Truth, Justice and the American Way

The New Look

I'm going to give this blog some kind of facelift soon; or maybe just do The Great Migration, or more accurately become born again, by getting a new Google account, new e-mail, new phone number, new name....

The Migration

I've kind of had the idea all along that I would use Blogger as a "trial and error" platform and then, after I had ironed out all the bugs, would become reincarnated, and would spring up with my own domain, on which I would run a blog that would feature everything that was good in my previous guise, but would not have all of the baggage that has surely accumulated over the course of a 15 year relationship with Google.

Google threatens to become the de-facto "one world government" that the world seems to be gravitating towards.

Given human nature, though, there will probably have to be an alternative government, as an equal and opposite reaction to it. Like the Coke vs. Pepsi thing.

The whole issue of "borders" that is rearing its head now has probably got something to do with the fact that once, say, 88% of all human beings have a Google account, then the king of Google is really the king of the world, and borders kind of become obliterated.

What if the population is spread out such that, everybody is working online in some capacity, and a random person pulled off the street in Sydney, Australia for example, might have only a 50% chance of actually being an Aussie.

She could be a French citizen, who does all her work on her laptop from whatever corner of the globe she happens to be hanging out at. Or...pick a country of origin.

This whole idea of migration has to do with people who have found themselves physically located on a plot of land somewhere, where there is some flag stuck in the ground, and they are citizens of that particular plot of land, along with everyone else who was unwittingly born there.

It is human nature to want to live in the most beautiful spots on earth, like when Joseph Smith said "This is the place!" upon cresting the Rocky Mountains and beholding what is now Salt Lake City, or maybe Provo, Utah.

It must really suck living in a physically beautiful place that has a lousy government, or a war going on. 

I was out in Utah, and the tap water at the little lodge where I was staying came out of the faucet as clear as liquid glass, and was the best water I've ever tasted.

When I walked down the street my first evening in St. George, Utah, I would hear the toot of a car horn, and would turn my head in that direction to see a whole family in a station wagon, smiling and waving at me -happy to see me, in St. George.

The little homeless shelter in that city of about 12,000 is enough to accommodate the entire homeless population of about 16 permanently homeless people. Those lost souls had their own rooms, and had moved in furniture and decorations, TV's etc..

There was one room for the wandering homeless, such as myself. A car which I had bought in Las Vegas for $425, a Toyota that really scooted around in that sea level city, began to lose power as I gained altitude, heading into Utah.

By the time I reached Cedar City, elevation 4,000 feet or so I recall, the Toyota was doing all of 25 miles per hour with the pedal to the floor. And the gas gauge was plunging towards empty at an alarming rate. It was definitely a fuel/oxygen mixture problem, exacerbated by the thinner air at the higher altitude, yet all the kings horses and all the kings men (or at least all six or so car mechanics in town) were unable to solve the riddle of the Toyota.

When I bought it, it had Mississippi plates on it, so I figure it might have run just find in that lowland state, and even all the way out to Vegas on Rt. 10, which is all around sea level.

The first morning that I woke up at The Care And Share, and sallied forth looking for coffee, there were people out front offering odd jobs around their houses. I wound up making 80 dollars that day, staining a deck, which was attached to a the house of a nice Mormon family.

The lady of the house served a hearty dinner of, what I imagine was Mormon food. I seem to recall chicken, so they weren't vegetarians.

One of the other guys on the job was named Grant Sanford.

He had wound up at The Care And Share after having been released from the nearest jail. His car was impounded.

Grant was a devout Christian man. He lived in Federal Way, Washington, where he worked as a framing carpenter. He would make $36/hour doing that, because of the "prevailing wages" in that state. But there would be gaps in his employment when the money would run out, and Grant would begin to borrow against his next paycheck, by driving off without paying for gas, or pushing en entire carriage of food out of the Kroger's nearby his house.

He always settled up his debts as soon as some work came in, but the gas station owners wouldn't know this.

He would sit down and make out checks and mail them, along with letters like "On November 9th, 1999; I was almost out of gas, but needed to pick up my wife, who was pregnant....and I drove off without paying for $17,72 worth of gas.

Please find enclosed a remittance for that amount..." type of thing.

He was a very biblical young man, of about 19 when I met him in St. George.

He had been caught by the Utah State Police, who held the considerable advantage of there being only one highway in and out of Provo; the same one that goes in and out of Salt Lake City; with red cliffs on one side, and a huge-ass salt water lake on the other, this acted to funnel Grant right into the waiting hands of The Law.

He had done something like 10 days in the sparsely populated Mormon jail, for theft of fuel,and then had made his way back to St. George, where his own Toyota was being kept in a fenced enclosure, in lieu of a $350 impound fee, which was accruing at an additional $35 per day.

But, he was a gamer, and was trying to grab work each morning, including weekends (but maybe not Sunday, depending upon how Mormons feel about working on that day) in an effort to catch up to the mounting fee.

This was admirable, I thought.

Grant had had an argument with his wife and mother of their two toddlers, Jacob and Issac (Grant said these were the first two names in the bible, or something).

So, he had just hopped in the Toyota, heading for, of all places, Mississippi.

