribe was the people who were born, lived and died where you did. You might not like all of them, nor they you, but some social structure enabled you to coexist most of the time with those people. You were all related by blood, then as the world grew and changed, you were all related by an idea – religion, nation, etc. Either way, for most of history, the members of your tribe looked generally like you. Your survival depended on knowing who your tribe was and what you could expect from them.

    Now, that’s a life’s quest. People move around. Is your tribe people who go to the same church, or people who like the same music, or just people who seem to like you and you like them? It’s harder to tell on sight who is “yours” and who is not.

    Outsiders – again, that used to be easier. There are three main responses to the Outsider:

    1. Kill it.
    2. Trade with it
    3. Ignore it.

    There are complications attached to all three, but while options 1 and 2 are well-known and discussed, option #3 doesn’t get a lot of coverage. We’ve always had that option. “Not like me” does not equal “and must die.” Those are two different thoughts.

    It’s not reasonable to push for a “Kumbaya-and-hand-holding” world. We’re not there yet. Too big of a leap from millennia of “Not like me so trade with it or kill it.” Even “Not like me so trade with it” is only middling embedded in our history. No, option #1 has been the preferred option too many times. From there to “Let’s all love one another!” is like asking a baby to walk to the moon. He’s barely mastered the basics, let alone conquering all the other challenges that would entail. Ask him to walk across the room a few times first. It’s hard enough to work with people you don’t like. Welcoming their presence is too big of a stretch for most of us.

    What we need to do, and it will be a conscious choice, is to acknowledge that there will always be The Other, the person who does not share some basic view on how the world works. The idea that there will always be many people not like you in really fundamental ways, that it’s a fact, and doesn’t require anything of you, much in the way the rotation of the Earth doesn’t require you to get out and push, needs to be spread until it’s part of our concept of the world.

    The next will be adopting the idea that if you can’t bring yourself to be open to those people, your response should be to just let them be is the next part. We need to uncouple “Not like me” from “so must die.” We need to tell our children, and ourselves, that we have options when it comes to dealing with people who are not like us and killing them isn’t the best one.

    If you happen to believe homosexuality, or being Muslim, or Christian, or a woman, or whatever it is you don’t like, is wrong, more power to you. We disagree, but you have a right to think that. And feel however you feel about it all. But unless they try to hold you down and make you join them, that’s as far as you get to go.

    Because they are human, and real, and have value, and that isn’t because you awarded it to them. They just have it. You don’t give it to them and you can’t take it away. If your whole ego depends on believing you run the universe on that scale, wow, are you in for some bad days. Your life now probably isn’t much fun, come to think of it – being responsible for the universe is a big, thankless task. Ask God.

    Option #1 is a lose-lose scenario. You kill, their tribe comes to kill you, so you kill some of them, so they… until there’s nobody left on one side, or both. Guess again if you think that mean your side is victorious. The land you depend on to live will be decimated. Many of your own, maybe you yourself, will die. It won’t change the other people. It may convince still others to side with them. You will lose all of the things they know that might have made your life better. Even if you are the ultimate victor, your wounded tribe will inherit ashes. It’s a zero-sum game.

    And if you think God is waiting to reward you for killing His creations, you need to ask who has been “interpreting” your sacred texts and what’s in it for them – because you are being played like a cheap flute by someone who is using you for his own power and ego gratification.

    We have a choice here. We can opt out of evolution, choose to remain not only tribal but violently tribal, and end up in the garbage heap of history, played by people who are using our fears and prejudices to control us for their own gain. Or we can nudge ourselves forward, determined to allow people who are not like us their human worth.

    We can try for Option #2 in the hope that this time, it’ll go okay, and make our fallback Option #3, which leaves us alive to pursue our own paths. And if you really don’t like the other tribe, feel free to feel that way. Not like them to your heart’s content. But don’t flash it in their faces, because that’s rude and if you’re really superior, you aren’t rude. And don’t kill them, because that’s stupid and how can one be both superior and stupid?

    Let’s just decide to grow up. As individuals and as a species. If we manage it, it will give us more time to do other things that are a lot more fun.

  • Reception Tonight — Time To Get Dragged Out From Under The Sofa

    Tonight’s the opening reception for one of the shows I’m in. If you can make it to Lincoln, CA, it should be a fun show. This is my second in this gallery and it’s a nice little gallery with welcoming people who really want things to be good for visitors.

    Writer Carol Terracina Hartman gave the show a mention in her Examiner.com column: http://www.examiner.com/article/nature-and-animals-art-show-opens-saturday-lincoln

    I’m a real introvert. I like people. It’s just that while extroverts gather energy from being around other people, introverts spend energy to be with others. I’m also shy, which isn’t the same thing. So I tend to either not say much or babble. Weirdly the fix for that seems to be accepting it and not caring much. People will like you or they won’t and there’s no predicting which way it will go, so you might as well relax.

    For past receptions, I’ve always been keyed up and tense. This time I’m just looking forward to it. The weather is beautiful (my gosh, it’s in the 80s in June in Sacramento. Usually it’s “how have we sinned, Lord?” hot. I’m couldn’t be more pleased and surprised if Oprah Winfrey showed up on our doorstep and yelled, “You get a car!”).

    So a short drive (it’s about thirty minutes away) with Mark on a beautiful day through the country to see what else is in the show (I’ve only seen a few of the other pieces). I don’t drink (well, I had a sip of Communion wine yesterday but I’m such a lightweight that almost put me on my butt), so finger foods, ice water and art. Should be a good evening. If you can make it introduce yourself — I promise not to hide under the furniture.

    On exhibit June 11 - July 1 at the Art League of Lincoln in Lincoln, CA.
    On exhibit June 11 – July 1 at the Art League of Lincoln in Lincoln, CA.