I can't remember why Mississippi. Maybe he heard there was work there; and was going to work and send her money. Probably the argument had been over money, and his borrowing habit.

He described the Mormon cops and jail-keepers as being the most polite and respectful he has ever encountered. Showing the cops a list he was keeping, of all his "creditors," in order to affirm his intentions to pay them all back had had the undesired side effect of allowing them to see just how long that list was; but it had made it seem like he was keeping track, at least, so as to pay them back.

They might have been impressed by the fact that about the only luggage he was carrying on the cross continental trip was a large bible on the passenger seat, along with copies of a Martin Luther style "grievance" notice that Grant had been disseminating by tacking to the front doors of churches all around Federal Way, Washington, and was hopeful of being able to nail to the front doors of churches in Mississippi.

He let me read a copy. It was pretty scathing. I remember the first line being something I paraphrase as: "Today's Christians ore the most pathetic group of believers since Christ walked the earth!" and it went on from there.

But, after about a week in Cedar City, during which the city's brain-trust of auto mechanics tried about a half dozen procedures on my Toyota with the Mississippi plates on it (I planned to make it legal after I got to wherever I wound up. I wasn't sure where this would be, but thought it was probably beyond Cedar City, Utah) with no luck, and after I had poured some of the 900 bucks I had left after buying the thing into it, for various experimental parts, it was decided between Grant and I that I would take one last sum of $350 out of my money, and would get his car out of impound, with the provision that he would take me along with him, to wherever he was going; beggars can't be choosers; just get me out of here, type of thing...

So, we went to the car from Mississippi, which sat just outside the garage of the mechanics whom I had already paid about $200 to.

The mechanics didn't seem to take much notice of us, as we grabbed my backpack out of the back seat of the thing. There was a cop there, whom they were talking to.

We hopped into the car that never made it to Mississippi, and off we went.

First, a stop back at The Share And Care, because Grant wanted to properly thank the volunteers there, and say goodbye to the half dozen permanent residents who had their own bedrooms there; whom he had befriended.

I guess I said goodbye to the place, too. My most vivid memories of it, besides the crystal clear tap water, were of seeing my first ever episode of The Simpsons on the TV in their little lounge area; and of meeting a woman who was born the same year, month and day as me (I don't know what hour of that day I was born, but she was probably older than me because she knew she was born at 5 a.m. and also, the poor thing looked about twice my age, which was 37 at the time).

After we left there, we went past the garage, where the cop that had been talking to the mechanics was now standing behind the Toyota, staring at the expired tags from Mississippi. A bolt of fear kind of shot through me. I probably wouldn't have made it far, even if they had fixed it; they must have alerted the cop about the tags.

I happened to have that federal fugitive warrant out for me at the time, for a homicide in Jacksonville, and was the subject of an nation-wide manhunt; something which I have blogged about.

I was using an alternate ID, but had actually shown my real one to the lady who was born on the same day as me after she doubted my claim. I had to retrieve it from where it had been well hidden in the car. If they felt they had any reason to investigate me, that lady could provide them with my exact birth date; yikes!

I knew I had nothing to worry about with the warrant, it was just a device to get me to testify in another case; but I didn't want them to catch me; I was going to turn myself in a couple days before the trial..

It works out well for the homeless of Cedar City, Utah, them comprising only about .5% of the community. Generosity outpaces demand.

This was 1999, though, and the Mormon guy whose brand new deck we had stained, which was going to skirt one side of an in-ground pool which was also being constructed, could afford to pay for all that, plus find a couple of in-demand homeless people to strew generosity upon to the tune of 80 bucks each, plus a fine dinner, because he was in one particular room of the house; his office; where he was working as a "web designer."

This was back before templates and dynamically generated code were commonplace, and he was making a fortune just by coding HTML into flat, static webpages that don't do anything...er...kind of like this blog, come to think of it...because the common man by and large didn't have the patience to learn HTML and CSS.

Plus, the Mormons prosper just through clean living, and their nice things are like monuments to their abstemious existences. The beautiful fountain in the front yard? -came out of the money never spent on a pack of cigarettes a day for ten years.

The family snowmobiles? You could buy them for your own family, if you had back all the money you've spent on beer and liquor in your lifetime, type of thing.

The "clean" religions members prosper, it's that simple.

"Oh, where are we going, anyways?" I asked Grant, who was excited about seeing his kids after about 3 weeks away from them.

"How do you feel about Seattle?"

"I feel like I'm headed there..."

And thus began The Federal Way, Washington adventure.

So, I plan on getting one of those "burner" cell phones, like a Tracfone for 10 bucks, which will come with a phone number that I can use to open a new Google account.

I will probably be using the tor browser so that Google can't look at my IP address and know that it's me. Maybe a VPN is in the cards, too.

I can then become reborn, with a new name and a new account; and I will know right away if it worked if I stop getting the same ads and having the same videos suggested on Youtube.

I really do think that Facebook, for one, is shunting people off into little splinter groups, so that they can't organize, perhaps. If you are flagged as being a "boomer," for example, on Youtube, then I think they kind of "disappear" you to the mainstream, so that your toxic attitudes (about truth, justice and the American way, perhaps) don't infect the global community..